By Richard Spencer, Dubai 9:30PM GMT 20 Jan 2011
But the World, the ambitiously-constructed archipelago of islands shaped like the countries of the globe, is sinking back into the sea, according to evidence cited before a property tribunal.
The islands were intended to be developed with tailor-made hotel complexes and luxury villas, and sold to millionaires. They are off the coast of Dubai and accessible by yacht or motor boat.
Now their sands are eroding and the navigational channels between them are silting up, the British lawyer for a company bringing a case against the state-run developer, Nakheel, has told judges.
"The islands are gradually falling back into the sea," Richard Wilmot-Smith QC, for Penguin Marine, said. The evidence showed "erosion and deterioration of The World islands", he added.
With all but one of the islands still uninhabited – Greenland – and that one a showpiece owned by the ruler of Dubai, most of the development plans have been brought to a crashing halt by the financial crisis.
Nakheel, the developer, was part of Dubai World, the state-owned conglomerate that had to be bailed out of debts put at around $25 billion at the end of 2009. The Dubai World Tribunal was set up to hear cases arising out of the restructuring and separation of the companies involved.
The low-lying islands represent a vague shape out to sea when viewed from Dubai's beaches, but are visible by satellite or from the top of the city's Burg Khalifa, the world's tallest building, which opened to the public last year.
According to the company, 70 per cent of the World's 300 islands have been sold. Nakheel is also behind Dubai's famous Palm-shaped offshore developments. Villas in the only one near completion, Palm Jumeirah, were given to or bought by footballers including David Beckham and Michael Owen.
Though few celebrity buyers were found for The World, it was rumoured – or joked – that Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie had considered Ethiopia.
Many investors who did buy the islands proved unwilling or unable to finance further work when Dubai's property prices halved in the space of a year.
Some were hit by troubles elsewhere – the owner of the company which bought Ireland for £24 million, John O'Dolan, committed suicide, while the man who bought Britain for £43 million, Safi Qurashi, is serving seven years in jail in Dubai after being accused of bouncing cheques.
The dispute being heard by the property tribunal involves Penguin Marine, the company which bought the rights to provide boat travel to the islands.
With little business, it is trying to exit the contract, which involves paying an annual fee of just under £1 million to Nakheel.
Nahkeel say they will cash an advanced payment guarantee worth just over £1 million if that happens.
Penguin claim that work on the islands has "effectively stopped". Mr Wilmot-Smith described the project as "dead".
Graham Lovett, for Nakheel, said the project was not dead but admitted it was "in a coma".
"This is a ten-year project which has slowed down," he said. "This is a project which will be completed."
He said Penguin would make money eventually. "That's the price Penguin makes to stay in the game," he said. "They have the potential to earn millions."
The tribunal found for Nakheel on Thursday, saying it would give full reasoning later.
A spokesman for Nakheel insisted the islands were not sinking. "Our periodical monitoring survey over the past three years didn't observe any substantial erosion that requires sand nourishment," a statement said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/8271643/The-World-is-sinking-Dubai-islands-falling-into-the-sea.html
Showing posts with label Enviroment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enviroment. Show all posts
Friday, January 21, 2011
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Federal records show steady stream of oil spills in gulf since 1964
Many policymakers think that the record before the BP oil spill was exemplary. In a House hearing Thursday, Rep. John J. "Jimmy" Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, "It's almost an astonishingly safe, clean history that we have there in the gulf." Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the industry's "history of safety over all of those times" had provided the "empirical foundation" for U.S. policy.
But federal records tell a different story. They show a steady stream of oil spills dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum -- which would fill an equivalent number of standard American bathtubs -- into the Gulf of Mexico between 1964 and 2009. The spills killed thousands of birds and soiled beaches as far away as Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Altogether, they poured twice as much as oil into U.S. waters as the Exxon Valdez tanker did when it ran aground in 1989.
The industry's record had been improving before the BP spill. In 2009, the largest one was about 1,500 barrels, about what BP's damaged well was leaking every hour before it was capped last week. But at least a handful of spills take place annually as a result of blowouts, hurricanes, lax pipeline maintenance, tanker leaks and human error, according to figures kept by the Minerals Management Service, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
Moreover, in at least one key instance, the official statistics understate the actual quantities of oil that have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. MMS statistics say that a 1970 blowout on a Shell Oil well that killed four people triggered a spill of 53,000 barrels. But Robert Bea, a University of California, Berkeley professor who at that time worked for Shell tracking the oil spill, says that the spill was 10 times that size and contaminated shorelines on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the U.S. Gulf Coast.
"I see the numbers, and I shrug my shoulders," said Bea, who contributed to a report issued last week on the April 20 Deepwater Horizon accident. The 1970 Shell blowout happened on a production platform, he notes. "We knew what the production rates were," he said.
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Today regulators rely heavily on company estimates, although some environmentalists fear that the spill size might be underestimated.
Full Story - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072305603.html?hpid%3Dtopnews
But federal records tell a different story. They show a steady stream of oil spills dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum -- which would fill an equivalent number of standard American bathtubs -- into the Gulf of Mexico between 1964 and 2009. The spills killed thousands of birds and soiled beaches as far away as Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Altogether, they poured twice as much as oil into U.S. waters as the Exxon Valdez tanker did when it ran aground in 1989.
The industry's record had been improving before the BP spill. In 2009, the largest one was about 1,500 barrels, about what BP's damaged well was leaking every hour before it was capped last week. But at least a handful of spills take place annually as a result of blowouts, hurricanes, lax pipeline maintenance, tanker leaks and human error, according to figures kept by the Minerals Management Service, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
Moreover, in at least one key instance, the official statistics understate the actual quantities of oil that have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. MMS statistics say that a 1970 blowout on a Shell Oil well that killed four people triggered a spill of 53,000 barrels. But Robert Bea, a University of California, Berkeley professor who at that time worked for Shell tracking the oil spill, says that the spill was 10 times that size and contaminated shorelines on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the U.S. Gulf Coast.
"I see the numbers, and I shrug my shoulders," said Bea, who contributed to a report issued last week on the April 20 Deepwater Horizon accident. The 1970 Shell blowout happened on a production platform, he notes. "We knew what the production rates were," he said.
ad_icon
Today regulators rely heavily on company estimates, although some environmentalists fear that the spill size might be underestimated.
Full Story - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072305603.html?hpid%3Dtopnews
Friday, July 16, 2010
Study: Global Warming to Bring Increased Heat Waves to US
Following last week’s record-breaking East Coast heat wave, a new study by Stanford University climate scientists says as global warming continues, such heat waves will be increasingly common in the future. The study found exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next thirty years, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health.
Source - http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/15/study_global_warming_to_bring_increased
Friday, March 19, 2010
The 445 Million Year Old Crab
As you can see, the horseshoe crab isn’t the most captivating wildlife star in terms of looks. But then I guess a lot of creatures that pre-dated the dinosaurs weren’t going for looks. The angular part of their shell above their eyes makes it seem like they have a permanent scowl. Horseshoe crabs actually belong to an animal group called chelicerates, which are closer to spiders than crabs.
Horseshoe crabs have more amazing features than just their looks. Their blood has hemocyanin in it instead of the common hemoglobin. This means that their blood really is blue unlike ours, which only looks blue until it touches air. The females provide the energy source that fuels America’s greatest wildlife spectacle: eggs (60,000-120,000 apiece to be specific).
Eggs are super-nutritious and humans aren’t the only species that know this. Birds know it too. They also know that horseshoe crab spawning climaxes during the last new or full moon of May. This is when the tides are the strongest and crabs can get the farthest onshore. Almost one million birds converge on the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States.
Red knots, the star migratory bird species, travel the farthest. Coming all the way from Chile, with no breaks since Brazil, the birds arrive at the point of starvation. They spend a few weeks fattening up and then fly on to their breeding ground in Canada. All told, they’ll cover over 10,000 miles.
Unfortunately, the migration has lost some of its intensity in the past two decades. Horseshoe crabs have been overharvested for use as bait, fertilizer, and blood for drugs. Fewer horseshoe crabs meant fewer eggs, and thus more hungry birds, which either didn’t reproduce or died. Red knot population numbers have plummeted from over 100,000 to 25,000. With new protections for horseshoe crabs, hopefully these numbers will rebound, but because horseshoe crab females take 10 years to reach a reproductive age, we’ll have to be patient like the birds and wait for the right time to see results.
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/ecology/millions-year-old-crab/20893
Horseshoe crabs have more amazing features than just their looks. Their blood has hemocyanin in it instead of the common hemoglobin. This means that their blood really is blue unlike ours, which only looks blue until it touches air. The females provide the energy source that fuels America’s greatest wildlife spectacle: eggs (60,000-120,000 apiece to be specific).
Eggs are super-nutritious and humans aren’t the only species that know this. Birds know it too. They also know that horseshoe crab spawning climaxes during the last new or full moon of May. This is when the tides are the strongest and crabs can get the farthest onshore. Almost one million birds converge on the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States.
Red knots, the star migratory bird species, travel the farthest. Coming all the way from Chile, with no breaks since Brazil, the birds arrive at the point of starvation. They spend a few weeks fattening up and then fly on to their breeding ground in Canada. All told, they’ll cover over 10,000 miles.
Unfortunately, the migration has lost some of its intensity in the past two decades. Horseshoe crabs have been overharvested for use as bait, fertilizer, and blood for drugs. Fewer horseshoe crabs meant fewer eggs, and thus more hungry birds, which either didn’t reproduce or died. Red knot population numbers have plummeted from over 100,000 to 25,000. With new protections for horseshoe crabs, hopefully these numbers will rebound, but because horseshoe crab females take 10 years to reach a reproductive age, we’ll have to be patient like the birds and wait for the right time to see results.
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/ecology/millions-year-old-crab/20893
Bluefin tuna loses out simply because scarce fish make a profit
Idiots. Morons. Blockheads. Numbskulls. Nothing quite captures the mind-withering stupidity of what has just happened in Doha. Swayed by Japan and a number of other countries, some of them doubtless bought off in traditional fashion, the members of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) have decided not to protect the Atlantic bluefin tuna.
Those who opposed suspending trade in the species argued that the temporary ban proposed by Monaco would devastate their fishing industries. There is some truth in this: for the years in which bluefin stocks would have been allowed to recover, the export ban would have put people out of work and reduced the output of their industry. But the absence of a ban ensures that, after one or two more seasons of fishing at current levels, all the jobs and the entire industry are finished forever, along with the magnificent species that supported them. The insistence that the fishing can continue without consequences betrays Olympic-class denial, a flat refusal to look reality in the face.
One of the commenters on a Guardian thread this week, who lives in Japan and uses the tag Kimpatsu, related his experiences of trying to discuss these issues.
"the Japanese policy towards both Bluefin tuna and whales has two engines of motivation. The first is the fact that the average Japanese is in denial about the imminent extinction of these creatures; the thought runs that as they have always eaten these animals (and many Japanese mistakenly think that the whale is a fish) since time immemorial, they will be able to continue doing so indefinitely into the future. When pressed on the subject of hunting to extinction, they grow aggressive. (I know from personal experience.) The second reason is the low-grade paranoia that informs all Japanese interaction with the outside world; the notion of Nihon tataki (Japan-bashing) is omnipresent. If you protest against whaling or tuna fishing, you're a cultural imperialist. If you point out that some Japanese are members of Greenpeace or oppose whaling (my GP is one), then "you don't understand Japanese mind so much". Remember: all your actions against whaling and overfishing are driven by a deep-seated, irrational hatred of Japan. Consequently, when you push, they push back."
I have no idea how representative this is, but the attitudes Kimpatsu describes were powerfully represented in The Cove, the film about the secret dolphin slaughter in Japan which won the 2010 Oscar for best documentary. The massacre it exposed is pointless, counter-productive and profoundly damaging to Japan's international image, but it was fiercely defended by what seemed to be the entire political establishment. Denial is evident everywhere on earth, but in the Japanese fishing and whaling industries it seems to have been raised to an art-form.
Source 1
Those who opposed suspending trade in the species argued that the temporary ban proposed by Monaco would devastate their fishing industries. There is some truth in this: for the years in which bluefin stocks would have been allowed to recover, the export ban would have put people out of work and reduced the output of their industry. But the absence of a ban ensures that, after one or two more seasons of fishing at current levels, all the jobs and the entire industry are finished forever, along with the magnificent species that supported them. The insistence that the fishing can continue without consequences betrays Olympic-class denial, a flat refusal to look reality in the face.
One of the commenters on a Guardian thread this week, who lives in Japan and uses the tag Kimpatsu, related his experiences of trying to discuss these issues.
"the Japanese policy towards both Bluefin tuna and whales has two engines of motivation. The first is the fact that the average Japanese is in denial about the imminent extinction of these creatures; the thought runs that as they have always eaten these animals (and many Japanese mistakenly think that the whale is a fish) since time immemorial, they will be able to continue doing so indefinitely into the future. When pressed on the subject of hunting to extinction, they grow aggressive. (I know from personal experience.) The second reason is the low-grade paranoia that informs all Japanese interaction with the outside world; the notion of Nihon tataki (Japan-bashing) is omnipresent. If you protest against whaling or tuna fishing, you're a cultural imperialist. If you point out that some Japanese are members of Greenpeace or oppose whaling (my GP is one), then "you don't understand Japanese mind so much". Remember: all your actions against whaling and overfishing are driven by a deep-seated, irrational hatred of Japan. Consequently, when you push, they push back."
I have no idea how representative this is, but the attitudes Kimpatsu describes were powerfully represented in The Cove, the film about the secret dolphin slaughter in Japan which won the 2010 Oscar for best documentary. The massacre it exposed is pointless, counter-productive and profoundly damaging to Japan's international image, but it was fiercely defended by what seemed to be the entire political establishment. Denial is evident everywhere on earth, but in the Japanese fishing and whaling industries it seems to have been raised to an art-form.
Source 1
Tories criticise UK for failing to support 20-year ban on African ivory sales
The Conservatives today criticised the government for failing to support proposals from a number of African countries to impose a 20-year ban on any legal sales of ivory.
The plan, led by Kenya, is being discussed at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in a bid to tackle the poaching of elephants and rhino.
It counters a bid by Tanzania and Zambia to hold one-off sales of their legally held ivory and "downlist" their elephants from the highest level of protection.
The UK government said it was initially "sympathetic" to the Kenyan proposals, subject to a review after 10 years of the scheme, but the EU, which votes as a bloc at Cites, decided not to back it. But on a Cites vote this week on whether to ban the international trade in bluefin tuna, the UK acted alone rather than as a bloc with Europe and chose to support the Monaco proposal of opposing the ban.
There are concerns that, if the one-off sales of ivory from four African countries in 2008 results in a lower demand for illegal ivory, a 20-year moratorium would not be a positive step.
But conservationists have raised fears over a rise in illegal trade and poaching following the sales, which they believe stimulate the market and provide a cover for traders to offload illegal stocks.
Shadow environment secretary Nick Herbert said the government had "shamefully" refused to support the Kenyan proposal for a ban on sales and continued to back stockpiling of legal ivory - for example from animals which had died naturally.
"Instead of flooding the market with more ivory and legitimising the trade, these stockpiles should be destroyed. We should be choking demand for ivory, not stoking it," he said.
The plan, led by Kenya, is being discussed at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in a bid to tackle the poaching of elephants and rhino.
It counters a bid by Tanzania and Zambia to hold one-off sales of their legally held ivory and "downlist" their elephants from the highest level of protection.
The UK government said it was initially "sympathetic" to the Kenyan proposals, subject to a review after 10 years of the scheme, but the EU, which votes as a bloc at Cites, decided not to back it. But on a Cites vote this week on whether to ban the international trade in bluefin tuna, the UK acted alone rather than as a bloc with Europe and chose to support the Monaco proposal of opposing the ban.
There are concerns that, if the one-off sales of ivory from four African countries in 2008 results in a lower demand for illegal ivory, a 20-year moratorium would not be a positive step.
But conservationists have raised fears over a rise in illegal trade and poaching following the sales, which they believe stimulate the market and provide a cover for traders to offload illegal stocks.
Shadow environment secretary Nick Herbert said the government had "shamefully" refused to support the Kenyan proposal for a ban on sales and continued to back stockpiling of legal ivory - for example from animals which had died naturally.
"Instead of flooding the market with more ivory and legitimising the trade, these stockpiles should be destroyed. We should be choking demand for ivory, not stoking it," he said.
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