(The Conversation) – On the morning of December 6 1917, a French cargo ship called SS Mont-Blanc collided with a Norwegian vessel in the harbour of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The SS Mont-Blanc, which was laden with 3,000 tons of high explosives destined for the battlefields of the first world war, caught fire and exploded.

The resulting blast released an amount of energy equivalent to roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT, destroying a large part of the city. Although it was far from the front lines, this explosion left a lasting imprint on Halifax in a way that many regions experience environmental change as a result of war.

The attention of the media is often drawn to the destructive explosions caused by bombs, drones or missiles. And the devastation we have witnessed in cities like Aleppo, Mosul, Mariupol and now Gaza certainly serve as stark reminders of the horrific impacts of military action.

However, research is increasingly uncovering broader and longer-term consequences of war that extend well beyond the battlefield. Armed conflicts leave a lasting trail of environmental damage, posing challenges for restoration after the hostilities have eased.

Research interest in the environmental impacts of war

Toxic legacies

Battles and even wars are over relatively quickly, at least compared to the timescales over which environments change. But soils and sediments record their effects over decades and centuries.

In 2022, a study of soil chemistry in northern France showed elevated levels of copper and lead (both toxic at concentrations above trace levels), and other changes in soil structure and composition, more than 100 years after the site was part of the Battle of the Somme.

Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash

Research on more recent conflicts has recorded the toxic legacy of intense fighting too. A study that was carried out in 2016, three decades after the Iran-Iraq war, found concentrations of toxic elements like chromium, lead and the semi-metal antimony in soils from the battlefields. These concentrations were more than ten times those found in soils behind the front lines.

The deliberate destruction of infrastructure during war can also have enduring consequences. One notable example is the first Gulf War in 1991 when Iraqi forces blew up more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. Crude oil spewed into the surrounding environment, while fallout from dispersing smoke plumes created a thick deposit known as “tarcrete” over 1,000 sq km of Kuwait’s deserts.

The impact of the oil fires on the air, soil, water and habitats captured global attention. Now, in the 21st century, wars are closely scrutinised in near real-time for environmental harm, as well as the harm inflicted on humans.

Embed from Getty Images
American Red Adair fire fighting worker sets up a permanent hose 30 May 1991 in Al-Ahmadi oil field in southern Kuwait in order to keep the fire of the damaged oil wells in the direction of the wind whilst protecting the employees who attempt to extinguish it. In 1991, Iraqi troops retreating after a seven-month occupation, smashed and torched 727 wells, badly polluting the atmosphere and creating crude oil lakes. In addition, up to eight billion barrels of oil were split into the sea by Iraqi forces damaging marine life and coastal areas up to 400 kilometres (250 miles) away. Kuwait will seek more than 16 billion dollars compensation for environment destruction wrought by Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anba said 07 December 1998. (Photo credit should read MICHEL GANGNE/AFP via Getty Images).

Conflict is a systemic catastrophe

One outcome of this scrutiny is the realisation that conflict is a catastrophe that affects entire human and ecological systems. Destruction of social and economic infrastructure like water and sanitation, industrial systems, agricultural supply chains and data networks can lead to subtle but devastating indirect environmental impacts.

Since 2011, conflict has marred the north-western regions of Syria. As part of a research project that was led by my Syrian colleagues at Sham University, we conducted soil surveys in the affected areas.

Our findings revealed widespread diffuse soil pollution in agricultural land. This land feeds a population of around 3 million people already experiencing severe food insecurity.

The pollution probably stems from a combination of factors, all arising as a consequence of the regional economic collapse that was caused by the conflict. A lack of fuel to pump wells, combined with destruction of wastewater treatment infrastructure, has led to an increased reliance on streams contaminated by untreated wastewater for irrigating croplands.

Contamination could also stem from the use of low-grade fertilisers, unregulated industrial emissions and the proliferation of makeshift oil refineries.

More recently, the current conflict in Ukraine, which prompted international sanctions on Russian grain and fertiliser exports, has disrupted agricultural economies worldwide. This has affected countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Nigeria and Iran particularly hard.

Many small farmers in these countries may have been forced into selling their livestock and abandoning their land as they struggle to buy the materials they need to feed their animals or grow crops. Land abandonment is an ecologically harmful practice as it can take decades for the vegetation densities and species richness typical of undisturbed ecosystems to recover.

Warfare can clearly become a complicated and entangled “nexus” problem, the impacts of which are felt far from the war-affected regions.

Conflict, cascades and climate

Recognising the complex, cascading environmental consequences of war is the first step towards addressing them. Following the first Gulf War, the UN set up a compensation commission and included the environment as one of six compensable harms inflicted on countries and their people.

Jordan was awarded more than US$160 million (£127 million) over a decade to restore the rangelands of its Badia desert. These rangelands had been ecologically ruined by a million refugees and their livestock from Kuwait and Iraq. The Badia is now a case study in sustainable watershed management in arid regions.

In the north-west region of Syria, work is underway to assess farmers’ understanding of soil contamination in areas that have been affected by conflict. This marks the first step in designing farming techniques aimed at minimising threats to human health and restoring the environment.

Armed conflict has also finally made it onto the climate agenda. The UN’s latest climate summit, COP28, includes the first themed day dedicated to “relief, recovery and peace”. The discussion will focus on countries and communities in which the ability to withstand climate change is being hindered by economic or political fragility and conflict.

And as COP28 got underway, the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK charity that monitors the environmental consequences of armed conflicts, called for research to account for carbon emissions in regions affected by conflict.

The carbon impact of war is still not counted in the global stocktake of carbon emissions – an essential reference for climate action. But far from the sound and fury of the explosions, warfare’s environmental impacts are persistent, pervasive and equally deadly.

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Jonathan Bridge, Reader / Associate Professor in Environmental Geoscience, Sheffield Hallam University

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“The erosion of ocean biodiversity is having multiple effects on ocean-related planetary health [81,64,66,108]. For example, the Ocean Living Planet Index, which measures trends in 10,380 populations of 3038 vertebrate species, declined 52% between 1970 and 2010. The OLPI also indicates that the global ocean fish stocks were over-exploited by 29%, ocean species declined by 39% and the world coral reefs decreased by 50% [160]. Various anthropogenic as well as climate change drivers are responsible for ocean biodiversity erosion. According to Luypaert et al. [86], among many stressors, climate change bears a 14% responsibility for ocean species threatened to extinction . . .

GOES’ initial estimate was that 50% of surface plankton have been lost since 1970. That would be alarming enough; the only question is whether that estimate was indeed too optimistic..

Mark Howarth, writing in the stalwart weekly from Dundee, Scotland, The Sunday Post, has a blockbuster scoop.

The Global Oceanic Environmental Survey, led by Edinburgh University marine biologist Howard Dryden at the university Roslin Innovation Centre had estimated that the plankton in the oceans had been halved in the past 40 years, and that all of it could be gone by 2040.

Dryden and GOES were off by twenty years.

Plankton is a blanket term for the billions of tiny sea organisms living close to the surface of the oceans, which are eaten by krill, small crustaceans, which are in turn eaten by fish and whales. No plankton, little or no marine life.

And while trees hog all the credit, plankton generate 70% of our oxygen.

Howarth reports that the GOES team just sampled the ocean water surface along the French and Portuguese coasts before heading across the Atlantic to Colombia. They and volunteers gathered 500 data points.

They expected to find five patches of plankton in every ~2.5 gallons (10 liters) of ocean water.

They found an average of one.

So in 1982 there would have been 10 patches of plankton in every 2.5 gallons of surface ocean water, and now there is one. That isn’t a 50% reduction.

If Dryden and his team’s survey is borne out by the scientific community, that is a 90% reduction.

It is like going to the zoo and finding nine in every ten of the animals there — the giraffes, the tigers, the reptiles — dead on the ground.

You would wonder, what happened here? Were they exposed to poison gas? Were they given poison to drink?

What is killing the plankton?

First, you know those billions and billions of tons of carbon dioxide we put up into the atmosphere every year, and how we have been doing that for decades? That is a big part of the problem and will get bigger.

Carbon dioxide dissolves into sea water, becoming bicarbonate ions and hydrogen ions. The accumulation of bicarbonate ions makes the ocean acidic, lowering the PH factor.

Plankton don’t do well with an acidic environment. Imagine if you dumped hydrochloric acid into your fish tank. Although many of the plankton organisms offset extra acid when their shells dissolve, providing extra calcium and raising the PH, they seem likely to be overwhelmed in this regard, and it is anyway not a function they can perform if they are all dead.

Other things are killing plankton, like petroleum spills and other industrial pollution, and the run-off from farms of fertilizer.

The goal of stopping carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 isn’t good enough. We need to stop them now.

By the way, another function of phytoplankton is to absorb carbon dioxide into their little shells, which sink to the bottom of the ocean when they die, where subduction processes can bury them forever They are a major carbon sink.

If they are gone, the carbon dioxide will just go straight into the oceans, which will be even more acidic than would otherwise have been the case.

Some 870 million people, 10-12% of the global population, substantially depend on marine life for their nutrition

The EU could ban crude oil imports from Russia within six months if a new round of sanctions is approved. Excluding a handful of countries, refined Russian oil products like petrol and diesel could cease to flow into the EU by the end of 2022.

The EU currently relies on Russia for 25% of the oil it imports, so the ban is intended to hurt Russian oil producers and weaken Vladimir Putin’s regime economically. If some of those fossil fuels and the machinery they power were replaced by green alternatives, scrapping oil supplies could benefit the climate too. And there’s a lot more to look forward to in a world with less oil sloshing around.

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“Russia produces close to 11 million barrels per day of crude oil,” says Amy Myers Jaffe, a research professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University in the US. “It uses roughly half of this output for its own internal demand, which presumably has increased due to higher military fuel requirements, and it exports five million to six million barrels per day.”

Much of that oil is refined and pumped into the tanks of combustion engine-cars, lorries, ships and other fossil fuel-burning vehicles. The global transport system – both passenger and freight – is almost entirely dependent (95%) on oil.

If all demand for oil were eliminated and vehicles either electrified or rendered obsolete by walking and cycling initiatives, private car motorists could potentially enjoy much lower prices each time they fuel up, says Tom Stacey, a senior lecturer in operations and supply chain management at Anglia Ruskin University:

“Driving an EV (electric vehicle) 100 miles will, on average, cost around £4 to £6 (US$5.50 to US$8.00), compared with £13 to £16 in a petrol or diesel car.”

Electricity bills have soared alongside fossil fuel prices in the last year though, blunting the cost advantage of owning an EV. In autumn 2021, when the average price per kilowatt-hour of electricity was £0.24 (it’s now expected to be £0.28), Stacey calculated that filling up an EV battery in the UK would cost half of what it does to fuel a petrol or diesel car.

Public charging rates vary, however, and some of the rapid recharging points you find at petrol stations can charge up to £34.50 for a full battery. “The financial benefits of switching to an EV don’t look so strong when electric costs are high,” Stacey says.

But while combustion engine-vehicles are picky about their fuel – often reliant on petrol and diesel refined from crude oil – EV batteries are compatible with electricity generated from any source, including solar panels fitted to your roof.

“These panels will cost money to be installed (although prices are falling every year), but once they are installed and the sun is shining, you can charge your car while it sits on your drive. When you consider that the average car isn’t used 95% of the time, it gives plenty of time to charge up from the sun for free,” Stacey says.

Planning for a future without oil

Pain at the petrol pump is not enough on its own to depress oil demand and spur electric vehicle purchasing en masse though. That’s according to research by Robert Hamlin, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Hamlin studied the 1973 oil crisis, when producer countries implemented an embargo which quadrupled oil prices, to understand how consumer behaviour responds to fuel price shocks – and whether it might benefit the transition to EVs.

“What do motorists do when they are confronted with a massive and sustained increase in petrol prices? As seen during the 1973 crisis and beyond, the consistent answer to this question is ‘not much’,” he says.

Hamlin points to rising combustion engine-car ownership in New Zealand in the decades after the crisis as evidence that motorists are unlikely to shun oil and go electric. “Instead,” he says, “household resources will be redirected away from … costs such as food, to pay for the increased cost of fuel.”

This would suggest that price signals and consumer choices are not enough on their own to limit climate change, or ensure everyone can enjoy the benefits of EVs. Instead, planning and policy by governments are likely to be instrumental.

And one policy which would slash how much oil we burn is shortening the work week. The UK just enjoyed the early May bank holiday weekend, in which many workplaces remained closed on Monday. Dénes Csala, a lecturer in energy storage systems dynamics at Lancaster University, calculates that every bank holiday saves more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s because fewer work days mean fewer car journeys, less heating and air conditioning in offices, and less energy demand in general. If long weekends became a permanent fixture, and Britain switched to a four-day week, the carbon savings could be enormous, according to Csala.

“The rule of thumb here is that at higher overall levels of electricity demand, more of that electricity will be generated from fossil fuels,” he says. This is because fossil fuel generators are fired up quickly to cover sudden shortfalls. How much CO₂ is produced to generate a unit of electricity at a particular time is called emissions intensity.

“Effectively replacing a work day with an extra weekend day … would potentially reduce energy consumption for that day by 10% and emissions intensity by 17.5%. These two effects add up: the lower electricity consumption of the weekend combines with lower carbon intensity, as there is less need to switch on polluting coal or gas plants, therefore potentially lowering emissions on any given day by 22% in May or 25% in January”, Csala says.

Expanding the weekend by a day could cut emissions from the UK’s electricity network equivalent to removing 1.2 million cars from the road. “It does not even count the carbon savings from the reduced traffic jams,” he says.

Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sometimes it may seem that humans have altered the Earth beyond repair. But our planet is an incredible system in which energy, water, carbon and so much else flows and nurtures life. It is about 4.5 billion years old and has been through enormous changes.

Is it possible to heal the damage we have already done to the Earth? – Anthony, age 13

At some points in Earth’s history, fires burned over large areas. At others, much of it was covered with ice. There also have been mass extinctions that wiped out nearly every living thing on its surface.

Our living planet is incredibly resilient and can heal itself over time. The problem is that its self-healing systems are very, very slow. The Earth will be fine, but humans’ problems are more immediate.

People have damaged the systems that sustain us in many ways. We have polluted air and water, strewn plastic and other trash on land and in oceans and rivers, and destroyed habitats for plants and animals.

But we know how to help natural processes clean up many of these messes. And there has been a lot of progress since people started waking up to these problems 50 years ago.

There still are problems to solve. Some pollutants, like plastic, last for thousands of years, so it’s much better to stop releasing them than to try to collect them later. And extinction is permanent, so the only effective way to reduce it is to be more careful about protecting animals, plants and other species.

Reversing climate change

The most serious damage humans are doing to the Earth comes mainly from burning coal, oil and gas, which is dramatically warming its climate. Burning these carbon-based fuels is changing the fundamental chemistry and physics of the air and oceans.

Every lump of coal or gallon of gasoline that’s burned releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There it heats the Earth’s surface, causing floods, fires and droughts. Some of this added carbon dioxide dissolves into the oceans and makes them more acidic, which threatens ocean food webs.

Climate change is a problem that will get worse until humans stop making it worse – and then it will take many centuries for the climate to return to what it was like before the Industrial Revolution, when human actions started altering it on a large scale.

The only way to avoid making things worse is to stop setting carbon on fire. That means societies need to work hard to build an energy system that can help everyone live well without the need to burn carbon.

The good news is that we know how to make energy without releasing carbon dioxide and other pollution. Electricity made from solar, wind and geothermal power is now the cheapest energy in history. Cleaning up the global electricity supply and then electrifying everything can very quickly stop carbon pollution from getting worse.

This will require electric cars and trains, electric heating and cooking, and electric factories. We’ll also need new kinds of transmission and storage systems to get all that clean electricity from where it’s made to where it’s used.

The rest of the carbon mess can be cleaned up through better farm and forest management that stores carbon in land and plants instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. This is also a problem that scientists know how to solve.

The Earth will certainly heal, but it may take a very long time. The best way to start is with everyone doing their part to avoid making the damage any worse.

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And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Scott Denning, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

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Featured photo:

“The Biden administration must end new leasing and phase out existing drilling,” said one advocate. “Anything less would be a gross failure of climate leadership.”

By Jake Johnson | –

A federal judge late Thursday blocked the Biden administration’s massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, a significant win for environmentalists as they work to prevent the Interior Department from handing public lands and waters over to the fossil fuel industry.

In his 68-page decision (pdf), Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. wrote that the Biden administration violated federal law by not adequately accounting for the emissions impact of the sale, which would have been the biggest offshore oil and gas lease sell-off in the country’s history.

“This is a huge victory for our climate, endangered whales, and Gulf communities.”

Climate groups characterized the sale—held just days after the COP26 summit in Glasgow—as the equivalent of “lighting the fuse of a massive carbon bomb.”

“The Department of the Interior acted arbitrarily and capriciously in excluding foreign consumption from their greenhouse gas emissions calculation,” Contreras, an Obama appointee, found.

The Biden Interior Department, which now must conduct a fresh environmental review, had relied on an analysis completed under the Trump administration, which was teeming with allies of the fossil fuel industry.

Brettny Hardy, senior attorney for Earthjustice—a group that sued the Biden administration over the lease sale—applauded the judge’s decision Thursday and said that “we simply cannot continue to make investments in the fossil fuel industry to the peril of our communities and increasingly warming planet.”

“Interior should use its next five-year leasing plan to protect our coastal communities and public waters and offer no new offshore leases,” Hardy added. “We can no longer afford to do anything less.”

On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden pledged to ban new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters, a promise that climate advocates cautiously applauded while demanding more ambitious action. One of the first executive orders Biden signed as president directed the Interior Department to pause all new oil and natural gas leasing on public lands and offshore waters.

Yet, over the past 12 months, the Biden administration has approved drilling permits at a faster rate than its oil-friendly predecessor. According to new federal data, the Biden administration signed off on more than 3,550 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first year in power.

Around a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—which Biden has promised to slash—come from fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

Administration officials insist they’ve been hamstrung by a Trump-appointed federal judge who, in a June ruling, blocked Biden’s temporary pause on new drilling leases. But climate groups argue the judge’s order did not require the administration to move ahead with the huge lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico—a conclusion echoed by the Biden Justice Department.

Following Contreras’ ruling on Thursday, Kristen Monsell of the Center for Biological Diversity said she is “thrilled the court saw through the Biden administration’s horribly reckless decision to hold the largest oil lease sale in U.S. history without carefully studying the risks.”

“This is a huge victory for our climate, endangered whales, and Gulf communities,” said Monsell. “New oil leases are fundamentally incompatible with addressing the climate emergency, and they’ll cause more oil spills and harm to wildlife and people in the Gulf.”

“For the sake of our climate and frontline communities,” she added, “the Biden administration must end new leasing and phase out existing drilling. Anything less would be a gross failure of climate leadership.”

Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

An oil spill first reported on Oct. 2, 2021, has released thousands of gallons of crude oil into southern California coastal waters. The source is believed to be a leak in an underwater pipeline connected to an oil drilling platform 17.5 miles offshore. Oil has washed ashore in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and into coastal marshes. Orange County has requested a federal disaster declaration. Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, explains the scope of this spill.

How large is this spill, and how much coastline is affected?

Reports estimate that about 126,000 gallons of oil have spilled from a ruptured undersea pipeline, potentially affecting 25 miles of coast in Orange County. As a precaution, the state of California has closed coastal fisheries from Huntington Beach to the city of Dana Point, extending out 6 miles from shore.

This stretch of shoreline includes many extremely important marine and coastal resources, from the Bolsa Chica wetlands complex to the Dana Point State Marine Conservation Area.

Wetlands provide critical wildlife habitat and are nurseries for many marine species. The ones in California are part of a network of wetlands along the Pacific coast that supports many sensitive local and migratory bird species. Rocky shorelines and tide pool areas along the Newport and Laguna coasts are also critically important habitat areas for birds, marine mammals and other wildlife.

Since Spanish settlement began in the mid-1500s, California has lost 90% or more of its coastal wetlands. That makes the ones that are left, such as the Talbert Marsh near the mouth of the Santa Ana River, even more important.

Orange County also has dozens of popular beaches that millions of residents and visitors use. They generate billions of dollars in revenue for the state’s coastal economy every year.

How does this event compare to other major spills in California?

Offshore oil development always entails some risk of an oil spill. California’s ocean waters have experienced multiple spills over the past 50-plus years.

The largest was the 1969 Santa Barbara offshore oil blowout, which sent more than 3 million gallons of oil onto local beaches. It was a major disaster that helped launch the modern environmental movement.

Other large spills since then include the American Trader tanker spill off the coast of Orange County in 1990, which released 416,000 gallons, and the 2015 Refugio pipeline spill in Santa Barbara County, which released 123,000 gallons from an underground pipeline on land into the ocean.

Offshore oil production presents spill risks from both platform drilling activities and the facilities that move oil from offshore to refineries and storage facilities on land – including undersea and underground pipelines. The vast array of oil and gas infrastructure along California’s coast requires constant monitoring and maintenance to avoid spills like this one.

What kind of technology does the state have to contain and clean up the oil?

Time is of the essence in oil spill response. Responders are deploying physical barriers such as booms and using skimmer boats to contain and clean up oil floating on the ocean’s surface. They also are constructing sand berms in front of wetlands to protect sensitive areas from oil washing in with the tides.

Other cleanup technologies include using chemical and biological agents to help break down and disperse oil in the water column, and possibly burning off oil to help remove it from the water. Aerial reconnaissance will help the Coast Guard and state agencies track the location and scale of the spill.

What possible impacts of this spill are you most concerned about?

I am most worried about oil’s acutely toxic effects on marine and coastal wildlife, including seabirds and other species that inhabit our coastal wetlands. Once oil gets into the marshes and sensitive shoreline locations, it becomes very difficult to clean up.

I am also concerned about longer-term impacts to sensitive wetland and rocky shoreline environments. Oil spills have a significant impact on our coastal economies, from fisheries to recreational activities, including beach closures.

Continued below after video.

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Bonus Video

Today: “Massive Oil Spill Off California Coast Is Impacting Beaches, Wildlife”

Offshore drilling is very unpopular in California. How long do you expect it will continue?

I expect that many Californians will see this spill as yet more evidence that the state and the nation should make a swift transition to alternative energy sources, such as solar power and offshore wind. Burning oil and other fossil fuels is one of the main sources of carbon dioxide emissions that are heating the planet and changing its climate.

Californians are consistently against new offshore oil development: In one recent poll, 72% opposed it. That reflects concern about oil spills and effects on fisheries and other competing ocean uses, as well as the impacts of climate change.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered that by 2035, all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California must be zero-emission vehicles. He also has asked the California Air Resources Board to analyze how to phase out oil extraction statewide by 2045.

Many Californians would like that to happen even sooner. I’m sure this latest disaster will only intensify pressure to end oil production in California, on land and offshore.

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Charles Lester, Director, Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, Marine Science Institute, University of California Santa Barbara

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Late last week a pipe coming off the Elly oil platform some 8 miles off the coast of Orange County broke, probably about 4 miles out. Some 126,000 gallons of oil came cascading in toward Huntington and Newport Beaches. On Friday, the LA Times reports, boaters began smelling the petroleum. And then on Saturday they saw it. Dolphins were swimming through it, inhaling its fumes, harming their lungs and immune functions. It might even make them infertile. The oil hit the beaches and the wetlands.

According to Chris Williams at LA’s Fox News affiliate (local affiliates often do real news), “Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr described the situation as a “potential ecologic disaster,” and said some of the oil had reached the shore and was impacting the Talbert Marshlands and the Santa Ana River Trail.”

The beaches are closed. Booms are trying to keep the oil from fouling the wetlands in the southeast but some will get through. Huntington Beach and Newport Beach live on the tourism industry, which taking the two together comes to about $2 billion a year. That $2 billion has just been placed in jeopardy this year.

These destructive oil spills are a frequent occurrence off the California coast.

There is often an outcry that the companies should do a better job of stopping such spills, but we all know they are a cost of doing business. The only way to prevent them is not to drill for oil in the ocean, which is a stupid idea anyway. Oil is made into gasoline for vehicles. The average passenger car in the U.S. emits 4.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year.

If you can, take public transport. If you need a car and can afford one, buy an electric car. The new generation drives like sport cars, with great pick-up, and have a range of 300 miles or so. Most automobile trips are 5 miles or less.

Continued below the video:
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Bonus Video:

Los Angeles Times: “Massive oil spill sends crude onto Orange County beaches, killing birds, marine life”

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The Huntington Wetlands Conservancy writes,

“Our annual bird count looks at counting the species of birds and number of each species in all four (4) marshes (Talbert, Brookhurst, Magnolia and Newland). This year’s event, conducted on January 1st, 2017, counted over 1500 birds, of which there were 74 species, 8 of which were endangered species. A special thank you to the volunteers working this year’s bird count as many of them were up before dawn and were still counting into the night as they do not stop until dusk.”

I think those endangered species just got more endangered. Sea birds that get oil in their feathers try to clean them with their beaks, ingesting the poison, so that they die. NOAA explains, “”Oil destroys the insulating ability of fur-bearing mammals, such as sea otters, and the water repellency of a bird’s feathers, thus exposing these creatures to the harsh elements. Without the ability to repel water and insulate from the cold water, birds and mammals will die from hypothermia.”

Hundreds of thousands of birds migrate annually down the Pacific flyway, stopping off at marshes such as these for food and shelter. Shrinking habitat for birds in North America has killed off about 3 billion of them since 1970, and last year thousands fell out of the sky from hunger because of the climate emergency-induced megadrought.

Coastal wetlands in California provide a buffer in coastal storms that slows shoreline erosion.

Some 90% of California’s coastal wetlands are gone.

As for life in the ocean itself, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains,

Fish, shellfish, and corals may not be exposed immediately, but can come into contact with oil if it is mixed into the water column — shellfish can also be exposed in the intertidal zone. When exposed to oil, adult fish may experience reduced growth, enlarged livers, changes in heart and respiration rates, fin erosion, and reproduction impairment. Fish eggs and larvae can be especially sensitive to lethal and sublethal impacts. Even when lethal impacts are not observed, oil can make fish and shellfish unsafe for humans to eat.”

Fishing charters off Orange County are also part of the tourism business that will suffer as the oil slick expands (it is already the size of Santa Monica).

Ironically, Huntington Beach, the affected area, voted for Donald Trump, who wanted to much expand drilling for oil off California.* Trump is the un-Midas; everything he touches turns to shit.

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*an earlier version of this posting said that Orange County voted heavily for Trump; only 44% of the county did, with Irvine and Anaheim heavily blue. Informed Comment regrets the error.