
Food & Water Watch
Yesterday, in city hall, Councilmembers Paul Koretz and Mike Bonin introduced a motion to place a moratorium on fracking within the city of Los Angeles and along the city's water supply route. They were joined outside beforehand by the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch, the environmental health group Physicians for Social Responsibly-Los Angeles, Citizens Coalition for a Safe Community (CCSC) and the Sierra Club to announce the motion at a press conference.
"On one hand, we're all concerned that a strong earthquake could destroy the Bay Delta levees and contaminate one of L.A.’s major water supplies with salt water," said Councilmember Paul Koretz. "On the other, fracking is happening all over the state, and the United States Geological Survey says fracking-related activity has definitively caused earthquakes in Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. As a state, we have to decide which it is, are we protecting our water supply, or not?"
"Already, 16 of our neighborhood councils have called for a ban on fracking," Koretz continued. "Like with coal power and plastic bags, if the federal or state governments are unwilling or unable to act to protect Angelenos, we will do our part to lead by example here at the local level."
“The quality of our water and the safety of our neighborhoods comes first,” said Councilmember Mike Bonin. “The threat fracking poses to families in L.A. is serious and I am proud to join Councilmember Koretz in proposing a moratorium on fracking in the City of Los Angeles and along our water supply route.”
Councilmember Bonin called on Gov. Brown (D-CA) to listen to the majority of Californians who disapprove of the inherently dangerous process of fracking and impose an immediate statewide moratorium on fracking.
“As Governor Brown has failed to act, cities like Los Angeles are stepping up to protect residents,” said Brenna Norton, Southern California organizer for Food & Water Watch. “Nationwide the evidence is clear: no amount of regulation can make this fundamentally destructive and toxic drilling safe."
"Food & Water Watch congratulates the courageous leadership of Councilmembers Paul Koretz and Mike Bonin, willing to stand up for Angelenos and all Californians,” Norton said.
Fracking is a highly polluting form of oil and gas extraction that involves blasting huge volumes of water mixed with toxic chemicals into the earth to break up rock formations. The controversial technique is currently unregulated and unmonitored by California officials. Fracking has been tied to air and water pollution, seismic activity and it threatens the climate by emitting large amounts of methane.
“The health impacts of the chemicals used in fracking, acidization and gravel packing are clear,” said Angela Johnson Meszaros, general counsel for Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles. “Introducing these chemicals into a densely populated city like Los Angeles exposes people to unnecessary threats in both the short term and over the long term. Fracking is all the more reckless because we’re creating all these exposure routes just to extract oil to burn which has its own massive negative health consequences.”
Oil companies have already begun fracking in the Los Angeles region, most notably in the Inglewood Oil Field, the largest urban oil field in the country, located between the Baldwin Hills and Culver City. Residents living near confirmed fracking activity in the L.A. area have already experienced severe property damage, a noxious oil field blowout in 2006 and a spike in serious health concerns.
"The Citizens Coalition for a Safe Community fully supports the councilmembers’ motion calling for a moratorium on fracking and other forms of risked-filled exploitation of the remaining fossil fuel reserves under the city of Los Angeles,” said Paul Ferrazzi of CCSC. “With many old, idle and abandoned oil wells under existing infrastructure in the city, this is the prudent action for Los Angeles city councilmembers to support before a disaster similar to the 1985 Fairfax District Ross Dress for Less explosion is allowed occur again.
"We must act now on the city and county levels to prevent the destruction of our urban and rural communities given Governor Jerry Brown's refusal to impose a statewide moratorium to allow independent study of the environmental and health risks already realized in other parts of the country," Ferrazzi concluded.
Oil companies are gearing up to frack unconventional shale oil in the Monterey Shale, a formation beneath some of the state’s most productive farmland, critical water sources and dozens of towns and cities from the Salinas Valley to the Los Angeles Basin. It has also been noted that the Los Angeles County portion of the Monterey Shale contains more oil per square meter than any other oil producing basin in the world, making it a potential hotbed for fracking and other dangerous extraction activity.
Actor and environmental champion Ed Begley, Jr. also joined the press conference. “It is very important that we realize the potential risks that others around the country have already been dealing with and make sure that we do not expose Californians to those risks,” said Begley. “There are just too many unknowns and our citizens cannot afford foolish experimentation with our water, air, health, earthquakes and climate."
“Fracking has become a very local hot-button issue," said Koretz. "As the industry searches for more extreme ways to wring additional oil out of mature urban wells, we can’t allow their drive for profits to come before the health and well-being of the people of Los Angeles and their property.”
Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for more related news on this topic.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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