Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008
Green technology was hot in 2008. Barack Obama won the presidential election promising green jobs to Rust Belt workers. Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year. And even Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy as a replacement for fossil fuels like petroleum, coal and natural gas.
But there's trouble on the horizon. The economy is hovering somewhere between catatonic and hebephrenic, and funding for the big plans that green tech companies laid in 2008 might be a lot harder to come by in 2009. Recessions haven't always been the best times for environmentally friendly technologies as consumers and corporations cut discretionary spending on ethical premiums.
Still, green technology and its attendant infrastructure are probably the best bet to drag the American economy out of the doldrums. So, with the optimism endemic to the Silicon Valley region, we present you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.
10. THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR
With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss researcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling's company Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country.
9. NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON
Carbon capture and sequestration has a seductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil — so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground.
It turns out, however, that it's not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth's crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could selectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gases going up the flues of fossil fuel plants.
That's where two classes of special cage-like molecules come into play, ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he'd made a new amine that seems particularly well-suited to working under real-world condition. Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier -- and therefore, more cost effective.
Perhaps better still, Yaghi's lab's technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators — want. Some of their crystals are shown in the image above.
8. GREEN TECH LEGISLATION GETS REAL
On the federal and state levels, several historic actions put the teeth into green tech bills passed over the last few years. A review committee of the EPA effectively froze coal plant construction, a boon to alternative energy (though earlier this month the EPA ignored the committee's ruling and it is unclear how the issue will be settled). In California, the state unveiled and approved its plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, which could be a model for a nationwide system. Combined with the green-energy tax credits in the $700-billion bailout bill, the government did more for green tech in 2008 than in whole decades in the past.
7. THE CATALYST THAT COULD ENABLE SOLAR
In July, MIT chemist Daniel Nocera announced that he'd created a catalyst that could drop the cost of extracting the hydrogen and oxygen from water.
Combined with cheap photovoltaic solar panels (like Nanosolar's), the system could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.
"You've made your house into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT told Wired.com. "I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."
The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand.
6. PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens might be a lot of things, but environmentalist he is not. That's why his support for a nationwide network of wind farms generated so much excitement. While his solution for transportation, natural gas vehicles, may not pan out, his Pickens Plan is the most visible alternative energy plan out there and it began to channel support from outside coastal cities for finding new sources of energy.
Of course, no one said Pickens is stupid. If his plan was adopted and major investments in transmission infrastructure were made, his wind energy investments would stand to benefit.
5. SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS
When most people think of harnessing the sun's power, they imagine a solar photovoltatic panel, which directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity.
Two companies, BrightSource and Ausra, debuted their pilot plants. They mark the first serious solar thermal experimentation in the United States since the 1980s. BrightSource's Israeli demo plant is shown above.
4. OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE
President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promise of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focused on turning Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhouse. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White House.
That's because green tech is going to need some help. With the world economy falling into recession, the price of oil has dropped, even though there are serious concerns about the long-term oil supply. When energy prices drop, clean tech investments don't seem quite as attractive, and the renascent industry could be in trouble. It's happened before, after all.
Back in the '70s, geopolitical events sent the price of oil soaring, which, as it tends to, created a boom in green tech. But the early 1980s saw the worst recession since the Depression. Sound familiar? In the poor economic climate, focus and funds were shifted away from green tech. The last nail in the coffin was the election of Ronald Reagan, who immediately pulled off the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the White House. The green tech industry collapsed.
History has given U.S. alternative energy research a second chance and environmental advocates hope that a different president will lead to a very different result.
3. SOLAR CELL PRODUCTION GETS BIG, GIGA(WATT)BIG
Every clean tech advocate's dream is a power-generating technology that could compete head-to-head with coal, the cheapest fossil fuel, on price alone. Nanosolar, one of a new generation of companies building solar panels out of cheap plastics, could be the first company to get there. Early this year, the company officially opened its one-gigawatt production facility, which is many times the size of most previous solar facilities.
Nanosolar, in other words, has found a process that can scale: it works as well in production as it does in the lab. That's the main reason that the company has picked up half-a-billion dollars in funding from investors like MDV's Erik Straser.
"[It's the] first time in industry a single tool with a 1GW throughput," Straser wrote in an e-mail. "It's a key part of how the company is achieving grid parity with coal."
2. PROJECT BETTER PLACE FINDS HOMES
Green technologies are dime a dozen, but a business model that could allow an entirely new, green infrastructure to be built is a rare thing.
Doing just that is the centerpiece of Sun Microsystems' SAP veteran Shai Agassi's vision for Project Better Place, a scheme that would distribute charging and swappable battery stations throughout smallish geographies like Israel, Hawaii and San Francisco. So far, there's very little steel in the ground, but in early December, the company's first charging location opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Agassi's plan is one of several projects — like new biofuels rail terminals — that could create fundamentally new energy ecosystems.
Some of these systems, however, are actually throwbacks to earlier eras. As Peter Shulman, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University, likes to remind his students: in the early 20th century, before the Model T, one-third of all cars were electric.
1. CALERA'S GREEN CEMENT DEMO PLANT OPENS
Cement? With all the whiz bang technologies in green technology, cement seems like an odd pick for our top clean technology of the year. But here's the reason: making cement — and many other materials — takes a lot of heat and that heat comes from fossil fuels.
Calera's technology, like that of many green chemistry companies, works more like Jell-O setting. By employing catalysis instead of heat, it reduces the energy cost per ton of cement. And in this process, CO2 is an input, not an output. So, instead of producing a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of cement made — as is the case with old-school Portland cement — half a ton of carbon dioxide can be sequestered.
With more than 2.3 billion tons of cement produced each year, reversing the carbon-balance of the world's cement would be a solution that's the scale of the world's climate change problem.
In August, the company opened its first demonstration site next to Dynegy's Moss Landing power plant in California, pictured here.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/the-top-10-gree.html
But there's trouble on the horizon. The economy is hovering somewhere between catatonic and hebephrenic, and funding for the big plans that green tech companies laid in 2008 might be a lot harder to come by in 2009. Recessions haven't always been the best times for environmentally friendly technologies as consumers and corporations cut discretionary spending on ethical premiums.
Still, green technology and its attendant infrastructure are probably the best bet to drag the American economy out of the doldrums. So, with the optimism endemic to the Silicon Valley region, we present you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.
10. THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR
With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss researcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling's company Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country.
9. NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON
Carbon capture and sequestration has a seductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil — so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground.
It turns out, however, that it's not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth's crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could selectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gases going up the flues of fossil fuel plants.
That's where two classes of special cage-like molecules come into play, ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he'd made a new amine that seems particularly well-suited to working under real-world condition. Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier -- and therefore, more cost effective.
Perhaps better still, Yaghi's lab's technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators — want. Some of their crystals are shown in the image above.
8. GREEN TECH LEGISLATION GETS REAL
On the federal and state levels, several historic actions put the teeth into green tech bills passed over the last few years. A review committee of the EPA effectively froze coal plant construction, a boon to alternative energy (though earlier this month the EPA ignored the committee's ruling and it is unclear how the issue will be settled). In California, the state unveiled and approved its plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, which could be a model for a nationwide system. Combined with the green-energy tax credits in the $700-billion bailout bill, the government did more for green tech in 2008 than in whole decades in the past.
7. THE CATALYST THAT COULD ENABLE SOLAR
In July, MIT chemist Daniel Nocera announced that he'd created a catalyst that could drop the cost of extracting the hydrogen and oxygen from water.
Combined with cheap photovoltaic solar panels (like Nanosolar's), the system could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.
"You've made your house into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT told Wired.com. "I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."
The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand.
6. PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens might be a lot of things, but environmentalist he is not. That's why his support for a nationwide network of wind farms generated so much excitement. While his solution for transportation, natural gas vehicles, may not pan out, his Pickens Plan is the most visible alternative energy plan out there and it began to channel support from outside coastal cities for finding new sources of energy.
Of course, no one said Pickens is stupid. If his plan was adopted and major investments in transmission infrastructure were made, his wind energy investments would stand to benefit.
5. SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS
When most people think of harnessing the sun's power, they imagine a solar photovoltatic panel, which directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity.
Two companies, BrightSource and Ausra, debuted their pilot plants. They mark the first serious solar thermal experimentation in the United States since the 1980s. BrightSource's Israeli demo plant is shown above.
4. OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE
President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promise of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focused on turning Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhouse. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White House.
That's because green tech is going to need some help. With the world economy falling into recession, the price of oil has dropped, even though there are serious concerns about the long-term oil supply. When energy prices drop, clean tech investments don't seem quite as attractive, and the renascent industry could be in trouble. It's happened before, after all.
Back in the '70s, geopolitical events sent the price of oil soaring, which, as it tends to, created a boom in green tech. But the early 1980s saw the worst recession since the Depression. Sound familiar? In the poor economic climate, focus and funds were shifted away from green tech. The last nail in the coffin was the election of Ronald Reagan, who immediately pulled off the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the White House. The green tech industry collapsed.
History has given U.S. alternative energy research a second chance and environmental advocates hope that a different president will lead to a very different result.
3. SOLAR CELL PRODUCTION GETS BIG, GIGA(WATT)BIG
Every clean tech advocate's dream is a power-generating technology that could compete head-to-head with coal, the cheapest fossil fuel, on price alone. Nanosolar, one of a new generation of companies building solar panels out of cheap plastics, could be the first company to get there. Early this year, the company officially opened its one-gigawatt production facility, which is many times the size of most previous solar facilities.
Nanosolar, in other words, has found a process that can scale: it works as well in production as it does in the lab. That's the main reason that the company has picked up half-a-billion dollars in funding from investors like MDV's Erik Straser.
"[It's the] first time in industry a single tool with a 1GW throughput," Straser wrote in an e-mail. "It's a key part of how the company is achieving grid parity with coal."
2. PROJECT BETTER PLACE FINDS HOMES
Green technologies are dime a dozen, but a business model that could allow an entirely new, green infrastructure to be built is a rare thing.
Doing just that is the centerpiece of Sun Microsystems' SAP veteran Shai Agassi's vision for Project Better Place, a scheme that would distribute charging and swappable battery stations throughout smallish geographies like Israel, Hawaii and San Francisco. So far, there's very little steel in the ground, but in early December, the company's first charging location opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Agassi's plan is one of several projects — like new biofuels rail terminals — that could create fundamentally new energy ecosystems.
Some of these systems, however, are actually throwbacks to earlier eras. As Peter Shulman, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University, likes to remind his students: in the early 20th century, before the Model T, one-third of all cars were electric.
1. CALERA'S GREEN CEMENT DEMO PLANT OPENS
Cement? With all the whiz bang technologies in green technology, cement seems like an odd pick for our top clean technology of the year. But here's the reason: making cement — and many other materials — takes a lot of heat and that heat comes from fossil fuels.
Calera's technology, like that of many green chemistry companies, works more like Jell-O setting. By employing catalysis instead of heat, it reduces the energy cost per ton of cement. And in this process, CO2 is an input, not an output. So, instead of producing a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of cement made — as is the case with old-school Portland cement — half a ton of carbon dioxide can be sequestered.
With more than 2.3 billion tons of cement produced each year, reversing the carbon-balance of the world's cement would be a solution that's the scale of the world's climate change problem.
In August, the company opened its first demonstration site next to Dynegy's Moss Landing power plant in California, pictured here.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/the-top-10-gree.html
How To Make Your Own Biodiesel
NZ airline flies jetliner partly run on biofuel
WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Looking to reduce its carbon footprint and cut its fuel bill, Air New Zealand on Tuesday tested a passenger jet that was powered partially with oil from a plum-sized fruit known as jatropha.
The airline is the latest carrier to experiment with alternative fuels, partly due to the threat of rising oil prices but also to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from aviation, which are projected to rise by 90 percent by 2020.
Air New Zealand said the two-hour flight from Auckland International Airport was the first to use what are known as second generation biofuels to power an airplane. Second generation biofuels typically use a wider range of plants and release fewer emissions than traditional biofuels like ethanol.
One engine of the Boeing 747-400 airplane was powered by a 50-50 blend of oil from jatropha plants and standard A1 jet fuel.
"Today, we stand at the earliest stages of sustainable fuel development and an important moment in aviation history," Air New Zealand Chief Executive Rob Fyfe said shortly after the flight.
Along with investing in new technology to replace outdated fleets and new designs that reduce weight and air resistance, the International Air Transport Association says airlines are experimenting with a range of plant materials in an effort to find the jet fuel of the future.
The association, which represents 230 airlines, said it wants 10 percent of aviation fuel to come from biofuels by 2017 as part of a broad climate change plan. Air travel now generates only 2 percent of global carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to global warming, but the industry's high growth rate has raised concern about future emissions.
"There are very promising biojet fuels, and jatropha is one of them," association spokesman Anthony Concil said Tuesday, adding that the industry is also looking at switch grass, algae and salt-tolerant plants called halophytes.
Jatropha is a bush with round, plum-like fruit that has been found in parts of South America, Africa and Asia. Seeds from jatropha are crushed to produce a yellowish oil that is refined and mixed with diesel.
Tuesday's flight was a joint venture by Air New Zealand, airplane maker Boeing, engine maker Rolls Royce and biofuel specialist UOP Llc, a unit of Honeywell International.
In February, Boeing and Virgin Atlantic carried out a similar test flight that included a biofuel mixture of palm and coconut oil — but that was dismissed as a publicity stunt by environmentalists who said the fuel could not be produced in the quantities needed for commercial aviation.
Continental Airlines has said on Jan. 7 it will operate a test flight out of Houston using a special blend of half conventional fuel and half biofuel with ingredients derived from algae and jatropha plants.
Simon Boxer, of environmental group Greenpeace New Zealand, said it was inevitable that airlines would show greater interest in sustainable biofuels as travelers become more aware of the harm that air travel causes the environment.
But he said it wasn't clear whether jatropha was really sustainable. He questioned what the environmental impact would be if jatropha grew popular and more land and resources were needed to produce it on a commercial scale.
Ken Morton, a Boeing spokesman, said he expects more airlines will embrace biofuels as countries introduce emission taxes and emission trading schemes that will impact the industry.
"It makes a lot of commercial sense to invest in these biofuels," said Morton, who was on hand for the New Zealand flight. "Certainly, it is what the public wants."
Jatropha on first glance appears to have many of the attributes demanded from the industry.
It grows almost anywhere, so it wouldn't compete with food crops as corn-based ethanol does and has a lower freezing point than traditional biofuels like palm oil.
India appears to be most bullish on jatropha, with plans to plant 30 million acres (12 million hectares) by 2012. Already, the Indian government says it has successfully run dozens of trucks and buses on jatropha-based biodiesel and 18.5 million acres (7.4 million hectares) of jatropha saplings are growing along the country's railroad tracks.
While Air New Zealand heralded Tuesday's flight as successful, Group Manager Ed Sims cautioned that it will be at least 2013 before the company can ensure easy access to the large quantities of jatropha it would need to use the biofuel on all its flights.
"Clearly we are a long, long way from being able to source commercially quantifiable amounts of the fuel and then be able to move that amount of fuel around the world to be able to power the world's airlines," Sims told New Zealand's National Radio.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081230/ap_on_re_as/as_new_zealand_airplane_biofuel
The airline is the latest carrier to experiment with alternative fuels, partly due to the threat of rising oil prices but also to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from aviation, which are projected to rise by 90 percent by 2020.
Air New Zealand said the two-hour flight from Auckland International Airport was the first to use what are known as second generation biofuels to power an airplane. Second generation biofuels typically use a wider range of plants and release fewer emissions than traditional biofuels like ethanol.
One engine of the Boeing 747-400 airplane was powered by a 50-50 blend of oil from jatropha plants and standard A1 jet fuel.
"Today, we stand at the earliest stages of sustainable fuel development and an important moment in aviation history," Air New Zealand Chief Executive Rob Fyfe said shortly after the flight.
Along with investing in new technology to replace outdated fleets and new designs that reduce weight and air resistance, the International Air Transport Association says airlines are experimenting with a range of plant materials in an effort to find the jet fuel of the future.
The association, which represents 230 airlines, said it wants 10 percent of aviation fuel to come from biofuels by 2017 as part of a broad climate change plan. Air travel now generates only 2 percent of global carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to global warming, but the industry's high growth rate has raised concern about future emissions.
"There are very promising biojet fuels, and jatropha is one of them," association spokesman Anthony Concil said Tuesday, adding that the industry is also looking at switch grass, algae and salt-tolerant plants called halophytes.
Jatropha is a bush with round, plum-like fruit that has been found in parts of South America, Africa and Asia. Seeds from jatropha are crushed to produce a yellowish oil that is refined and mixed with diesel.
Tuesday's flight was a joint venture by Air New Zealand, airplane maker Boeing, engine maker Rolls Royce and biofuel specialist UOP Llc, a unit of Honeywell International.
In February, Boeing and Virgin Atlantic carried out a similar test flight that included a biofuel mixture of palm and coconut oil — but that was dismissed as a publicity stunt by environmentalists who said the fuel could not be produced in the quantities needed for commercial aviation.
Continental Airlines has said on Jan. 7 it will operate a test flight out of Houston using a special blend of half conventional fuel and half biofuel with ingredients derived from algae and jatropha plants.
Simon Boxer, of environmental group Greenpeace New Zealand, said it was inevitable that airlines would show greater interest in sustainable biofuels as travelers become more aware of the harm that air travel causes the environment.
But he said it wasn't clear whether jatropha was really sustainable. He questioned what the environmental impact would be if jatropha grew popular and more land and resources were needed to produce it on a commercial scale.
Ken Morton, a Boeing spokesman, said he expects more airlines will embrace biofuels as countries introduce emission taxes and emission trading schemes that will impact the industry.
"It makes a lot of commercial sense to invest in these biofuels," said Morton, who was on hand for the New Zealand flight. "Certainly, it is what the public wants."
Jatropha on first glance appears to have many of the attributes demanded from the industry.
It grows almost anywhere, so it wouldn't compete with food crops as corn-based ethanol does and has a lower freezing point than traditional biofuels like palm oil.
India appears to be most bullish on jatropha, with plans to plant 30 million acres (12 million hectares) by 2012. Already, the Indian government says it has successfully run dozens of trucks and buses on jatropha-based biodiesel and 18.5 million acres (7.4 million hectares) of jatropha saplings are growing along the country's railroad tracks.
While Air New Zealand heralded Tuesday's flight as successful, Group Manager Ed Sims cautioned that it will be at least 2013 before the company can ensure easy access to the large quantities of jatropha it would need to use the biofuel on all its flights.
"Clearly we are a long, long way from being able to source commercially quantifiable amounts of the fuel and then be able to move that amount of fuel around the world to be able to power the world's airlines," Sims told New Zealand's National Radio.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081230/ap_on_re_as/as_new_zealand_airplane_biofuel
Is Global Warming Creating New Climate Zones?
Anyone with a sense of the 4.5 billion-year history of climate and geological change on our planet knows that change is the only true global constant. Global warming is re-structuring the world's climate zones, with some estimates that by 2100 polar and mountain climates disappearing altogether and formerly unknown ones emerging in the tropics (keep in mind that the Antarctic was once a tropical life-zone).
When climate zones shift, the animals and plants that live in them will be at greater risk of extinction, said Jack Williams, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"What we've shown is these climates disappear, not just regionally, but they're disappearing from the global set of climates, and the species that live in these climates really have nowhere to go as the system changes," according to Williams.
Acclerating climate change will also lead to dramatic shifts in the behavior of nation states and the human species as a whole. I've listed recent posts on climate change and global warming.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/12/global-warming.html
When climate zones shift, the animals and plants that live in them will be at greater risk of extinction, said Jack Williams, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"What we've shown is these climates disappear, not just regionally, but they're disappearing from the global set of climates, and the species that live in these climates really have nowhere to go as the system changes," according to Williams.
Acclerating climate change will also lead to dramatic shifts in the behavior of nation states and the human species as a whole. I've listed recent posts on climate change and global warming.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/12/global-warming.html
Environmentalists Detained for Photographing Tennessee Ash Spill
The major coal ash spill that occurred in eastern Tennessee on Monday covered an area of approximately 400 acres in debris from a retention lake near the Kingston Fossil Plant. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest utility company in the United States, assured the locals that the water was safe to drink, despite the fact that approximately one billion gallons of coal fly ash – a byproduct of burning coal – spilled into nearby rivers and polluted them severely.
Tom Kilgore, the leader of TVA, said on Sunday that the company would pay for testing the quality of water in wells around the spill site, so as to reassure some 2-300 affected residents that the spill posed no immediate danger to their health. An entire neighborhood in Harriman was flooded, and the debris made its way into the Emory River, which prompted concerns for people living in nearby Kingston.
Although it exhibits a PR-friendly facade, TVA also refuses to let independent observers take pictures and water samples from the affected area. Two photographers who tried to capture the site on film were detained by TVA police and held in custody for about an hour before being released. The two, members of the Knoxville-based United Mountain Defense, said that they wanted to take water samples of their own, to have it independently tested.
“This is an issue of national importance. People need to know if the water is safe or not,” said David Cooper, one of the photographers.
The illegal detention was widely criticized by civil rights groups, which said that the very core of American freedom was infringed upon by the actions of TVA police. They argued that people had a right to know the scale of the disaster, and also to see for themselves the devastation. There are currently no laws in place to prevent people from taking water samples out of national rivers or creeks, they added.
The danger now is that the ash spill will dry out, which would mean that a cloud of ash, similar to the one released by a volcano, will roam the region and deposit itself on everything it comes across. Emergency response teams are currently working to clear the area of potentially hazardous remains.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Environmentalists-Detained-for-Photographing-Tennessee-Ash-Spill-100941.shtml
Tom Kilgore, the leader of TVA, said on Sunday that the company would pay for testing the quality of water in wells around the spill site, so as to reassure some 2-300 affected residents that the spill posed no immediate danger to their health. An entire neighborhood in Harriman was flooded, and the debris made its way into the Emory River, which prompted concerns for people living in nearby Kingston.
Although it exhibits a PR-friendly facade, TVA also refuses to let independent observers take pictures and water samples from the affected area. Two photographers who tried to capture the site on film were detained by TVA police and held in custody for about an hour before being released. The two, members of the Knoxville-based United Mountain Defense, said that they wanted to take water samples of their own, to have it independently tested.
“This is an issue of national importance. People need to know if the water is safe or not,” said David Cooper, one of the photographers.
The illegal detention was widely criticized by civil rights groups, which said that the very core of American freedom was infringed upon by the actions of TVA police. They argued that people had a right to know the scale of the disaster, and also to see for themselves the devastation. There are currently no laws in place to prevent people from taking water samples out of national rivers or creeks, they added.
The danger now is that the ash spill will dry out, which would mean that a cloud of ash, similar to the one released by a volcano, will roam the region and deposit itself on everything it comes across. Emergency response teams are currently working to clear the area of potentially hazardous remains.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Environmentalists-Detained-for-Photographing-Tennessee-Ash-Spill-100941.shtml
The Trial of the World
Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Bolivar Cevallos walks around the farm where his family once lived amid the oil fields of Ecuador’s Amazon rain forest. His boots sink ankle deep in tar. Everywhere he steps, oily muck seeps from the ground.
A gasolinelike smell hangs in the sweltering jungle air. The mess is a remnant of oil drilling in a 120-mile-long swath of the tropical jungle in northeastern Ecuador where Texaco Inc. and Ecuador’s state-run oil company, PetroEcuador, have pumped billions of barrels of crude from the ground during the past 40 years.
Cevallos, 51, whose face is tanned and creased from a life working in the tropical sun, plunges a shovel into a ditch. Grease oozes out and drains into a river his family used for drinking and bathing for more than 25 years.
About 230,000 people live in Ecuador’s northeastern rain forest side by side with oil wells and pools of drilling waste. Cevallos is no longer one of them.
Four years ago, a doctor diagnosed his daughter, Diana, with histiocytosis X, a rare blood disease that caused tumors that punched holes in her skull.
“The doctor told us to get out because the pollution would make her sicker, maybe kill her,” says Cevallos, who used to tend patches of cacao on his farm and now works as a laborer on a construction site for $6 a day. His daughter, now 5, is thin and still ailing.
As he speaks, a dog claws at trash around the family’s abandoned, windowless, one-bedroom, cement-walled home.
‘I Was Already Poor’
“I was already poor, and now I was going to get poorer,” he says.
The ruined land around Cevallos’s home is part of one of the worst environmental and human health disasters in the Amazon basin, which stretches across nine countries and, at 1.9 billion acres (800 million hectares), is about the size of Australia.
And depending on how an Ecuadorean judge rules in a lawsuit over the pollution, it may become the costliest corporate ecological catastrophe in world history.
If the judge follows the recommendation of a court- appointed panel of experts, he could order Chevron Corp., which now owns Texaco, to pay as much as $27 billion in damages.
The case, which has languished for 15 years in U.S. and Ecuadorean courts, highlights the growing human and environmental toll of the global quest for oil.
“If they have to pay out, who takes the big hit? Ultimately, the shareholders,” says Pat Doherty, director of corporate responsibility at the Office of the New York City Comptroller, which controls 6.5 million Chevron shares in public pension funds.
‘Bad Shape’
Doherty says Chevron should settle. Otherwise, if the company loses, he expects it will file appeals in Ecuador and the U.S. for years to come, leaving stockholders in limbo.
“They’re really in bad shape on this,” he says. “A settlement would make sense. The trees that last the longest are the ones that bend.”
Ecuador, which reported annual per capita income of $3,400 in 2007 and defaulted on its bonds in December for the second time in a decade, is one of two Latin American members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and depends on oil revenue to fund a third of the national budget.
Both sides in the Amazon case agree that for a quarter of a century, until 1990, Texaco discharged 16 billion gallons of wastewater that’s a byproduct of drilling.
In 1993, 76 people who lived near the wells -- including members of the indigenous Cofan and Quichua Indian tribes and people who came to the Amazon from other parts of Ecuador for jobs -- sued White Plains, New York-based Texaco in New York federal court.
Chevron Blames PetroEcuador
They claimed the pollution had ruined their livelihood as farmers and fishermen and made them and their families sick.
Chevron says Texaco had completely cleaned up its mess by 1998. PetroEcuador, which took over Texaco’s operations in 1990 -- and not Texaco -- is to blame for today’s pollution, Chevron says.
From 1990 until 2007, government-owned PetroEcuador released wastewater into the environment, says Fausto Mej a, a spokesman for PetroEcuador. He says the company has spent the past 16 years cleaning up, decreasing its dumping each year. It stopped releasing waste entirely by 2008, he says.
The case will be decided in an old concrete building in the Amazonian oil town of Lago Agrio, 37 miles (60 kilometers) north of Cevallos’s former home. With a shoe store, a T-shirt shop and a beauty salon on the street level, the building, which has no elevator, also houses a provincial courthouse.
141,000 Documents
On the fourth floor, Judge Juan Nunez oversees the lawsuit, weighing evidence and pondering whether Chevron should pay billions in damages. Nunez, 55, who wears a tan, open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, is president of the Nueva Loja Superior Court, the highest judicial body in Ecuador’s northeastern Sucumb os province.
He reviews soil tests, expert reports and requests for inspections of contaminated sites. A dark cherry desk in his office is covered with files in pink folders bound with string. The case has become a pincushion for legal and technical disputes, accumulating more than 141,000 documents.
Nunez will decide the case without a jury, as is customary in Ecuador’s legal system. In civil cases, judges gather evidence from witnesses, documents and experts before reaching a decision. A statue of Lady Justice sits on a dusty coffee table near an old sofa in Nunez’s otherwise Spartan office.
Nunez says his task is to decide what damage has been done and who is responsible. If he rules against Chevron, he’ll determine the dollar amount of the judgment. He talks about the gravity of the case. “There are people who are dying or have died,” he says.
1,401 Deaths
In November, a team of engineers, doctors and biologists submitted a court-ordered report concluding that Texaco’s pollution had caused 2,091 cases of cancer among residents and led to 1,401 deaths from 1985 to 1998.
The panel had previously concluded that Texaco polluted streams and drinking water in a 1,920-square-mile (4,972- square-kilometer) area and caused economic and social damage to people who live near the wells.
Chevron should pay as much as $27 billion in cleanup costs and compensation for families of the sick and the dead, the court-ordered study says. Nunez, a former Ecuadorean Air Force officer, says that by March, most of the evidence will be submitted, and he’ll reach a decision on the case later in 2009.
Silvia Garrigo, Chevron’s lead in-house attorney in the case, has made dozens of trips to Ecuador’s Amazon region in the past five years from her office at the company’s suburban, San Ramon, California, campus, 40 miles east of San Francisco.
Wrongly Accused
She says residents have wrongly accused Texaco of contaminating the environment and that there’s no credible evidence linking diseases to Texaco’s work.
“They have been told so many times that it’s Texaco, so everything that goes wrong in their lives, if their cow dies, it’s Texaco,” Garrigo, 47, says. “If their wife has diabetes, it’s Texaco.”
Health problems among residents of the Amazon are linked to poor sanitation and poverty, and residents of the oil region are pawns of activists and greedy attorneys, Garrigo says.
“You have people that are very needy,” she says. “They will lie. ‘My baby will have medical care, my son will get a job, if I testify.’”
If the judge follows the report’s recommendations, it could be the biggest industrial environmental judgment ever, surpassing Chevron’s 2007 profit by 50 percent. Chevron says it would appeal an adverse outcome, which could stave off paying anything for years.
Exxon Valdez
Nunez’s ruling has the potential to dwarf the $470 million in damages paid by Union Carbide Corp. over a chemical leak in Bhopal, India, that killed 3,800 people in 1984. And it could exceed the cost for the biggest oil spill ever in U.S. waters, Exxon Mobil Corp.’s nearly $4 billion in compensation and fines for the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska in 1989.
Exxon settled both civil and criminal charges to end the litigation.
In 1995, Texaco agreed with Ecuador’s Energy and Mines Ministry and PetroEcuador to clean up some of the waste dumping. Three years later, the agency approved the $40 million repair effort by Texaco. It released the company from responsibility for pollution that remained, according to a letter to the U.S. court from Ecuador’s ambassador in Washington.
Five years later, government auditors reported they had discovered pits oozing with oil and said the cleanup had been botched.
“Texaco has caused irreversible damage,” says the report by the General Controller of the State, a government agency that audits public contracts. “The environmental remediation and repair agreement goes against the country’s interest,” says the report, which was approved on April 9, 2003.
A Sham
Garrigo, Chevron’s lawyer, says the controller’s audit is a sham. It’s part of an Ecuadorean government campaign to concoct a case against the company and help the jungle residents and their lawyers reap billions of dollars of damages, she says.
“We have independent scientific analysis that refutes those findings,” Garrigo says.
Doctors at Ecuador’s top cancer hospital say oil pollution has taken a heavy toll on public health in the Amazon.
“There are enough cancer cases in the Amazon to show there is a trend, and the trend is rising,” says Rena Munoz, the doctor in charge of clinical oncology at Sociedad de Lucha Contra el Cancer, the Quito cancer hospital known as SOLCA that has treated people from the area.
Regardless of who’s to blame, oil pollution is a part of daily life in northeastern Ecuador. San Carlos is a town of 2,800 residents living in run-down wooden houses in the heart of the former Texaco oil fields.
‘We Drank This Water’
Trucks and bulldozers driven by government workers putting in the town’s first paved streets leave giant tread marks in the mud. A crude-oil processing plant run by PetroEcuador has machinery that roars like jet engines. Smokestacks spew flames and black, sooty clouds into the air.
Texaco built dozens of oil wells near San Carlos, and one is next to the Cevallos family’s abandoned home.
“We drank this water because we had to; there’s no other water,” says Cevallos, dressed in rubber boots and jeans caked with mud, sweating on the banks of the stream. “No one ever told us it was bad, so we just drank it for years. Before, we didn’t know. Now, we do.”
Cevallos says the waste pit by his old home, which is overgrown with weeds and is the size of a tennis court, has been there since he moved to the farm with an uncle in the mid-1970s. Workers contracted by Texaco used bulldozers to cover the pits with dirt, he says.
1.2 Million Oil Barrels
The well produced 144,321 barrels of wastewater and 1.2 million barrels of crude in the 18 years Texaco managed it, according to company documents in court records.
When Cevallos’s daughter, Diana, became ill in 2004, she was bathed in water from the polluted stream in her parents’ efforts to lower her fever.
Maria Barba, a doctor at Baca Ortiz Children’s Hospital in Quito, diagnosed the girl with histiocytosis X. Barba says she’s used cancer treatments to fight the disease as it flooded Diana’s body with white blood cells that attacked her bones and organs with tumors.
Barba sits at her desk at Baca Ortiz, where she runs the oncology and hematology department, reviewing Diana’s records. She says she can’t prove how Diana got the illness. Poor nutrition and sanitation, she says, make people sick in the impoverished Amazon, but pollution from oil drilling waste is a factor.
“It could be the water,” Barba says.
The Cevallos family isn’t named in the lawsuit.
No Scientific Evidence
Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson says there’s no scientific evidence linking Diana’s disease to crude oil.
In Joya de los Sachas, a town about 5 miles north of San Carlos, three boys stand on a 29-inch-wide (74-centimeter- wide) oil pipeline running down the median on the main street. They’re selling candy in the midday sun as trucks, scooters and buses speed by.
On a rutted dirt road near the pipeline in Sachas, Cevallos sits in the front room of his brother’s three-room house. His family sought refuge there four years earlier after fleeing their polluted farm to help Diana heal. To pay the medical bills, he’s had to sell two small houses he was fixing up.
Cevallos has been able to take Diana to clinics and hospitals in Ecuador’s public health system, which charges patients for medicine only. He’s had to pay for drugs and treatments, including $210 for injections every three weeks.
Next to Texaco’s old Sushufindi 38 well, farmer Manuel Salinas, 72, steps out of his family’s wooden shack and walks 50 feet, through a garbage-strewn patch of coffee trees. A pool of thick oil 50 yards (45 meters) long bakes in the sun.
Chickens in Quagmire
Salinas says the oily pool has been there since he moved to the farm in the early 1970s. He started to worry that the water wasn’t safe years ago, when his chickens would slip into the quagmire and die a slow death.
Havoc Laboratory in Quito, which analyzed soil samples for residents, found oil contamination about 20,000 percent above safe levels. Chevron spokesman Robertson says company tests found that drinking water near the pit isn’t polluted.
Both Texaco and PetroEcuador have been cited by government inspectors for repeated spills since oil production began in the 1960s. In 1994, PetroEcuador began reinjecting wastewater from drilling into the oil formations deep below the ground, PetroEcuador’s Mejia says.
Reinjection is a common practice in the U.S. For decades, Texaco put the waste into unlined pits, treated it and then discharged it into rivers and streams, a practice that was legal in Ecuador at the time, Chevron says on its Web site.
Outlawed in U.S.
As Texaco was dumping waste in Ecuador, environmental regulators in U.S. states were outlawing open-air pools.
Texas banned unlined waste pits that leaked into groundwater as far back as 1969, says Steve Seni, former assistant director of environmental studies at the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil industry.
A few miles from San Carlos, Ines Suquisupa stands by a grave in a jungle clearing with a photograph of her daughter Ana Patino. Ana, a shy girl who got good grades in school, agonized with leukemia for weeks in the wooden shack in which she was reared near an oil well outside San Carlos.
Doctors at Eugenio Espejo Hospital in Quito referred her to the Red Cross Hospital in Quito. There, Juan Sghirla, a hematologist, concluded her leukemia was so advanced that there was little he could do. That day, on June 20, 2005, Ana died. She was 18 years old.
“It was so fast that before we knew it, she was dead,” says Suquisupa, standing by her unpainted wooden home, which has uncovered openings for windows and no running water.
Shallow Water Well
Ana probably came down with the deadly disease because of the oil pollution around her home, Sghirla says. Ana, whose family settled the farm before she was born, grew up about 100 yards from an oil well and drank from a shallow water well that lay underneath rusty crude-oil pipelines.
A team from the general controller’s office that took soil tests at a well near Ana’s home found hydrocarbon contamination 5,716 times normal levels, the 2003 audit says.
Once, when neighbors tried to dig a water well a few feet away, they struck a layer of tar, says Suquisupa, 50, who makes a living tending a patch of cacao and coffee on her farm. Ana’s family isn’t among those who sued Chevron.
Chevron spokesman Robertson says soil and water tests found no chemicals known to cause leukemia.
There had been no oil production in Ecuador’s Amazon before 1964. That year, Texaco entered the region when the government gave the company the right to explore a strip of jungle in two provinces, Orellana and Sucumbios, near the Colombian border. On March 29, 1967, the search bore its first fruits.
A well called Lago Agrio, which is Spanish for Sour Lake, gushed thick, black crude. Sour Lake is also the name of a Texas town where Texaco made one of its first oil strikes, in 1903.
‘Country’s Salvation’
Jorge Viteri, an engineer who worked for one of Texaco’s contracted exploration crews, recalls dancing by the well that day as the crude rained down.
“We thought it would be our country’s salvation, bringing us out of poverty,” says Viteri, 82, who wrote a book, Oil, “Spears and Blood” (Palabra Editores, 2008), about the quest for oil in Ecuador.
Four decades later, 35 percent of Ecuadoreans live below the government’s poverty line, earning less than $720 a year. In rural areas like the northeast Amazon, the poverty ranking is nearly 60 percent, according to Ecuador’s National Institute of Statistics and Census.
Starting in 1964 and throughout Texaco’s 26-year presence in the Amazon, Texaco crews cleared roads, built bridges and river ports and hired more than 3,000 laborers. Workers also dug hundreds of pits near wells and processing stations to hold the water containing salt and chemicals that comes up with oil during drilling, court records show.
Little Threat
Chevron’s Robertson says the chemicals pose little or no threat to health. Ecuador’s Amazon gets an average of 120 inches of rain a year, and Texaco’s pits sometimes overflowed, polluting streams, according to the 2003 general controller’s audit.
The roads Texaco built helped open up a strip of the Amazon that had been inaccessible to vehicles and inhabited by small groups of Amazonian Siona-Secoya, Cofan and Quichua Indians.
A wave of poor Ecuadoreans, mainly from the southern Andean city of Loja, flocked to the area, encouraged by government settlement programs. These so-called colonists built wooden shacks on stilts and cut down the jungle next to wells and waste pits to start farms.
Nunez remembers flying over the region when he was in the air force during those years. Dark areas showed where the lush jungle had been slashed away.
“You ask yourself what happened and what caused this?” Nunez says. “You don’t have to be a technical expert to know something has happened.” He says the memories won’t influence his decision in the case.
Military Rulers
By the early 1970s, Ecuador’s military rulers began pressuring for a direct stake in the oil riches, says Alberto Acosta, a historian and former Ecuadorean energy minister.
PetroEcuador bought the majority stake of the oil venture in 1977, leaving Texaco to work the wells. The state-owned company needed Texaco then because it lacked experience in oil drilling. Texaco ran the fields until June 1990, when PetroEcuador took over. Texaco kept a 37.5 percent stake in the oil fields until 1992, when PetroEcuador bought all of it.
As management was changing hands, Miguel San Sebastian, a physician based in Spain, began to wonder how the oil pollution was affecting the health of people living in Ecuador’s Amazon. San Sebastian had worked as a traveling doctor treating Indians and colonists in the jungle where Texaco operated.
“You could see it everywhere, the spills in rivers and pits,” says San Sebastian, 42, who’s now a professor of epidemiology at Umea University in Umea, Sweden. “We started to sense that it had to have an impact on people’s health.”
Lawyers Notice
Texaco’s oil drilling in Ecuador also began to attract the attention of American lawyers. Amherst, Massachusetts, attorney Cristobal Bonifaz, a former research engineer at DuPont Co., grew interested in oil pollution in the Ecuadorean Amazon when his son showed him a report by an environmental group.
Ecuadorean-born Bonifaz, whose grandfather, Neptali Bonifaz, was elected president of Ecuador in 1931, traveled to the region to take a look. “I saw lakes of oil,” he says.
Bonifaz contacted Harold Kohn, a Philadelphia antitrust attorney who pioneered the use of class-action, or group, lawsuits. Kohn’s son Joseph, a partner at Kohn Swift & Graf P.C. in Philadelphia, teamed up with Bonifaz.
Steven Donziger, a former journalist and Washington public defender who went to Harvard Law School with Bonifaz’s son, John, joined the case.
On Nov. 3, 1993, Bonifaz, Donziger and Kohn walked into a federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan with members of Ecuadorean Indian tribes in traditional dress and filed the lawsuit against Texaco.
Jurisdiction Battle
Lawyers for both sides fought over whether the suit should be in a U.S. court. Texaco sought dismissal, saying the U.S. courts were the wrong forum because the land and the people affected were in Ecuador.
The plaintiffs said the case should stay in the U.S. because Texaco was a U.S. company.
In the midst of the legal wrangling in New York, Texaco signed an agreement on May 4, 1995, with Ecuador’s energy ministry and PetroEcuador to clean up a portion of the oil fields. In return, Texaco would be absolved from any liability for environmental damage.
Texaco said it would clean up about a third of the waste pits because it had held a 37.5 percent interest in the oil fields for the last six years of its partnership with PetroEcuador. The state-owned company would take care of the rest.
Back in New York, U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff threw the case out in 1996, saying disputes that occurred in Ecuador shouldn’t be decided in U.S. courts. He also said the case had been improperly filed because it didn’t name PetroEcuador as a defendant.
Decision Reversed
The Amazon residents appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan. The court reversed the decision and sent the case back to Rakoff, saying it should be decided in Ecuador.
Texaco then learned that Ecuadorean government environmental officials questioned the company’s cleanup.
In September 1996, the energy ministry’s environmental department issued a report saying Texaco had failed to identify more than 200 additional waste pits and hadn’t come up with a plan for treating about 50,000 barrels of crude-oil waste, according to memos cited in the 2003 controller’s audit.
In 2001, inspectors from the government controller’s office found oil seeping out of 41 Texaco waste pits and said 59 pits had been left uncovered. Texaco’s cleanup didn’t comply with Ecuador’s environmental regulations, and the government erred in certifying the cleanup as complete, the audit concluded.
$45.8 Billion Acquisition
Back in the U.S., as Texaco was facing the cleanup controversy in Ecuador, Chevron, then the second-largest U.S. oil company, acquired No. 3 Texaco in October 2001 for $45.8 billion. Chevron saw acquiring Texaco as a way to cut costs and have more capital to compete with rivals in the search for new oil reserves.
In 2003, the Ecuadoreans filed their case in Superior Court in Nueva Loja, also known as Lago Agrio, 20 miles south of the Colombian border. The suit was led by U.S. and Ecuadorean lawyers. Pablo Fajardo, a community activist and former oil worker who earned a law degree in 2004, joined the lawyers.
Bonifaz, the lawyer who started the suit in 1992, left the case. In a different case in San Francisco, a federal judge fined Bonifaz $45,000 in 2007 for filing untrue claims that three Ecuadorean families had cancer cases linked to Texaco pollution.
Bonifaz says he had relied on information from Ecuadorean lawyers not connected to the Chevron case.
Under Ecuadorean environmental rules, lawsuits over pollution are handled by chief judges, who rotate every two years.
Evaluating Pollution Data
In 2007, Judge Germn Yanez, the case’s third judge, appointed Richard Cabrera, a geological engineer in Quito with 20 years of experience, to evaluate the pollution data, assess the effects of contamination on people and the environment and recommend a cleanup plan.
Cabrera had specialized in environmental studies for mining and oil companies in Ecuador, and he put together a team of scientists, doctors and biologists.
In April 2008, Cabrera’s team concluded that Texaco’s mishandling of waste until 1990 was the main cause of the pollution. It proposed a cleanup of 916 pits and underground aquifers. The report pegged total damages at $16 billion.
The team reviewed studies by San Sebastian, the Spanish doctor, and a group of government health workers. It found that cancer rates were above those of areas of Ecuador without oil operations. Its revised report, which used studies by the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. court cases to gauge costs, increased the damage estimate to $27 billion.
Not Supported By Evidence
Chevron says the expert panel’s findings aren’t supported by the evidence. The company hired doctors, epidemiologists and other experts who refute the report.
The Chevron case is the most important environmental litigation on the planet, says Mike Brune, executive director of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, which lobbies companies to improve their practices.
“When the verdict comes in, it will force environmental ethics to go global,” he says.
Nunez says the case will have international significance.
“The Amazon gives the breath of life to humanity,” Nunez says. “That’s why this is the trial of the world.”
Cevallos says Texaco’s legacy has made his world crumble. His daughter, Diana, is a lively girl with a broad smile who likes to do homework while sitting with her mother, Sandra Gutierrez. She’s spent much of the past year taking 18-hour round trips by bus with her mother to the hospital in Quito every three weeks, for chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
Across the old Texaco fields in Ecuador’s Amazon, after 40 years of oil production, thousands are ill and hundreds have died. Most have no way out.
“People are getting sick all around here,” says Cevallos, standing by his abandoned house. “But what can you do? When you’re poor, there’s nowhere else to go.”
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A gasolinelike smell hangs in the sweltering jungle air. The mess is a remnant of oil drilling in a 120-mile-long swath of the tropical jungle in northeastern Ecuador where Texaco Inc. and Ecuador’s state-run oil company, PetroEcuador, have pumped billions of barrels of crude from the ground during the past 40 years.
Cevallos, 51, whose face is tanned and creased from a life working in the tropical sun, plunges a shovel into a ditch. Grease oozes out and drains into a river his family used for drinking and bathing for more than 25 years.
About 230,000 people live in Ecuador’s northeastern rain forest side by side with oil wells and pools of drilling waste. Cevallos is no longer one of them.
Four years ago, a doctor diagnosed his daughter, Diana, with histiocytosis X, a rare blood disease that caused tumors that punched holes in her skull.
“The doctor told us to get out because the pollution would make her sicker, maybe kill her,” says Cevallos, who used to tend patches of cacao on his farm and now works as a laborer on a construction site for $6 a day. His daughter, now 5, is thin and still ailing.
As he speaks, a dog claws at trash around the family’s abandoned, windowless, one-bedroom, cement-walled home.
‘I Was Already Poor’
“I was already poor, and now I was going to get poorer,” he says.
The ruined land around Cevallos’s home is part of one of the worst environmental and human health disasters in the Amazon basin, which stretches across nine countries and, at 1.9 billion acres (800 million hectares), is about the size of Australia.
And depending on how an Ecuadorean judge rules in a lawsuit over the pollution, it may become the costliest corporate ecological catastrophe in world history.
If the judge follows the recommendation of a court- appointed panel of experts, he could order Chevron Corp., which now owns Texaco, to pay as much as $27 billion in damages.
The case, which has languished for 15 years in U.S. and Ecuadorean courts, highlights the growing human and environmental toll of the global quest for oil.
“If they have to pay out, who takes the big hit? Ultimately, the shareholders,” says Pat Doherty, director of corporate responsibility at the Office of the New York City Comptroller, which controls 6.5 million Chevron shares in public pension funds.
‘Bad Shape’
Doherty says Chevron should settle. Otherwise, if the company loses, he expects it will file appeals in Ecuador and the U.S. for years to come, leaving stockholders in limbo.
“They’re really in bad shape on this,” he says. “A settlement would make sense. The trees that last the longest are the ones that bend.”
Ecuador, which reported annual per capita income of $3,400 in 2007 and defaulted on its bonds in December for the second time in a decade, is one of two Latin American members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and depends on oil revenue to fund a third of the national budget.
Both sides in the Amazon case agree that for a quarter of a century, until 1990, Texaco discharged 16 billion gallons of wastewater that’s a byproduct of drilling.
In 1993, 76 people who lived near the wells -- including members of the indigenous Cofan and Quichua Indian tribes and people who came to the Amazon from other parts of Ecuador for jobs -- sued White Plains, New York-based Texaco in New York federal court.
Chevron Blames PetroEcuador
They claimed the pollution had ruined their livelihood as farmers and fishermen and made them and their families sick.
Chevron says Texaco had completely cleaned up its mess by 1998. PetroEcuador, which took over Texaco’s operations in 1990 -- and not Texaco -- is to blame for today’s pollution, Chevron says.
From 1990 until 2007, government-owned PetroEcuador released wastewater into the environment, says Fausto Mej a, a spokesman for PetroEcuador. He says the company has spent the past 16 years cleaning up, decreasing its dumping each year. It stopped releasing waste entirely by 2008, he says.
The case will be decided in an old concrete building in the Amazonian oil town of Lago Agrio, 37 miles (60 kilometers) north of Cevallos’s former home. With a shoe store, a T-shirt shop and a beauty salon on the street level, the building, which has no elevator, also houses a provincial courthouse.
141,000 Documents
On the fourth floor, Judge Juan Nunez oversees the lawsuit, weighing evidence and pondering whether Chevron should pay billions in damages. Nunez, 55, who wears a tan, open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, is president of the Nueva Loja Superior Court, the highest judicial body in Ecuador’s northeastern Sucumb os province.
He reviews soil tests, expert reports and requests for inspections of contaminated sites. A dark cherry desk in his office is covered with files in pink folders bound with string. The case has become a pincushion for legal and technical disputes, accumulating more than 141,000 documents.
Nunez will decide the case without a jury, as is customary in Ecuador’s legal system. In civil cases, judges gather evidence from witnesses, documents and experts before reaching a decision. A statue of Lady Justice sits on a dusty coffee table near an old sofa in Nunez’s otherwise Spartan office.
Nunez says his task is to decide what damage has been done and who is responsible. If he rules against Chevron, he’ll determine the dollar amount of the judgment. He talks about the gravity of the case. “There are people who are dying or have died,” he says.
1,401 Deaths
In November, a team of engineers, doctors and biologists submitted a court-ordered report concluding that Texaco’s pollution had caused 2,091 cases of cancer among residents and led to 1,401 deaths from 1985 to 1998.
The panel had previously concluded that Texaco polluted streams and drinking water in a 1,920-square-mile (4,972- square-kilometer) area and caused economic and social damage to people who live near the wells.
Chevron should pay as much as $27 billion in cleanup costs and compensation for families of the sick and the dead, the court-ordered study says. Nunez, a former Ecuadorean Air Force officer, says that by March, most of the evidence will be submitted, and he’ll reach a decision on the case later in 2009.
Silvia Garrigo, Chevron’s lead in-house attorney in the case, has made dozens of trips to Ecuador’s Amazon region in the past five years from her office at the company’s suburban, San Ramon, California, campus, 40 miles east of San Francisco.
Wrongly Accused
She says residents have wrongly accused Texaco of contaminating the environment and that there’s no credible evidence linking diseases to Texaco’s work.
“They have been told so many times that it’s Texaco, so everything that goes wrong in their lives, if their cow dies, it’s Texaco,” Garrigo, 47, says. “If their wife has diabetes, it’s Texaco.”
Health problems among residents of the Amazon are linked to poor sanitation and poverty, and residents of the oil region are pawns of activists and greedy attorneys, Garrigo says.
“You have people that are very needy,” she says. “They will lie. ‘My baby will have medical care, my son will get a job, if I testify.’”
If the judge follows the report’s recommendations, it could be the biggest industrial environmental judgment ever, surpassing Chevron’s 2007 profit by 50 percent. Chevron says it would appeal an adverse outcome, which could stave off paying anything for years.
Exxon Valdez
Nunez’s ruling has the potential to dwarf the $470 million in damages paid by Union Carbide Corp. over a chemical leak in Bhopal, India, that killed 3,800 people in 1984. And it could exceed the cost for the biggest oil spill ever in U.S. waters, Exxon Mobil Corp.’s nearly $4 billion in compensation and fines for the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska in 1989.
Exxon settled both civil and criminal charges to end the litigation.
In 1995, Texaco agreed with Ecuador’s Energy and Mines Ministry and PetroEcuador to clean up some of the waste dumping. Three years later, the agency approved the $40 million repair effort by Texaco. It released the company from responsibility for pollution that remained, according to a letter to the U.S. court from Ecuador’s ambassador in Washington.
Five years later, government auditors reported they had discovered pits oozing with oil and said the cleanup had been botched.
“Texaco has caused irreversible damage,” says the report by the General Controller of the State, a government agency that audits public contracts. “The environmental remediation and repair agreement goes against the country’s interest,” says the report, which was approved on April 9, 2003.
A Sham
Garrigo, Chevron’s lawyer, says the controller’s audit is a sham. It’s part of an Ecuadorean government campaign to concoct a case against the company and help the jungle residents and their lawyers reap billions of dollars of damages, she says.
“We have independent scientific analysis that refutes those findings,” Garrigo says.
Doctors at Ecuador’s top cancer hospital say oil pollution has taken a heavy toll on public health in the Amazon.
“There are enough cancer cases in the Amazon to show there is a trend, and the trend is rising,” says Rena Munoz, the doctor in charge of clinical oncology at Sociedad de Lucha Contra el Cancer, the Quito cancer hospital known as SOLCA that has treated people from the area.
Regardless of who’s to blame, oil pollution is a part of daily life in northeastern Ecuador. San Carlos is a town of 2,800 residents living in run-down wooden houses in the heart of the former Texaco oil fields.
‘We Drank This Water’
Trucks and bulldozers driven by government workers putting in the town’s first paved streets leave giant tread marks in the mud. A crude-oil processing plant run by PetroEcuador has machinery that roars like jet engines. Smokestacks spew flames and black, sooty clouds into the air.
Texaco built dozens of oil wells near San Carlos, and one is next to the Cevallos family’s abandoned home.
“We drank this water because we had to; there’s no other water,” says Cevallos, dressed in rubber boots and jeans caked with mud, sweating on the banks of the stream. “No one ever told us it was bad, so we just drank it for years. Before, we didn’t know. Now, we do.”
Cevallos says the waste pit by his old home, which is overgrown with weeds and is the size of a tennis court, has been there since he moved to the farm with an uncle in the mid-1970s. Workers contracted by Texaco used bulldozers to cover the pits with dirt, he says.
1.2 Million Oil Barrels
The well produced 144,321 barrels of wastewater and 1.2 million barrels of crude in the 18 years Texaco managed it, according to company documents in court records.
When Cevallos’s daughter, Diana, became ill in 2004, she was bathed in water from the polluted stream in her parents’ efforts to lower her fever.
Maria Barba, a doctor at Baca Ortiz Children’s Hospital in Quito, diagnosed the girl with histiocytosis X. Barba says she’s used cancer treatments to fight the disease as it flooded Diana’s body with white blood cells that attacked her bones and organs with tumors.
Barba sits at her desk at Baca Ortiz, where she runs the oncology and hematology department, reviewing Diana’s records. She says she can’t prove how Diana got the illness. Poor nutrition and sanitation, she says, make people sick in the impoverished Amazon, but pollution from oil drilling waste is a factor.
“It could be the water,” Barba says.
The Cevallos family isn’t named in the lawsuit.
No Scientific Evidence
Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson says there’s no scientific evidence linking Diana’s disease to crude oil.
In Joya de los Sachas, a town about 5 miles north of San Carlos, three boys stand on a 29-inch-wide (74-centimeter- wide) oil pipeline running down the median on the main street. They’re selling candy in the midday sun as trucks, scooters and buses speed by.
On a rutted dirt road near the pipeline in Sachas, Cevallos sits in the front room of his brother’s three-room house. His family sought refuge there four years earlier after fleeing their polluted farm to help Diana heal. To pay the medical bills, he’s had to sell two small houses he was fixing up.
Cevallos has been able to take Diana to clinics and hospitals in Ecuador’s public health system, which charges patients for medicine only. He’s had to pay for drugs and treatments, including $210 for injections every three weeks.
Next to Texaco’s old Sushufindi 38 well, farmer Manuel Salinas, 72, steps out of his family’s wooden shack and walks 50 feet, through a garbage-strewn patch of coffee trees. A pool of thick oil 50 yards (45 meters) long bakes in the sun.
Chickens in Quagmire
Salinas says the oily pool has been there since he moved to the farm in the early 1970s. He started to worry that the water wasn’t safe years ago, when his chickens would slip into the quagmire and die a slow death.
Havoc Laboratory in Quito, which analyzed soil samples for residents, found oil contamination about 20,000 percent above safe levels. Chevron spokesman Robertson says company tests found that drinking water near the pit isn’t polluted.
Both Texaco and PetroEcuador have been cited by government inspectors for repeated spills since oil production began in the 1960s. In 1994, PetroEcuador began reinjecting wastewater from drilling into the oil formations deep below the ground, PetroEcuador’s Mejia says.
Reinjection is a common practice in the U.S. For decades, Texaco put the waste into unlined pits, treated it and then discharged it into rivers and streams, a practice that was legal in Ecuador at the time, Chevron says on its Web site.
Outlawed in U.S.
As Texaco was dumping waste in Ecuador, environmental regulators in U.S. states were outlawing open-air pools.
Texas banned unlined waste pits that leaked into groundwater as far back as 1969, says Steve Seni, former assistant director of environmental studies at the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil industry.
A few miles from San Carlos, Ines Suquisupa stands by a grave in a jungle clearing with a photograph of her daughter Ana Patino. Ana, a shy girl who got good grades in school, agonized with leukemia for weeks in the wooden shack in which she was reared near an oil well outside San Carlos.
Doctors at Eugenio Espejo Hospital in Quito referred her to the Red Cross Hospital in Quito. There, Juan Sghirla, a hematologist, concluded her leukemia was so advanced that there was little he could do. That day, on June 20, 2005, Ana died. She was 18 years old.
“It was so fast that before we knew it, she was dead,” says Suquisupa, standing by her unpainted wooden home, which has uncovered openings for windows and no running water.
Shallow Water Well
Ana probably came down with the deadly disease because of the oil pollution around her home, Sghirla says. Ana, whose family settled the farm before she was born, grew up about 100 yards from an oil well and drank from a shallow water well that lay underneath rusty crude-oil pipelines.
A team from the general controller’s office that took soil tests at a well near Ana’s home found hydrocarbon contamination 5,716 times normal levels, the 2003 audit says.
Once, when neighbors tried to dig a water well a few feet away, they struck a layer of tar, says Suquisupa, 50, who makes a living tending a patch of cacao and coffee on her farm. Ana’s family isn’t among those who sued Chevron.
Chevron spokesman Robertson says soil and water tests found no chemicals known to cause leukemia.
There had been no oil production in Ecuador’s Amazon before 1964. That year, Texaco entered the region when the government gave the company the right to explore a strip of jungle in two provinces, Orellana and Sucumbios, near the Colombian border. On March 29, 1967, the search bore its first fruits.
A well called Lago Agrio, which is Spanish for Sour Lake, gushed thick, black crude. Sour Lake is also the name of a Texas town where Texaco made one of its first oil strikes, in 1903.
‘Country’s Salvation’
Jorge Viteri, an engineer who worked for one of Texaco’s contracted exploration crews, recalls dancing by the well that day as the crude rained down.
“We thought it would be our country’s salvation, bringing us out of poverty,” says Viteri, 82, who wrote a book, Oil, “Spears and Blood” (Palabra Editores, 2008), about the quest for oil in Ecuador.
Four decades later, 35 percent of Ecuadoreans live below the government’s poverty line, earning less than $720 a year. In rural areas like the northeast Amazon, the poverty ranking is nearly 60 percent, according to Ecuador’s National Institute of Statistics and Census.
Starting in 1964 and throughout Texaco’s 26-year presence in the Amazon, Texaco crews cleared roads, built bridges and river ports and hired more than 3,000 laborers. Workers also dug hundreds of pits near wells and processing stations to hold the water containing salt and chemicals that comes up with oil during drilling, court records show.
Little Threat
Chevron’s Robertson says the chemicals pose little or no threat to health. Ecuador’s Amazon gets an average of 120 inches of rain a year, and Texaco’s pits sometimes overflowed, polluting streams, according to the 2003 general controller’s audit.
The roads Texaco built helped open up a strip of the Amazon that had been inaccessible to vehicles and inhabited by small groups of Amazonian Siona-Secoya, Cofan and Quichua Indians.
A wave of poor Ecuadoreans, mainly from the southern Andean city of Loja, flocked to the area, encouraged by government settlement programs. These so-called colonists built wooden shacks on stilts and cut down the jungle next to wells and waste pits to start farms.
Nunez remembers flying over the region when he was in the air force during those years. Dark areas showed where the lush jungle had been slashed away.
“You ask yourself what happened and what caused this?” Nunez says. “You don’t have to be a technical expert to know something has happened.” He says the memories won’t influence his decision in the case.
Military Rulers
By the early 1970s, Ecuador’s military rulers began pressuring for a direct stake in the oil riches, says Alberto Acosta, a historian and former Ecuadorean energy minister.
PetroEcuador bought the majority stake of the oil venture in 1977, leaving Texaco to work the wells. The state-owned company needed Texaco then because it lacked experience in oil drilling. Texaco ran the fields until June 1990, when PetroEcuador took over. Texaco kept a 37.5 percent stake in the oil fields until 1992, when PetroEcuador bought all of it.
As management was changing hands, Miguel San Sebastian, a physician based in Spain, began to wonder how the oil pollution was affecting the health of people living in Ecuador’s Amazon. San Sebastian had worked as a traveling doctor treating Indians and colonists in the jungle where Texaco operated.
“You could see it everywhere, the spills in rivers and pits,” says San Sebastian, 42, who’s now a professor of epidemiology at Umea University in Umea, Sweden. “We started to sense that it had to have an impact on people’s health.”
Lawyers Notice
Texaco’s oil drilling in Ecuador also began to attract the attention of American lawyers. Amherst, Massachusetts, attorney Cristobal Bonifaz, a former research engineer at DuPont Co., grew interested in oil pollution in the Ecuadorean Amazon when his son showed him a report by an environmental group.
Ecuadorean-born Bonifaz, whose grandfather, Neptali Bonifaz, was elected president of Ecuador in 1931, traveled to the region to take a look. “I saw lakes of oil,” he says.
Bonifaz contacted Harold Kohn, a Philadelphia antitrust attorney who pioneered the use of class-action, or group, lawsuits. Kohn’s son Joseph, a partner at Kohn Swift & Graf P.C. in Philadelphia, teamed up with Bonifaz.
Steven Donziger, a former journalist and Washington public defender who went to Harvard Law School with Bonifaz’s son, John, joined the case.
On Nov. 3, 1993, Bonifaz, Donziger and Kohn walked into a federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan with members of Ecuadorean Indian tribes in traditional dress and filed the lawsuit against Texaco.
Jurisdiction Battle
Lawyers for both sides fought over whether the suit should be in a U.S. court. Texaco sought dismissal, saying the U.S. courts were the wrong forum because the land and the people affected were in Ecuador.
The plaintiffs said the case should stay in the U.S. because Texaco was a U.S. company.
In the midst of the legal wrangling in New York, Texaco signed an agreement on May 4, 1995, with Ecuador’s energy ministry and PetroEcuador to clean up a portion of the oil fields. In return, Texaco would be absolved from any liability for environmental damage.
Texaco said it would clean up about a third of the waste pits because it had held a 37.5 percent interest in the oil fields for the last six years of its partnership with PetroEcuador. The state-owned company would take care of the rest.
Back in New York, U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff threw the case out in 1996, saying disputes that occurred in Ecuador shouldn’t be decided in U.S. courts. He also said the case had been improperly filed because it didn’t name PetroEcuador as a defendant.
Decision Reversed
The Amazon residents appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan. The court reversed the decision and sent the case back to Rakoff, saying it should be decided in Ecuador.
Texaco then learned that Ecuadorean government environmental officials questioned the company’s cleanup.
In September 1996, the energy ministry’s environmental department issued a report saying Texaco had failed to identify more than 200 additional waste pits and hadn’t come up with a plan for treating about 50,000 barrels of crude-oil waste, according to memos cited in the 2003 controller’s audit.
In 2001, inspectors from the government controller’s office found oil seeping out of 41 Texaco waste pits and said 59 pits had been left uncovered. Texaco’s cleanup didn’t comply with Ecuador’s environmental regulations, and the government erred in certifying the cleanup as complete, the audit concluded.
$45.8 Billion Acquisition
Back in the U.S., as Texaco was facing the cleanup controversy in Ecuador, Chevron, then the second-largest U.S. oil company, acquired No. 3 Texaco in October 2001 for $45.8 billion. Chevron saw acquiring Texaco as a way to cut costs and have more capital to compete with rivals in the search for new oil reserves.
In 2003, the Ecuadoreans filed their case in Superior Court in Nueva Loja, also known as Lago Agrio, 20 miles south of the Colombian border. The suit was led by U.S. and Ecuadorean lawyers. Pablo Fajardo, a community activist and former oil worker who earned a law degree in 2004, joined the lawyers.
Bonifaz, the lawyer who started the suit in 1992, left the case. In a different case in San Francisco, a federal judge fined Bonifaz $45,000 in 2007 for filing untrue claims that three Ecuadorean families had cancer cases linked to Texaco pollution.
Bonifaz says he had relied on information from Ecuadorean lawyers not connected to the Chevron case.
Under Ecuadorean environmental rules, lawsuits over pollution are handled by chief judges, who rotate every two years.
Evaluating Pollution Data
In 2007, Judge Germn Yanez, the case’s third judge, appointed Richard Cabrera, a geological engineer in Quito with 20 years of experience, to evaluate the pollution data, assess the effects of contamination on people and the environment and recommend a cleanup plan.
Cabrera had specialized in environmental studies for mining and oil companies in Ecuador, and he put together a team of scientists, doctors and biologists.
In April 2008, Cabrera’s team concluded that Texaco’s mishandling of waste until 1990 was the main cause of the pollution. It proposed a cleanup of 916 pits and underground aquifers. The report pegged total damages at $16 billion.
The team reviewed studies by San Sebastian, the Spanish doctor, and a group of government health workers. It found that cancer rates were above those of areas of Ecuador without oil operations. Its revised report, which used studies by the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. court cases to gauge costs, increased the damage estimate to $27 billion.
Not Supported By Evidence
Chevron says the expert panel’s findings aren’t supported by the evidence. The company hired doctors, epidemiologists and other experts who refute the report.
The Chevron case is the most important environmental litigation on the planet, says Mike Brune, executive director of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, which lobbies companies to improve their practices.
“When the verdict comes in, it will force environmental ethics to go global,” he says.
Nunez says the case will have international significance.
“The Amazon gives the breath of life to humanity,” Nunez says. “That’s why this is the trial of the world.”
Cevallos says Texaco’s legacy has made his world crumble. His daughter, Diana, is a lively girl with a broad smile who likes to do homework while sitting with her mother, Sandra Gutierrez. She’s spent much of the past year taking 18-hour round trips by bus with her mother to the hospital in Quito every three weeks, for chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
Across the old Texaco fields in Ecuador’s Amazon, after 40 years of oil production, thousands are ill and hundreds have died. Most have no way out.
“People are getting sick all around here,” says Cevallos, standing by his abandoned house. “But what can you do? When you’re poor, there’s nowhere else to go.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a_lJWUAmsu8c&refer=home
Revolucion elevo esperanza de vida 20 anos en oriente cubano
Los beneficios sociales garantizados por la Revolución cubana desde su triunfo en 1959 posibilitan que hoy los pobladores del oriente del país vivan dos décadas más.
Según datos revelados este lunes por la emisora Radio Angulo, hace medio siglo los naturales de la nororiental provincia de Holguín vivían como promedio 21 años menos.
La expectativa de vida entonces rondaba los 57 años, debido al atraso socio-económico que lastraba el desarrollo de esta región.
Al triunfar, la Revolución implementó un sistema nacional de salud pública que garantizó la atención médica gratuita a todos los cubanos, sin importar sexo, edad, credo o filiación política.
En ello incide además el subsidio estatal a una canasta básica familiar que satisface las normas dietéticas internacionales, pese a la crisis mundial de alimentos.
La esperanza de vida en Cuba es actualmente de 77,97 años, cinco más que el promedio en Latinoamérica y el Caribe, aunque también creció la natalidad en los últimos meses.
La Oficina Nacional de Estadística reveló el crecimiento estable de nacidos vivos este año, tendencia que había disminuido en los últimos tiempos acentuando el envejecimiento poblacional.
Pese a ello, el Parlamento aprobó el pasado sábado una nueva Ley de Seguridad Social, que extiende cinco años la edad laboral como alternativa al mencionado envejecimiento.
Las autoridades argumentan que los cubanos llegan hoy a la tercera edad con más salud física y mental que en 1963, cuando fue establecido el sistema de seguridad social vigente hasta ahora.
http://www.diariocolatino.com/es/20081230/internacionales/62216/
Según datos revelados este lunes por la emisora Radio Angulo, hace medio siglo los naturales de la nororiental provincia de Holguín vivían como promedio 21 años menos.
La expectativa de vida entonces rondaba los 57 años, debido al atraso socio-económico que lastraba el desarrollo de esta región.
Al triunfar, la Revolución implementó un sistema nacional de salud pública que garantizó la atención médica gratuita a todos los cubanos, sin importar sexo, edad, credo o filiación política.
En ello incide además el subsidio estatal a una canasta básica familiar que satisface las normas dietéticas internacionales, pese a la crisis mundial de alimentos.
La esperanza de vida en Cuba es actualmente de 77,97 años, cinco más que el promedio en Latinoamérica y el Caribe, aunque también creció la natalidad en los últimos meses.
La Oficina Nacional de Estadística reveló el crecimiento estable de nacidos vivos este año, tendencia que había disminuido en los últimos tiempos acentuando el envejecimiento poblacional.
Pese a ello, el Parlamento aprobó el pasado sábado una nueva Ley de Seguridad Social, que extiende cinco años la edad laboral como alternativa al mencionado envejecimiento.
Las autoridades argumentan que los cubanos llegan hoy a la tercera edad con más salud física y mental que en 1963, cuando fue establecido el sistema de seguridad social vigente hasta ahora.
http://www.diariocolatino.com/es/20081230/internacionales/62216/
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