By David Helvarg / Blue Notes / January 16, 2018
Two new reports in Science magazine confirm what we’ve been seeing for years: climate change and nutrient pollution are contributing to dead zones in the world’s ocean – in part because a warmer, more acidic ocean holds less dissolved oxygen.
Another study of 100 reefs showed coral bleaching is occurring globally at least once every six years. The most recent wave reduced half of the corals in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (watch the Academy-Award nominated film ‘Chasing Coral’).
And of course, climate-induced extreme weather events like hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria contributed to making 2017 the costliest year for natural disasters in U.S. history.
Munich Re, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, estimated it will break an industry record with approximately $135 billion in disaster relief payouts. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the total cumulative damage of last year’s floods, fires, and other weather events was $306.2 billion.
Some scientists and economists are now telling us what’s become obvious to most. We have to get off of fossil fuels ASAP.
Yet on January 4, 2018, Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke released the Trump Administration’s plan to open up almost all of our public seas – expanding access to the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to new oil surveying, drilling, and inevitable spilling. Opening up the East Coast waters from Maine to Florida, new areas of the Gulf of Mexico, waters off California and the entire West Coast and the Arctic Ocean off Alaska is ridiculously irresponsible.
The gauntlet is down. If this Administration wants to transform our public seas into an oil-stained garbage dump, then we’ll meet them in the streets and beaches to defend our environment and blue economy. Like Churchill speaking of one of the last existential threats to our planet, we will never surrender.
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