About 60 percent of the toxic water used to extract the natural gastouted in mendacious commercials by the natural gas industry as clean energyis left underground. The rest is stored in huge, open pits that dot the landscapes at drilling sites, before it is loaded into hundreds of large vehicles and trucked to regional filtration facilities. Such drilling has already poisoned wells in western Pennsylvania, Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, New Mexico, Kansas, Montana, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming. Those whose water becomes contaminated, including people living in towns such as Dimock, Pa., must have water trucked in to provide for their needs. Farm animals that have drunk the toxic mixture that has leeched from gas drilling sites have died. Cattle ranchers in Colorado, where drilling is occurring in close proximity, have reported that their livestock birthrates have gone down and animals are bearing deformed offspring.
Bibens' specialty is "biochar," a highly porous charcoal made from organic waste. The raw material can be any forest, agricultural or animal waste. Some examples are woodchips, corn husks, peanut shells, even chicken manure. Bibens feeds the waste -- called "biomass" -- into an octagonally shaped metal barrel where it is cooked under intense heat, sometimes above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the organic matter is cooked through a thermochemical process called "pyrolysis". In a few hours, organic trash is transformed into charcoal-like pellets farmers can turn into fertilizer. Gasses given off during the process can be harnesed to fuel vehicles of power electric generators. Biochar is considered by many scientists to be the "black gold" for agriculture.
In November, Tesoro sued ConocoPhillips' subsidiary Tosco Corp. charging Tosco had disposed of waste improperly at the 168,000 barrel per day (bpd) Martinez, California, refinery, and concealed the soil and groundwater contamination when Tesoro bought the plant.
The process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore 'carbon negative'.
"The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies."
Researchers led by Roberto Danovaro at the University of Pisa in Italy added controlled amounts of three brands of sunscreen to seawater surrounding coral reefs in Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand and Egypt.
Even small doses provoked large discharges of coral mucous -- a clear sign of environmental stress -- within 18 to 48 hours. Within 96 hours complete bleaching of corals had occurred.
We are behaving like bacteria growing on an agar plate, flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another microbe colonizes and takes over, using them as their resource.
