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Thousands Evacuated After Chemical Leak and Massive Fire at 'Cancer Alley' Oil Refinery
"Such events are an all-too-common and exceptionally dangerous reality for those living within fossil fuel and petrochemical 'sacrifice zones,'" observed one researcher.
Aug 25, 2023
A mandatory evacuation was ordered for thousands of people living within a two-mile radius of a Marathon Petroleum refinery in Louisiana's so-called "Cancer Alley" after a chemical leak and massive fire broke out at a storage tank there on Friday.
The temporary evacuation order, which Marathon Petroleum called "precautionary," followed a leak of naphtha—a hazardous and highly flammable liquid hydrocarbon mixture—and blaze at the refinery in Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish, located about 45 miles upriver from New Orleans.
About 8,660 people live within two miles of the refinery, according to Nola.com. One of them, 42-year-old Lashonda Melancon, said she was trying to figure out where to go with her 14-year-old daughter.
"I've got asthma bad and this is not good for me," she said.
People living near the refinery said flames could be seen dozens of feet in the air. The smoke plume from the disaster was visible from outer space.
Marathon Petroleum said in a statement: "The release and fire are contained within the refinery's property and there have been no injuries. As a precaution, air monitoring has been deployed in the community. No off-site impacts have been detected. All regulatory notifications have been made."
However, contained does not mean controlled—the latter means extinguished—and Marathon Petroleum spokesperson Justin Lawrence said the company did not know when the blaze would be put out.
Operational since 1977, the 200,000-barrel-per-day facility is the newest oil refinery in the United States. Marathon Petroleum's three biggest shareholders are the Vanguard Group, SSgA Funds Management, and Blackrock, private equity firms that have come under fire for financing fossil fuel expansion during a worsening climate emergency.
In May, Reuters reported there had been 13 U.S. refinery fires in 2023, the majority of them along the Gulf Coast.
St. John the Baptist Parish is located in what's known as Cancer Alley or Death Alley, a swath of predominantly Black parishes—the Louisiana equivalent of counties—between New Orleans and Baton Rouge containing nearly 150 oil refineries and plastics and chemical plants, many of them located along or near the Mississippi River.
In neighboring St. James Parish, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reported an 800% cancer hazard increase due to petrochemical facilities in the parish between 2007 and 2018.
The area is also known as a "sacrifice zone," or place where polluting industrial facilities are built in close proximity to residents—usually people of color or those with low income.
Responding to the disaster, Antonia Juhasz, senior fossil fuel researcher at Human Rights Watch, wrote on the social platform formerly known as Twitter that "such events are an all-too-common and exceptionally dangerous reality for those living within fossil fuel and petrochemical 'sacrifice zones.'"
Anne Rolfes, executive director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a frontline community advocacy group, said in a statement that "the petrochemical industry is here in Louisiana for one reason only: To make as much money as possible."
"As long as the state of Louisiana continues to look away from fires and mushroom clouds, these accidents will continue," she continued. "I have been dealing with this for nearly a quarter of a century. There are terrible accidents, workers are burned alive, and the state of Louisiana does nothing."
"Workers and residents are left to bear the brunt of the industry's negligence and predatory expansion that continue to jeopardize our health and safety," Rolfes added.
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'Investing in Climate Chaos': Vanguard Is Now World's Largest Funder of Fossil Fuels
"If it is bad for the environment, it is bad for retirement," said one environmental campaigner. "Vanguard's retirement schemes are built on investments that jeopardize our future."
Apr 20, 2023
The Vanguard Group, one of the world's largest asset management firms, has surpassed its competitor BlackRock as the planet's leading investor in fossil fuels, according to a report released Thursday.
The report—published by the German environmental and human rights group Urgewald—shines a spotlight on the 6,500 finance firms whose combined holdings of bonds and shares in oil, gas, and coal companies are valued at $3.07 trillion. That's more than the gross domestic product of any nation on Earth save the U.S., China, Japan, or Germany.
Vanguard and BlackRock—the "Terrible Two" of finance—together account for 17% of all institutional investment in fossil fuels, with the former holding $269 billion in coal, oil, and gas investments and the latter $263 billion.
\u201cNew @urgewald report identifies the top global institutional investors holding bonds & shares in coal, oil & gas companies worth a total of US$ 3.07 trillion. The top 10 are led by Vanguard, Blackrock, StateStreet, Capitol Group, & Saudi Arabia. https://t.co/dwNYal0oJy\u201d— Antonia Juhasz (@Antonia Juhasz) 1681997979
According to the report, Vanguard holds bonds and shares in 200 fossil fuel companies, with its largest single investment—$34 billion—in ExxonMobil.
"If it is bad for the environment, it is bad for retirement," Doug Norlen of the green group Friends of the Earth said in a statement. "Vanguard's retirement schemes are built on investments that jeopardize our future."
\u201c\ud83d\udea8 New research released by @urgewald found @Vanguard_Group & @BlackRock to be the two biggest fossil fuel investors. \n\nThe two US-based asset managers account for 17% of all investments in fossil fuel companies. \n\nhttps://t.co/oWvNXfe5pQ \n\n#IICC #InvestingInClimateChaos\u201d— Climate Votes (@Climate Votes) 1681985944
As the report states:
Vanguard's CEO, Tim Buckley, has made abundantly clear that he has no intention of putting restrictions on investments in climate-destructive business models. Consequently, Vanguard dropped out of the Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative in December 2022.
BlackRock is a member of the Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative and claims to be a sustainability leader, but its fossil portfolio barely differs from Vanguard's. Despite the fact that BlackRock adopted [its] first coal policy in 2020, it remains the world's largest investor in companies developing new coal plants, mines, or coal infrastructure.
"At a time when the [United Nations] warns that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half by 2030, pension funds, insurers, mutual funds, and asset managers are still gambling away our future by sinking money into the world's worst climate offenders," Urgewald energy and finance director Katrin Ganswindt said in a statement. "By publishing our research online, we want to empower clients, regulators, and the public to hold these institutional investors accountable."
Earlier this month, a sister report—Banking on Climate Chaos—was published by a coalition of groups including Urgewald and showed that the world's 60 largest private banks have provided $5.5 trillion in financing to the fossil fuel industry, belying their net-zero and other pledges that activists have called "greenwashing."
The report was published the same day as 16 Quakers and other climate activists ranging in age from 22 to 84 were arrested during a protest organized by Vanguard SOS—an international campaign launched by civil society groups, grassroots activists, and financial experts—at Vanguard's headquarters west of Philadelphia in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
\u201cActivists are currently blocking all entrances at @Vanguard_Group headquarters. Vanguard would rather shut down their campus than commit to reasonable action on climate.\n@xrphilly @AM_WakeUpCall @fixmyfunds @StopMoneyPipe\u201d— EarthQuakerActionTeam (@EarthQuakerActionTeam) 1681914114
"This is an 'all hands on deck' moment for addressing the ecological crisis," explained Frank Fortino, a member of the climate action group Extinction Rebellion Philadelphia who was arrested at the demonstration. "I'm here today because I feel that urgency and because we need Vanguard leadership to also feel that urgency."
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'Free Basics' Will Take Away More Than Our Right to the Internet
Dec 29, 2015
As the TRAI decides the fate of Free Basics, Mark Zuckerberg is in India with Rs100 crore in pocket change for advertising. Facebook's Free Basics is a repackaged internet.org, or in other words, a system where Facebook decides what parts of the internet are important to users.
Reliance, Facebook's Indian partner in the Free Basics venture, is an Indian mega-corporation interested in telecom, energy, food, retail, infrastructure, and land. Reliance obtained land for its rural cell phone towers from the government of India and grabbed land from farmers for SEZs through violence and deceit. As a result and at no cost, Reliance has a huge rural, semi-urban and suburban user base -- especially farmers. Although Free Basics has been banned (for the time being), Reliance continues to offer the service across its networks.
A collective corporate assault is underway globally. Having lined up all their ducks, veterans of corporate America, such as Bill Gates, are being joined by the next wave of philanthropy-corporate Imperialists, including Mark Zuckerberg. The similarities in Gates and Zuckerberg's perfectly rehearsed, PR firm-managed announcements of giving away their fortunes are uncanny. Whatever entity the Zuckerbergs form to handle the US$45 billion they will be investing will most likely look like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ie: powerful enough to influence the climate negotiations, responsible for nothing.
What could Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have to gain from dictating terms to governments during the climate summit? "The Breakthrough Energy Coalition will invest in ideas that have the potential to transform the way we all produce and consume energy," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page. It was an announcement of Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Coalition, the combined wealth of hundreds of billions of dollars of 28 private investors who will influence how the world produces and consumes energy.
At the same time, Gates is currently behind a push to force chemical, fossil fuel-dependent agriculture and patented GMOs (#FossilAg) through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). It is an attempt to lock African farmers into a dependence on fossil fuels that should be left underground, as well as creating a dependence on Monsanto for seeds and petrochemicals.
95% of the cotton in India is Monsanto's proprietary Bt Cotton. This year, in regions from Punjab to Karnataka, 80% of this Bt crop failed -- that's 76% of Bt Cotton farmers with no crop left at harvest time. If they had a choice, they would switch. But what resembles a choice between cotton seeds is the same BT cotton seed, marketed by different companies under different names, purchased in desperation as farmers try combination after combination of seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides -- all of which have chemical names designed to make you feel inadequate -- until you have no 'choices' left but to take your own life.
What Monsanto has done by pushing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) laws and patents on seeds, Zuckerberg is attempting to do to internet freedom in India. And like Monsanto, he is targeting the most marginalized Indians.
Free Basics will limit the internet to the vast majority of India. From the outset, Free Basics has said it won't allow video content because it would interfere with the telecom companies' services (read: profits)—despite the TRAI's own recommendation that video content is more accessible to different parts of the population.
Once allowed as a free service, what will stop telecom companies from redefining the internet to suit their own interests and those of their corporate partners? After all, the ban on Free Basics has not stopped Reliance from continuing to offer the service to its huge user base, many of whom are farmers.
Why should Mark Zuckerberg decide what the internet is to a farmer in Punjab, who has just lost 80% of his cotton harvest because Monsanto's Bt Cotton and the chemicals he was told to spray completely failed? Should the internet allow him to see how GMO technology has failed everywhere in the world and is only kept afloat through unfair market and trade policies, or should the internet suggest the next patented molecule he should spray on his crop?
The Monsanto-Facebook connection is deep. The top 12 investors in Monsanto are the same as the top 12 investors in Facebook, including the Vanguard Group. The Vanguard Group is also a top investor in John Deere, Monsanto's new partner for 'smart tractors.' This partnership will bring all food production and consumption, from seed to data, under the control of a handful of investors.
It's no surprise that the Facebook page March Against Monsanto, a major American movement in support of labeling and regulating GMOs, was deleted.
Recently India has seen an explosion in e-retailing. From large corporations to entrepreneurs, people all over the country are able to sell what they make to a market that was earlier unreachable to them. Craftsman have been able to grow their businesses, farms have found consumers nearby.
Just like Monsanto with patented seeds, Zuckerberg wants not just a slice, but the whole pie of the basic economy of the Indian people, especially its farmers and peasants. What would Monsanto's monopoly over climate data mean for farmers enslaved through a Facebook gateway to Monsanto data delivered through an internet that is controlled by Facebook? What would this mean for internet and food democracy?
The right to food is the right to choose what we want to eat; to know what is in our food (#LabelGMOsNow) and to choose nourishing, tasty food -- not the few packaged goods that corporations want us to consume.
The right to the internet is the right to choose what spaces and media we access; to choose spaces that enrich us -- not what companies think should be our 'basics'.
Our right to know what we are eating is as essential our right to information, all information. Our right to an open internet is as essential to our democracy as our right to save, exchange, and sell open-pollinated farmers' seeds.
In the ultimate Orwellian doublespeak, "free" for Zuckerberg means "privatised", a far cry from privacy -- a word Zuckerberg does not believe in. And like corporate-written "free" trade agreements, Free Basics is anything but free for citizens. It is an enclosure of the commons, which are 'commons' because they guarantee access to the commoner, whether it be seed, water, information or internet. What Monsanto's IPRs are to seed, Free Basics is to information.
Smart Tractors from John Deere, used on farms growing patented Monsanto seed, sprayed and damaged using Bayer chemicals, with soil and climate data owned and sold by Monsanto, beamed to the farmer's cellphone from Reliance, logged in as your Facebook profile, on land owned by The Vanguard Group.
Every step of every process right up until the point you pick something up off a supermarket shelf will be determined by the interests of the same shareholders.
Talk about choice.
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