Pollution By Ocean Energy Exploration Companies: Abandoned oil and gas wells leave the ocean floor spewing methane - by Hannah Seo

Out on the deck of a research boat, Tara Yacovitch looked out to the water. In the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, the seascape is peppered with lights. And every light is part of an offshore oil or gas platform.

Offshore platforms can vary greatly in size—some are as big as multi-storied buildings, while others resemble small but very tall rooms. The boat carrying Yacovitch and her team also housed a variety of science equipment: methane isotope readers, spectrometers, and other tools to measure methane levels in the air around these sites.

Yacovitch, an instrument scientist at Aerodyne Research, is trying to understand the scope of what some scientists say is a massive environmental issue lurking below our seas. Wells are routinely drilled into the sea floor for oil and gas production, and abandoned when they stop being economically viable—sometimes this is after years of oil or gas extraction, sometimes it's part way through drilling before the well is even finished. But not all of these wells are plugged and properly maintained before being left behind. The result: methane and other gases leaking in unknown quantities for years on end from tens of thousands of holes in the ocean floor.

The harms for the ocean and its inhabitants, and the atmosphere above, are largely unknown. But we do know that methane is about 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, measured over a 20-year period, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

Read more at: Abandoned oil and gas wells leave the ocean floor spewing methane - The Daily Climate

Pollution - plastic waste: How Big Oil and Big Soda Kept the Plastics Crisis a Secret for Decades - by Tim Dickinson

A disaster created by BIG OIL and BIG SODA killing mankind

Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year,

Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!”

With new legislation, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, Udall is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. Unveiled in February, the bill would ban many single-use plastics and force corporations to finance “end of life” programs to keep plastic out of the environment. “We’re going back to that principle,” the senator tells Rolling Stone. “The polluter pays.”

The battle pits Udall and his allies in Congress against some of the most powerful corporate interests on the planet, including the oil majors and chemical giants that produce the building blocks for our modern plastic world — think Exxon, Dow, and Shell — and consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that package their products in the stuff. Big Plastic isn’t a single entity. It’s more like a corporate supergroup: Big Oil meets Big Soda — with a puff of Big Tobacco, responsible for trillions of plastic cigarette butts in the environment every year. And it combines the lobbying and public-relations might of all three.

Americans have occasionally crusaded against “problem plastics” — scapegoating packing peanuts, grocery bags, or drinking straws for the sins of our unsustainable consumer economy. We’ve been slow to recognize that we’re actually in the midst of a plastic pandemic. Over the past 70 years, we’ve gotten hooked on disposable goods and packaging — as plastics became the lifeblood of an American culture of speed, convenience, and disposability that’s conquered the globe. Plastic contains our hot coffee and frozen dinners. It is the material of childhood, from Pampers to Playmobil to PlayStation 4. It cloaks our e-commerce purchases and is woven into our sneakers, fast fashion, and business fleece. Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute, and 500 billion plastic bags a year — including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash.

But the world’s plastic waste is not so easily contained. Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into the oceans — the equivalent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. John Hocevar is a marine biologist who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace, and spearheaded the group’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

Increasingly, his work has centered on plastics. “This is a much bigger problem than ‘just’ an ocean issue, or even a pollution issue,” he says. “We’ve found plastic everywhere we’ve ever looked. It’s in the Arctic and the Antarctic and in the middle of the Pacific. It’s in the Pyrenees and in the Rockies. It’s settling out of the air. It’s raining down on us.”


Read more at: How Big Oil and Big Soda Kept the Plastics Crisis a Secret for Decades - Rolling Stone

Ocean virusses: oceans have hundreds of thousands of viruses

Hundreds of thousands of viruses in oceans

Read more at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48066332

USA: Global Warming and Lobsters- Losing hope for lobster south of Cape Cod - by David Abe

Tom Tomkiewicz remembers when there were so many lobster traps in Buzzards Bay it looked as if he could walk across the water on their buoys.

Now, the 42-year-old lobsterman and his dwindling number of colleagues have to set their traps far out to sea, well beyond view of the coast, to catch the few lobsters that remain.

In the colder waters off the coast of Maine, lobstermen have been hauling in record catches. But south of Cape Cod, where rising sea temperatures have contributed to the decimation of the lobster population, the industry has collapsed. In some areas, catches have plunged 90 percent below their peak in the late 1990s, leaving scant hope that a once-storied fishery can recover.

“There’s nothing here,” said Tomkiewicz, one of only 35 Massachusetts lobstermen who still have permits to fish in the state and federal waters that stretch from Nantucket Sound to Long Island Sound. “It’s crazy.”

The steep decline has left regulators in a quandary: Should they tighten fishing restrictions in the hope of preserving what’s left of the lobster population? Or accept that conservation efforts may be futile and let lobstermen continue setting thousands of traps?

Even scientists who have sought tighter restrictions in hopes of saving the region’s lobster population acknowledge such efforts may be in vain.

“If temperature is the main driver of what’s happening, I have doubts that much can be done,” said Jim Manning, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Woods Hole who runs a program that monitors lobsters from New York to Nova Scotia.

For an iconic New England industry, the picture is devastating. In New York, lobstermen caught just 218,000 pounds last year, down from more than 9.4 million pounds in 1999. In Connecticut, the lobster catch plummeted from 3.7 million pounds in 1998 to fewer than 259,000 pounds last year, while Rhode Island’s catch fell from 8.2 million pounds in 1998 to 2.3 million pounds last year. In the Massachusetts waters south of Cape Cod, such as Buzzards Bay, last year’s catch had fallen about 60 percent below its 1998 peak.

Despite the precipitous drop, fishing regulators have tabled or rejected a range of proposals aimed at conserving the species. Many of the remaining lobstermen, who have complied with trap reductions in the past, are hoping regulators won’t impose further restrictions and will let them fish what’s left of the population, as rising lobster prices have made the catch increasingly valuable in recent years.

Last year, the lobster landed in Massachusetts was worth $82 million — nearly double the value in 1990, when the catch was roughly the same size.

But scientists worry that without more aggressive action, lobsters in the region could soon become commercially extinct.

“Fishing is exacerbating the problem as the population continues to decline,” said Kathleen Reardon, Maine’s lead lobster biologist and the chairwoman of a technical committee that advises the Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission, which sets lobster regulations along the East Coast. “But we haven’t done anything to change that trajectory.”

At the same time, Reardon acknowledged the possible futility of conservation efforts.

Reads more: Losing hope for lobster south of Cape Cod - The Boston Globe

Europe's seas face 'bleak future'

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature

"Europe's seas face 'bleak future'
Turtle swimming next to a fishing net (Image: TVE)

Europe's seas are in a 'serious state of decline' as a result of coastal development, overfishing and pollution from agriculture, warn scientists.

The continent's regional seas will deteriorate even further unless action is taken to curb the threats, they add."