Britain to claim more than 1 million sq km of Antarctica

First Japan, then Russia. Now Britain:

The United Kingdom is planning to claim sovereign rights over a vast area of the remote seabed off Antarctica, the Guardian has learned. The submission to the United Nations covers more than 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles) of seabed, and is likely to signal a quickening of the race for territory around the south pole in the world’s least explored continent.

The claim would be in defiance of the spirit of the 1959 Antarctic treaty, to which the UK is a signatory. It specifically states that no new claims shall be asserted on the continent. The treaty was drawn up to prevent territorial disputes.

The Foreign Office, however, has told the Guardian that data is being gathered and processed for a submission to the UN which could extend British oil, gas and mineral exploitation rights up to 350 miles offshore into the Southern Ocean.

As we have seen/discussed more or less on an ongoing basis. For all our big talk about international co-operation, none of us have, truly, accepted that we are all in this together (sorry, John F Kennedy. It just isn’t happening). We are friends of only very fair weather, indeed.

The kick is that, like the Russian plan, reliance is upon the Law of the Sea:

Last month the Guardian revealed the UK is working on three other sub-sea claims in the Atlantic: around South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, surrounding Ascension Island and in the Hatton/Rockall basin, west of Scotland. Britain has already lodged a joint claim at the UN – with France, Ireland and Spain – for a large area of seabed in the Bay of Biscay.

The Foreign Office confirmed yesterday that the UK was working to extend sovereign territory into new areas. “There are five claims in total that the UK is hoping to put forward,” a statement said. “They are in the Bay of Biscay, around Ascension, off the British Antarctic Territory, around the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and in the Hatton/Rockall basin.

“We believe these five meet the geological conditions required. The claims are based on article 76 of the UN convention of the law of the sea.”

…meaning the US can’t, for now, play. For now. The fact that the US is not in the game has never stopped them ruining such games before (International Criminal Court, anyone?), and no country in this game is pretending any of their own niceties will last, either:

The UK claim on Antarctica will be its most controversial because it depends on proximity to the British Antarctic Territory which overlaps rival land claims by Chile and Argentina. The environmental protocol to the Antarctic treaty, agreed in 1991, currently prohibits all mineral related activity, other than for scientific research.

The stakes are perceived, simply put, to be too high. The US has been documented as taking on Iraq (a) for oil, and (b) because they could (as opposed to the far tougher tasks of Iran or North Korea). We are seeing, and will see, most countries doing what they can to get what they can while they can. The basic behaviour is not that different. One wonders whether it’s even changed since the Ardipithecenes (no, no apologies to the creationists).

It shall be interesting, to say the least, to observe just how much lip-service our governments pay to how many international treaties, and how many nasty lawyers are brought to bear to stretch them how far. No?

Cows don’t give milk

This story isn’t related to that fact, per se; I just thought I’d remind people. They don’t. At least we show the appropriate gratitude, though.

Grist magazine is running a series of articles, over their way, about food and farming. Principally, that which we have come to know as Big Ag. The series contains, amongst other things, a very good history (Iowa-based, but transferable without loss of generality) of food production in the US:

In a sense, Iowa can be seen as a vast machine whose inputs are artificial fertilizer, pesticide, hybridized and genetically modified seeds, and one of the world’s richest stores of topsoil, and whose outputs are corn, soy, pork, beef, and ethanol. But those are only the official products, the kind hailed by the likes of the Iowa Farm Bureau. Other outputs include nutrient runoff from fields, manure spills and air pollution from CAFOS, and degradation of topsoil by chemical use.

…

The state has a long history of using its enviable soil to produce a wide variety of delicious food — not just inputs for industry. A striking study [PDF] by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State tracks the number of crops widely planted on Iowa’s farms. As recently as 1920, 34 items made the list, including plenty of fruits and vegetables: apples, potatoes, cherries, plums, grapes, strawberries, pears, peaches, raspberries, watermelons, apricots, and tomatoes.

By 1964, all of those readily edible items had fallen off the list. Today, only corn, soy, hay, and oats — all mainly intended for feed, not food — remain as widely planted field crops.

It also contains a look at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO: think battery hens; then, think battery pigs, cows, etc. Throw up. Rinse, then repeat) specifically, in two counties in Iowa:

Over the past 15 years, hog production has concentrated into fewer and fewer counties in Iowa even as it expanded, putting severe pressure on the people who live in CAFO-dominated areas. “From a high spot on our land, we can see a good 100 hog operations within a four-mile radius,” says Kuper, who along with her husband runs a 250-acre grain farm and raises beef cattle on pasture.

According to Iowa State University research, 337 farms in Hardin County kept hogs in 1992. By 2002, that number had dropped to 137. Essentially, the diversified farms stopped raising hogs over that period.

But while the number of hog operations dropped, the total number of hogs skyrocketed, from around 200,000 to nearly 900,000. Kuper figures that since 2002, the last year for which figures are available, the number of hogs confined in Hardin annually has grown even more, surpassing a million. That means nearly 55 hogs for each one of the county’s 18,000 residents. And it’s a sizeable chunk of the 15.5 million hogs raised each year in the nation’s No. 1 hog-producing state.

Finally (at least of the better articles), the effects of CAFO, or factory farming, comes in, amongst other things, the waste (I mean that literally):

The Mississippi River basin, which includes the Missouri River, drains 1.83 million square miles east of the Rocky Mountains and provides drinking water to more than 18 million people. The river receives not only the effluent of all those humans, but also that of their crops and cows.

Of the many threats to drinking water in this region, which includes 65 percent of America’s cropland, farming is by far the worst.

This is nutrient run-off: a by-product of ever-intensive monocultural agriculture (as opposed to the good old days, when we used the waste from livestock as manure for a varied crop – so that we didn’t over-burden soil, and because we still had the risk of bad crops, so we needed to not go hungry).

When soil runs off the land, it also sends phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizer into ditches and streams; 6 billion pounds end up in the Mississippi and its tributaries each year. In rivers and reservoirs, these nutrients encourage the growth of algae. When algae die, bacteria feast on them, and they also consume oxygen in the water. The biotic riot sluices down to the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created an oxygen-free “dead zone” that supports no marine life. In the summer of 2007, the zone expanded from 6,000 square miles to 7,500, an area nearly the size of New Jersey.

But enough about shrimp: those algae are bad news for drinking water, too. Anaerobic conditions release iron and manganese previously bound to a river or reservoir’s bottom sediments, which causes the water’s taste, odor, and color to quickly go downhill. To deal with skunked water, plant operators dump in chemicals like potassium permanganate or copper sulfate. Dead algae and bacteria can also combine with chlorine — the mainstay of water disinfection since the early 20th century — to form nasty byproducts like trihalomethanes, which have been linked to an increased risk of bladder cancer and miscarriage.

The nitrogen itself, which converts to nitrate, is also a potential health threat to humans. In babies, nitrate binds to hemoglobin in blood and hinders its ability to deliver oxygen to the brain. In adults, high nitrate levels have been linked with increased risk of hyperthyroidism, birth defects, and miscarriage.

This series is not just interesting, it is of immense importance. In a country whose laws, in direct contradiction to those of, say, the EU (.pdf link), actively prevent consumers tracing their beef from the supermarket back to the farm (but there’s no mad cow here, we promise), we still eat from farms. We pay higher prices, agribusinesses and food service/production companies routinely show up in Fortune 500 on the backs of subsidies to the freaking moon, yet ordinary (sensible, sustainable) farmers still exist at the margin of profitability.

It behoves everyone to understand, on at least an above-rudimentary level, their own food-economies.

Uranium sale billions lost as India opts out

From today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Australia’s plans to sell uranium to India appear certain to be scuttled after the Indian Government announced it was unlikely to sign a pact with the US on civil nuclear co-operation.

The US-India deal was a pre-condition to the planned sales of uranium because India is outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and Australia bans sale to non-signatories. The US-India civil nuclear agreement was considered by the Australian and US governments to include sufficient safeguards to allow sales to India to proceed.

The sales were likely to have been worth billions in export dollars because India plans to use nuclear energy to meet its burgeoning power needs.

With 24% or so of the world’s Uranium, currently enjoying an appreciating market, I don’t imagine we’ll have trouble finding buyers.

What was India’s stupid problem, though?

The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, has told the US President, George Bush, that “certain difficulties” would prevent India from moving forward on the pact for the foreseeable future.

The main obstacle is not the agreement itself but rather India’s internal politics, including fears from the communist parties in the ruling coalition that India is moving too close to the US, officials and experts familiar with the deal said.

Besieged for two months by growing opposition to nuclear energy co-operation with the US, Mr Singh indicated over the weekend that he would rather save his government than the pact.

Readers may recall that Singh was not popular when he first went in for this deal with the Americans. Looks like he stayed that way. Ultimately it serves the big baskers like John Howard and Alexander Downer right – don’t go trying to sell things like Uranium to non-treaty countries – especially crazy ones right next to equally crazy ones, when they still go to near-war on a routine basis.

Having called his election, we shall see whether Howard has to wear this egg on his face into it. Probably as early as this evening/tomorrow.

The second-rate Valhalla of mediocrity in quantity

Do you read Cat and Girl? No? Do.