What’s wrong with generating 250 million litres of toxic waste daily?
Politicians like to hide behind the jobs argument, but we all know that they need funding from oil companies to get elected.
Industrial pollution is killing our water supply. In Alberta (Canada) alone, there have been about 2 crude oil spills per day. In the US, they simply store 30 trillion litres of toxic liquid thousands of feet below the surface of the earth. At least, it’s not urine.
Remember acid rain?
When I was a kid in the 1980s, the environmental problem of the time was acid rain. Looking back, this was probably my initial exposure to the toxic nature of industrial production. But school doesn't teach you to think deeply about things. No activists or movements in the affluent part of Toronto where I grew up to highlight the issues either. Our big problem was trying to convince our parents to get Nike Air shoes, the latest fashion trend at the time. Too bad society focused our gaze on the empty pursuit of material things as we should have been taught to care about drinking water instead. It turns out to be a massive problem.
How bad is water pollution?
It’s bad. Can you imagine that the Canadian tar sands generate about 2 billion litres of toxic waste every week? In the US, those 30 trillion litres of toxicity that I mentioned earlier are stored in 680,000 sites that could be leaking into the water you drink. Shouldn't this be something that the media should be whipped into a frenzy over?
Oil production and industrial dumping as well as mining, fracking and industrialized agriculture, are all big contributors to the water pollution problem.
Tar sands & Oil: The tar sands create 250 million litres of toxic waste daily and contain “chemicals like arsenic, lead and mercury." These end up in the disaster-waiting-to-happen tailing ponds, which we will discuss in our next installment. But I wanted to focus on just the problem of oil spills for this post: “Alberta’s had an average of two crude oil spills a day, every day for the past 37 years…That makes 28,666 crude oil spills in total, plus another 31,453 spills of just about any other substance you can think of putting in a pipeline – from salt water to liquid petroleum” the article goes on to say:
“But maybe more telling is what it doesn’t include: The regulatory body’s database is messy and missing data in many places; it doesn’t include any spills from some of the biggest pipelines – those crossing provincial or national borders. These fall under National Energy Board jurisdiction. For the 53 per cent of spills from somewhere other than a pipeline, such as oil wells and pumping stations, anything under 2 cubic metres (2,000 litres, or about twelve and a half barrels) doesn’t get counted.” [Emphasis added]
Industrial waste: In the US, ProPublica found that American companies have “injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth”. They also found that “[t]here are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.” Why does this matter? Recall that “over a third of humans drink groundwater every day," and so when these sites leak, they will kill/maim/harm those people.
Mining and Fracking: Mining companies annually dump 396 billion pounds (180 million tonnes) of “each year into rivers, lakes, and oceans worldwide, threatening vital bodies of water." While fracking wells produced over 1 trillion litres (280 billion gallons of toxic wastewater that “often contains cancer-causing and even radioactive materials, and has contaminated drinking water sources from Pennsylvania to New Mexico.” The tragic reality of fracking was made famous by Josh Fox in his documentary Gasland. Here is the infamous scene where a man lights his water on fire:
A similar situation is occurring in Canada. Jessica Ernst was involved in a “lawsuit claims fracking contaminated the water supply at her homestead near Rosebud, about 110 kilometres east of Calgary”.
https://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/alberta-oil-gas-collateral-damage-she-can-light-her-water-on-fire.htm
Dams: One thing I learned during this research was how dams cause mercury poisoning. Mercury is naturally occurring in the soil. As long it's exposed to air, it's not a problem. But when you submerge that soil under water, bacteria convert this hidden mercury into methyl-mercury. This is consumed by the fish who, in turn, poison people who eat. In Canada, the Cree people in Quebec had to abandon eating fish, forcing them on to the mainstream diet of unhealthiness. The result? Increased rates of diabetes and other problems.
Agriculture
The pollution from the factory farm is an excellent illustration of how vast sums of capital invade an industry, overwhelm it and cause problems that didn’t exist before.
Animal waste: Sustainable, organic farms can use animal manure to fertilize their crops and lands. American factory farms, in contrast, generate 1,000,000 tons of manure per day. That “three times the amount generated by the country’s human population.” As a result, the land can't absorb the manure. Instead, they are stored in lagoons, and when they "reach capacity, farmers will often opt to apply manure to surrounding areas rather than pay to have the waste transported off-site." Canada has a similar problem with this approach to farming. Around Lake Winnipeg, the amount of manure produced is equal to 50 million people.
Why does this matter? The manure is toxic. For example, hog manure may contain anything from metals (e.g. lead, cadmium, etc.) to viruses (e.g. Salmonella, E. coli, etc.). Can these ponds breach? Yes, they can! In July 2012, one of the lagoons of hog manure spilled into Beaver Creek “pollut[ing] more than 20 miles …wiping out 148,283 fish and 17,563 freshwater mussels". The 2016 article goes on to explain that 9 species are extinct, and 18 others have not returned to their previous levels.
Herbicides and Pesticide: When vast tracts of factory farmland are sprayed with these toxic chemicals, they inevitably end up in the water. Here are some examples:
In Canada, 35 million kilograms of herbicides and pesticides are applied annually on agricultural land. One example of a water-bound pollutant is glyphosate, which is a key ingredient in Monsanto’s infamous weed-killer Roundup. According to the World Health Organization, glyphosate is a "probable carcinogen."
In Prince Edward Island, Canada, virtually all of its groundwater (which they depend on for drinking water) is contaminated with nitrates.
In California’s Central Valley, one out of ten people are at risk of drinking groundwater that is unsafe due to nitrate contamination.
Eutrophication: What is eutrophication? When the fertilizer from the factory farms overwhelms a river, it causes a blue-green algae, known as cyanobacteria, to take over the river. It's safe in small doses, but in large quantities, it’s a disaster. In 2014, the “city of Toledo, Ohio, shut down the city’s public drinking water system for three days due to the concentration of blue-green algae in Lake Erie." But this is only the beginning. When these bacteria die-off in the millions, they do 2 things: (1) suck the oxygen out of the river and (2) block out the sunlight killing plants and microorganisms that live deep in the water. What's the worst-case scenario? Dead zones with "massive fish die-offs (known as 'fish kills')."
Does science only matter when trying to make Muslims apostatize?
Members of the so-called New Atheist movement have often heralded the importance of science when it comes to debating with Muslims and broadly attacking Islam. We see this especially with people like the now-dead Christopher Hitchens who went from being a communist to supporting the Iraq War and wrote a book attacking the Islamic belief.
If he had been a "data-driven decision" maker, he would look at the statistics and realized that cancer, which killed him, is one of the top killers in the US. So why focus on Islam as an existential threat when the real issue lies with the current system? Because science doesn’t matter. Why? Because when science interferes with profits, then science is simply ignored. Secularism has banished the “Christian” priests to the margins of society. But these were simply replaced with a new secular-priesthood. Don’t both sets of priests justify military campaigns in the Muslim world despite centuries separating them?
Indisputably, science and technology have resulted in the Capitalist-West catapulting ahead of the Ottoman Caliphate, which lagged behind Europe because it had a weak understanding of Islam. But that doesn’t mean anything for us here in Canada when it comes to water-safety: the dollar rules the day when it comes to that. Look at how the Canadian courts gave Jessica Ernst – an environmental scientist – the runaround. She launched a lawsuit back in 2007, “alleging negligence in regards to the controversial hydraulic fracturing of shallow gas formations in central…Her lawsuit contends that Encana unlawfully fracked into aquifers near her homestead in Rosebud, about 110 kilometres east of Calgary, contaminating them with methane and other hydrocarbons, and that the energy regulator and Alberta Environment failed to conduct a proper investigation”.
One would assume, based on the propaganda generated by the Capitalist West, that somehow science would have a right to intervene in this case and ensure that water safety was maintained. But that's not reality. The supremacy of science is merely parroted by the propagandists say to get Muslims to abandon Islam. The real crime is if we believe in their empty rhetoric.
Her lawyer quit on her, and now she is out $400,000. She says: “What I have learned is that Canada’s legal system is a farce…The legal system doesn’t want ordinary people in it. They don’t want citizens who will not gag and settle out of court for money so corporations and government can continue their abuse.”
There you have it. No magic science button to sort it out. The rationality that the enlightenment thinkers hoped to get from a secular system does not exist. The irrational desire to be wealthy at all costs overrules the basic science that requires us to have access to clean water.
How will the Caliphate handle matters of science?
In the Caliphate, the scientists will need to be consulted on opinions when it comes to technical matters involving the environment, such as how to get natural gas out of the ground without harming people. However, what prevents the Caliph from ignoring the scientists the way the Capitalist elite do in this system? The case will be taken to a special court, the Mahkamat ul Madhalim (Court of Unjust Acts), whose sole purpose is to holds the Caliph accountable. It is only this system that can hold the rich accountable and ensure that the rights (e.g. to water, food, clothing, etc.) of the society are attended to.
In sha Allah, in the next installment, we will look at the disaster-waiting-to-happen tailing ponds.