Shock: Fracking Used to Inject Nuclear Waste Underground for Decades

TruthStream Media | Mar 4, 2015 | Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton

Unearthed articles from the 1960s detail how nuclear waste was buried beneath the Earth’s surface by Halliburton & Co. for decades as a means of disposing the by-products of post-World War II atomic energy production.

Fracking is already a controversial practice on its face; allowing U.S. industries to inject slurries of toxic, potentially carcinogenic compounds deep beneath the planet’s surface — as a means of “see no evil” waste disposal — already sounds ridiculous, dangerous, and stupid anyway without even going into further detail.

Alleged fracking links to the contamination of the public water supply and critical aquifers, as well as ties to earthquake upticks near drilling locations that are otherwise not prone to seismic activity have created uproar in the years since the 2005 “Cheney loophole,” which allowed the industry to circumvent the Safe Drinking Water Act by exempting fracking fluids, thus fast tracking shale fracking as a source of cheap natural gas.

Now, it is apparent that the fracking industry is also privvy to many secrets of the nuclear energy industry, and specifically, where the bodies are buried, err… dangerous nuclear waste is buried, rather — waste that atomic researchers have otherwise found so difficult to eliminate.

Truthstream uncovered several published newspaper accounts from the Spring of 1964 concerning a then-newly disclosed plan to dump nuclear waste produced by the atomic energy industry into hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wells using a cement slurry technique developed by Halliburton & Co. The top two fracking companies in the nation at the time were Halliburton and Dowell, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical.

And here we thought fracking was a relatively new industrial phenomenon growing in popularity over just the last couple of decades. Boy were we wrong. Revealed within these articles is Halliburton’s long-standing relationship with the secret government and deep ties between the oil and nuclear industries.

Teaming up with the U.S. Government and Union Carbide Corp., who operate nuclear materials divisions at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, Halliburton was then credited with “solving” the radioactive waste problem faced by America’s secretive nuclear industry. Dumping waste via fracking had apparently been going on since 1960, according to the reports, but was only made public here in 1964.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Each of the articles Truthstream found carry the same account under different headlines, with four of them using identical copy, and the fifth, published in the San Antonio Express, slightly rewritten based upon the same source information. The photo captions of each story also add some useful tidbits:

These ran in the:

April 19, 1964 edition of the Great Bend Tribune,
the April 22, 1964 edition of the Warren Times-Mirror,
the April 26, 1964 edition of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal,
the May 3, 1964 edition of the San Antonio Express News (original)
and the June 15, 1964 edition of the Denton Record Chronicle.

The story read, in part:

“Two techniques originated by the petroleum industry for its own uses are expected to solve a major problem in the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The problem is the disposal of dangerous, sometimes deadly, radioactive waste by-products.”

“Researchers at Halliburton Co’s. Technical Center here working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists, have combined the oil well cementing technique with the hydraulic fracturing production stimulation technique to entomb radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground.”

“The method used at Oak Ridge begins by mixing the waste with a cement slurry, pumping the mixture down a hole drilled into the Conasuaga shale and then fracturing the shale to create a horizontal crack. The crack fills with the mixture to form a thin, horizontal sheet several hundred feet across. The mix sets to permanently hold the radioactive waste in the formation.”

“Union Carbide Corp., which operates facilities at Oak Ridge for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and Halliburton, which provides specialized oil field services such as cementing fracturing worldwide, have collaborated on the project since 1960.”

The mix remained liquid for 48 hours before it was supposed to permanently set and remain there, entombed, forever.

The articles make clear that the Atomic Energy Commission was preparing to use fracking as a means of disposing of nuclear wastes at additional facilities, with Oak Ridge being simply one of the largest, and the first to publicly disclose these out-of-sight disposal procedures:

“Oak Ridge has a radioactive waste disposal problem typical of the nation’s nuclear sites. Each year about four million gallons of waste, including such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and ruthenium 103, are generated at Oak Ridge.”

“Among the disposal methods already tried have been dumping concrete-encased barrels of waste in the ocean or burying the waste in lead-lined containers. These are considered either too dangerous or too expensive or both.”

Unfortunately, the ocean has been used as a giant trashcan not only by the nuclear industry, but municipal garbage and landfill companies and many other entities as well, without any real concern about its significant effects on the food supply and larger ecosystem of the planet.

“If this process is successful for disposal of Oak Ridge National Laboratory intermediate-level wastes, it has potential application at other atomic energy sites where suitable geological conditions exist,” the Atomic Energy Commission says.”

The slightly different version in the San Antonio Express News added these details:

“A couple of techniques used by oilmen when they have hopes of production may soon be used by the Atomic Energy Commission for – of all things – radioactive garbage disposal.”

“Final tests are now under way at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in trying a combination of oil well cementing plus hydraulic fracturing to entomb radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground.”

Meanwhile, the Great Bend Tribune added information about the Halliburton executives involved in the plan in their caption for a photo which shows businessmen looking at a diagram explaining how nuclear waste like strontium 90 is mixed with cement and injected into shale formations:

“Halliburton engineer Mack Stogner, left, reviews the project with Harry P. Conroy, senior vice president and general manager of the oil field service firm, and W.D. Owsley, senior vice president.”

The process includes remote controlled operation of the hydraulic fracturing drill in order to shield workers from the “medium level” radioactive substances being dumped into the earth’s crust, as the Warren Times Mirror in Pennsylvania notes in the caption:

“Disposing of Waste – Working behind shielding and wearing film badges, Halliburton Company personnel use demounted oil field service units to dispose of radioactive waste generated at the Oak Ridge, Tenn. nuclear site.”

How often this procedure has been used at other facilities since then is not entirely clear, though we know from reports discussed below that the practice continued and there is no indication that it ever stopped.

Five years later, the October 22, 1969 edition of the San Bernardino County Sun carried a report titled, “3 Ways to Manage Radioactive Waste.”

It discussed the ongoing and growing problems with nuclear waste, naming three principle strategies for managing the toxic stuff, summed up as “(1) delay and decay, (2) concentrate and confine and (3) dilute and disperse,” discussing how materials with lower half lives can supposedly be safely sequestered and later dumped, while other materials can be simply diluted and poured into existing groundwater supplies and systems.

The UPI story originating out of Oak Ridge states, in part,

“Since the start of the atomic era in the 1940s, nuclear reactors around the nation have produced 75 million gallons of hazardous high level radioactive waste materials.”

“And scientists here and elsewhere around the nation still are wrestling with the problems of what to do with this material, which promises to become even more plentiful as more and more commercial nuclear reactors go into power production.”

Oak Ridge proclaims that it found a solution to dealing with high level nuclear wastes, which has thus far been to keep it,

“…buried a few feet underground in storage tanks – tanks which must be periodically replaced because of the natural deterioration of the steel and other materials of which they are fabricated.”

“It is in this area of confining the high level wastes, whose radioactive half life ranges up to 30 to 50 years, that the Atomic Energy Commission is pushing dramatic new concepts.”

“One disposal system, involving materials in the medium range of radioactivity, is the hydraulic fracturing procedures. This system is now being used at Oak Ridge and involves mixing the liquid radioactive waste with concrete to form a grout which is pumped into shale formations 500 to 800 feet underground.”

Note, this article cites a shallower depth, at levels as shallow as 500 feet, after the 1964 articles claimed a further removed depth of 1,000 feet to 5,000. The even “higher level wastes” were disposed of in abandoned salt mines, according to Oak Ridge.

Nuclear Waste ‘Safely Flushed Away’ into the Water Supply

The 1969 article states that “low level waste” is “material which can safely be flushed away into rivers and lakes or released into the atmosphere because the level of radioactivity is so low that is presents no hazard when diluted and flushed into man’s natural environment. The more difficult problem is involved in the high level, liquid and solid wastes which are produced in the reprocessing of used fuel elements from nuclear reactor cores.”

The idea that the waste dumped into water supplies was so “low level” as to be completely harmless is likely dubious and hopeful at best. Fluoride, a by-product of the nuclear power industry, was one of those constituents, and was transformed from being known as a rat poison to being known as a dental benefit by the original spin doctor and propagandist, Edward Bernays.

In his book “The Fluoride Deception,” author Christopher Bryson revealed how the nuclear industry also used fluoridation of the public water supply as a means of secretly dumping industrial waste after fluoride was a major by-product in the uranium enrichment process for building the atomic bomb. Bryson told Democracy Now:

The Manhattan Project needed fluoride to enrich uranium. That’s how they did it. The biggest industrial building in the world, for a time, was the fluoride gaseous diffusion plant in Tennessee the Manhattan Project and Dr. Hodge as the senior toxicologist for the Manhattan Project, were scared stiff less that workers would realize that the fluoride they were going to be breathing inside these plants was going to injury them and that the Manhattan Project, the key — the key of U.S. Strategic power in the Cold War Era, would be jeopardized because the Manhattan Project and the industrial contractors making the atomic bomb would be facing all these lawsuits from workers, all these lawsuits from farmers living around these industrial plants and so Harold Hodge assures us that fluoride is safe and good for children.

More recently, an Associated Press investigation found in 2011 that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the United States were leaking tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, into groundwater supplies via corroded pipes and tunnels. AP found at least 37 locations were in direct violation of federal drinking water standards for tritium, in some cases hundreds of times over.

Fracking Nuclear Waste ‘Safe for Millions of Years’… Unless It Leaks

Some 30 trillion gallons of toxic waste has been kept out of sight, out of mind by U.S. industries that have injected it hundreds and thousands of feet underground into wells since the 1960s.

Scientists who work for these corporations have used computer modeling to assure the Environmental Protection Agency that this waste poses no threat to our aquifers and that layers of rock deep within the Earth would safely store this stuff like Tupperware for millenia.

Already, several incidents have proven that scientific computer models are no match for reality.

It is clear from a December 21, 1973 article that disposal of nuclear waste via fracking continued, along with promises that it would be safe for millions of years to come.

The Dixon Evening Telegraph wrote in “Geologists look at energy crunch”:

“The U.S. Government is disposing of approximately 250,000 gallons of intermediate-level wastes each year using a technique called hydraulic fracturing. Liquids are pumped into impervious shales 1,000 to 5,000 feet below the surface. High pressure is applied causing the rocks to fracture and the liquid moves out laterally. Because the rock and radioactive wastes it contains will not be exposed to the biosphere for millions of years, this method should be safe unless leakage into an overlying aquifer occurs.”

That is, as the article points out, unless there are leaks.

As we found in research, leakage is exactly what has happened time and again throughout the years, including at disposal sites for Oak Ridge National Laboratories, according to reports in the following cases.

Via ProPublica:

In April, 1967 pesticide waste injected by a chemical plant at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal destabilized a seismic fault, causing a magnitude 5.0 earthquake — strong enough to shatter windows and close schools — and jolting scientists with newfound risks of injection, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A year later, a corroded hazardous waste well for pulping liquor at the Hammermill Paper Co., in Erie, Pa., ruptured. Five miles away, according to an EPA report, “a noxious black liquid seeped from an abandoned gas well” in Presque Isle State Park.

In 1975 in Beaumont, Texas, dioxin and a highly acidic herbicide injected underground by the Velsicol Chemical Corp. burned a hole through its well casing, sending as much as five million gallons of the waste into a nearby drinking water aquifer.

And these are hardly the only examples… in fact, it is just scratching the surface of an issue that is almost as incomprehensible as it is unfathomable.

Then in August 1984 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., radioactive waste was turned up by water monitoring near a deep injection well at a government nuclear facility.

Bingo…

There it is. The infallible, permanent, and “impermeable” deep injection wells that Halliburton and the Atomic Energy Commission considered as a solution to nuclear waste for eons to come were found turning up radioactive nuclear waste at the very Oak Ridge site where these 1960s disposal projects were taking place.

Subterranean Waste Disposal a ‘Cornerstone of the Nation’s Economy’

Those cemented wells, filled with injected disposal substances may be safely secured for a few years or even decades, but that is no guarantee for the years down the road and its certainly not the millenia as promised by Halliburton and others in the industry. In fact, many of the wells have been forgotten, abandoned, and are lost to the record books.
As ProPublica reports:

There are upwards of 2 million abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators’ records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing seepage up the well structure.

And many of these are injection wells, where all kinds of unwanted, toxic substances are dumped in order to be forgotten… though not necessarily gone.

Not only are these practices taking place, they are widespread… and widely defended, even with the known failures and safety issues.

Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection process — burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface — are far more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.

Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation’s economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It’s also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, “clean coal” technologies, nuclear fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth’s surface. (source)

Sure, maybe it’s better than dumping it directly into the waterways, but still. This isn’t just playing with fire, this is playing with the lives of everyone in the nation for generations to come.

Please read ProPublica’s full series of reports on this, starting here. Things have to change.

These people should not have started messing with something they did not know how to fully and safely manage.

How long can this madness continue until it winds up tainting every drinking glass in America?

Engineer Mario Salazar, who worked as a technical expert for 25 years with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington, told ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten something that should give us all pause about how radioactive nuclear waste and industrial pollutants in general are being handled, and where they may ultimately end up:

“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted. A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”

Citizens worldwide mobilize against corporate water grabs

Water is Life! - Milwaukee in solidarity with
those fighting water shutoffs in Detroit.
Photo: OccupyRiverWest.com.

The Ecologist | Feb 15, 2015 | Victoria Collier

The US and other governments are pushing a failed model of water privatization, writes Victoria Collier - but water is a human right, not just a commodity to be traded for profit or monopolized by corporations, and citizens and communities worldwide are fighting back, from Detroit to Cochabamba, from Berlin to Malaysia, to reclaim their water commons. 

"The last 15 years have seen at least 180 cases of water 'remunicipalization' in 35 countries, according to the Transnational Institute, and the trend is growing."

Earlier this month on 5th February, New Jersey became the latest state to subvert democracy by authorizing the fast-track sale or lease of water utilities without public notice, comment, or approval.

The controversial decision highlights the intensifying struggle over who owns, controls, and profits from the most precious - and threatened - resource on Earth.

We tend to associate corrupt water privatization schemes with the developing world, where according to the World Health Organization, nearly 2.6 billion people still lack a latrine and 1.1 billion people have no access to any type of improved drinking source of water.

In this crisis environment, the World Bank and IMF have spent decades imposing water privatization as a condition of their exploitative loans, profiting a handful of transnational water corporations. But according to renowned food and water rights advocate Maude Barlow,

"The performance of these companies in Europe and the developing world has been well documented: huge profits, higher prices for water, cut-offs to customers who cannot pay, little transparency in their dealings, reduced water quality, bribery, and corruption."

Double diasaster for impacted communities

Water privatization has also followed on the heels of war and natural disaster in devastated regions where massive reconstruction projects are needed. These are the largely unregulated profit-centers of what journalist Naomi Klein coined the "disaster capitalism complex".

But now, disaster capitalism has come home to the United States. Private corporations are taking advantage of lucrative opportunities created by the intentionally crippled tax base of American states.

Decades of neo-liberal policies have bled the public sector to the point of collapse: deregulation, outsourcing, tax cuts for the one percent, and trillions lost annually to war spending, corporate welfare and off-shore tax-havens.

Cash-strapped governments can finally no longer repair crumbling infrastructure or meet future development needs. Offering to "fill the budget gap", the private sector is grabbing public assets and resources, particularly water, blinding public officials to the consequences of long-term contracts with substantial up-front payments.

The fast-growing 'public-private-partnership' or PPP model is a friendly marketing euphemism for privatization. PPPs facilitate the transfer of public utilities, like water, to profit-driven private corporations. This is proving a slippery slope as laws are constantly changing, always further acceding to corporate demands.

In June 2014, water investment advisors Bluefield Research praised the "revised regulatory landscape" and cheered a "major step forward for the market" when President Obama signed the Water Resources Reform and Development Act (WRRDA) into federal law, which among many other provisions seeks to expand private financing for water projects.

Private sector groups like the American Water Works Company (AWWC), Water Environment Federation (WEF), and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) began lobbying to further weaken WRRDA's public protections and to force tax-free Private Activity Bonds (PABs) so private investors can pocket more money at the expense of public coffers.

Meanwhile, investment banks including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Carlyle Group, Allianz and many others are aggressively buying up the world's declining fresh water supply and infrastructure in what is being called a "liquid gold rush".

The global water fightback

But water is not a commodity; it is a human right. As climate change, population growth, industry use and pollution threatens the world's dwindling fresh water supplies, the onslaught of privatization is being countered by a powerful backlash to reclaim that precious resource for the public sphere.

The last 15 years have seen at least 180 cases of water 'remunicipalization' in 35 countries, according to the Transnational Institute, and the trend is growing.

In France, which had the longest history of water privatization, numerous cities have recently reclaimed their water, including Paris in 2010. From Spain to Buenos Aires, Cochabamba to Kazakhstan, Berlin to Malaysia, water privatization is being aggressively rejected.

Yet, because water privatization is notoriously at odds with democracy, citizens often find they must take to the streets in nonviolent marches and civil disobedience in order to defend their rights and reclaim control of this vital resource.

In Bolivia, a historic public uprising literally drove Bechtel from Cochabamba in 2000. In Ireland, nearly 100,000 people took to the streets in December 2014, to protest the right-wing government's plans to privatize water services. India and Nigeria are also launching campaigns against dangerous and undemocratic privatization schemes.

In the Unites States, residents of Detroit, Michigan spent the summer of 2014 fighting mass water shut-offs to tens of thousands of low-income, mostly African American residents. More than 3,000 protesters marched and citizens - including the elderly and disabled - engaged in direct action to block the trucks sent to disconnect water without notice. Detroiters will now have to mobilize against the water privatization expected through their new regional authority.

In Portland, Oregon, residents are mobilizing now to oppose the costly and unnecessary water system to be built by CH2M Hill, the notoriously corrupt mega-developer and privatization pioneer. CH2M Hill has also planned a mass-privatization scheme for California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, called the West Coast Infrastructure Exchange.

Public-Public Partnerships (PUPs) are emerging frameworks for preventing corporate takeovers of natural resources and developing non-profit, public-driven solutions for water infrastructure needs.

PUPs are partnerships between "two or more public authorities or organizations based on solidarity, to improve the capacity and effectiveness of one partner in providing public water or sanitation services", according to the Public Services International Research Unit.

Such solidarity partnerships are underway in Japan, the Netherlands, India, Costa Rica, Brazil, and many other countries.

We must continue to organize in the United States around similar, pro-active democratic solutions, to prepare for a future increasingly defined by resource scarcity, and fundamentally threatened by the corporate imperative of profits over people and democracy.

---

Victoria Collier is the Education Director of the National Election Integrity Coalition, the co-founder of Girasol, a center for sustainable ecology and economy in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

Obama "dramatically" increases allowable levels of radiation in drinking water

© Natural News

Natural News | Jan 17, 2015 | Jonathan Benson

As radioactive pollution continues to accumulate throughout the environment as a result of nuclear incidents like Fukushima, the U.S. government's response is not to try to mitigate this threat to public health but rather to increase the official maximum exposure levels and basically redefine how much radiation is considered safe.

The Obama Administration recently did this with regard to radiation in drinking water, dramatically increasing allowable levels in response to "radiological incidents" that make it impossible to keep radiation levels below the previously established thresholds. So, the new approach is to continually raise these thresholds so that water can be considered safe.

It isn't, of course, but that's the illusion that the American plutocracy would have us all accept as reality -- or what the nuclear industry describes as the "new normal," according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The goal is to maintain the ruse for as long as possible, or until so many people are ill and dying of cancer that nothing can be done to stop this runaway train.

According to a press release from PEER, the White House's decision to allow the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to alter its official radiation guides, known as Protective Action Guides (PAGs), make radiation cleanup mandates more lax than they have ever been in the history of the agency's existence.

"In soil, the PAGs allow long-term public exposure to radiation in amounts as high as 2,000 millirems," explains the press release. "This would, in effect, increase a longstanding 1 in 10,000 person cancer rate to a rate of 1 in 23 persons exposed over a 30-year period."

Allowable levels of radiation in drinking water are basically undefined at this point 

For drinking water, the requirements are even more obscured. According to the same report, the EPA's new standard is undefined in this regard as the agency "continues to seek input." But the gist of it allows for indeterminable "flexibility" in discarding the previously established limits for drinking water and basically allowing whatever radiation is present in water to be considered "safe."

There's obviously nothing scientific about this "new normal" policy, but most of the "sheeple" probably won't even take a second look at it. PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch said it right when he told some in the media that the Obama Sdministration's new guidelines are something that "only Dr. Strangelove could embrace."

"If this typifies the environmental leadership we can expect from Ms. McCarthy," he stated, referring to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, "then [the] EPA is in for a long, dirty slog. No compelling justification is offered for increasing the cancer deaths of Americans innocently exposed to corporate miscalculations several hundred-fold."

Interestingly, the guidelines in the new PAGs for how to handle "radiological emergencies," which include evacuations, shelter-in-place orders, food restrictions and other actions, seem to fit the bill for what the world currently faces with Fukushima. Radiation releases from the shuttered plant are still so high that a Japanese government official recently reported that there is no other option but to continue dumping contaminated releases into the ocean.

This tainted ocean water will obviously continue circulating around the world, polluting ocean life, soils, and other ecosystems encountered by humans. And this will result in even higher levels of radiation for which the EPA will have to cover up the truth and pretend as though everything is just fine.

"We have to dispose of the water," stated Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority in Japan, in a public comment after expressing that he was "overwhelmed" by the number of tanks holding radioactive water.

Sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca

http://www.peer.org

http://enenews.com

http://science.naturalnews.com

Mounting Evidence Exposes Dangers of Energy Drinks

© Prevent Disease

Prevent Disease | Dec 22, 2014 | Natasha Longo

Two research papers, each published separately, suggest that concerns over levels of caffeine and sugar in energy drinks, and their effects on young people who drink them, are mounting.

Energy drinks are beverages that claim to "make you more alert and give you energy." Most have ingredients like caffeine, sugar, taurine, vitamins and herbs. They can be found anywhere you buy beverages beside the pop, juices and sports drinks.

The amount of caffeine in energy drinks is more than what is recommended for children. Most government public health agencies say that children under 12 years of age should have less than 85 mg of caffeine per day depending on their age. This means that one energy drink can easily put children over their caffeine limits.

Energy Drinks have previously been found to cause irreversible damage to tooth enamel and detrimentally affect the contraction of the heart. A study published in the issue of General Dentistry, the peer-reviewed clinical journal of the Academy of General Dentistry, found that an alarming increase in the consumption of sports and energy drinks, especially among adolescents, is causing irreversible damage to teeth--specifically, the high acidity levels in the drinks erode tooth enamel, the glossy outer layer of the tooth.

The FDA says they are powerless to change formulation of energy drinks. "We have no guidance or regulations that govern the formulation of energy drinks," said FDA spokeswoman Susan Cruzan. The agency does not have the authority to do that.Cruzan said. "Under current law, the manufacturer is responsible for ensuring that its products are safe and such products do not require FDA premarket review or approval."

"There's a tremendous amount of caffeine in these drinks," Jeanna Marraffa, a clinical toxicologist at the Upstate New York Poison Center told USA TODAY. "I would say: know what's in these products, have a sense of how much you're consuming and realize they are not safe. Certainly you can have toxic effects from them."

Patrice Radden, a spokeswoman for Red Bull, said the company is confident in the safety of its products and does not see the need for warning labels.

All energy drinks including Nos, Red Bull, Rockstar, Monster, Full Throttle and several others all contain many toxic sweeteners such as sucralose, aspartame and high-fructose corn syrup.

3 Times Higher Caffeine

Noting that caffeine levels in energy drinks are up to three times higher than in other caffeinated drinks including coffee or cola, Dorner said known side-effects included a rapid heart rate, palpitations, a rise in blood pressure "and in the most severe cases, seizures or sudden death".

Manufactured by the chemical industry, synthetic caffeine is big business in many drinks that contain the drug.

NATURAL CAFFEINE: Natural, real caffeine comes from various plant species. Caffeine content within these plants will vary throughout the year depending on weather, soil conditions, time of year harvested, etc. So caffeine content is impossible and impractical to determine for labeling on products like coffee or tea. They have constantly changing amounts. Naturally caffeinated products will not have caffeine as an ingredient or measurement on the label.

SYNTHETIC CAFFEINE: The first sign the caffeine in your drink is synthetic is it is listed on the label & has an exact measurement. This is the cheapest & most common added caffeine source. The processes & compounds may vary between chemical companies, but they are all disturbing.

FORTIFIED CAFFEINE: Still usually synthetic, caffeine can be obtained from the coffee decaffeination industry, although it is substantially pricier & rarely used. This will also note caffeine on the label with a measurement. Caffeine supplies from this industry use methylene chloride, formaldehyde or ethyl acetone for it's removal. There is no such thing as removing the caffeine with just water.

Two Studies Expose Dangers

The first study - a study of 10-35 year olds Danes' intake of energy drinks conducted by the National Food Institute of Denmark - shows that when children aged 10-14 consume energy drinks, one in five consumes too much caffeine.

Indeed, when their caffeine intake from other sources such as cola and chocolate is included, every second child, and more than one in three adolescents aged 15-17 consume too much caffeine, said the report.
The Danish report also found that 42% of energy drink consumers have experienced adverse effects such as insomnia, restlessness and heart palpitations.

"It is worrying that so many have experienced adverse effects from drinking energy drinks," said Jeppe Matthiessen, senior adviser from the National Food Institute.

The report also suggests that 10-14 year olds have 'limited knowledge' of the ingredients in energy drinks, the side effects of drinking them and the recommendation that children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers should not consume energy drinks.

"It seems as if there has been a change in the perception of the types of drinks that people consider normal to drink," said Matthiessen. "Among younger consumers energy drinks now have the same status as soft drinks had previously."

"Both the use of and attitudes towards energy drinks give us reason to be concerned that the intake will increase in the coming years and we therefore suggest that more information will be made available about energy drinks aimed at children and adolescents as well as their parents."

Sugar and caffeine?

A second study, published in the Journal of Caffeine Research, adds to the debate on caffeine and energy drinks by evaluating whether the effects of caffeine differ with or without sugar.

The results the research show that the physiological responses to caffeine with and without sugar 'varied widely' between individuals.

Elaine Rush and her colleagues from Aukland University measured the heart rate and carbon dioxide production (as a measure of respiration) of individuals for 30 minutes before and after they consumed a defined quantity of sugar, caffeine, or sugar and caffeine.

The team said that the wide range of responses may be due to the effects of caffeine phenotype, physical activity level, habitual intake and metabolic responses, including markers of de novo lipogenesis -- adding that further research is needed.

Natasha Longo has a master's degree in nutrition and is a certified fitness and nutritional counselor. She has consulted on public health policy and procurement in Canada, Australia, Spain, Ireland, England and Germany.

Alarm bells toll for human civilization as world's 12th largest mega-city to run out of water in just 60 days

© Natural News

Natural News | Dec 3, 2014 | Mike Adams

The city of Sao Paulo is home to 20 million Brazilians, making it the 12th largest mega-city on a planet dominated by shortsighted humans. Shockingly, it has only 60 days of water supply remaining. The city "has about two months of guaranteed water supply remaining as it taps into the second of three emergency reserves," reports Reuters. [1]

Technical reserves have already been released, and as the city enters the heavy water use holiday season, its 20 million residents are riding on a fast-track collision course with severe water rationing and devastating disruptions.

But this isn't a story about Sao Paulo; it's a report that dares to point out that human societies are incredibly shortsighted and nearly incapable of sustainably populating planet Earth. In numerous regions around the world -- including California, India, Oklahoma, Brazil, China and many more -- human populations are rapidly out-growing the capacity of their local water systems. Even though keeping populations alive requires food... and growing food requires water... almost no nation or government in the world seems to be able to limit water consumption of local populations to levels which are sustainable in the long term.

Instead, the endless greed of the "grow-consume-profit" business model that dominates the global economy leaves no room for any hint of balance with nature. The overriding philosophy of modern business is to dominate nature with chemicals, mining and monoculture to maximize profit while kicking any really large problems down the road for the next generation to deal with.

The result is a world where nobody thinks about the long-term implications of today's trends because everybody's too busy trying to extract a buck or two out of the very system that will destroy their future.

Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson will also run dry 

Consider Las Vegas while you ponder all this: Here's a city with no water future whatsoever, continuing to build new casinos and grow its population even as the water level of Lake Mead has already dropped to emergency levels (and continues to plummet). What do the people of Las Vegas imagine they will drink when all the cheap, easy water is gone? Will they swallow dust and pretend it's water?

The sobering truth is that nearly everyone who lives in Las Vegas doesn't think about this. By definition, anyone who realized the truth about the disappearing water throughout Nevada, Arizona and California would have already sold their property and moved away. Those who still inhabit regions with unsustainable water supplies -- such as Sao Paulo -- are choosing to make believe the problem doesn't exist.

This delusional psychology is, of course, reflected across modern human civilization and its governments, where delusional rhetoric and make believe fantasies about "endless economic growth" keep the obedient masses toiling away day after day, hoping they are securing a future which has already been mortgaged away.

Dwindling water supplies are like government debt spending 

We're often tricked into believing the government will solve all these problems for us. Yep, some Americans foolishly believe the same government which just issued $1 trillion in new debt to pay the interest on its existing debt is somehow really, really good at planning for the future instead of mortgaging it away. [2]

If fresh water were a bank account, the world's spending deficit against that account would be deeply in the red and approaching a tipping point of default. And in precisely the same way the U.S. government borrows money to cover today's expenses with no intention of ever paying it back, human society is also borrowing water to cover today's water demands with no intention or capability of ever paying it back.

Right now in California and around the world, farmers are pumping water out of the ground that should have remained there until the year 2030. As they keep pumping the aquifers dry, they'll be reaching ever more precariously forward into the future, using up water in 2015 that should have lasted until 2050 (or beyond).

In this same way, aquifers that should have lasted 100 - 200 years will be bone dry in the not-too-distant future. Farms that once produced food will instead produce a new Dust Bowl. Populations that depended on cheap food to afford basic living expenses will find themselves starving and bankrupt (and living on government food stamps, with the accompanying loss of freedom that always follows government handouts). The world's governments -- all of which rely on food affordability to keep populations relatively docile -- will find themselves facing mass revolts and social chaos.

You are about to watch a milestone event in the history of our world 

Unless some miraculous rain reverses the extreme drought, the city of Sao Paulo is about to experience a literal "dry run" of this scenario in as little as 60 days. The history of human civilization has never witnessed a city of 20 million people run out of water before, and no one knows exactly how such a scenario might play out. But whatever happens, a far worse rendition of the crisis will inevitably unfold across Las Vegas, Southern California, North Texas and the Arizona cities of Phoenix and Tucson. (In Tucson, they still wishfully call dry water channels "rivers" even though water almost never flows through them.)

Modern humans will not acknowledge reality until it slaps them hard in the face. Whether the subject is the chemical contamination of the world, the mass over-fishing of the world's oceans, the pharmaceutical contamination of waterways, the using up of world oil reserves, the genetic pollution of crops with GMOs, the deep well pumping of water aquifers or the unsustainable government debt spending that props up fraudulent government regimes everywhere, few people have the will to honestly acknowledge the future implications of today's actions. Most people prefer to just "get by" with the status quo. Besides, isn't there a holiday sale going on at Best Buy?

It's also more convenient to believe the lies told to us all by government and mass media. "Everything is under control" is the biggest lie of all, repeatedly uttered by governments that are almost universally bankrupt and incompetent. The really big lie almost everyone believes is the idea that no radical and sudden changes can ever happen -- that things will continue on the way they've always been for the simple (illogical) reason that they've always been that way. Few people can imagine a world without fossil fuels; without a functioning power grid; without a 911 emergency responder system that functions; without cheap and easy food magically appearing on grocery stores shelves, etc.

And so the citizens of the world will greedily drink down the very last drop of water remaining. They will fill their fuel tanks with the last gallon of gas; clear-cut the last remaining forest; fish the oceans into mass marine extinction; mine the last remaining rare earth elements out of the ground; and dam up the last free-flowing river on the planet. The appetite of Earthlings for immediate satiation and quick-turnaround profits can only lead to self-destruction.

Have no illusions that if oxygen in the atmosphere could be turned into solid gold, people everywhere around the world would be incessantly mining the atmosphere for profit until the entire global population died of asphyxiation. With their very last breath, they'd be saying, "But I'm RICH!"

When Sao Paulo -- the world's 12th largest city -- collides with reality in the next few months, it will be following in the footsteps of Easter Island, the Anasazi Indians, ancient Assyrians and other failed civilizations which collapsed and died out long ago.

If you are reading this, you are living in a time of great historical significance: You will be witness to the unfolding of the "era of collapse" across human civilization. This era has already begun, and although it may take a century to see it all unravel, future historians will view this era as a time of unbridled destruction of the planet at the hands of over-extended human societies grounded in self-delusion.

Sources for this story include:

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/29/us...

[2] http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/terence-p-jeff...

Monster Wells: Hundreds Of Fracking Wells Using 10-25 Million Gallons of Water Each

DeSmog Blog | Nov 23, 2014 | Mike Gaworecki

While the oil and gas industry likes to claim that fracking is not an especially water intensive process, a new report has found that there are more than 250 wells across the country that each require anywhere from 10 to 25 million gallons of water.

The American Petroleum Institute suggests that the typical fracked well uses “the equivalent of the volume of three to six Olympic sized swimming pools,” which works out to 2-4 million gallons of water.

But using data reported by the industry itself and available on the FracFocus.org website, Environmental Working Group has determined that there are at least 261 wells in eight states that used an average of 12.7 million gallons of water, adding up to a total of 3.3 billion gallons, between 2010 and 2013.

Read more..

#Droughtshaming: New Tattletale App Allows Californians to Tell on ‘Water Waster’ Neighbors

TruthStream Media | Oct 31, 2014 | Melissa Melton

"Did you know the 1.7 million dairy cows, 563,000 beef cattle, 131,000 hogs, 49.6 million broiler chickens, and 19.7 million egg-laying hens on factory farms in California produce as much untreated manure as 456 million people?"

Amid California’s record drought, towns up and down the state are rolling out smartphone apps that enable people to snap pictures of neighbors and businesses who are violating water restriction rules and “play water cop”:

The apps put more boots on the ground to spot waste and leaks that might go unnoticed, officials say. They say the high-tech citizen reporting programs are intended to encourage water conservation, and not to be used as evidence to fine offenders.

But at least one private company is taking things a step further. Creators of Vizsafe, a neighborhood watch app, have added a feature allowing users to map photos of water wasters — a practice dubbed “drought shaming” on Twitter and Instagram.

Read more..

At least one California town is now bone dry as megadrought continues

© Unknown

SOTT | Oct 26, 2014 | Cliff Weathers

A poor, rural community in Calfornia's agricultural belt has run out of water.

At least one California town has gone dry, and many are expected to follow soon. East Porterville, in Tulare County is now without water, as the wells that feed it have dried up. Residents, according to Yahoo! News, now have to drive to the local fire station to get water to drink, bathe, and flush the toilet. And ironically, the town is near what was once the largest freshwater lake in California.

Tulare County, which relies heavily on the agricultural industry, is parched. The some 500 wells that feed its residents and farmers have gone dry. And the county says that it may be years and cost $20 million before a new groundwater management program, which includes a hookup between East Porterville and Porterville's water systems, goes into effect.

The county is named for Tulare Lake, which was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes. It was drained for regional agricultural purposes, begining in the early 20th Century. The lake basin is now some of the most fertile soil in the Central Valley, the most productive agricultural region of the United States. Although dry for the most part, the lake occasionally reappears after unusually high levels of rainfall or snow melt, the last time being 1997.

Earlier this month, a 5,000-gallon-water tank, donated by the county's Sheriff's Association was delivered to East Porterville, and that is primary source of water for this low-income community. Residents now drive to the fire department with empty water jugs and pump water from the tanks to take home. The county has also been supplying free bottled water, paid for by the state, to residents for drinking and cooking.

However, there are worries within the community that the county might use the bottled-water handout to identify undocumented residents or condemn homes that are in disrepair. Non-profit groups and churches have also been trying to help supply water to East Porterville residents.

"It's a disaster," says Andrew Lockman, manager of the Tulare County Office of Emergency Services. "It's not a tornado, it's not a hurricane, it's a quiet disaster."

California is beginning of the fourth year of the megadrought (new water year begin in October), with 2014 being the worst period. For the most part, much lower precipitation rates during the winter months have fueled the drought. Snowpacks have been meager and reservoir levels are at historical lows. Warmer and dryer summers have only exacerbated the problem. Climate forecasters are predicting that megadroughts such as this one are likely the new norm.

Also problematic for California is the state's water distribution system, a vast network of dams, pipelines, and canals that's more than 90 years old and not capable, even under the best of conditions, of providing sufficient water for the state's growing population. NPR News reports that engineers and politicians agree that a substantial infrastructure upgrade is needed regardless of future water forecasts. Gov. Jerry Brown is currently asking voters to pass a bond, totalling $7 billion, to upgrade the state's water network. Included in this would be two new, massive reservoirs and expansion of many others in the state.

Meanwhile, dozens of communities in the state are reporting they're on the verge of running out of water. Some say they'll have no water in as little as 60 days. Many of the communities that are at the crisis point are small, poor and isolated, often relying on one water source, without backups, to provide for their customers.

Currently, 14 communities are on the "critical list," meaning they've informed the state that they've reached a point where they don't believe they will have adequate public water within the next two months. Some of these communities have turned to trucking in water for now while they look for long-term solutions to the drought's ialmpact on their water systems. California's 154 reservoirs are about 50% below their historic average.

The U.S. Drought Monitor, a government-funded weekly map of drought conditions, reports that 82% of the state is experiencing a severe to exceptional drought, with 58% suffering from the harshest of drought conditions. The entire state has been suffering from drought conditions since May, the first time in 15 years.

Source: AlterNet

‘Fracking loophole’ allows drilling companies to use unregulated toxins – report

Reuters / Mario Anzuoni

RT | Oct 23, 2014

A number of US oil companies are taking advantage of the so-called “Halliburton Loophole” to circumvent federal legislature regulating diesel-based fluids in fracking, instead exploiting the environment with even more toxic chemicals, new report says.
 
“Because of a gap in the Safe Drinking Water Act, companies are allowed to inject other petroleum products (beyond diesel) without a permit, and many of these non-diesel drilling fluids contain even higher concentrations of the same toxins found in diesel,” report by the Environmental Integrity Project released on Wednesday reads.

Titled “Fracking’s Toxic Loophole”, the report says that the 2005 Energy Policy Act authorities the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) to “regulate diesel-based fracking fluids because of the toxicity of BTEX compounds” found in diesel.

However due to the so-called “Halliburton loophole” in the legislature the federal government is not applying the same protection standards to other fracking fluid other than diesel-based.

Overall, the Halliburton Loophole represents a significant reduction in federal oversight of drilling and fracking operations, the report claims.
 
“This double standard illustrates what happens when Congress manipulates environmental statutes for the benefit of polluters, instead of allowing EPA to make public health decisions based on the best available science,” the report reads.

Looking at the limited data available through FracFocus, Material Safety Data Sheets, and state agency websites the study discovered that at least six fracking fluid additives available on the market contain more benzene than diesel fuel. In addition another at least 21 fluids have much higher concentrations of ethylbenzene than benzene. Chemicals on the market also have high levels of xylene and toluene, which can lead to increased health risks.

Citing FracFocus data, the study points out that at least 153 wells in 11 states were fracked with fluids “containing ethylbenzene between January 2011 and September 2014.” Of those, 77 wells were found in Oklahoma, 23 in North Dakota, followed by Texas with 20 wells. The report says that it is not clear how often these toxic petroleum products are being used.

Reuters / Jonathan Ernst

The documented cases include the injection of a mix of crude oil, butane, and other fluids with up to 48,000 gallons of 4.1 percent benzene into a well in Dimmit County, Texas by BlackBrush O&G, LLC. While Discovery Operating Services, reported using nearly 1,000 gallons of benzene in eleven wells in Midland and Upland Counties in Texas.
 
“Benzene is known to increase cancer risk, and the Safe Drinking Water Act Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) is designed to limit exposure to no more than five parts per billion. However, thanks to the Halliburton loophole, the Safe Drinking Act regulates diesel-based fluids but no other petroleum products with much higher benzene concentrations,” the report reads.

The study also cites a case in Oklahoma where Citation Oil and Gas Corporation of Texas injected mix containing up to 4,538 gallons of ethylbenzene, “equivalent to the amount found in nearly half a million gallons of diesel fuels.”
 
“Ethylbenzene is classified as a probable carcinogen, and cancer risk is considered significant when concentrations exceed the Maximum Contaminant Level of 0.7 parts per million in drinking water,” the report says.

Eric Schaeffer Executive Director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former Director of Civil Enforcement at EPA says that the loophole must be repealed.
 
“To protect public health, Congress should repeal the Halliburton Loophole and EPA should broaden the categories of fracking fluids that require Safe Drinking Water Act permits,” said Schaeffer. 

“Without these reforms, we are perpetuating a loophole that allows the unregulated injection of unlimited quantities of highly toxic pollutants into the ground.”

14 California communities now on verge of waterless-ness; mass migration out of California seems imminent

© Natural News

Natural News | Oct 20, 2014 | Jonathan Benson

Unless California gets some heavy rain, and soon, the state's roughly 38 million residents will eventually be up a creek without a paddle -- or without a creek, for that matter. The latest media reports indicate that some 14 communities throughout the state are now on the verge of running completely dry, and many more could join them in the coming year if conditions remain as they are.

A few months ago, the official count was 28 communities bordering on complete waterless-ness, according to the Water Resources Control Board. Those that have since dropped off the list were able to come up with a fix, at least for now. The other 14, though, face an unprecedented resource collapse that could leave thousands of Californians with no other choice but to pack their bags and head to greener pastures.

"It's a sign of how severe this drought is," verbalized Bruce Burton, an assistant deputy director for the board, to the Los Angeles Times about some of the drastic measures being taken. For the first time ever, the water board has begun tracking communities throughout the state that are bordering on complete water loss, a situation that has never before occurred.

Most of the communities on the brink are located in California's Central Valley, the "food basket" of America that The New York Times (NYT) once declared to be the nation's greatest food resource. Most of America's carrots are grown there, as are the bulk of salad greens, almonds and citrus fruits that we all take for granted -- but that could soon disappear due to the continued drought.

'Larger, more sophisticated communities' face total water depletion

In some stricken areas, water facilities have been able to secure temporary supplies from neighboring communities as they figure out longer-term solutions. In Siskiyou County near the Oregon border, the city of Montague was actually able to construct a brand-new irrigation ditch to transport water from a lake 25 miles away, replacing an old ditch that had run dry back in April.

While most of the communities facing total water depletion are relatively small in size, with only a few thousand residents each, the prospect of larger communities also becoming affected is increasingly likely. Tom Quinn, the executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, says that, if the drought continues, many of the more iconic regions of California will suffer.

"If this drought keeps on going, some larger, more sophisticated communities are going to be in trouble next year," he told the LA Times.

Mountains shifting due to water losses 

It isn't just that no new water is coming into California -- underground aquifers and other former backup sources are also running dry. According to research published in the journal Science, the entire Western United states has lost an astounding 240 gigatons of water since 2013, an amount equivalent to 1 billion tons.

In spatial terms, this amount of water could be spread out across the entire Western U.S. in a solid 10-centimeter sheet, constituting about 63 trillion gallons, or enough to fill 75,000 football stadiums. This loss has not only altered the gravitational field of California, according to the study, but also caused mountains throughout the state to rise up out of the ground in some areas.

"100 percent of the state is in drought, with 82 percent of the land designated as in 'extreme' or 'exceptional' drought, the highest levels on the U.S. Drought Monitor scale," explains the National Journal. "Thirty-seven million people are affected by the drought."

Once a Sea - now it's the Aral Desert

What was once the Aral Sea at Muinak,
Qoraqalpoghiston, Uzbekistan.
Photo: so11e via Flickr.

The Ecologist | Oct 16, 2014 | Anson Mackay

The Aral Sea is a well known environmental disaster zone. But this year, it got a whole worse, writes Anson Mackay, as its biggest basin dried up completely to expose a toxic, salty wasteland. With continuing irrigation and declining river flows due to climate change, the desert is only set to expand. 

The Aral Sea has reached a new low, literally and figuratively. New satellite images from NASA show that, for the first time in its recorded history, its largest basin has completely dried up.

However, the Aral Sea has an interesting history - and as recently as 600-700 years ago it was as small, if not smaller, than today.

The Aral recovered from that setback to become the world's fourth largest lake, but things might not be so easy this time round.

Today, more people than ever rely on irrigation from rivers that should instead flow into the sea, and the impact of irrigation is compounded by another new factor: climate change.

Really a lake - but now, a wasteland

Sandwiched between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea is actually a lake, albeit a salty, 'terminal' one. It is salty because evaporation of water from the lake surface is greater than the amount of water being replenishing through rivers flowing in.

It is terminal because there is no outflowing river. This makes the Aral Sea very sensitive to variations in its water balance caused either by climate or by humans.

Indeed, the sea has long been a cause celebre in the world of environmental catastrophes, an exemplar of the devastating harm that ill thought-out economic policies can have on the environment.

Intensive irrigation of cotton plantations in the deserts of the western Soviet Union prevented water reaching the Aral Sea, leading to the drastically low levels we see today. This in turn meant the highly-salty waters killed off many plants and animals.

During early Soviet Union times, the Aral Sea and its fringing wetlands were a significant resource for the fishing industries, agriculture, animal husbandry and fur trapping.

Six decades of profligate cotton irrigation

But in the 1950s, the extent of irrigated land used for 'white gold' (cotton) increased dramatically from 4 billion to 8 billion hectares, with Uzbekistan becoming one of the world's largest cotton producers. To feed cotton's insatiable demand for water, the Karakum Canal was built out of the desert sands and because it was unlined, water losses were extremely high.

During the late 1960s, the amount of water evaporating from the Aral Sea become greater than the amount of water entering the lake, so lake levels declined dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. More than 75% of the surface area and more than 90% of the lake's volume has been lost.

In 1987-1988, the lake split into two, and the Large and Small Aral Sea basins were created. International efforts have been made to protect the Small Aral Sea through the construction of dams, and this has meant that lake levels here have increased.

The Large Aral Sea continued to shrink and subsequently split itself into two basins; a deeper, smaller west Large Aral and a more shallow, but expansive, east Large Aral. And it is this latter basin which NASA images show had dried out completely this summer.

Toxic, salty dust storms causing disease and death

The environmental impact of the drying Aral has been devastating. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and hundreds of species have disappeared. Toxic metals and agrochemicals (herbicides, pesticides, insecticides), used to prevent disease and pests from lowering cotton yields, found their way into the sea through its rivers.

But because the Aral is a terminal lake, the pollutants were never washed out, and they instead sunk to the bottom sediments.

Now these bottom sediments are exposed to the air, they are blown up into the atmosphere as toxic, salty dust storms, which can spread for many hundreds of kilometres causing increased deaths and chronic disease, especially the young.

However, lower lake levels have also exposed ancient irrigation systems and mausoleums surrounded by settlements (some remains of which are still under water), built during the late Middle Ages. This means that in certain parts of the Aral, lake levels during 13th-14th century must have been lower.

We still aren't sure exactly what caused such extreme regression, but a cooler, drier climate played a role. The 13th century Mongol invasion of central Asia also led to the Amu Dar'ya, one of two major rivers that feed the Aral, being diverted to the Caspian Sea. Clearly humans were a major factor in the Aral's previous dry spell.

By the late 16th century, the Aral Sea started to fill up again, in part because irrigated channels meant the Amu Dar'ya once more flowed into the lake.

With climate change and continuing irrigation, water flows will cease

A key question that remains today therefore is how much of the lake's current regression is due to intensive irrigation and how much may be due to climate change over the past 50 years. Recent studies suggest only 14% of the shrinking of the Aral Sea since the 1960s was caused by climate change, with irrigation by far the biggest culprit.

Researchers looking at what will happen to Aral Sea levels with global warming over the next few decades have combined several model predictions together and expect net water loss to increase as more evaporation leads to less river inflow.

However, if irrigation of the rivers continues, then net water loss will be even greater as river flow into the Aral Sea will essentially cease.

Climate change may be one of the world's great problems but over-irrigation is at least possible to reverse with the right policy changes. But the two issues together make a disastrous combination.

The future for much of the Aral Sea does not look great.

---

Anson Mackay is Professor of Environmental Change at University College London. He received funding from INTAS between 2003-2005 to research water level change in the Aral Sea over recent millennia.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Groups Demand End of Everglades Oil Drilling, Fracking And Fix Water Problems

© Green Med Info

Green Med Info | Oct 15, 2014 | Dr. Karen Dwyer

Citizens draw the line against new oil drilling in Greater Everglades after unauthorized fracking threatens water supplies and triggers county and state lawsuits; they call on Scott to shut down all new Everglades oil drilling and update state regulations to 1) ban fracking and all forms of extreme extraction, 2) set a one mile buffer zone from drill site to family home, 3) secure DEP stronger enforcement powers, with significant penalties and fines.

NAPLES, FL—The Stonecrab Alliance, Food & Water Watch, Clean Water Initiative, and ReThink Energy Florida are organizing an "It's All About the Water" march to Governor's Rick Scott's beachfront home starting at 4 p.m., Saturday, October 18, beginning at the Naples Pier.  The groups intend to shut down new Everglades oil drilling and fracking and urge Scott to fix a broad range of water problems in Florida.  By land and by sea, participants will march on the beach and paddle from the Naples Pier to the Governor's beachfront home.  Banners, signs, and flags will spell out concerns.  Solidarity Fish from the east coast will make visible the need to send clean water south from Lake Okeechobee.

Participants will bring their own "troubled waters" samples in containers marked with location and date to vividly show the variety of water problems Florida faces from drilling, fracking, the BP oil spill, Lake Okeechobee water releases, and more.  In the Governor's beachfront backyard participants will deliver their troubled waters, enjoy music, participate in a water blessing from the Miccosukee Otter Clan, and listen to speakers.  Speakers will map out solutions for water problems such as banning new drilling and fracking, cleaning toxic Lake Okeechobee discharges, sending clean water south to restore the Everglades, curbing agricultural and industrial run-off, denying permits for gas-fired power plants and pipelines, investing in clean, renewable energy to curb sea-level rise and climate change.  Closing with a candlelight vigil and wish lanterns, they'll invite everyone, from legislators to land barons, to partner with them in saving Florida's waters and Everglades.

The march follows fast on a milestone victory for citizens — after unauthorized fracking threatened water supplies and wetlands.  Faced with fines, penalties, protests, and lawsuits, Dan A. Hughes has abandoned all plans to explore for oil in Florida.  The Texas oil company terminated its 115,000 acre lease while the state revoked all its permits and filed a lawsuit for clean up.  This means 115,000 acres in the heart of the Everglades, some, only 1000 feet from homes, has been saved from drilling and fracking.  Most significantly, the proposed drill site that had placed 30 families in an Emergency Evacuation Zone has been turned into a watermelon field.  Although citizens are still celebrating the shutdown of Hughes, the company has countersued the state and other oil companies have leased an additional 330,000 acres so the struggle for the Everglades and clean water escalates.

Governor Scott's support of the oil industry has fueled the expansion of new drilling in Florida.  Residents and environmentalists say they don't want another Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill—with its long chain of documented misjudgments, operational failings, and oversight mistakes.  They want to protect the aquifers that supply Florida with its drinking water and save the watersheds that sustain wetlands.  "It's about our water," they say.  Accidents happen.   Over time pipes leak.  Injected chemicals surface.  And even cement casings fail.  One accident could ruin a community's aquifer.  The risks are too great and benefits, too small.  Drilling is not in the public interest—especially not in Florida since its limestone geology sources the state's drinking water and is extremely porous and highly susceptible to groundwater contamination.  A sign sums up the problem: "Can't Clean up an Aquifer:  Don't Drill."

Read more..