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SpaceX Explosion Sparks Environmental Concerns After Coating Texas Community in Ash
"What kind of danger did Cameron County bring to our community when SpaceX was welcomed here?" Elma Arredondo, a retired school teacher who used to work at Port Isabel's Garriga Elementary, asked in an interview with Texas Public Radio.
"What kind of danger did Cameron County bring to our community when SpaceX was welcomed here?"
Thursday's launch was the first test for Starship, the largest rocket ever built. The rocket lifted off successfully at 8:33 am CT and shot about 39 kilometers into the air before multiple engines failed and the rocket lost altitude as it started to wobble, SpaceX explained. This triggered the decision to explode both the ship and its booster.
"With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship," SpaceX wrote on its website.
Starship Flight TestStarship gave us quite a show during today's first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in ...
Interesting Engineeringsaid SpaceX's attitude was in keeping with its "fail fast, learn fast" approach, but the company's leadership, including CEO Elon Musk, aren't the ones who have to live with the consequences of those failures. That would be the residents of Port Isabel, who have to deal with the potential health impacts of Thursday's ash rain, or the endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtles currently nesting on Boca Chica's beaches.
"We are not against space exploration or this company," Center for Biological Diversity senior attorney Jared Margolis toldCNBC Monday. "But while we are looking to the stars, we should not readily sacrifice communities, habitat, and species."
Before the launch, SpaceX predicted that the debris field would extend about one square mile around the site, with debris falling only three-quarters of a mile away. Port Isabel, therefore, should have been spared, as should have South Padre Island, which is a few miles away.
Instead, Port Isabel spokeperson Valerie Bates toldThe New York Times that almost the entire town "ended up with a covering of a rather thick, granular, sand grain that just landed on everything."
Particulates from the Starship explosion coat a car in Port Isabel.(Photo: Yvette Espinoza Pennington/SpaceX Boca Chica Group/Facebook)
Bates said that the debris posed no "immediate concern for people's health," and environmental compliance and risk expert Eric Roesch, who warned on his blog ESG Hound that the launch was likely to have a bigger impact than SpaceX attested, said it was impossible to say without a chemical analysis. However, Roesch also told CNBC that particulate matter in general can cause lung and breathing problems.
There was physical damage as well. Vibrations broke a window at a Port Isabel gym and, closer to the site, larger pieces of debris hit a car.
"Concrete shot out into the ocean, and risked hitting the fuel storage tanks which are these silos adjacent to the launch pad," Sierra Club Lone Star chapter director Dave Cortez told CNBC.
Roesch said all the flying particulates and concrete came from a large crater that formed at the launch site because SpaceX didn't install a trench or water system to redirect and quench fire.
"He just wanted to get this thing up in the air," Port Isabel resident Sharon Almaguer told theTimes of Musk. "Everybody else sort of be damned."
That everybody else may include the turtles and other animals that live near Boca Chica.
"SpaceX's Boca Chica facility sits amid one of the most unique natural habitats in the northern hemisphere," Roesch noted in an April 16 blog post. "The area is home to countless endangered species and provides a wintering home to the piping plover and red knot."
Roesch said that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the launch permission based on noise, heat plume and, other calculations from 2019, when Starship was 20% smaller.
"The resulting damage to the community and the environment predicted are certainly understated, inadequate, and inaccurate," he said days before the launch.
"[Musk] just wanted to get this thing up in the air ... Everybody else sort of be damned."
In the face of the explosion, the FAA told CNBC that it had grounded further launches for a "mishap investigation," which is standard operating procedure. Future Starships can launch again once SpaceX has undertaken additional "environmental mitigations," FAA said. However, Margolis thought the hurdle would be too easily cleared to protect human and animal well-being.
This isn't the first time a Musk company has clashed with Texas communities over environmental impacts. At a public hearing in March, community members of Bastrop, Texas, protested his Boring Company's plans to dump self-treated wastewater into the nearby Colorado River instead of using the city system. The company is seeking a permit to do this, but it has previously come under fire for moving forward without construction and air quality permits, and residents are frustrated with how the billionaire can use money to have his way in their city.
"The owner of these companies spent $44 billion on Twitter, and it had no impact on his ability to continue to build these businesses," Bastrop property owner Amy Weir said at the meeting, as Gizmodoreported. "There is no way for the state to enforce its laws or protect the people and businesses downstream, should there be an issue with discharge from this facility."
Oxfam: World's Largest Food Companies Creating Legacy of Destruction
According to Oxfam, these "Big 10"--that together generate $1 billion-a-day in profit--are failing millions of people in developing countries who supply land, labor, water and commodities needed to make their products.
"It's time these companies take more responsibility for their immense influence on poor people's lives," said Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director for Oxfam International. "Eighty percent of the world's hungry people work in food production and these companies employ millions of people in developing countries to grow their ingredients. They control hundreds of the world's most popular brands and have the economic, social and political clout to make a real and lasting difference to the world's poor and hungry."
As The Guardianreports:
The charity's Behind the Brands report compiled a scorecard, rating the "big 10" food companies in seven categories: the transparency of their supply chains and operations, how they ensure the rights of workers, how they protect women's rights, the management of water and land use, their policies to reduce the impacts of climate change and how they ensure the rights of the farmers who grow their ingredients.
The company with the lowest score - just 13 out of 70 - was ABF. It scored just one mark out of 10 in its treatment of land, women and climate change, while the highest scores it managed to achieve was three out of 10, in relation to workers and transparency.
In joint second-lowest place were Kellogg's and General Mills, which owns Old El Paso, Haagen-Dazs and Nature Valley, with both scoring 16 out of 70.
In the campaign's first targeted action, Oxfam will target Nestle, Mondelez and Mars for their failure to address inequality faced by women who grow cocoa for their chocolate products. As part of that effort, the group released a series with first-hand accounts which explore the inequality that women cocoa growers face. And the campaign is urging people to use their own voices and social networks to speak out against the food giants.
"No brand is too big to listen to its customers," said Hobbs. "If enough people urge the big food companies to do what is right, they have no choice but to listen. By contacting companies on Twitter and Facebook, or signing a petition to their CEO, consumers can do their part to help bring lasting change in our broken food system by showing companies their customers expect them to operate responsibly."
The 'Behind the Brands' campaign also released this list of ways that the "Big 10" fail to meet their commitments:
- While some of the "Big 10" have publicly committed to women's rights, none have committed to eliminating discrimination against women throughout their supply chains.
- None of the companies have adequate policies to protect local communities from land and water grabs, despite all of them sourcing commodities plagued by land rights violations, such as palm oil, soy and sugar. Not one company has declared 'zero tolerance' against land grabs in their supply chains.
- All ten companies are overly secretive about their agricultural supply chains, making their claims of 'sustainability' and 'social responsibility' difficult to verify. Nestle and Unilever are most open about the countries they source from, but no company is providing enough information about their suppliers.
- Companies are generally increasing their overall water efficiency but most have failed to put policies in place to limit their impact on local water sources. Only Pepsi has publicly recognized water as a human right and committed to consult local communities. Nestle has developed guidelines for its suppliers to manage water and was ranked top for policies on water.
- All of the companies have taken steps to reduce direct emissions, but only five - Mondelez, Danone, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Mars - publicly report on agricultural emissions associated with their products. Unilever alone has committed to halve its greenhouse gas footprint by 2020. None have yet developed policies to help farmers in their supply chains to build resilience to climate change.
- None have publicly committed to pay a fair price to farmers or fair business arrangements with them across all agricultural operations. Only Unilever - which is top-ranked for its dealings with small-scale farmers - has specific supplier guidelines to address some key issues faced by farmers.
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