Steve Backshall & Naomi Wilkinson
Live n’ Deadly, a great new show presented by YPTE Presidents Steve Backshall and Naomi Wilkinson starts this weekend. Steve and Naomi will tour the UK, giving children the chance to encounter some of the world’s most extraordinary wildlife as well as revealing fascinating facts and facing a series of nail-biting outdoor challenges.
Check it out on Saturday 11th September, on BBC2. It’s on from 9.00am – 10.00am. Remember, it’s live!
It’s great that at last, BP seems to have managed to stem the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Today, we also have the news that 75% of the oil has either been dispersed, collected or has evaporated. However, that still leaves a huge amount of oil out there. Latest estimates suggest that 4.9 million barrels of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon blew up in April, killing eleven oil workers. 4.9 million barrels sounds like a lot. Well, it’s actually 778,610,000 litres. If it were fuel, it would fill the tanks of about 15.5 million cars! So even if there’s just 25% of the spilled oil left in the Gulf, that’s still nearly 195 million litres of oil loose in the sea.
But what has it meant for the environment? What we do already know is that something over 3,000 seabirds have been washed up dead on the beaches. This contrasts with the 600,000 or so killed by the oil spill in Alaska caused by the Exxon Valdez in 1989. Over 500 sea turtles and 64 dolphins have also been found dead. The impact on the coastal grasslands has been patchy, but where oil has come ashore and damaged the grasses, green shoots of recovery are already being seen.
However, many of the effects of the spill will be seen in the longer term, not in the immediate aftermath. The impact on the shrimp fisheries will not be known for some time, nor perhaps even more worryingly, the effects the spill may have had on the bluefin tuna living in the Gulf. So for now, it’s a question of watch this space. One thing is certain though – the environmental impacts could have been far worse.
I was delighted to read yesterday that President Obama has now recognised that we need to move more quickly on the creation of green energy. This is what I’ve been saying since the Deepwater Horizon crisis happened. He said
“Beyond the risks inherent in drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned wealth to other countries every month – including many in dangerous and unstable regions.
In other words, our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.”
Exactly! What we need to concentrate on is the alternatives for energy production. That should be the priority for humanity as a whole, but in a country as oil-dependent as the USA, that’s even more important.
There can be no doubt that this has been a massive environmental disaster and its effects will be felt for years to come. It has done great damage to the wildlife of the region and is badly hurting the economy of the Gulf coast too. But the whole reason that it happened was because of the world’s increasing demand for oil and the difficulties faced when trying to get at new reserves in highly inaccessible places. The oil will, one day, run out. And we all need to be ready before that happens. The sooner we can stop our carbon emissions and move to renewable energy, the better for us all – and for all the species we share the planet with.
I was delighted to learn yesterday of the EU’s new initiative to certify that biofuels have not been sourced from areas of former rainforest. Huge amounts of deforestation are taking place, particularly in Southeast Asia, as huge agri-businesses clear rainforest to make way for palm oil plantations. Palm oil is one of the most commonly used ingredients in biodiesel.
Biofuel was seen as a new greener answer to our upcoming energy crisis, but how can it be greener if you have to burn down the rainforest to make way for the crops that create it? The craze for biofuel has also led to land being turned over to grow fuel where once food was grown. Bearing in mind how many people don’t have enough to eat in the world, this was madness.
So if this certification means that we’ll get biofuels that we know haven’t been grown on former rainforest or forced people into hunger, then I’m all for it. It hasn’t happened yet though and may only be voluntary, which isn’t a whole lot of good. My big fear is that it’ll just mean that the growers will sell their oil to other countries outside of the EU, where they might not be so fussy.
As I write this, there is an oil slick drifting just a few miles from the white sand beaches of Florida. It seems likely that it will begin washing ashore sometime tomorrow. Meanwhile, thousands of barrels of oil are still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico every day. Anything up to 836,000 barrels of oil are estimated to have leaked into the ocean since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded and sank. That’s more than three times the amount of oil spilt when the Exxon Valdez spilled its cargo of oil in Alaska. Despite BP’s best efforts, the oil continues to pour from the oil well, though there is now hope that the flow of oil may soon be stemmed, if not stopped entirely.
The environmental catastrophe not only affects huge numbers of animal and plant species. The knock-on effects are very human, with fishermen unable to fish, holiday beaches ruined and a tourism industry in tatters.
President Obama, BP and their contractors are all arguing about who is at fault. At this point we should not be looking for someone to blame. We should be fixing the problem. Once the flow of oil is stopped and its effects have been mitigated, that’s when we should analyse what went wrong and how we could prevent such accidents from happening in the future.
To take a positive from this, let’s be clear about one thing: we all need to reduce our reliance on oil and all carbon-based fuels. This disaster has been caused, ultimately, by humanity’s demand for more oil – and the US’s demands are greater than most! Oil fuels our transport, it drives our industry and many of our favourite everyday items use oil in their manufacture. If this disaster has shown us anything, it’s that our society needs to change its priorities. In future, we need to forget the idea that growth is the only way forward in an economy. Being happy with what we’ve got may have to be enough in future. That’s a huge leap, but in the meantime, changing the way we create energy should be our priority.
Renewable energy is developing fast, but there’s still a way to go before we can all afford to use it instead of carbon-based energy generation and fuels. It’s not just about being green, it’s about making money. Imagine the fortune that will be made by the company which cracks mass production, affordable, renewable, emission-free power…
I spent an amazing day at TOTAL’s offices yesterday working with some of their staff on judging the shortlisted projects for the TOTAL Green School Awards. The quality of the young people’s work was fantastic and it was truly inspiring to see how much excellent environmental work is being done in our schools. The young people and their teachers should all feel very proud.
Thanks also to TOTAL for supporting the awards and for the hard work and enthusiasm of the judging panel, which was made up of TOTAL’s staff who were representing many of the company’s UK businesses. Some of them traveled long distances to take part in the judging. The results will be announced very soon on the TOTAL Green School Awards website, which can be found at www.totalgreenschoolawards.com
Our new coalition government here in the UK is already giving me cause for optimism. They have only been in office for a couple of days but already some of the environmental policies they’re announcing seem like big steps towards making the UK a greener place. They are scrapping plans to build new runways, which is great news for our environment. They’re planning to tax aircraft, not passengers in future, which should mean that airlines fly less half-empty planes around the world.
And this morning I heard Chris Huhne, our new Lib Dem Energy Secretary talking about a new emphasis on renewable energy for our future. As he said, we are ideally placed as an island to exploit wind, tidal and wave energies and these need to be brought to greater prominence. Of course, all of these forms of renewable energy have their impacts on the environment too and these need very serious consideration. But the fact that we now have a government that is going to take renewables seriously is brilliant, so long as the words are turned into actions…
Well, the judging for the TOTAL Green School Awards has started. We have a fantastic array of environmental work from the schools in England, Scotland and Wales. I never cease to be amazed by the enthusiasm of the young people and the ingenuity of their teachers. We have a couple of weeks of hard work ahead, but it’s a lot of fun and gives you hope for the future. If these young people grow up to be so interested in looking after our world, then it will be a better place!
The United Nations has today issued a new environmental report, the Third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3), which has some pretty serious news of us all. The report says that biodiversity – the huge range of different animal and plant species on the planet – actually matters rather a lot. It states that it’s not just important to have lots of different animals and plants for their own sake. They actually provide huge benefits to human life on the planet and without them, either whole parts of some countries’ economies would cease to exist or we would have to spend enormous amounts of money to achieve what nature does for free for us at the moment. These benefits include purifying our air and water, protecting coastlines from storm damage and providing reasons for tourists to visit particular areas.
To take freshwater systems as an example, if rivers and streams become too polluted with fertilisers from farms, the resulting growth of algae chokes out the fish and plants that would grow there naturally and eventually makes the water unfit for humans to drink. We would then have to invest a lot of money creating processes for purifying the water. Destruction of forest meanwhile has been estimated to cause the planet environmental damage that would cost us anything up to $5 trillion to repair or replace!
The report also warns us that many ecosystems may soon be so damaged that they reach a ‘tipping point’, where we cause so much damage that further destruction happens naturally. Rapid dieback of coral reefs after damage would be an example of this.
According to the Red List of Threatened Species, maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 21% of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12% of all known birds and 27% of reef-building corals are threatened with extinction. That’s pretty scary and shows how we still have a lot to learn about sharing the planet with the other species who live here.
In many ways, GBO-3 is telling us the obvious, but it’s interesting because it tells us the economic impact of our actions. Unfortunately, few people and fewer governments see past the short term. For most of us, getting lots of money now is much more important than having small amounts trickling down over time, even if in fifty years we know there’ll be a lot of mess to clear up.
If we’re really serious about maintaining and improving life on the planet, not just for ourselves but for all the other species we share it with, then we need to make big changes. We have to take a longer term view and not be so concerned with short term gains. We may have to change our mindsets to take the view that by not exploiting the planet’s natural resources now, we might be better off in fifty years. It’s a huge step to take, but it’s one we all need to think very seriously about.
Sadly, the almost inevitable has happened. In spite of immense efforts over the last couple of weeks, leaking oil resulting from the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon has started to wash ashore on the Chandeleur Islands, important breeding grounds for rare and endangered species. It is also having a massive impact on the human population, with fishermen unable to fish and their fishing grounds threatened for the future.
This really should lead us to question how long we can continue to build our society on carbon-based technology. It’s no good just saying ‘You can’t drill here’, as has happened in California and Florida. Until we have developed proper alternatives, demand for carbon-based fuels will continue to grow – just look at the massive expansions in car ownership in India and China and the ever increasing demands for energy. Creating fuel shortages by banning drilling will only make things worse or relocate exploration to other parts of the planet.
Once this crisis has passed and the oil is cleared up, the priority for humanity across the globe should be all about developing viable, affordable alternatives which enable us to travel efficiently and to power and heat our homes without impacting on the planet. This is where all our energy and automotive industries need to be turning their attention. But this change won’t be immediate – indeed, I anticipate that it will be a slow and painful process – and until the technology is there to support us, we’ll carry on creating energy primarily by burning things – oil, gas and coal – which means that we’ll use more and more of them all the time and accidents like this will happen again, but hopefully very rarely.