Also on today’s menu:
Oh, No: The Nurdles!
Shell Wins, Whales Lose
Provisions of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better initiative that are aimed at helping to deal with climate change could allow fossil fuel companies to avoid most of their corporate income taxes. The legislation includes changes to a tax credit for removing carbon dioxide from smokestacks or the atmosphere and, combined with more than $12 billion in funding for carbon capture and carbon removal technologies contained in the bipartisan infrastructure bill enacted in November, provides a 70 percent increase in the value of those credits.
As Inside Climate News puts it, the changes “would hand fossil fuel companies nearly every item on their carbon capture wishlist.”
The legislation would not only raise the amount of the tax credit but also would allow companies to receive direct payments from the federal government, rather than having to deduct the amounts from their income tax statements. It also would extend the credit’s eligibility by six years.
Oh, No: The Nurdles!
Last week, we were discussing the problem with plastics, and the proposed Break Free From Plastics Act that would take strict measures to deal with the situation. The Guardian recently ran an article about the sinking of the X-Press Pearl container ship after it caught fire in the Indian Ocean in May. The United Nations has classified the incident as Sri Lanka’s “worst maritime disaster”, in which the most “significant” harm was from the spillage of 87 containers full of lentil-sized plastic pellets: nurdles.
Nurdles are the tiny beads used for creating plastic products. Made of polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and other plastics, they can be released into the environment from plastic plants or when shipped around the world as raw material to factories. Depending on their density, they will either sink or float, whether in freshwater or saltwater. Seabirds, fish, and other wildlife often mistake them for food.
Nurdles will fragment into nanoparticles that are the second-largest source of micropollutants in the ocean, by weight, with 230,000 tons of them ending up in oceans every year. They continue to circulate in ocean currents and wash ashore for decades, and serve as “toxic sponges”, which attract chemical toxins and other pollutants onto their surfaces. “The pellets themselves are a mixture of chemicals — they are fossil fuels,” Tom Gammage of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international campaign group, says. He said lab studies show that, when a fish eats a pellet, some of the pollutants it has absorbed will come loose, threatening marine life and those who consume it.
Shell Wins, Whales Lose
A South African high court has ruled that Royal Dutch Shell can move ahead with seismic tests to explore for oil in whale breeding grounds along South Africa’s eastern coastline, dismissing an 11th-hour legal challenge by environmental groups.
Shell plans to begin firing extremely loud sound waves through the waters off the Wild Coast, which is home to whales, dolphins, and seals. Green groups fear that exploring for oil could disrupt the sea mammals’ habitat and damage the ecologically diverse environment. The court found that the groups had failed to prove there was a reasonable danger of “irreparable harm.”
Happy Khambule, a senior campaigner for Greenpeace Africa, said, “We will continue to support the nation-wide resistance against Shell and pursue the legal avenue to stop Shell. We must do everything we can to undo the destructive colonial legacy of extractivism, until we live in a world where people and the planet come before the profits of toxic fossil fuel companies.”
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