Wall Street has been a curse on our country since the financial institutions there manipulated our political process and subverted both political parties to destroy the New Deal reforms that imposed sensible regulations and helped fuel the rise of our nation’s middle class and living standards after WWII. When the deregulation of the Banksters was accomplished, they immediately did what anyone with half a brain would expect: crashed our economy, exacerbated income inequality, and pocketed Trillions of dollars in free bailouts while pushing a political agenda to siphon off wealth from the “lower classes” (i.e., the eponymous 99%). They deserve all the opprobrium for their criminal misdeeds and mischief that the Occupy Movement has once again rightly highlighted.

However, another industry is also siphoning off money from the 99%, and weakening our economy through its efforts to eradicate investment in renewable energy. What’s even worse about this industry is that its actions will have long term consequences for the future of our planet and the future of our species. That industry is named in the title to this diary: Big Oil. Their products have altered our climate in ways that are killing people today, and will kill more people in the future, as well as lowering the health and living standards for all but the wealthiest among us. Here are just a few examples of the horrific consequences that are now and will in the future occur as a result of our continued dependence on their products, an addiction that they foster through their influence and control over our elected officials and the federal government:

Depletion of Natural Resources:

(cont.)

LONDON, Oct 17 (Reuters) – The Earth’s natural resources like food, water and forests are being depleted at an alarming speed, causing hunger, conflict, social unrest and species extinction, experts at a climate and health conference in London warned on Monday.

Increased hunger due to food yield changes will lead to malnutrition; water scarcity will deteriorate hygiene; pollution will weaken immune systems; and displacement and social disorder due to conflicts over water and land will increase the spread of infectious diseases, they said.

Indeed, the experts cited above conservatively predict 70 million people will die as a result of climate change — and that is only from one region: Sub-Saharan Africa — by 2050. Diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis, diseases that will kill millions of people and create public health crisis for generations to come. In other words:

Climate Change will Damage Public Health

“Climate change will progressively weaken the Earth’s life support mechanism,” [Tony McMichael, professor of population health at the Australian National University.] said. “Health is not just collateral damage on the side, the risk is central and represents a denouement of all the other effects of climate change”. […]

“The biggest risk to human health is from the rise in fossil fuel use, causing cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer,” [Ian Roberts, professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine] added.

Europe will also be at risk from heatwaves, floods and more infectious diseases as pests shift to northern latitudes, said Sari Kovats, lead author of the Europe chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment report.

Clean, fresh drinking water is disappearing

(a) As a result of Climate Change:

Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to confront a pretty dire problem: they were running out of water. Due to a severe and lasting drought, water reserves in this country of 11,000 people had dwindled to just a few days’ worth. […]

Other island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati will see their groundwater spoil as sea levels rise. Texas, along with much of the American Southwest, is in the grip of a truly record-breaking drought — even after days of storms in the past month, Houston’s total 2011 rainfall is still short of its yearly average by a whopping 2 ft., or 60 cm. Australia has experienced severely dry weather for so long, it’s not even clear whether the country is in a state of drought, or more worryingly, a new and permanent dry climate that could forever alter life Down Under. “Climate-change impacts on water resources continue to appear in the form of growing influence on the severity and intensity of extreme events,” says Peter Gleick, one of the foremost water experts in the U.S. and head of the Pacific Institute, an NGO based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues. “Australia’s recent extraordinary extreme drought should be an eye-opener for the rest of us.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2097159,00.html#ixzz1b8tvTt30

[More on Tuvalu’s water crisis here and here.]

and

(b) As a result of oil and gas production practices that contaminate fresh water:

From Injection Wells

Injection wells, where pressurized liquid waste or other fluids are injected into aquifers, are a major method of disposal for industrial and hazardous waste. Injection wells are also used to help recover oil, gas and minerals. For example, injection wells are used to inject fresh water into an underground oil field for secondary recovery of oil. Uranium and sulfur are often mined by injecting hot water into formations to loosen up these materials. […]

Injection wells have been involved in a number of controversial lawsuits and permit battles, as well as high-profile groundwater contamination cases, usually resulting from improper handling of the waste at the surface prior to injection …

[Additional links regarding groundwater contamination as a result of oil and gas production can be found here.]

From Hydrofracking

There are few things a family needs to survive more than fresh drinking water. And Louis Meeks, a burly, jowled Vietnam War hero who had long ago planted his roots on these sparse eastern Wyoming grasslands, was drilling a new well in search of it. […]

Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. […]

But in the spring of 2005, Meeks’ water had turned fetid. His tap ran cloudy, and the water shimmered with rainbow swirls across a filmy top. The scent was sharp, like gasoline. And after 20 minutes — scarcely longer than you’d need to fill a bathtub — the pipes shuttered and popped and ran dry.

Meeks suspected that environmental factors were to blame. He focused on the fact that Pavillion, home of a single four-way stop sign and 174 people, lies smack in the middle of Wyoming’s gas patch. Since the mid 1990’s, more than 1,000 gas wells had been drilled in the region — some 200 of them right around Pavillion — thousands of feet through layers of drinking water and into rock that yields tiny rivulets of trapped gas. The drilling has left abandoned toxic waste pits scattered across the landscape. […]

Three months before his water went bad, EnCana had laid pipe down into a gas well about 500 feet from Meeks’ front door. The well, called Tribal Pavillion 24-2, had “circulation” problems during its construction — meaning that the cement may not have filled all the space between the well and the earth, and that its walls had to be strengthened. EnCana says the problems were minor and had nothing to do with the deterioration of Meeks’ water. “There is no evidence to suggest the well bore integrity was in any way or at any time compromised,” Hock said. But over time Meeks’ water had become undrinkable. His neighbors stopped filling up their bottles with it. Soon they were afraid to touch it. […]

As more wells were drilled, however, more reports began to emerge from people who had similar experiences to that of Louis Meeks.<p<

In Clark, a small northern Wyoming town, benzene was detected in an aquifer after a well blowout. In central Colorado, near the town of Silt, a water well exploded, sending its cap shooting off into the sky. A few miles away, methane gas was found bubbling up out of a placid eddy in a tributary to the Colorado River; then high levels of benzene were detected. It was difficult to say what led to each of these accidents — the latter two of which were also connected to EnCana wells — but drilling and the close proximity of hydraulic fracturing operations was a common thread. […]

Yet that’s what Meeks tried to do. In October 2007 he hired a private engineering firm to take samples of his water. The glass vials were shipped to a lab in Virginia … and analyzed for an array of pollutants. … In addition to abnormal levels of chloride, iron and total dissolved solids, the lab found glycols, a chemical often used to keep fluids flowing in cold conditions. “Glycols are commonly used in antifreeze,” testing hydrogeologist Bill Newcomb wrote in the lab report, “and with regard to natural gas production, in dehydration processes.”

[More about contamination of groundwater by hydrofrackng can be found here and here.]

Species Extinction

ondon (CNN) — Climate change is shrinking many plant and animal species and is likely to have a negative impact on human nutrition in the future, according to a new study.

Rising temperatures and growing variability in rainfall are affecting the size of all species in the ecosystem from microscopic sea organisms to land-based predators, say researchers. […]

But perhaps most worrying for marine life was the reduced growth rates of phytoplankton in response to acidification which “could negatively affect all ocean life because (it) forms the basis of the marine food web.”

Researchers also say plants, which were generally expected to get larger as CO2 levels rise, are not immune from reductions.

“Over the past century, various plant species have shown significant negative correlations between growth and temperature…resulting in smaller grasses, annual plants and trees in areas that are getting warmer and drier,” according to the study.

[More links on species extinction can be found here and here]

This is obviously not an exhaustive list of all of the many dangers, problems and likely negative outcomes posed by the fossil fuel industries and the continued use of their “products.” In particular large oil and gas mega-corporations, who continue to fund denial of climate change science while lobbying for increased drilling for oil and gas, and also for for reductions in government investment in renewable and sustainable sources of energy, are the single greatest threat to human civilization this century.

So, to everyone in the Occupy Movement, please consider widening your target to occupy cities where the corporate headquarters of companies associated with oil and gas production are located. For future millions if not billions of people, this issue is literally a matter of life or death.

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