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This remains a five-alarm fire. We have just days left in our Fall Campaign and the numbers we’re seeing are not good. This is terrifying for us, especially when everything we cherish is on the ballot just one week from now.
The historic Permanent Peoples' Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change began on Monday, May 14 and runs through Friday, May 18, live-streaming and archived online.
For the first time in its nearly 40-year history, this session of the PPT has an international focus and includes arguments about the rights of Nature in addition to the rights of people. Among those participating from our region are Cornell University fracking engineer and professor emeritus Anthony Ingraffea, Ithaca College scholar in residence, ecologist, and author Sandra Steingraber, and the grassroots Coalition to Protect New York (CPNY), represented by independent journalist and activist Maura Stephens.
The PPT is a highly respected international forum that grew from the Russell-Sartre Tribunal to investigate whether breaches of human rights norms occurred during the Vietnam War. It subsequently conducted hearings to determine whether human rights standards were abridged in Bhopal, Chernobyl, and other sites. Its most recent session was on Myanmar's (Burma's) crimes against Rohingya and Kachin peoples.
The current session focuses on the potential human rights violations of fracking and climate change. The judges will also be asked to consider the rights of Nature -- because the protection of a healthy environment may be a fundamental prerequisite for the protection of human rights.
Amicus briefs were submitted by attorneys and others representing nongovernmental organizations, including CPNY, on whose behalf cofounder Stephens will present evidence and arguments orally on Friday, May 18 at noon EDT.
Cornell's Anthony Ingraffea gave one of the critical Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and Climate Change leading up to the weeklong tribunal, and Steingraber gave the keynote speech on Monday evening.
Earth jurisprudence attorneys from Scotland and Australia presented witness testimony and oral and written arguments addressing the session's central questions from a Nature-rights perspective, and a team of human rights attorneys offered witness testimony and reports from preliminary tribunals held in areas where fracking is used in oil and gas extraction.
Judges will likely spend several months reviewing the evidence and deliberating before issuing their opinion.
Attorneys, witnesses and judges convene via Zoom web conferencing software daily. The proceedings are being streamed on the Spring Creek Project Facebook page and archived within 30 minutes for viewing. A full schedule of daily Tribunal proceedings is posted on the Spring Creek Project website and on tribunalonfracking.org.
Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes, and super storms, chemical accidents and explosions in refineries, storage facilities, fertilizer and chemical plants are not natural disasters. They are also not rare events. We have seen their deadly and costly consequences far too often. Advances in meteorology have greatly enhanced opportunities for natural disaster preparedness. Sandy and Katrina have clearly demonstrated the power and impact of such storms on our lives, homes, and infrastructure. And the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was surely a wakeup call on the potential of hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis to compromise electrical power and greatly compound an impending disaster.
Natural events may not be preventable, but many of the consequences are. Housing can be constructed so that there is no structural collapse in the event of an earthquake. Vulnerable facilities can be hardened, located, or re-located away from populated areas, and away from fault lines, flood plains, and water ways that further heighten the risks of chemical accidents. But more fundamentally, inherently unsafe facilities and operations can be redesigned, retrofitted, and ultimately replaced by manufacturing and storage facility changes in inputs, final products, and processes that are inherently safer.
Inherent safety approaches differ from what is called secondary prevention which involves the strengthening of reaction vessels and pipes, the use of neutralizing baths, and the venting of toxic or explosive chemicals. Inherent safety approaches result in creating production and storage facilities with significantly smaller probabilities of having untoward human and commercial disasters. The European Union, but not the United States, in three successively more-demanding versions of its Seveso Directive (1982, 1996, 2012), adopted a hierarchy of prevention approaches favoring inherent safety approaches over secondary prevention for chemical accident prevention.
The Union Carbide Bhopal pesticide plant explosion in 1984 could have been wholly avoided by the construction of an inherently safer plant, which was then already used by DuPont to make the same pesticide at other locations. That notorious explosion hastened the 1990 passage of Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act. In 1996, twelve years after the Bhopal explosion, EPA promulgated its first requirement that certain high-hazard industries issue a risk management plan (RMP) to prevent chemical accidents. This was one of two chemical safety interventions contemplated by the Clean Air Act. Although professional, environmental, community, and some industry advocates urged EPA to prioritize inherent safety approaches over secondary prevention -- as had the European Union four years earlier. EPA caved in to massive industry pressure and announced it had "decided not to mandate inherently safer technology analysis" (61 Fed. Reg. 31, 69). This analysis, which would have required the identification of alternative inherently safer inputs, final products, and processes would have established the basis for the ultimate adoption of inherently safer technology.
The second intervention created in the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act to encourage the reduction of chemical accidents was the creation of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (otherwise known as the Chemical Safety Board or CSB). Despite CSB's checkered history of industry opposition and interference, funding and staffing problems, and leadership failures, many of its investigations and recommendations systematically improved chemical safety.
Prompted by the fertilizer explosion that consumed West, TX, on January 13, 2017, EPA published the Chemical Disaster Rule, a revised set of more stringent requirements than the 1996 RMP. This was the result of an agency analysis of 2,200 chemical accidents that occurred in the period 2004 to 2013, over 1500 of which caused harm. This included 58 deaths, more than 17,000 people injured, hospitalized, or forced to seek remedial care, as well as $2 billion in property damage. Once again, however, the EPA did not adopt inherent safety approaches as a preferred required practice, although the U.S. history of recent disasters should have mandated it in the interest of public and worker safety.
The revised rule would have enhanced protection for local first responders, community members, and employees from death or injury due to chemical facility accidents. It was due to have come into force, requiring covered facilities to comply at various future times. In June, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt ordered a 20-month year delay in implementation of the rule. The rule's more stringent provisions did not require inherent safety approaches, but did require designated operations to assess whether safety improvements were practicable. These improvements included storing fewer chemicals, using better tanks, improving backup power systems, i.e., feasible, effective, and immediately-needed improvements, even if they did not include inherently safer alternatives. The rule also had more stringent requirements for data accessibility and emergency planning.
We all know that changes in chemical production, manufacturing and storage cannot be done overnight, but one would think the government would want to hasten their adoption.
In remembrance of the Bhopal gas genocide, Navdanya along with other civil society organisations is organising a People's Assembly against Dow/DuPont, on November 29th 2016. This will be an assessment of Dow/DuPont's crimes in terms of having committed genocide and ecocide against the people of Bhopal.
This is the 32nd anniversary of the struggle for Bhopal, and together we are calling for " No More Bhopal" by presenting an alternative: a poison-free organic India.
The Bhopal gas genocide of December 3, 1984, in which at least 2,300 to 10,000 people died overnight and between 200,000 to 500,000 were injured, is the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world. Even today, tens of thousands are dying a slow death due to exposure to the toxic Methly isocyanate (MIC). MIC was used to create a highly noxious pesticide, called 'Sevin', which was manufactured by a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company, Union Carbide Company(UCC).
But the poisoning of the Bhopal did not end on 3rd December 1984, toxic chemicals continued to leak from the solar evaporation ponds. They contaminated the water bodies and surrounding areas near the UCC factory. People living in those areas are still exposed to heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, cadmium, etc. In fact a recent survey found out that 19 out of 20 women living in affected areas still have mercury in their breastmilk. Even after 32 years, people have little access to poison-free, clean water. Children continue to be born deformed and with teratogenic effects.
The Chingari Trust, which has been working closely with the disabled children, has about 800 children with disabilities enrolled, yet thousands more are left out as there are no rehabilitatation facilties for them.
The current situation is grim for survivors as the government hospitals that were set up to treat the victims are now defunct. Due to lack of resources and doctors, the victims and their families have to go to private clinics and hospitals.
Furthermore, the government of India still has not managed to get just compensation for survivors. There are many cases being fought against Dow by the people of Bhopal, demanding justice for their losses and demanding to make the company liable for crimes against the people of Bhopal and to make sure no corporation in the world can get away with such heinous crimes.
Faced with such corrupt systems and corporations, the people of Bhopal along with Navdanya will be organising a People's Assembly to give out our judgement against Dow-DuPont for their crimes. Through this assembly we will analyse each aspect of the genocide and pass the verdict. We have experts from all fields that have worked closely with Bhopal survivors and continue to fight to achieve justice for Bhopal.
Today, Bhopal is not just a city: it represents the crisis that is still affecting its people even after three decades. At worst today the posions of Bhopal have seeped into every home with the spread of industrial agricutlure. There are cancer trains going from Punjab to Rajasthan, and all across the fertile farming lands of India - especially in the rural areas there is a growing cancer epidemic. The same poisons that caused genocide in Bhopal are now killing millions across the whole country. There is a food style disease epidemic, that is caused by toxin-laden, pesticide-sprayed foods.
From our venue of Gandhi Bhavan, Bhopal, we shall pledge to create an alternative to the poisons in our food systems and an alternative to the toxic cartel of war (chemical) -producing companies that are destroying our food and our health. We shall give a call for Organic India, and make sure that all of our fields and farms are free of the chemical poisons of the Green Revolution. There will be no place for toxics in our farms or on our plates. We had work to create a poison-free and organic India by 2020 and send out a message to all people of the world, NO MORE BHOPAL, not in our fields and not in our foods.