was kommen mag

Climate change is affecting transport of pollutants and changing precipitation too. As a result, there is remobilisation of contaminants. So when snow and ice melt you release contaminants trapped in the top layers over the last 50 to 60 years. When snow and ice melts faster than it accumulates, you have runoff of stored contaminants that had been trapped in snow and ice. This is something that is ongoing today and will continue.

The trouble is that classical contaminants like persistent organic compounds degrade slowly; the cold temperature means this happens even slower in the Arctic. We are talking about PCBs [Polychlorinated biphenyls], the hexachlorocyclohexanes, lindane, all stored in snow. There are also the brominated flame retardants, mercury, lead, and the radionuclides which fell back to earth after nuclear testing back in the 1960s. Once remobilised, they become available for biological systems and can enter the food chain.

via Anthony King

proconorg:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a public letter on Mon. Apr 22 criticizing the conclusions of a Mar. 1, 2013 State Department environmental review of the proposed Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

According to the EPA, the State Department had concluded in its “Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Review“ that tar sand oil would continue to find its way into the US market regardless of whether or not the pipeline is built, and therefore, approval of the pipeline would “not by itself substantially affect GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions or contribute to climate change.”

The EPA letter criticized those findings, arguing that the State Department report did not properly assess the higher costs associated with rail transport of tar sand oil. The EPA reasoned that higher transportation costs could reduce the total amount of tar sands oil that is extracted and refined, thus reducing future greenhouse gas emissions.

Jack Spencer, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, challenged the EPA’s conclusions stating that the “EPA’s objections to the State Department’s draft [environmental impact statement] demonstrate once again that the EPA is more interested in promoting a political agenda than protecting public health and safety… The XL pipeline has been studied extensively and has been found to be environmentally safe twice.”

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been opposed to the pipeline stating that he is “disturbed by the proposal” and questions “why in the world would we ever consider approving a new Big Oil pipeline to carry dirty fuel and keep America addicted to oil, when we could save money, create jobs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil by moving to stronger fuel economy standards?” Dr.James Hansen, former Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, has argued that “exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”

Engineering bacteria to make petroleum substitute, pump out hydrocarbons.

via Kate Prengaman

This is an op-ed by Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway’s then minister of foreign affairs (now the minister of Health), via New York Times online, July 19, 2012

Our response to extremist terror must be more openness and more democracy.

[…]

Virtually all modern forms of extremism accuse liberal Western democratic systems of being hypocritical and, ultimately, weak. Al Qaeda portrays the West as anti-Islamic imperialists masquerading as promoters of democracy. Right wing extremism suggests the West is committing cultural suicide through its lax judicial system and naïve multiculturalism.

Both have committed horrific acts designed to bait us into betraying our values and making them martyrs. In fact, it is remarkable to see the many similarities between these two sorts of extremism in their disdain for diversity and their indiscriminate violence against civilians.

In this context, it is a mistake to treat crimes committed by extremists as exceptions, subject to special processes. They must be held accountable in accordance with and to the full extent of the law. Hiding suspects from public view merely dehumanizes the perpetrators and undermines any moral or judicial lessons.

By contrast, prosecuting extremists who have committed crimes in a public courtroom makes it all the more shockingly clear that their horrific acts were undertaken by human beings, and that all of us must work every day to combat the ideas of extremism.

Today the Supreme Court of the US decided the long-awaited Kiobel case, which brings up questions about the Alien Tort Statute. The Alien Tort Statute (ATS) is a grant of jurisdictional authority to federal district courts in the Judiciary Act of 1879 (codified at 28 USC §1350). The relevant provision reads:

The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.

This wording obviously leaves many questions, most noticeably, what is the law of nations? 

In their decision of Filartiga v. Peña-Irala, the Second Circuit determined that, because of a critical mass of evidence from various conventions and international agreements, torture was against customary international law, and therefore a non-US national subjected to torture by another private citizen could rightfully bring a claim against them in US courts. This didn’t apply to public actors due to the Act of State Doctrine (which essentially stands for the fact that US courts won’t sit in judgment over the actions of another state on their own nationals. If you want more about the Act of State Doctrine, read the 1964 case Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino).

US courts have historically been very hesitant to apply their own law extraterritorially without a further reason to do so, such as an expression that Congress wills it in the actual language of the statute the court is applying (see Judge Learned Hand’s 1945 opinion US v. Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa)). In other words, there is a presumption against US law applying outside the US. The ATS seemed to be such an expression, giving tacit authority to apply US tort law to events occurring outside US borders. Because of that, courts had carved out a niche of humanitarian law that was enforced extra-territorially by US courts.

Since that little niche was created, humanitarian lawyers have been trying to anchor as many claims against human rights abuses in it as possible by analogizing all sorts of terrible things to torture. But the niche took a hit today.  Nigerian nationals, who were subjected to human rights abuses by Nigerian military were suing Royal Dutch Petroleum for their participation in the offenses in order to protect their minerals interests. The specific issues before the Court today were: (1) whether corporations are immune from ATS claims; and (2) whether ATS claims can extend extraterritorially.

On the first question, the Court decided that corporations are not immune from ATS claims. If Royal Dutch Shell tortures you, you can sue them under the ATS. On the second question, the court determined that the plaintiffs in Kiobel did not meet the standard requisite to outweigh the presumption against US courts’ application of US law outside its borders. So while the decision makes ATS claims more difficult, it didn’t kill the statute, as many are reporting.

That’s just some brief context; you can read the opinion for yourself (I’ve linked to it at the top of this post).  It’s a big deal.