Nigeria
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‘Sweet Crude’ documents oil exploitation in the Niger River Delta
Picture in your mind the Niger River Delta. What do you think of? Water, mangrove trees, fishing boats? Wrong. Try brown sludge-filled waterways flanked by constantly flaring gas stacks. Welcome to Oporoza, Nigeria — the place where 10 percent of U.S. oil imports originates. When filmmaker Sandy Cioffi traveled to Oporoza in 2006 to make […]
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Cameroon and Nigeria team up to protect endangered gorilla
Cameroon and Nigeria will partner up to protect the world’s most endangered gorilla under an agreement facilitated by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Only some 300 Cross River gorillas remain, all of which live only in those two Central African countries. Gorilla gorilla diehli is threatened by illegal logging, agricultural conversion of its habitat, and poaching […]
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Drilling more in the U.S. won’t avert any environmental damage from drilling overseas
I was planning on ignoring this column from Charles Krauthammer — always a good idea — but two or three people have asked me about it now, so I guess it’s worth saying something. Krauthammer’s thesis is that when we put areas in the U.S. off limits to oil drilling, we push drilling into countries […]
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Challenging the militarization of U.S. energy policy
This essay originally ran on TomDispatch; it is reprinted here with Tom's kind permission.
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American policymakers have long viewed the protection of overseas oil supplies as an essential matter of "national security," requiring the threat of -- and sometimes the use of -- military force. This is now an unquestioned part of American foreign policy.
On this basis, the first Bush administration fought a war against Iraq in 1990-1991 and the second Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003. With global oil prices soaring and oil reserves expected to dwindle in the years ahead, military force is sure to be seen by whatever new administration enters Washington in January 2009 as the ultimate guarantor of our well-being in the oil heartlands of the planet. But with the costs of militarized oil operations -- in both blood and dollars -- rising precipitously, isn't it time to challenge such "wisdom"? Isn't it time to ask whether the U.S. military has anything reasonable to do with American energy security, and whether a reliance on military force, when it comes to energy policy, is practical, affordable, or justifiable?
How energy policy got militarized
The association between "energy security" (as it's now termed) and "national security" was established long ago. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first forged this association way back in 1945, when he pledged to protect the Saudi Arabian royal family in return for privileged American access to Saudi oil. The relationship was given formal expression in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter told Congress that maintaining the uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil was a "vital interest" of the United States, and attempts by hostile nations to cut that flow would be countered "by any means necessary, including military force."
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Two crazy environmental stories via podcast
I've been catching up on a backlog of podcasts this week (I haven't used my iPod in weeks; in New York City you almost feel alien if you walk the streets without cables in your ears). From one of my favorites, the NPR Environment podcast, two surprising stories.
The first is from their excellent Climate Connections series, created in conjunction with National Geographic. Who knew that Nigeria's natural gas flares are so big they can be viewed from space? As horrifying as it sounds, apparently, "every year, millions of dollars are literally going up in smoke in Nigeria," as oil-drilling companies burn off unwanted natural gas produced during crude- oil extraction.
What makes this practice so egregious, beyond the fact that it contributes more CO2 to the atmosphere than any other activity south of the Sahara, and beyond the fact that the noxious fumes are destroying the respiratory health of Nigeria's people and dirtying their drinking water, is that the very people who live next to these perennial blow torches often don't have electricity themselves.
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Rebels slash production production take hostages in Nigeria.
Everyone's favorite fungible commodity is causing some real trouble in Nigeria, where rebels claiming to represent "ethnic Ijaw communities" are laying siege to property owned by Royal Dutch Shell, the Guardian reports. There's even a hostage crisis brewing:
The group of three Americans, two Thais, two Egyptians, a Filipino, and a Briton -- John Hudspith -- were seized by up to 40 gunmen who stormed a pipe-laying barge. In emails to news agencies, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) said its goal was to punish oil corporations and the government for siphoning off the region's wealth without returning anything to its impoverished ethnic Ijaw communities; as well as saying the hostages' fate had yet to be decided, the movement also warned that they might end up being killed in crossfire with the army.
The rebels managed to halt about a fifth of supply in Nigeria, which according to the Wall Street Journal is "Africa's leading oil exporter and the U.S.'s fifth-largest supplier, usually exporting 2.5 million barrels daily." Crude surged past the $60/barrel mark on the news.
I wonder what ol' Shotgun Dick Cheney thinks of all this.
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Nigerian activist Odigha Odigha fights to halt illegal logging
In southeastern Nigeria, private logging companies are felling the country’s last remaining rainforests. These hardwood forests shelter the highest diversity of primates in the world and some 20 percent of the planet’s butterfly species. Odigha Odigha. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. Odigha Odigha grew up in and around these forests, in the Ijagham community of Cross […]