Last year, Russian authorities gave Exxon the green light to build a pipeline across a lagoon on Sakhalin Island that is a crucial feeding ground for the world’s last surviving colony of Western Gray Whales.

Read more of this story »

Sarah Palin’s record is not very favorable for wildlife. She’s put efforts into undoing federal wildlife protections for polar bears and beluga whales in order to protect oil and gas drilling operations, for example. But her position on wolf hunting is perhaps the most controversial.

One of Palin’s first acts in office was to put a $150 bounty on the heads of her state’s wolves, allegedly with the goal of increasing the moose and caribou population. But this was no ordinary hunt - it was meant to incentivize the aerial killing of wolves, in which private hunters take a small plane and chase down wolf packs until they’re exhausted and can’t move any more, when they either shoot them from the air or land and execute them at point blank range. A Defenders of Wildlife ad illustrating this process is available at ClimateProgress.

Read more of this story »

Mark Twain once said, “Whiskey is for drinkin’, water is for fightin’ over.” In Irena Salina’s award-winning documentary, FLOW, which opens this Friday, the global battles to own, protect, and understand water are virtuously examined. Experts have labeled the world water crisis the most important political, social and environmental issue of the 21st Century, and with 3,900 children dying every day from water borne diseases caused by the lack of access to clean water, one can see why this is a critical issue.

In our conversation, Irena Salina shared her thoughts about the spiritual nature of water, the Earth’s fever, and what needs to be done to alleviate the crisis:

You spent five years making this film. Why do you think it’s so important for people to care about water?

The earth is made of almost 70 percent water, and we are made of almost 70 percent of it. Without it, we won’t exist. From the moment we are born, to when we are adults we are surrounded by water and it is one of the main things we need to live. And we need clean water because ever 8 seconds a child dies from diseases from unsanitary water. There is so much to water and most people don’t know about it.

Read more of this story »

Read more of this story »

In an effort to build consensus, the chair person of the conference urged for there to be little debate and no voting at the meeting this year. The goal is to “pay it forward,” and use any additional good will that is created this year at next year’s meeting with the hope that more can be accomplished. Many environmentalists find the chairman’s plan to be intolerable, as they claim that Japan is using “scientific research” as an excuse to hunt approximately 1,000 whales each year. But Japan isn’t the only country ignoring a 1986 ban on commercial whaling that was agreed upon by the commission.

Read more of this story »

Read more of this story »

Usually.

Read more of this story »

Whale Music (also available at iTunes or ThousandMileSong) features the sounds of beluga, killer and humpback whales, as well as a newly recorded Pete Seeger song, “The World’s Last Whale.”

Read more of this story »

Source:  LA Times

Image courtesy of  Environmental News Service

Greenpeace, rightfully so, disagreed hotly with this theory, and went about setting twenty satellite tags on humpbacks migrating out of New Caledonia and the Cook Islands. They worked in conjunction with scientists in the area, from the Cook Islands Whale Research and Opération Cétacés (New Caledonia).

The plan was to prove to the world that just as much research, if not more, can be gathered through non-lethal means.

Japan naively contradicted this theory, by saying that simply tracking a whale could not tell you whether it was male or female, pregnant, or various other factors. The simple and obvious explanation, is that no, of course you don’t need tracking to determine those factors. All you need to do is look at the whale!

Several months on, and the Great Whale Trail has been a great success.

Currently, all tags are currently offline, long before they reached the Antarctic feeding grounds. But before they went offline, the sheer amount of data collected was spectacular.

Whales headed off in different directions, in packs and alone, and the information received filled in migratory patterns that until now, had been a complete mystery to scientists. For example, though whales had been photographed in New Caledonia and in New Zealand, no one knew where they went in between.

One whale, named Saravah, made her way to the top of New Zealand’s east coast, before her tag went offline. Mikaela on the other hand, who departed from New Caledonia with Saravah, headed north along the western coast of New Caledonia, before heading west in to the area known as the Chesterfields.

The whales from the Cook Islands provided scientists with their greatest surprise. Instead of heading off individually like the New Caledonian whales, all eight whales started heading west. And though not travelling together, their group movement has posed more questions than it’s answered.

What surprised them further was that none of the whales, all the way in to October before their tags went offline ever showed any signs of turning towards Antarctica (October is late in the season). This differed from the Caledonian whales, who all but Mikaela headed south.

Greenpeace has made their point, and amazingly so. They have collected data that the Japanese could only hope for, and on their first attempt. In fact, the Japanese lethal studies program will yield almost no information on the research recommendations provided by the International Whaling Commission.

All of this adds up to one simple and irrefutable fact: you do not need to kill whales for research!

Greenpeace - Whale migration - the first scientific results are in

The Great Whale Trail

More from GO

Greenpeace versus Japan: Killing Not Necessary for Whale Research

Greenpeace hopes to make a mockery of Japan’s method of whale research – killing whales in their hundreds – with their Great Whale Trail initiative. They currently have 19 whales tagged, moving from their breeding grounds in New Caledonia and the Cook Islands to their normal feeding grounds in the south; already they are discovering new behaviors.

For a long time, the journey between breeding grounds and feeding grounds has been a mystery (to us humans at least – the whales seemed to be in on it). The long journey has grown more dangerous as well over the last decades, with changing weather patterns and sea temperatures, not to mention the pollution and garbage littering the seas.

Collaborating with scientists from Opération Cétacés in New Caledonia and the Center for Cetacean Research and Conservation (CCRC) in the Cook Islands, Greenpeace has placed tracking tags on to the dorsal fins of 19 humpback whales. These tags are regularly relaying back data and providing real-time locations and tracking of the whales.

This is a truly fascinating experiment, and one that flies in the face of Japanese whale research. For many years, Japan has held to the belief that many hundreds of whales must die to provide answers for their scientific queries.

"They’ve been doing it for 20 years," said Mike Hagler, an Oceans Campaigner for Greenpeace in New Zealand, "and in that time there’ve been thousands of whales that have been killed."

"This year for example," he continued, “[Japan is] going to be targeting over a thousand whales; something like 935 minky whales and an additional 50 humpback whales and 50 fin whales."

I spoke to Mike on the phone, and he told me that Japan’s targets have changed over the past 2 or 3 years, from just hunting the minky whales to "targeting the humpback whales and the now endangered fin whales."

Japan’s methods of research are already proving brutal when compared to what Greenpeace has discovered since this initiative began. By visiting the Greenpeace Great Whale Trail page, a user will find a Google Map of the whales’ progress. Already we can see anomalies in their behavior and travel patterns, and you don’t even need to be a scientist.

So far, there are two groups of whales: seven out of the Cook Islands and the remaining 12 from New Caledonia. The majority of the whales from both locations have spread out, as they’ve begun travelling, but the seven from the Cook Islands haven’t even turned south yet. Whether they are heading for a slipstream that will ease their journey, or another unknown location, no one is sure.

In addition, Mikaela – a pregnant female humpback out of New Caledonia – has begun heading towards the Australian east coast, apparently heading for the sunny beaches of the Gold Coast. Why these odd behaviors? No one is sure, but over the next few months amateur and professional scientists alike have the chance to find out.

Japanese researchers, however, are kicking back. Japan’s Fisheries Agency official Hideki Moronuki responded to Greenpeace by saying that "You can’t tell, with a satellite, if a whale is male or female, how old it is, if it is pregnant, or what it eats. There are too many things you can’t tell."

This attack at Greenpeace seems a little absent minded, considering that not even Greenpeace have said that their research is entirely satellite-based.

In my phone call with Mike Hagler, I was able to ask him about Japan’s retaliation. He explained that the satellite research is taken in context with other non-lethal methods of research.

"The satellite monitoring in combination with other monitoring research can basically tell us everything we need to know about a lot of things, including the whale’s gender."

He added that "killing the whales to find out if they’re pregnant makes absolutely no sense. When they were setting the tags they were able to determine whether or not the whales were pregnant or not" via visual observation.

Moronuki told reporters that Japan uses both lethal and non-lethal methods and that "it is best to do both." Japan has no plans to change their current research methods.

The humpback whales were tagged by Greenpeace during the period of late August through September, and already there is a wealth of information being passed back.

"The actual satellite information will tell us information about the habitats that they prefer," said Mike when I asked him about what information they were getting back. According to Mike, it’s "information that is really vital in the Oceania region because there is very little information about the humpbacks in this particular area of the world."

"They’re beaming useful information all the time, particularly the whales in the Cook Islands area; they really have a dearth of information about that population."

"They seem to be attracted to seamount areas," he added, as we were wrapping up. Seamount areas

…tend to be areas that are highly productive, especially in the open oceans… around seamount chains there is a lot of upwelling and nutrients associated with that and attracting life forms, so they seem to be attracted to those areas.

I would like to thank Mike Haggler, and the New Zealand Greenpeace staff for their cooperation. It was a real benefit to get Mike’s input on this, and I hope that you have got as much out of it as I did.

Great Whale Trail initiative

Greenpeace - Tracking whales from space

MSNBC - Humpback whales monitored via satellite

ENN - Greenpeace tracks whales as Japan prepares to hunt

Google Map

New Zealand Greenpeace

Photo Courtesy of Greenpeace

WASHINGTON - At 08:04 AM this morning, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) announced the end of a 21-year moratorium on commercial whaling:

The IWC has joined forces with the international community to support the development alternative fuel," said spokesman Phillip Alloway. "Due to increasing domestic oil prices and the serious implications of global warming, we understand the necessity of finding viable substitutes for petroleum. Whales represent a vast untapped, convenient, and usable source of oil that can be made into a renewable fuel, namely biodiesel.

Biodiesel, a diesel-like fuel usable in all diesel engines, can be made from any plant or animal oil, including animal fat. The raw oil is combined with methanol and lye to make biodiesel, a 'methylalkyl ester', or in this case, 'whale-oil ethyl ester' (WOME ). A whale's body mass typically contains up to 50% blubber - the portion of the animal processed into whale oil - making it the highest-producing biodiesel feedstock currently available (compared to soybeans at 14% oil, and palm kernels at 36% oil). Although thedevelopment of Whale-Oil Biodiesel (WOBD ) is novel, the use of whale oil as a 'biofuel' is nothing new. In fact, until the discovery of petroleum, whale oil was the predominant lubricant and fuel source,combusting in street lamps worldwide. It's the oil that temporarily made Nantucket the richest city in America.

ExxonMobile (EM), one of the newest leaders in renewable energy, declared plans for extensive whaling operations and a marketing campaign for the WOBD.

"We already have the ships and the infrastructure. All we needed was the go-ahead" said senior VP George Phullmaker.

In anticipation of the announcement, EM said it has reconfigured the Exxon-Bengal (one if it's largest supertankers) to accommodate whaling equipment. The ship now features 3 rocket-propelled harpoons with built-in GPS tracking devices, although one crewmember said the pride and joy is an antique wooden whaling skiff salvaged from the Essex, now mounted on the deck for "aesthetic purposes". The most important feature of the Bengal, however, may be its ability to manufacture biodiesel while at sea:

"In addition to standard boilers for converting blubber to oil, we also have a refinery that can process about 10 million gallons of oil into ASTM quality biodiesel per year. "

Since the average sperm whale weighs 80,000 lbs, that means an average of about 5,228 gallons of oil can be derived from each catch.

"In the old days, ships could only process about one whale every three days. Now we can do about 6 whales a day, which means we can collect about 219,607 gallons of oil each week. The nice thing is, was can process and even blend all this oil without ever landing in port."

From a distribution perspective, it’s a recipe for success. EM can now deliver millions of gallons of biodiesel anywhere in the world, allowing the corporation to seek out ports offering premium prices.

"We are not concerned by international regulations of any kind," the EM spokesman said.

With the price of biodiesel in the U.S. hovering around $3.00/gallon, WOBD could be a financial windfall.

ExxonMobile is very proud of supporting this new renewable fuel. The benefits of biodiesel are clearly established. Furthermore, there is no need to worry about oil spills anymore: whale oil is biodegradable and non-toxic.

But not everyone was happy about the IWC's decision, and international protest commenced immediately. Environmental groups expressed a mixture of shock and horror.

"We are speechless… I can't believe this is happening," was all one advocate could muster.

"It was only a matter of time until this feedstock was considered as viable," Jim Whaler of Whale Rights Watch said. "We thought it would take at least $5.00/gallon gas before it happened, but well, whatever…"

Others were quick to question the logic behind the proposal:

"How many whales can there possibly be? It's ridiculous! Even if they could harvest every last whale in the ocean, it would only meet about 1-2% of theUS's fuel needs."

The IWC and EM were quick to counter these comments:

Despite reports of plummeting populations, there are numerous species that have rebounded in the last 21 years. But take a worst-case scenario like the Humpback whale: most estimates put the number of Humpbacks at about 10,000 whales today. It would take at least 47 years to harvest the whole population, yielding 65,613,756 gallons of usable oil.

Critics maintain that this is only 0.23% of the alternative fuel that will be required by the 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard.

GreenOptions managed to ask EM spokesman Phillip Alloway for direct comment (via personal communication):

Look, whales are doomed anyway. We all know that global warming is raising sea temperatures, right? Well pretty soon it's going to be too hot for all those phytoplankton that the whales eat, and guess what - no more whales. I know, it's a Catch-22. Nobody actually likes whaling, but at least were trying to do something for the environment… Hey, you aren't recording this are you?

David Cornell, a scientist, confirmed Alloway's prediction. "Oceanic warming will eventually inhibit formation of calcium-carbonate skeletons in animals at the bottom of the food chain," he said. "This has grave implications for all sea life, not just whales."

An international whaling frenzy is anticipated as fleets compete to be the 'first in the water'. The announcement has even inspired the decedents of Nantucketwhaleman to resurrect century-old traditions. "There's a sea of oil out there," one enthusiastic fisherman said. "You just have to go out there and get it."

No one is quite sure how the WOBD will compare to biodiesel currently available, although it's expected to be similar to fuel made other types of animal fat. One major concern is how the burning fuel will smell, and some municipalities are already murmuring about banning the fuel: "We don't want downtown to smell like Nantucket harbor in 1835."

But the bottom line is this: increasing fuel demand combined with pressure for alternative fuels could prompt a whaling boom that makes Nantucket whalemen look like a bunch of amateurs.

Quick Facts:
What it is: Whale Oil Biodiesel (or WOBD)
Who can use it: WOBD will burn in any diesel engine without modification
Where you can buy it: Look for WOBD at your local biofuel station by fall of this year
Benefits: Increased lubricity, decreased reliance on foreign oil, creates domestic jobs.

Bumper Sticker

UPDATE: April Fools!