Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Did Newmont Do It?

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Yesterday an Indonesian Court threw out charges against the world’s largest gold producer, Newmont Mining Corporation, not because the company might be innocent, but because the company had a deal with the Indonesian government whereby disputes are to be settled by arbitration.

At issue is whether the company polluted Buyat bay in northern Sulawesi with mercury and arsenic.

According to ABC Online and other reports, a government-commissioned probe and a police study concluded that the bay was polluted, but several other studies, including by the World Health Organisation and the Indonesian Health Ministry, did not support that charge.

I can’t find the WHO report or study undertaken by the Minimata Institute on the internet. I would appreciated links from anyone who does happen to stumble across one or other of the reports.

According to the The Jakarta Post on October 4 last year this is what the reports concluded:

A laboratory test by Japan’s Minamata institute and the World Health Organization (WHO) shows the mercury levels in hair samples taken from residents living at Buyat Bay in North Sulawesi were normal, the Ministry of Health said on Sunday.

Ministry director general of communicable disease Umar Fahmi said the level of mercury in the residents’ hair was 2.65 micro grams per gram or around one-twentieth of the dangerous level of 50 set by WHO.

“It indicates a normal level of mercury content in human body. The level is equivalent with the mercury content found in healthy Japanese citizens,” Umar told The Jakarta Post.

The WHO study apparently also looked at mercury levels in fish and I think sediment?

According to my colleagues Mike Nahan and Don D’Cruz:

Like virtually all the foreign owned mining ventures in Indonesia, NMR [Newmont Mining Corporation] was from its inception subjected to a campaign by ‘local’ NGOs backed and funded by western activists.

In the case of the campaign against NMR, this included: the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), the Indonesian Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam), the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (Elsham), KELOLA and the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), aka Friends of the Earth Indonesia, just to name a few.

… When the appropriate Indonesian government ministers dismissed, on expert advice, the claims of the NGOs, the NGOs filed lawsuits against them.

With the assistance of friendly ‘experts’, these claims were successfully promoted in the West, such as in a recent New York Times feature story.

What the New York Times and its NGO sources ignored was the considerable body of evidence that directly contradicted the NGO line.

Shortly after the New York Times ran the story in September, the Indonesians National Police arrested six of NMR’s most senior executives (one was released due to health risks) on charges based on the NGO claims that the NMR and its executives knowingly polluted the Bay and damaged the livelihood and health of the local community.

The fact that the action took place only as mining was coming to an end fed rumours that charges had been created to force a pay-out from Newmont before the mine closed.

There is information at the Newmont website responding to articles in the New York Times including:

The Times points out that the Minahasa roaster facility emitted approximately 17 tons of mercury into the atmosphere over a four and one-half year period. While the Times makes this seem like a significant quantity, this level of emissions complied with all applicable US and Indonesian air quality regulations. It is not a level of emissions that would cause any human health impacts to nearby residents.

In many ways it is a pity the case is not going to trial, so all the evidence could be laid out. But then again, who gets a fair trial in Indonesia?

……………….
The Newmont website also has a detailed history of gold, click here. This year saw the price of gold reach a 17 year record at US$480 an ounce in October. Is the price going to keep going up?

Buffalo Hunting Season Opens In US

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I was interested to read in today’s The Age newspaper that the buffalo hunting season opened in the US yesterday:

The hunt will allow up to 50 of the Plains bison, often called buffalo in North America, to be killed in the three-month season that opens on November 15. A lottery for 24 permits drew nearly 6,200 applicants, including an unsuccessful Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer.

Sixteen additional permits were reserved for native American tribal members, and 10 went to hunters who had drawn permits for a previous hunt that was cancelled.

Hunters typically eat any bison they kill and sometimes mount the head and horns.

… Facing nationally televised protests and tourist boycotts, the Montana legislature banned bison hunting in 1991.

Regulations forbid game officials from helping, and hunters are all required to attend classes on the rules of the hunt.

At the turn of the 20th century, only 23 bison survived in Yellowstone National Park. The herd now numbers around 4,900.

Which animals can be legally hunted in Australia? I know crocodile hunting is banned in the Northern Territory though 600 are culled every year. There is an annual quota for kangaroos.

New Bans on Tree Clearing in NSW: How Many Trees Saved for How Many Dollars?

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Yesterday NSW Natural Resources Minister Ian Macdonald unveiled the new regulations for the state’s Native Vegetation Act 2003. The regulations will come into effect on December 1.

The story goes that the NSW Farmers Association ‘capitulated’ on the Act on the promise that the regulations would be more reasonable.

Now it looks like the regulations transfer responsibilities to local ‘Catchment Management Authorities’ with farmers developing and getting their ‘Property Vegetation Plans’ endorsed by these boards that I understand include local ‘wise men’, greens and bureacrats.

According to yesterday’s press release there will be no more broadscale tree clearing, there are offset provisions (farmers can cut down trees in one area if it is absolutely necessary, if they agree to plant more somewhere else), and it all comes with $436 million for those disadvantaged, download file with media release and ‘details of package’.

The ‘compensation packages’ could be seen as very generous. At least relative to Quensland where landholders have got not much more than a ‘poke in the eye’ by way of ‘compensation’ for the latest round of restrictions.

Landholders’ Institute Secretary Ian Mott puts the legislative agenda in a ‘so how many trees will really be saved for how many dollars’ context with a piece he wrote today titled, NSW Virtual Vegetation Policy, download file .

Mott makes some good points including that:

Sparks & wildfires lost 770,000ha to hot (habitat destroying) fires in 2003 while State Forests NSW only lost 70,000ha. …

But what has this got to do with clearing controls? Well, it is all about character, scale and intensity of impacts and the capacity of wildlife to recover from those impacts.

Landsat tells us that over the past two decades, total clearing in NSW has only been about 16,000ha of which about half is regrowth clearing that will still take place. Another 25% is clearing for power lines, roads and infrastructure so this leaves a net 4000ha of annual ‘habitat destruction’ that will be covered by the new legislation. Note that no attempt has been made to quantify forest expansion to derive a net figure.

Dr John Benson, of the Botanic Gardens, has provided most of the key factoids on which the NSW policy process has relied on from SEPP 46 to the more recent changes. It was he who provided the notorious 150,000ha annual clearing estimate to the NSW Vegetation Forum. He used data from the Moree Plain and extrapolated for the entire State. It was he who, in “Setting the Scene”, his backgrounder for the 2003 legislation, advised the government that there had been 35 million ha of clearing prior to the mid 1930’s. But he then failed to include a total on a table showing cleared area in each bioregion. This missing total of 28 million hectares would have made it clear that there had been an increase in forested area, net of clearing, of 7 million hectares over the past 7 decades. That is, 1 million hectares of expansion per decade or 100,000ha of extra forest a year.

In my own district (Byron Shire) the aerial photos confirm that private forest has trebled in area (net of clearing) since 1954 and the annual clearing rate is less than 2% of the average annual expansion rate for the past half century.

But “don’t you worry about that”, the new legislation comes with a $460 million budget over 5 years (essentially a reallocation of the old DLWC budget) and this works out to about $23,000 per hectare of ‘saved’ private forest.

And if $23,000/ha is an appropriate, cost effective and responsible public outlay for protecting habitat then what is the Premier, the Minister and the policy doing about the 700,000 hectares lost to government exacerbated wildfires? At those costings it came to $16.1 billion in damage to publicly owned habitat?

When in Drought, Grow Organic

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My friend Dr David Tribe from Melbourne University has just started his own blog, click here. Congratulations David!

I was scrolling through his recent posts and there is a great paper on organic farming, download file. Well it provides good quantitative comparative data on yields, nitrogen inputs, and nitrogen leaching for conventional and organic systems for trials in Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.

It is a pity they don’t include the data from the Rodale Institute in the US.

Scott Kinnear, a Director of The Biological Farmers of Australia and Victorian Greens Candidate, and others, often quote the trials from the institute as evidence that that organic farming systems are superior to conventional systems and in particular that they give a higher yield.

Indeed Kinnear claims as much on page 9 of a recent speech titled How Organics and Slow Food will Feed The World:

“Organic farming in the US yields comparable or better than
conventional industrial farming, especially in times of drought”.

The only example of this that I can find is a paper titled The performance of organic and conventional cropping systems in an extreme climate year, by Don Lotter, Rita Seidel, and Bill Liebhardt of the Rodale Insitute. They write:

In five out of six of the drought years during the 21 year experiment, corn yields were significantly higher in the organic treatments than those in the conventional treatment. The 1999 drought year being far more severe, results were more complex, and showed differences between the two organic crop systems.
Rainfall during the 1999 crop season totaled only 41% of average. The critical month of July had only 15 mm of rain, about 17% of the average. Crop yields were reduced to less than 20% in corn and 60% in soybean. Most farmers would have abandoned such a dismal corn crop; however, this kind of stress can expose differences between crop management systems that mild stress conditions cannot.

So if you don’t mind a really dismal yield, and if in drought, well you could go organic.

Otherwise, as the GMO Pundit, Dr Tribe says:

A review of farming performance in practice shows that for the same crop yield, organic farming requires more land than is needed with conventional farming with synthetic fertiliser.

In Defence of a Good Lie

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Many academics genuinely believe that promoting anxiety and fear about a problem is a form of valium public service, according to Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Kent University, writing in The Times Higher Education Supplement last month.

The articles includes the comment:

The defence of the “good lie” or the “greater truth” is invoked when inflated stories are peddled to raise awareness of an issue. …

Appeals to a “greater truth” are prominent in debates about the environment. It is claimed that problems such as global warming are so important that a campaign of fear is justified. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, justified the distortion of evidence in the following terms: “Because we are not just scientists but human beings… as well… we need to capture the public imagination.” He added that “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified statements and make little mention of any doubts that we have”. With such attitudes widely circulated, is it any wonder that Hurricane Katrina is widely perceived as punishment for humanity’s environmental sins? That advocacy research translates so well into the language of divine retribution indicates how the crusading spirit can destroy the integrity of academic enterprise.

Of course academics are entitled to adopt a partisan role. They also have a right to raise concerns about the problems that capture their imagination.

We are also normal human beings who can get carried away with the findings of our research. Academic passion and commitment make a significant contribution to society. But however noble the ideals that motivate it, the promotion of fear displaces the quest for the truth. Instead of clarifying issues it contributes to a dishonest polarisation of attitudes that invariably closes down discussion. Fear entrepreneurship on campuses, like elsewhere, serves only the interest of intolerance and prejudice.

I reckon the biggest lie from the global warming alarmists is that it is going to get drier as it gets warmer.

On 27th May last year ABC Radio’s World Today had a feature titled ‘Changing conditions means more efficient water use needed: expert’ in which Peter Cullen suggested that as a consequence of climate change there will be more droughts and that agriculture will need to re-adjust. A few months later Tim Flannery was on ABC TV’s 7.30 Report (23rd June 2004) telling us that Australia was going to be affected by climate change sooner and harder than anywhere else on the planet and that Perth may end up a ‘ghost metropolis’ from lack of rain.

That was before the drought broke. I had a look at dam levels in Perth this morning and they keep rising, click here.

Isn’t it true that as it gets warmer it is, on average, going to get wetter? That’s what Australia’s climatologists tell us (Australasian Science, June 2004). That’s why there is more snow falling on Greenland. Furthermore, a paper by Roderick and Farquhar in the International Journal of Climatology (Vol 24, Issue 9, 2004) indicates that contrary to expectations, measurements of pan evaporation show decreases over the last 30 years in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere and also across Australia.

There seems a great propensity to exaggerate water issues and suggest that there is everywhere a shortage.

Media headlines in Queensland’s south east over the last week have focused on Brisbane Lord Mayor’s anger at nearby Gold Coast and Redlands decisions to reduce water restrictions and allow watering of gardens from 4pm rather than sticking with a 7pm to 7am regime. Redlands have a near full dam and completely independent water supply, yet Brisbane’s Lord Mayor wants everyone to suffer the restrictions. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Crikey Greenpeace

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In August, Melbourne’s The Age newspaper reported that Greenpeace was experiencing something of a cost blow out.

On Friday, Crikey was quoting an anonymous tipster suggesting financial problems at the multi-national, text follows below.

I find much of the information from the ‘anonymous tipsters’ a bit far fetched.

Crikey also published a response from Greenpeace denying they are on the verge of bankruptcy, text follows below.

It is interesting that the rumours are circulating. It is interesing that the media is taking an interest in the organisation. Once Greenpeace managed to focus the media exclusively on its campaigns.

Text from Crikey’s anonymous tipster:

A friend of mine who is a contractor at Greenpeace Australia Pacific is about to get the flick because they have suddenly realised that they are on the verge of bankruptcy. After taking a high risk strategy of running big deficits in the hope of a massive fundraising increase, they have suddenly panicked. Their three months reserve policy (see their financial report on their website) is gone, along with the reserves. To save the organisation, they have stopped hiring people for empty positions (I hear there are quite a few) and told all contractors that when their term contracts expire, they are out (this applies to about 20% of staff and their contracts generally expire by the end of the year). They have pretty much stopped any campaigning work for the rest of the year to save cash.

The CEO has left this disaster a couple of months ago (without even knowing it was coming) and has just taken up a position as CEO of the RSPCA in Australia. In the two weeks since this crisis began, one member of senior management has quit and the other 3 are under pressure to go. The new CEO starts in a few weeks.

The reason for this huge deficit – fund raising out of control. Fund raising expenses this year are around 50% of total organisation expenditure (up from 36% last year and around 30% in previous years).

For the next few months they are going to desperately try to find a few million to save from their annual budget. At the end of their review some full time staff are probably going to get the flick as well. Staff are close to starting a revolution.

The craziest thing about this is that fund raising income is above budget for the year and expenditure is below budget (because Greenpeace hardly does any campaigning any more). The whole disaster is because of financial incompetence by management.

On a side note – the board clearly didn’t see this coming either. Not quite sure what that bunch of pleasure cruisers are up to.

Crikey also published a response from Sonia Zavesky, Greenpeace communications manager:

Greenpeace Australia Pacific is not on the verge of bankruptcy. 3.8 million people worldwide give money to Greenpeace – in Australia Pacific we receive regular monthly donations of $1 million per month.

This year we will have more money donated to our work than ever before, and as our audited financial statements show, we maintain appropriate reserves. In line with our 5 year strategic fundraising plan, our investment in fundraising for the 04/05 tax year is 32% of turnover. This is annual planning and budget time and as we do every year we are looking at what campaigning work needs to be done and what staffing levels and operating budgets are required. As is the practise in most organisations, contract staff are brought in to cover busy periods, holiday cover etc. At the end of each contract period a decision is made on whether that contract needs to be extended. So while we can understand that some contract staff may find this difficult, it is simply wrong to say that all contractors are out, or that we are on shaky financial ground.

The simple truth is, that when your remit is to save the planet from environmental devastation, it’s hard to cut work. But our campaigning needs are changing, our methods of communicating are changing and we would be irresponsible managers if we did not adjust our structure and staffing levels accordingly.

As your article mentions, one senior manager has recently resigned: that is me. After 2.5 years working for an organisation I truly love, I have had to concede that being a sole parent and working for a global outfit that campaigns 24/7 around the globe, often in rapid response mode is no longer viable for me.

Greenpeace is the largest independent global environment organisation. We do not accept any funding from governments or business. We rely on donations from individuals who care about the planet to fund our work. We take our responsibility to our supporters very seriously, even if that means taking some measures that are unpopular with some individuals.