August, 03 2016, 05:15pm EDT
Lawsuit Challenges Plan to Turn California Aquifer Into Dump for Oil Waste
The Center for Biological Diversity today sued California regulators for supporting a so-called "aquifer exemption" plan to turn underground water in the Price Canyon area of San Luis Obispo County into a permanent disposal site for oil wastewater and other fluids. There are at least 100 water supply wells for drinking water and crop irrigation within a mile of this aquifer.
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif.
The Center for Biological Diversity today sued California regulators for supporting a so-called "aquifer exemption" plan to turn underground water in the Price Canyon area of San Luis Obispo County into a permanent disposal site for oil wastewater and other fluids. There are at least 100 water supply wells for drinking water and crop irrigation within a mile of this aquifer.
Today's lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in San Luis Obispo, faults regulators for not analyzing the aquifer exemption plan's risks as required by the California Environmental Quality Act. The suit asks the court to set aside the state's approval of the aquifer exemption and halt oil company injection into this underground water until regulators have complied with CEQA.
"Oil regulators are disturbingly determined to turn this aquifer into an oil industry waste dump, but they can't just shrug off California's environmental laws," said Maya Golden-Krasner, the Center attorney bringing the lawsuit. "As California sweats out another year of drought, officials must analyze the risks of sacrificing underground water in San Luis Obispo County and across the state to oil companies. If we let oil companies pollute these aquifers, Californians will bitterly regret that decision in the dry decades to come."
The state's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources submitted the aquifer exemption application in February to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. If the EPA approves the plan to exempt the aquifer from protection under the Safe Drinking Water Act, oil giant Freeport-McMoRan could move forward with plans to drill hundreds of new wells in the area.
This is state officials' first attempt to seek an aquifer exemption following revelations last year that oil companies have been allowed to dump toxic waste into scores of protected underground water supplies across California (interactive map), in violation of federal and state water-protection laws.
A Center analysis has identified serious flaws in the aquifer exemption application for Arroyo Grande. The application, for example, fails to mention the company's plans to dramatically expand operations in the Arroyo Grande oil field. Freeport hopes to drill up to 350 new wells (including injection wells) to achieve up to a 10-fold increase in daily oil production.
The application also does not include any analysis of what will happen to the aquifer if that expansion proceeds -- including possible changes in pressures underground and the potential for inducing fractures that could transport pollution to other water sources.
Oil industry wastewater can contain high levels of benzene and other cancer-causing chemicals. State oil officials' own study detected benzene levels in oil wastewater at thousands of times the federal limits for drinking water.
"It's shocking that Gov. Jerry Brown's oil regulators are supporting the oil industry's efforts to get federal permission to dump waste into California's protected aquifers," Golden-Krasner said. "California officials must put our thirsty state's water needs ahead of oil company profits."
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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'Outrageous': US Accepts Israeli Assurances on Legal Use of Weapons in Gaza
Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer called the U.S. assessment "absolutely scandalous."
Mar 25, 2024
The Biden administration on Monday said that Israel's use of U.S.-supplied weapons in a war that's killed and maimed more than 114,000 Palestinians complies with international law, a conclusion that flies in the face of multiple court rulings that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza and the assessments of legal and human rights experts around the world.
Referring to a letter from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said during a Monday press briefing that the Biden administration has "had ongoing assessments of Israel's compliance with international humanitarian law" and "have not found them to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had until Monday to certify to Congress that Israel is adhering to President Joe Biden's February 2023 memo stating that "no arms transfer will be authorized where the United States assesses that it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit... genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949... or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law."
"These assurances are perspective, but of course, our view on them is informed by our ongoing assessments of Israel's conduct in the war in Gaza," said Miller.
Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer called the U.S. assessment "absolutely scandalous."
US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller insisted during a press briefing that Israel has not violated international law in its military operation in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/9OP5xRm0Gx
— The Great Investor (@TheGreatInvest2) March 25, 2024
According to Palestinian and international officials, Israeli bombs and bullets—many of them provided by the United States as part of the $3.8 billion in annual military aid and additional emergency shipments—have killed more than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, the majority of them women and children.
In December, Biden implored Israel to stop its "indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza. Since then, Israeli forces have killed or wounded over 40,000 people.
Experts have pointed to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided "bunker-buster" bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas' underground tunnels.
Aided by artificial intelligence-based target selection systems, Israel Defense Forces commanders are approving bombings they know will cause large numbers of civilian casualties. In a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander, the IDF dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, killing more than 120 civilians.
Even the United States military—which since 2001 has killed hundreds of thousands of people during the open-ended so-called War on Terror—avoids using 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas due to the tremendous damage they cause.
Regarding the Biden administration's assessment that Israel is adhering to international law when it comes to providing humanitarian assistance to besieged and starving Gazans, journalist Krystal Ball noted Monday that Blinken "admits 100% of the population is being starved yet somehow certifies that Israel isn't blocking humanitarian aid."
WATCH: "100% of the population of Gaza is experiencing severe levels of acute food insecurity. We cannot, we must not allow that to continue."
U.S. Sec. of State Antony Blinken pushes for an immediate cease-fire and more humanitarian aid into Gaza. pic.twitter.com/U1Mme7fqiJ
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 21, 2024
"This is fucking outrageous," Ball said on social media as critics pointed out how Gallant publicly declared in October that Israel would commit the war crime of a "complete siege" of Gaza.
The U.S. assessment stands in stark contrast with two major court rulings—one by the International Court of Justice and the other by a federal court in California—that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, as well as with findings by at least hundreds of jurists and other experts around the world, including in Israel, that the assault on Gaza is genocidal. Observers accuse Israel of ignoring an ICJ order for Israel to avoid acts of genocide.
On Monday, the United Nations Human Rights Council published a draft report that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The report recommended suspending military aid to Israel in light of its numerous violations of international law.
A growing number of Democratic U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups have urged the Biden administration to immediately cut off arms transfers to Israel, citing its illegal conduct in Gaza, including mass killing and destruction and the blocking of lifesaving humanitarian aid.
Also on Monday, Palestine defenders rallied in Washington, D.C. to protest a visit to the State Department by Gallant and to demand an end to U.S. aid and weapons to Israel. Another high-level Israeli delegation's visit to Washington was canceled Monday after the U.S. abstained from a U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.
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"This is a huge victory for the protection of our public lands," said Friends of the Earth.
Mar 25, 2024
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management will have to reevaluate the wildlife and public health impacts of a major 2022 oil and gas lease sale in Wyoming after a federal judge ruled Friday that the agency had overlooked "what is widely regarded as the most pressing environmental threat facing the world today" when it moved forward with leasing 120,000 of federal land.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in Washington, D.C. that the BLM did not halt the lease sale even after it acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on the federal lands could result in the same negative environmental and social impacts as the addition of hundreds of thousands of cars to U.S. roads each year.
Moving forward with one of the Biden administration's largest lease sales despite its likely environmental harm, said Cooper, was illegal under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws.
Representing The Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth (FOE), environmental legal group Earthjustice sued BLM over its leasing plans' potential impact on the greater sage grouse, an endangered bird species, and other wildlife, as well as groundwater impacts.
The judge found BLM did not complete a sufficiently detailed review of drilling impacts on the greater sage grouse, and relied too heavily on outdated and overly broad analyses of oil and gas drilling in Wyoming.
While the agency has been attempting to "stop the bleeding" of the greater sage grouse, whose population has declined nearly 40% since 2002, the BLM still refused to postpone leasing in a critical habitat for the bird.
The Biden administration also did not adequately explain its analysis of potential groundwater harms, said the ruling.
Despite some conservation strides by the Biden administration, The Wilderness Society's Ben Tettlebaum said the court's decision "affirms that much work remains" to be done. The BLM, he added, "must fully account for the serious impacts of its oil and gas program on groundwater, wildlife, and the climate."
Tettlebaum said the ruling also proves the agency is required to "factor into its leasing decisions the enormous costs that greenhouse gas emissions stemming from its oil and gas program impose on public land resources and on the communities that depend on them for clean air and water."
Hallie Templeton, legal director for FOE, added that the federal government "simply cannot ignore climate, wildlife, and water impacts when analyzing the myriad risks of oil and gas leasing, whether in Wyoming or across the country," as the ruling makes clear.
"We are beyond pleased with this outcome," said Templeton.
The ruling "should be another wake up call for the Bureau of Land Management to at long last address the damage caused from federal oil and gas development," said Alexandra Schluntz, senior associate attorney for Earthjustice. "It is time to make fossil fuel leasing on our public lands a thing of the past."
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"Israel's genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure."
Mar 25, 2024
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday published a draft report that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.
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Israel
rejected the report as "an obscene inversion of reality."
According to Palestinian and international humanitarian officials, Israel's 171-day Gaza onslaught has killed at least 32,333 Palestinians, most of them women and children, while wounding nearly 75,000 others and displacing around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people. Thousands more Palestinians are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings. Disease and deadly starvation caused and exacerbated by Israel's siege and blockade of Gaza are spreading rapidly.
"Israel's genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure," the draft report asserts. "For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group—demographically, culturally, economically, and politically—seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources."
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"The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all."
The draft report urges U.N. member states to "enforce the prohibition of genocide in accordance with their... obligations" under international law. In January, the U.N.'s International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that Israel was "plausibly" perpetrating genocide in Gaza and ordered the country's government to "take all measures within its power" to prevent genocidal acts. Human rights defenders say Israel has ignored the order.
"Israel and those states that have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide must be held accountable and deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death, and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people," the publication argues.
The draft report recommends measures including:
- Immediate implementation of an arms embargo on Israel, as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ;
- Immediate referral of the situation in Palestine to the International Criminal Court in support of its ongoing investigation;
- Ensuring that Israel, as well as states who have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, acknowledge the colossal harm done, commit to nonrepetition, with measures for prevention and full reparations, including the full cost of the reconstruction of Gaza;
- Deploying an international protective presence to constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied territories; and
- Ensuring that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is properly funded to enable it to meet the increased needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel on Monday informed the U.N. that it will no longer allow UNRWA convoys carrying food aid into northern Gaza, even as the Palestinians are starving to death, a move that one humanitarian campaigner called a "death sentence."
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