engineeringdaze	Wednesday - You Might Be an Engineer If...	engineer, New Year's resolution, wife	Leave a comment	
– you have kept your New Year’s resolution by proving that you have made your relationship with your wife more efficient.
Kolkata: After Joing Safforn Brigade Mukul Roy started game plan to break the house of rulling party but a new twist turned the table of ongoing West Bengal politics. In a jolt to West Bengal Safforn brigade, convenor of the BJP party’s state intellectual cell Diptangshu Chowdhury joined the Trinamool Congress on Saturday.
In present scenerio, BJP started their tricks but TMC hits the six on last ball. Diptangshu Chowdhury, a former army officer and also a close aide of Mukul Roy, had joined the BJP ahead of the assembly elections last year and had unsuccessfully contested the polls.
Chowdhury, who was later appointed as convenor of the state unit’s intellectual cell, joined the ruling TMC in presence of TMC secretary general Partha Chatterjee. He said he wants to be part of the developmental process started by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
State BJP president Dilip Ghosh said Chowdhury’s leaving the party would not have any impact in the state as he didn’t have organisational skill.
Posted by News Editor in At Risk, Energy, Latest News, RSS on January 24, 2013 11:50 pm / no comments
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada, January 24, 2013 (ENS) – Canadian environmental groups today warned that a new proposal by Kinder Morgan pipeline company would “exponentially” raise the risk of a major oil spill in the Salish Sea’s most populous region, including the cities of Vancouver and Victoria.
The insurance available to cover response costs and damages of such a spill would fall short, leaving Canadian taxpayers to pay up to 90 percent of these costs, finds a report by the Georgia Strait Alliance, Living Oceans Society, West Coast Environmental Law and the Wilderness Committee.
The Salish Sea is the network of coastal waterways between the southwestern tip of the Canadian province of British Columbia, and the northwestern tip of the U.S. state of Washington, including the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound.
The groups’ report follows a January 10 announcement by Kinder Morgan Canada that the company now proposes to enlarge capacity of the Trans Mountain pipeline to 890,000 barrels per day from a previously planned 750,000 bpd.
The current Trans Mountain Pipeline runs from Edmonton, Alberta to Burnaby, British Columbia. The company has announced plans to build a C$5.4 billion new pipeline in parallel to it. The new pipeline would bring total capacity to 890,000 barrels per day, mostly crude oil to be shipped to Asia via oil tankers from Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver located on Burrard Inlet.
“Thirteen customers in the Canadian producing and oil marketing business have now signed binding, long-term contracts, which demonstrates the need for this proposed expansion that will serve both existing and new markets,” said Ian Anderson, president of Kinder Morgan Canada.
“Ever since they took control of the Transmountain Pipeline and Westridge Terminal in 2005 Kinder Morgan has worked to quietly increase tar sands oil exports through their pipeline and onto to tankers in Vancouver Harbour,” said Wilderness Committee campaigner Ben West last March.
Now, between 70-90 Aframax oil tankers a year travel through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, across the Strait of Georgia, into Vancouver harbor and up Burrard Inlet. Each oil tanker can carry up to 750,000 barrels of oil.
If Kinder Morgan’s plan to build a new pipeline were to be approved, at least 300 oil tankers a year would be plying these waters. Larger Suezmax tankers are planned, which would require the dredging of Burrard Inlet.
“The proposed escalation from 80 tankers per year to 400 or more into Kinder Morgan’s Westridge Terminal in Burnaby, combined with other plans to expand shipping on the south coast, equals a phenomenal increase in the risk of a serious oil spill,” said Brenda Belak, of West Coast Environmental Law.
“The risk of oil spills is one of the main reasons that the majority of British Columbians on the Kinder Morgan tanker and pipeline route oppose the project,” said Belak.
The groups’ report reviews the insurance structure set up by the International Maritime Organization after the Exxon Valdez disaster, which limits the liability of oil shippers and sets up funds that can be drawn on in the event of a major oil spill. Canada is signatory to all of these agreements.
“Taken together, all four of the funds that respond to major oil spills would provide only $1.34 billion, or about one-tenth of the estimated cost of a major spill,” explained Karen Wristen of Living Oceans Society.
A study by the Washington State Department of Ecology, conducted in 2004, concluded that a major spill would cost 165,000 jobs and US$10.8 billion in economic impacts in Washington State alone. This does not include individual claims or environmental impacts.
A study released last month by the University of British Columbia looked at spills on the Enbridge Northern Gateway tanker route and estimated a major spill would cause C$9 billion in damage to the North Coast economy.
“The Salish Sea is already recognized as one of Canada’s most at-risk bodies of water,” said Christianne Wilhelmson, with Georgia Strait Alliance. “When we consider how many aspects of our local economy are driven by a clean, productive and aesthetically attractive ocean, a major oil spill represents the potential for widespread and long-term damages.”
The Salish Sea is inhabited by killer whales, at least 200 species of fish, over 1,500 species of invertebrates, 100 species of marine birds, and about 500 species of marine plants.
British Columbia’s Fraser River is the largest producer of salmon on the Pacific coast of North America.
The region is home to over seven million people who live around the shores of Puget Sound, Georgia Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The memory of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 informs the groups’ report.
“That accident, and an estimated 80 percent of all shipping accidents, occurred as a result of human error,” said Gwen Barlee of the Wilderness Committee, based in Vancouver. “You can’t design that factor out of the system, and not acknowledging that in risks assessments is foolhardy.”
The U.S. Coast Guard has estimated that even if the Exxon Valdez been a double-hulled tanker such as the ones that are proposed to serve the Kinder Morgan terminal, it would still have ruptured. The spill might have been reduced by 25 to 40 percent, but it would still have wiped out the herring fishery and devastated the economy of Alaska’s Cordova Bay, the groups point out.
Presently, Kinder Morgan is conducting outreach and consultation with land owners, First Nations, businesses, local governments, and other stakeholders. The company hopes to file a formal application to the National Energy Board in late 2013, have construction start in 2016, and be shipping oil by 2017.
NEW YORK, New York, July 30, 2017 (ENS) – The Global Pact for the Environment, a new United Nations treaty to define fundamental environmental rights everywhere in the world, is being drafted and will be presented to the UN General Assembly in September by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Should the UN adopt the treaty, it will be the first time environmental rights will have legal and binding power at national and international levels and can be used in courts.
The Pact gathers fundamental and common principles of environmental law, including the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, the 1982 World Charter for Nature, the 1992 Rio Declaration and the Earth Charter.
It sets out principles that compel national governments and other legal entities to protect the environment, promote sustainable development and intergenerational equity, and ensure the right of access to information and environmental justice.
“There are over 500 international treaties dealing with the environment, with varying degrees of enforcement,” explained Justice Antonio Herman Benjamin, a justice of the National High Court of Brazil and chair of the IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law, who helped draft the Pact.
“This proposal to the UN will bring greater coherence to international environment laws, and set out clear obligations for States and individuals to protect the environment,” Benjamin said.
The initiative to draft the Global Pact for the Environment is chaired by Laurent Fabius, president of the Constitutional Council of the French Republic and former president of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, at which world governments unanimously adopted the first global agreement to limit climate change.
The proposal for the Pact originated in the November 2015 report of the Environmental Commission of Le Club des Juristes, a French think tank. The report, “Increasing the Effectiveness of International Environmental Law,” proposed the adoption of a Global Pact for the Environment to serve as a binding, universal “umbrella text” synthesizing the principles of all instruments shaping environmental governance.
The Drafting Committee at the French Constitutional Court, June 2017 (Photo courtesy IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law)
With operational support from the Club des Juristes, a drafting committee was convened in Paris on June 23. Meeting into the night, the 30-member committee drew conclusions, harmonized the principles from a human rights perspective, and finalized the 26 articles of the draft Pact.
Article 1 states, “Everyone has the right to live in an environment that is ecologically sound and conducive to health, well-being, dignity, culture and development.”
Article 2 states, “Any State or international institution, any natural or legal person, whether public or private, has a duty to take care of the environment.”
Article 3 states, “Parties shall integrate environmental protection requirements into the design and implementation of their policies and national and international organizations, in particular with a view to promoting the fight against climate change, protection of the oceans and maintenance of biodiversity. They undertake to seek sustainable development.”
The concept of “polluter pays” is included in the draft Pact, as is the “right to reparation” and a principle of “non-regression,” which would not allow a State signatory of the pact to reverse a law favorable to the environment.
More than 150 experts from 54 countries across five continents were consulted throughout the process.
On June 24 the Global Pact for the Environment was launched at the Sorbonne in Paris, where it was introduced by President Macron to an audience of advocates of global environmental governance that included former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, IUCN President Zhang Xinsheng, Chair of the R20 – Regions of Climate Action Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Special Envoy on Climate Change.
President Macron pledged to personally act to lay the foundations for Pact’s adoption as a new global covenant by the UN General Assembly.
To fight climate change, said President Macron, “We must reorganize, transform, change behaviors, invest and do it with determination. To do so, we will decarbonize energy production, strengthen the price of carbon, support the development of green finance, provide favorable conditions for researchers and entrepreneurs around the world who provide climate solutions, and mobilize public and private funding. We must integrate climate issues into international trade as well as into our modes of production.”
At the launch of the draft Global Pact for the Environment, from left: Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, French President Emmanuel Macron, President of the Constitutional Council of France Laurent Fabius, IUCN President Zhang Xinsheng, Sorbonne, Paris, France, June 24, 2017 (Photo by Michel Richard courtesy IUCN)
“Now it is a matter of taking this fight even further and of acting decisively on the global scale. The United Nations is the right arena for that,” Macron said.
Everyone involved in the initiative acknowledges that the current text of the Pact will be modified as it moves through the process of becoming a UN treaty that governments can sign and ratify.
The next step is a one-day conference on September 20 at Columbia University in New York hosted by the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
It will be held under the guidance of Fabius and of Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to the UN Secretary-General on the Sustainable Development Goals, and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia’s Earth Institute.
Timed to coincide with the 72nd Session of the UN General Assembly, which opens September 19, the conference will explore the complex legal and political challenges of the Pact in view of the hundreds of existing agreements and soft law principles on the environment, and the current global political scene.
After the conference at Columbia, President Macron will present the draft Global Pact for the Environment to the General Assembly meeting at UN headquarters.
Professor Sachs said in a video statement, that the world will honor the Paris Agreement, but, he said, “…we do see very clearly that the agreement by itself and in conjunction with commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals will not be enough.”
“We need to put the protection of the environment on a rigorous, and sound, clear and universal, legal basis. We need the international law to stand clearly on the rights of people to a safe environment, on the right to climate justice restitution and compensation for wrongs committed by companies that don’t behave or by governments that are rogue and irresponsible regarding the natural environment,” said Sachs.
“This initiative for a Global Pact for the Environment calls on the world’s leading jurists to help craft an agreement that in my view should have two strong bases,” said Sachs. “One is the legal framework rights to environmental safety, climate safety, protection of biodiversity, standards of behavior and clear methods for protecting those rights.”
“The second should be clear global governance based at the United Nations.” Said Sachs, “We have a UN Security Council for War and Peace. We need, in my personal view, a UN Security Council for the Environment.”
“It’s time for us to be bold because we know that we are really at the edge,” Sachs warned. “We’ve really reached the very last limits of safety – we need to act decisively.”
Justice Benjamin expressed the resolute spirit of the legal experts involved, saying, “We will continue to develop the environmental rule of law ensuring that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity are regarded as a human right.”