FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
NOAA Climate Study 2014 Reveals Hottest Year on Record
Press Statement
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Washington, DC
January 16, 2015
What’s surprising is that anyone is surprised that 2014 was the hottest year on record. The science has been screaming at us for a long, long time. We’ve seen thirteen of the warmest years on record since 2000. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are at an all-time high, which we know leads to a warming planet. We’re seeing higher than ever occurrences of extreme weather events like catastrophic droughts, storm surges and torrential rain. These events are having devastating economic, security and health impacts across the planet.
This report is just another sound in a steady drumbeat that is growing increasingly more urgent. So the question isn't the science. The question isn't the warning signs. The question is when and how the world will respond. Ambitious, concrete action is the only path forward that leads anywhere worth going.
Showing posts with label ENVIRONMENT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ENVIRONMENT. Show all posts
Friday, January 16, 2015
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
GREENHOUSE GASES AND PREHISTORIC RAINS OVER AFRICA
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Increasing greenhouse gases linked to rains over Africa thousands of years ago
Past may be prologue for climate in Africa
An increase in greenhouse gas concentrations thousands of years ago was a key factor in higher amounts of rainfall in two major regions of Africa, scientists have discovered.
The finding provides new evidence that today's increase in greenhouse gases will have an important effect on Africa's future climate.
Results of the study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., are published today in a paper in the journal Science.
"The future effect of greenhouse gases on rainfall in Africa is a critical socioeconomic issue," said NCAR climate scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner, the paper's lead author. "Africa's climate seems destined to change, with far-reaching implications for water resources and agriculture."
The research drew on advanced computer simulations and analyses of sediments and other records of past climate. It was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
Mysterious period of rain
Otto-Bliesner and colleagues set out to understand the reasons behind the dramatic climate shifts that took place in Africa thousands of years ago.
As ice sheets that had covered large parts of North America and northern Europe retreated from their maximum extent around 21,000 years ago, Africa's climate responded in a way that had puzzled scientists.
Following a long dry spell during the glacial maximum, the amount of rainfall in Africa abruptly increased, starting about 14,700 years ago and continuing until around 5,000 years ago.
So intense was the rainfall--turning desert into grassland and savanna--that scientists named the span the African Humid Period (AHP).
The puzzling part was why the same precipitation phenomenon occurred simultaneously in two well-separated regions, one north of the equator and one to the south.
Previous studies had suggested that, in northern Africa, the AHP was triggered by changes in Earth's orbit that resulted in more summertime heating. (Today the northern hemisphere is closest to the Sun in winter, due to a 20,000-year cycle of wobble in Earth's axis.)
But Otto-Bliesner said the orbital pattern alone would not explain the simultaneous onset of the AHP in southeastern equatorial Africa. Instead, the study revealed the role of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with changes in circulation patterns in the Atlantic Ocean.
As Earth emerged from the last Ice Age, greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, increased significantly--reaching almost pre-industrial levels by 11,000 years ago--for reasons that are not yet fully understood.
Most recent natural global warming and increased greenhouse gases
It was the most recent time during which natural global warming was associated with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.
The influx of fresh water from melting ice sheets in North America and Scandinavia about 17,000 years ago began weakening a critical circulation pattern that transports heat and salinity in the Atlantic Ocean like a conveyer belt.
The weakened circulation had the effect of moving precipitation to southernmost Africa, suppressing rainfall in northern, equatorial and East Africa.
When the ice sheets stopped melting, the circulation became stronger again, bringing precipitation back north of the equator and to Southeast equatorial Africa.
That change, coupled with the orbital shift and the warming of the atmosphere and oceans by the increasing greenhouse gases, is what triggered the AHP, the scientists believe.
"This study is a step toward solving the puzzle of what triggered abrupt changes in rainfall over southeastern equatorial and northern Africa during early deglaciation," said Anjuli Bamzai, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.
"Through an analysis of proxy records and climate model simulations, the team demonstrated that the recovery of what's calledthe Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, played a role as an initial trigger to wetter conditions."
Putting together a puzzle
To piece together the puzzle, the researchers drew on fossil pollen, evidence of former lake levels and other proxy records indicating past moisture conditions.
They focused their work on northern Africa, which includes the present-day Sahel region encompassing Niger, Chad and northern Nigeria. They also focused on the largely forested area of today's eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and much of Tanzania and Kenya in southeastern equatorial Africa.
In addition to the proxy records, they simulated past climate with the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model, a powerful global climate model funded by NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy that uses supercomputers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
By comparing the proxy records with the computer simulations, the scientists demonstrated that the climate model had the AHP right.
This helps validate its role in predicting how rising greenhouse gas concentrations might change rainfall patterns in a highly populated and vulnerable part of the world.
"Normally climate simulations cover perhaps a century, or take a snapshot of past conditions," Otto-Bliesner said. "A study like this, dissecting why climate evolved as it did over this 10,000-year period, was more than I thought I would see in my career."
-NSF-
Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF
Increasing greenhouse gases linked to rains over Africa thousands of years ago
Past may be prologue for climate in Africa
An increase in greenhouse gas concentrations thousands of years ago was a key factor in higher amounts of rainfall in two major regions of Africa, scientists have discovered.
The finding provides new evidence that today's increase in greenhouse gases will have an important effect on Africa's future climate.
Results of the study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., are published today in a paper in the journal Science.
"The future effect of greenhouse gases on rainfall in Africa is a critical socioeconomic issue," said NCAR climate scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner, the paper's lead author. "Africa's climate seems destined to change, with far-reaching implications for water resources and agriculture."
The research drew on advanced computer simulations and analyses of sediments and other records of past climate. It was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
Mysterious period of rain
Otto-Bliesner and colleagues set out to understand the reasons behind the dramatic climate shifts that took place in Africa thousands of years ago.
As ice sheets that had covered large parts of North America and northern Europe retreated from their maximum extent around 21,000 years ago, Africa's climate responded in a way that had puzzled scientists.
Following a long dry spell during the glacial maximum, the amount of rainfall in Africa abruptly increased, starting about 14,700 years ago and continuing until around 5,000 years ago.
So intense was the rainfall--turning desert into grassland and savanna--that scientists named the span the African Humid Period (AHP).
The puzzling part was why the same precipitation phenomenon occurred simultaneously in two well-separated regions, one north of the equator and one to the south.
Previous studies had suggested that, in northern Africa, the AHP was triggered by changes in Earth's orbit that resulted in more summertime heating. (Today the northern hemisphere is closest to the Sun in winter, due to a 20,000-year cycle of wobble in Earth's axis.)
But Otto-Bliesner said the orbital pattern alone would not explain the simultaneous onset of the AHP in southeastern equatorial Africa. Instead, the study revealed the role of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with changes in circulation patterns in the Atlantic Ocean.
As Earth emerged from the last Ice Age, greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, increased significantly--reaching almost pre-industrial levels by 11,000 years ago--for reasons that are not yet fully understood.
Most recent natural global warming and increased greenhouse gases
It was the most recent time during which natural global warming was associated with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.
The influx of fresh water from melting ice sheets in North America and Scandinavia about 17,000 years ago began weakening a critical circulation pattern that transports heat and salinity in the Atlantic Ocean like a conveyer belt.
The weakened circulation had the effect of moving precipitation to southernmost Africa, suppressing rainfall in northern, equatorial and East Africa.
When the ice sheets stopped melting, the circulation became stronger again, bringing precipitation back north of the equator and to Southeast equatorial Africa.
That change, coupled with the orbital shift and the warming of the atmosphere and oceans by the increasing greenhouse gases, is what triggered the AHP, the scientists believe.
"This study is a step toward solving the puzzle of what triggered abrupt changes in rainfall over southeastern equatorial and northern Africa during early deglaciation," said Anjuli Bamzai, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.
"Through an analysis of proxy records and climate model simulations, the team demonstrated that the recovery of what's calledthe Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, played a role as an initial trigger to wetter conditions."
Putting together a puzzle
To piece together the puzzle, the researchers drew on fossil pollen, evidence of former lake levels and other proxy records indicating past moisture conditions.
They focused their work on northern Africa, which includes the present-day Sahel region encompassing Niger, Chad and northern Nigeria. They also focused on the largely forested area of today's eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and much of Tanzania and Kenya in southeastern equatorial Africa.
In addition to the proxy records, they simulated past climate with the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model, a powerful global climate model funded by NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy that uses supercomputers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
By comparing the proxy records with the computer simulations, the scientists demonstrated that the climate model had the AHP right.
This helps validate its role in predicting how rising greenhouse gas concentrations might change rainfall patterns in a highly populated and vulnerable part of the world.
"Normally climate simulations cover perhaps a century, or take a snapshot of past conditions," Otto-Bliesner said. "A study like this, dissecting why climate evolved as it did over this 10,000-year period, was more than I thought I would see in my career."
-NSF-
Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
TRACERS ID HYDRAULIC FRACTURING FLOWBACK SPILLS
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
New tracers can identify frack fluids in the environment
Scientists develop new geochemical tracers, tested at sites in West Virginia and Pennsylvania
Scientists have developed new geochemical tracers that can identify hydraulic fracturing flowback fluids that have been spilled or released into the environment.
The tracers have been field-tested at a spill site in West Virginia and downstream from an oil and gas brine wastewater treatment plant in Pennsylvania.
"By characterizing the isotopic and geochemical fingerprints of enriched boron and lithium in flowback water from hydraulic fracturing, we can now track the presence of 'frack' fluids in the environment and distinguish them from wastewater coming from other sources, including conventional oil and gas wells," said Duke University geochemist Avner Vengosh, who co-led the research.
"This gives us new forensic tools to detect if frack fluids are escaping into our water supply and what risks, if any, they might pose."
Using the tracers, scientists can determine where frack fluid contamination has--or hasn't--been released to the environment and, ultimately, help identify ways to improve how shale gas wastewater is treated and disposed of.
The researchers published their findings today in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Their study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is the first to report on the development of the boron and lithium tracers.
"With increasing exploitation of unconventional oil and gas reservoirs through the use of hydraulic fracturing, it's important that we are able to assess the extent of hydraulic fracturing fluids entering the environment," said Alex Isern, section head in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.
"This work is critical as it demonstrates that geochemical fingerprinting provides a powerful tool to differentiate potential sources of contamination and therefore guide efforts to mitigate environmental impacts."
Adds Nathaniel Warner of Dartmouth College, lead author of the paper, "This new technology can be combined with other methods to identify specific instances of accidental releases to surface waters in areas of unconventional drilling.
"It could benefit industry as well as federal and state agencies charged with monitoring water quality and protecting the environment."
Hydraulic fracturing fluids--or frack fluids--typically contain mixes of water, proprietary chemicals and sand. Mixtures can vary from site to site.
Drillers inject large volumes of the fluids down gas wells at high pressure to crack open shale formations deep underground and allow natural gas trapped within the shale to flow out and be extracted.
After the shale has been fractured, the frac fluids flow back up the well to the surface along with the gas and highly saline brines from the shale formation.
Some people fear that toxic frack fluid chemicals in this flowback could contaminate nearby water supplies if they're accidentally spilled or insufficiently treated before being disposed of.
"The flowback fluid that returns to the surface becomes a waste that needs to be managed," Vengosh explained.
"Deep-well injection is the preferable disposal method, but injecting large volumes of wastewater into deep wells can cause earthquakes in sensitive areas and is not geologically available in some states.
"In Pennsylvania, much of the flowback is now recycled and reused, but a significant amount of it is still discharged into local streams or rivers."
It's possible to identify the presence of frack fluid in spilled or discharged flowback by tracing synthetic organic compounds that are added to the fluid before it's injected down a well, Vengosh said, but the proprietary nature of these chemicals, combined with their instability in the environment, limits the usefulness of such tracers.
By contrast, the new boron and lithium tracers remain stable in the environment.
"The difference is that we are using tracers based on elements that occur naturally in shale formations," Vengosh said.
When drillers inject frack fluids into a shale formation, they not only release hydrocarbon, but also boron and lithium that are attached to clay minerals in the formation.
As the fluids react and mix at depth, they become enriched in boron and lithium.
As they're brought back to the surface, they have distinctive fingerprints that are different from other types of wastewater, including wastewater from a conventional gas or oil well, and from naturally occurring background water.
"This type of forensic research allows us to clearly identify possible sources of wastewater contamination," Vengosh said.
Thomas Darrah of The Ohio State University, Robert Jackson of Duke and Stanford Universities and Romain Millot and Wolfram Kloppmann of the French Geological Survey also co-authored the paper, which was partly funded by the Park Foundation.
-NSF-
Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF
Thursday, October 16, 2014
SCIENTISTS LOOK TO SUNFLOWERS FOR ANSWERS
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Ten things to know about the flowers of fall: Sunflowers
Scientists unfurl common flowers' genetic secrets
Scientists are finding that answers to biological and environmental questions large and small may be hidden in the petals of common sunflowers.
For example, how frequently and under what conditions does evolution take the same path? When independent populations evolve the same characteristics, are the underlying genetic changes similar or different?
To peer into the world of speciation--how one species branches into another--the National Science Foundation (NSF) spoke with George Gilchrist, a program director in the agency's Division of Environmental Biology and with Ken Whitney, a plant biologist at the University of New Mexico who studies populations of experimental sunflowers in Texas.
With funding from NSF, Whitney and botanist Loren Rieseberg of Indiana University Bloomington and the University of British Columbia are learning whether sunflowers are converging or diverging in their traits.
1) Why do scientists study sunflowers?
Whitney (KW): Sunflowers represent a "recent" success story. In the past three million years, this group has diverged (or branched into new species) in some 50 species in North America. Sunflowers live in a variety of habitats, from forests to deserts to salt marshes.
Sunflowers also contain examples of many important processes, including the evolution of both annual and perennial lifestyles, hybridization (mating between species) and the phenomena of polyploidy (the doubling of chromosome sets in a lineage). All this combines in an "evolutionary cauldron."
2) Where did sunflowers originate?
(KW): The genus Helianthus, true sunflowers, is native to North America. The common sunflower, H. annuus, and its seeds are one of only three crops that were domesticated north of Mexico. The second, sumpweed, was a favorite of Native Americans, but is no longer in use; the third, Jerusalem artichoke, is actually the root of another sunflower species, H. tuberosus.
3) What are the major commercial uses of sunflowers?
(KW): Oilseed sunflower varieties are used to produce oil used in cooking. A separate set of varieties, called confectionary varieties, has been developed to produce the large seeds we eat directly--such as those that are roasted and salted.
4) How do sunflowers link North America and Russia?
(KW): Although the crop sunflower originated in North America, it had to travel to Europe to achieve its current form. Much of the breeding for large seed size and high oil content was done in Russia in the 1800s, a legacy that is still with us in the sunflower variety called "Russian Mammoth." Many of us grow this plant in home gardens.
Sunflower varieties from Russia made it back to the U.S. in the late 1880s, but it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that crop sunflowers were grown on a large commercial scale in the United States.
5) What's the difference between wild sunflowers and those that are domesticated and grown as crops?
(KW): Both wild and crop sunflowers are the same species, H. annuus. Wild sunflowers have many flowering heads on each plant, and have small seeds. A major event in the domestication of the sunflower was the creation of a "monocephalic" plant with a single large flowering head and large seeds.
6) How much diversity is there in wild sunflowers?
(KW): The 50 or so species of wild sunflowers are both ecologically and genetically diverse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture maintains seed stocks of most wild sunflower species, in part because they contain genetic material that can be used to improve cultivated sunflower varieties. For example, a pest-resistant species might provide genes that could decrease pest damage in cultivated sunflowers.
7) What ecological factors drive sunflowers' diversity?
(KW): Sunflowers live in a wide range of habitats, and are widespread across the North American continent. That geographic range means that sunflowers have adapted to very different environmental conditions during the course of their radiation.
8) Are there medical treatments derived from sunflower products?
(KW): Sunflower products, especially the oil from the seeds, have long been used in folk medicine, but I'm not aware of any uses in modern medicine.
9) Do wild sunflowers hybridize? What role has hybridization played in speciation?
(KW): Sunflowers are notorious for hybridizing: mating across species boundaries and exchanging genetic material between species. Sometimes this genetic exchange leads to improved performance, for example in the Texas sunflower our team has been studying.
We have evidence that when wild H. annuus captured genes from another species, H. debilis, it was able to expand its range southward and become a new subspecies, H. annuus texanus. In other sunflowers, hybridization may lead to entirely new species. The sunflowers H. annuus and H. petiolaris have hybridized repeatedly and have produced three new sunflower species that live on the desert floor, on sand dunes, and in salt marshes.
Gilchrist (GG): This research has been critical to understanding how hybridization can lead to rapid speciation. While many hybrids are sterile, some genetic changes create hybrids with extra sets of chromosomes that are fully fertile, but reproductively isolated from their parents.
These new hybrid sunflowers often are uniquely adapted to new habitats that neither of the parent species occupies. Speciation by hybridization is very common in plants and may play a major role in plant diversification.
10) Do insects and pathogens attack sunflowers?
(KW): Sunflowers are indeed attacked by insects, especially grasshoppers, caterpillars, aphids and their relatives, as well as by fungal and bacterial pathogens.
A sunflower's life, scientists say, is no bed of roses.
-- Cheryl Dybas,
Thursday, June 19, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY'S AT NEXT STEPS PANEL OF OUR OCEAN CONFERENCE
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Closing the Next Steps Panel of Our Ocean Conference
Remarks
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Loy Henderson Conference Room
Washington, DC
June 17, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY: This is our last meeting of the entire group in this room. There will be a breakout group meeting here later in the day, but this will be the last session in which everybody will be assembled in the same room at the same time. And I just want to observe that over the course of my career I’ve been to a lot of conferences, but I have to tell you I’ve never been to one where people stayed in their seats, sat as attentive and as focused as you have with as little movement and sort of breakup and large gaps in the seating. I personally am impressed by the way in which there has just been a sense of serious purpose and intent here, and I congratulate and thank all of you for that. You are the ones who have brought that sense of urgency to this effort here. I might say that by being so rigid and so firmly planted we can say with certainty that the oceans movement is a hard-ass group of folks. (Laughter and applause.)
What’s amazing, I sat there listening to the folks who felt inspired to contribute beyond what had been previously thought would occur. And so out of this conference has come more – a commitment to a combination of effort with respect to climate and oceans, but specifically focused on acidification and sea level rise and all the special efforts of these recent spontaneous announcements that you have made. And I’m particularly grateful to the minister from the Bahamas and the Bahamas initiative which is so critical, to Ted Waitt and the Waitt Foundation. I can remember meeting with Ted in San Diego a long time ago when he sort of focused and told me he was really going to put his energy and focus into the oceans, and he has done that tremendously and importantly.
The Cook Islands Prime Minister Puna, we thank you for a 50-mile zone, which just really moves people away from areas of greatest accessibility and will have a significant impact. Mark Spalding, The Ocean Foundation, and the Global Environment Facility, creating a platform for action, and Lynne Hale and Nature Conservancy, a 3.8 million investment in the Marine Initiative.
And finally are my friends from the UK, William Hague and his representative, special representative for climate change, and the effort to work on partnerships and recognize this is indeed an enormous diplomatic challenge to bring countries together in a multilateral forum. This has been as delightful a group of committed activists, scientists, academians, NGOs, civil society, and government representatives who have come together with a serious purpose, and I think everybody deserves their mutual congratulations.
Out of this, particularly with the remarkable contribution and seriousness of purpose expressed by the Government of Norway, we have today received commitments for action over $1,450,000,000, and that is all directed to ocean (inaudible). (Applause.)
In addition to that, with some new commitments we’re soon going to be halfway to the number of countries needed to ratify the Port State Measures Agreement so that it can enter into force. And I will personally engage in efforts, and I hope others here will join, particularly my minister colleagues, in the effort to push to get that done. When we achieve that, we get a few more countries on board, we’ll be able to take an enormous step forward in preventing illegally caught catches, illegal fish catch from making it to the market.
Finally, right now only a small fraction of the world’s ocean, as we have all talked about it, is currently protected. But with the announcements that have been made here today and over the course of this conference and additional announcements at lunch, including the announcement President Obama made this morning, we’re potentially on the verge of protecting more than 3 million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. We need to do more elsewhere but that is a terrific start, and I congratulate everybody for their part in doing that. (Applause.)
We have a lot to do in a short time. There isn’t anybody here who hasn’t come here because they don’t understand the depth of this challenge. And I am so appreciative for all of you taking the time, making the commitment to be here. Our hope was and remains – and it’s something that I felt significantly in my travels both as a senator and as Secretary, I would talk to people. And you’d get a certain number of people who go to a conference in one place or another, but we haven’t often enough been able to convene all of the stakeholders that are necessary. We don’t have them all here either yet. We need to continue to push that. Because when people come together like this, there is a certainty of purpose, a certainty of understanding the challenge. And there’s a sense of unity and of breadth, scope if you will, of people taking actions ready to move that in itself is infectious, as we saw today with spontaneous combustion presenting these additional efforts. We have to continue that. And I said at the outset of this that is the purpose of this meeting.
So our team has been assembling a compilation of the best practices and of those suggestions made here for those things that need to be done in order to get this job done. And we will be putting this plan out immediately this afternoon after this conference. Everybody here can go to it immediately onstate.gov. It will be accessible. We will be working to promulgate it. We’ll be working to try to build a critical energy underneath it to take it to the United Nations, to take it to other international organizations that could have an impact. And we will try to build this so that this will become, in effect, the guide for the steps that we need to take in order to protect our ocean and in order to encourage other nations to sign on to do the same.
Eventually our goal is for this plan to translate into a unified global ocean policy. Now governments obviously have an important role to play. We all know that. But what is proven here by Ted and Nature Conservancy and other individual efforts here is that people, civil society, these young folks who are here who are going to be tweeting and pushing this out to social media and engaging, can begin to create a movement at colleges, universities, schools all across the world – this is something everybody can understand – and force political action by virtue of making this a voting issue where people feel that if they don’t do this they’re not going to be running a government, they’re not going to get elected. That’s how it works most effectively.
And lest any of you have any doubt about that, let me tell you something. When I first came back from Vietnam back in 1969-’70, I didn’t first begin to protest the war. I first began to be involved with something called Earth Day, Earth Day 1970. And we organized. Twenty million people came out of their homes and said we don’t want to drink toxic water, we don’t want to have cancer thrust on us, we don’t want to live next to a waste dump. And guess what? Those 20 million people then focused on 12 members of the United States Congress. They were labeled the “dirty dozen,” the worst votes on the environment in Congress. And in the next election, seven of them lost. (Applause.) That sent a message up and down the spines of the survivors, who then promptly voted for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and they created the EPA. (Applause.) We didn’t even have an Environmental Protection Agency until that happened. (Applause.)
So as we leave here, we need to remember the power of these facts and these ideas of this mission. And I just ask everybody here to think about one last thing. I will always remember the comments of President Kennedy in 1962 when he attended the World Cup – not World Cup, excuse me, the Americas Cup. (Laughter.) I have World Cup on the mind. And he talked about our connection to the sea and it’s a wonderful passage and you should all go be reminded, but I’d just remind you quickly. He talked about how each of us has this special connection to the sea because we come from the sea, and you just have to measure the amount of salt in water in the human body and in the veins in our blood, and you understand that connection. And so we leave here with a special sense of that connection, but most importantly, thanks to all of you, we leave here with a special mission, a special renewed vigor, a sense of commitment to what we have to achieve. I thank you all for being part of this effort.
We will convene again. It will be in Peru, and after that maybe back here. We will convene again.
PARTICIPANT: Chile.
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, it’ll be in Chile instead of Peru. (Laughter.) Thank you. Thank you
very much. (Applause.)
What’s amazing, I sat there listening to the folks who felt inspired to contribute beyond what had been previously thought would occur. And so out of this conference has come more – a commitment to a combination of effort with respect to climate and oceans, but specifically focused on acidification and sea level rise and all the special efforts of these recent spontaneous announcements that you have made. And I’m particularly grateful to the minister from the Bahamas and the Bahamas initiative which is so critical, to Ted Waitt and the Waitt Foundation. I can remember meeting with Ted in San Diego a long time ago when he sort of focused and told me he was really going to put his energy and focus into the oceans, and he has done that tremendously and importantly.
The Cook Islands Prime Minister Puna, we thank you for a 50-mile zone, which just really moves people away from areas of greatest accessibility and will have a significant impact. Mark Spalding, The Ocean Foundation, and the Global Environment Facility, creating a platform for action, and Lynne Hale and Nature Conservancy, a 3.8 million investment in the Marine Initiative.
And finally are my friends from the UK, William Hague and his representative, special representative for climate change, and the effort to work on partnerships and recognize this is indeed an enormous diplomatic challenge to bring countries together in a multilateral forum. This has been as delightful a group of committed activists, scientists, academians, NGOs, civil society, and government representatives who have come together with a serious purpose, and I think everybody deserves their mutual congratulations.
Out of this, particularly with the remarkable contribution and seriousness of purpose expressed by the Government of Norway, we have today received commitments for action over $1,450,000,000, and that is all directed to ocean (inaudible). (Applause.)
In addition to that, with some new commitments we’re soon going to be halfway to the number of countries needed to ratify the Port State Measures Agreement so that it can enter into force. And I will personally engage in efforts, and I hope others here will join, particularly my minister colleagues, in the effort to push to get that done. When we achieve that, we get a few more countries on board, we’ll be able to take an enormous step forward in preventing illegally caught catches, illegal fish catch from making it to the market.
Finally, right now only a small fraction of the world’s ocean, as we have all talked about it, is currently protected. But with the announcements that have been made here today and over the course of this conference and additional announcements at lunch, including the announcement President Obama made this morning, we’re potentially on the verge of protecting more than 3 million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. We need to do more elsewhere but that is a terrific start, and I congratulate everybody for their part in doing that. (Applause.)
We have a lot to do in a short time. There isn’t anybody here who hasn’t come here because they don’t understand the depth of this challenge. And I am so appreciative for all of you taking the time, making the commitment to be here. Our hope was and remains – and it’s something that I felt significantly in my travels both as a senator and as Secretary, I would talk to people. And you’d get a certain number of people who go to a conference in one place or another, but we haven’t often enough been able to convene all of the stakeholders that are necessary. We don’t have them all here either yet. We need to continue to push that. Because when people come together like this, there is a certainty of purpose, a certainty of understanding the challenge. And there’s a sense of unity and of breadth, scope if you will, of people taking actions ready to move that in itself is infectious, as we saw today with spontaneous combustion presenting these additional efforts. We have to continue that. And I said at the outset of this that is the purpose of this meeting.
So our team has been assembling a compilation of the best practices and of those suggestions made here for those things that need to be done in order to get this job done. And we will be putting this plan out immediately this afternoon after this conference. Everybody here can go to it immediately onstate.gov. It will be accessible. We will be working to promulgate it. We’ll be working to try to build a critical energy underneath it to take it to the United Nations, to take it to other international organizations that could have an impact. And we will try to build this so that this will become, in effect, the guide for the steps that we need to take in order to protect our ocean and in order to encourage other nations to sign on to do the same.
Eventually our goal is for this plan to translate into a unified global ocean policy. Now governments obviously have an important role to play. We all know that. But what is proven here by Ted and Nature Conservancy and other individual efforts here is that people, civil society, these young folks who are here who are going to be tweeting and pushing this out to social media and engaging, can begin to create a movement at colleges, universities, schools all across the world – this is something everybody can understand – and force political action by virtue of making this a voting issue where people feel that if they don’t do this they’re not going to be running a government, they’re not going to get elected. That’s how it works most effectively.
And lest any of you have any doubt about that, let me tell you something. When I first came back from Vietnam back in 1969-’70, I didn’t first begin to protest the war. I first began to be involved with something called Earth Day, Earth Day 1970. And we organized. Twenty million people came out of their homes and said we don’t want to drink toxic water, we don’t want to have cancer thrust on us, we don’t want to live next to a waste dump. And guess what? Those 20 million people then focused on 12 members of the United States Congress. They were labeled the “dirty dozen,” the worst votes on the environment in Congress. And in the next election, seven of them lost. (Applause.) That sent a message up and down the spines of the survivors, who then promptly voted for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and they created the EPA. (Applause.) We didn’t even have an Environmental Protection Agency until that happened. (Applause.)
So as we leave here, we need to remember the power of these facts and these ideas of this mission. And I just ask everybody here to think about one last thing. I will always remember the comments of President Kennedy in 1962 when he attended the World Cup – not World Cup, excuse me, the Americas Cup. (Laughter.) I have World Cup on the mind. And he talked about our connection to the sea and it’s a wonderful passage and you should all go be reminded, but I’d just remind you quickly. He talked about how each of us has this special connection to the sea because we come from the sea, and you just have to measure the amount of salt in water in the human body and in the veins in our blood, and you understand that connection. And so we leave here with a special sense of that connection, but most importantly, thanks to all of you, we leave here with a special mission, a special renewed vigor, a sense of commitment to what we have to achieve. I thank you all for being part of this effort.
We will convene again. It will be in Peru, and after that maybe back here. We will convene again.
PARTICIPANT: Chile.
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, it’ll be in Chile instead of Peru. (Laughter.) Thank you. Thank you
very much. (Applause.)
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY'S REMARKS AT "OUR OCEANS CONFERENCE"
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Welcoming Remarks at Our Ocean Conference
Remarks
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Loy Henderson Conference Room
Washington, DC
June 16, 2014
Cathy, thank you very, very much. Welcome, everybody, distinguished guests all. We have many government leaders, many people, as Cathy mentioned, from foundations, from NGOs, from various interested entities. We are really delighted to have such an extraordinary expert concerned group come together to discuss this really critical issue. And I am personally very, very grateful to the leadership of our terrific Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment – it’s a big package, obviously – who has been working diligently to put this together. You can tell from the surroundings this will be interactive; there will be a lot of visual input to digest and a great deal of science to document what we are talking about here over the course of these next couple of days.
But I’m really grateful to my team here at the State Department that has worked overtime under Cathy’s leadership to help bring everybody together here today, and I thank you all for coming. I welcome you to the State Department, to the Loy Henderson Conference Room, particularly those of you who are representing countries from around the world, the private sector, civil society, academia, as well as many, many people joining us online via livestream through state.gov. And I hope many more people will join us over the course of the next two days.
As many of you know, convening a conference like this has been a priority of mine for some period of time. I really started thinking about this when I was still in the Senate and we wanted to try to pull it together. And then last year we did, and as you know, we had a political moment here in Washington – that’s polite diplomatic-ese – which prevented us from going forward at that time. But candidly, I think it’s worked for the better because it gave us more time to think about how to make this conference perhaps even more effective and how to maximize what we’re doing here.
A commitment to protecting the ocean, which we all share, has really been a priority of mine for a long time, as Cathy mentioned a moment ago, literally from the time I was growing up as a child in Massachusetts when I first dipped my toes into the mud off Woods Hole Oceanographic in that area of Buzzards Bay and the Cape and was introduced to clamming and to fishing and all of those great joys of the ocean. I have had this enormous love and respect for what the ocean means to us. I went into the Navy partly through that and I had the pleasure of crossing the Pacific both ways on a ship and passing through many different parts of the Pacific Ocean region. It’s sort of in my DNA. My mother’s family was involved way, way, way back in the early days of trade through the oceans. And indeed my father was a passionate sailor who, in his retirement, found a way to sail across the ocean several times.
So I learned very early on to appreciate this vast expanse of the ocean, so vast that three-quarters of our planet is really ocean. Someone might have called our planet Ocean, not Earth, if it was based on that, but obviously it is not. Stewardship of our ocean is not a one-person event; it’s a nation event, it’s a country event, it’s a universal requirement all across this planet. And I tried very hard when I was in the Senate as chairman of the Senate Oceans and Fisheries Subcommittee where we rewrote our Magnuson fishery laws on several different occasions, created the Stellwagen Bank Sanctuary, the Coastal Zone Management Act, enforcement, flood insurance, rethinking it – all these things that have to do with development and runoff and non-point source pollution and all of the things that concern us as we come here today.
And that is the concern that I bring to this effort as Secretary of State now. The reason for that is really very, very simple. And for anyone who questions why are we here when there are so many areas of conflict and so many issues of vital concern as there are – and regrettably, because of that, I will not be at every part of this conference because we have much to do with respect to Iraq and other emergencies that we face. But no one should mistake that the protection of our oceans is a vital international security issue. It’s a vital security issue involving the movement of people, the livelihood of people, the capacity of people to exist and live where they live today. The ocean today supports the livelihoods of up to 12 percent of the world’s population. But it is also essential to maintaining the environment in which we all live. It’s responsible for recycling things like water, carbon, nutrients throughout our planet, throughout the ecosystem – “system” is an important word – so that we have air to breathe, water to drink. And it is home to literally millions of species.
Protecting our ocean is also a great necessity for global food security, given that more than 3 billion people – 50 percent of the people on this planet – in every corner of the world depend on fish as a significant source of protein. The connection between a healthy ocean and life itself for every single person on Earth cannot be overstated. And we will hear from scientists who will talk about that relationship in the course of the next hours and days.
The fact is we as human beings share nothing so completely as the ocean that covers nearly three quarters of our planet. And I remember the first time I really grasped that notion. It was in the early 1970s when the first color pictures of Earth from space were released, the famous blue marble photographs. And when you look at those images, you don’t see borders or markers separating one nation from another. You just see big masses of green and sometimes brown surrounded by blue. For me, that image shaped the realization that what has become cliched and perhaps even taken for granted – not perhaps, is taken for granted – is the degree to which we all share one planet, one ocean.
And because we share nothing so completely as our ocean, each of us also shares the responsibility to protect it. And you can look at any scripture of any religion, any life philosophy, and you will draw from it that sense of responsibility. I think most people want their children and their grandchildren to benefit from a healthy ocean the same way that we’ve been privileged to. And they want to do their part to be able to ensure that that is the case.
But here’s the problem: When anybody looks out at the ocean – we’re all sort of guilty of it one time or another – when you stand on a beach and you look out at the tide rolling in, you feel somehow that the ocean is larger than life, that it’s an endless resource impossible to destroy. So most people underestimate the enormous damage that we as human beings are inflicting on our ocean every single day. When people order seafood from a restaurant, most of the time they don’t realize that a third of the world’s fish stocks are overexploited, too much money chasing too few fish, and nearly all the rest are being fished at or near their absolute maximum sustainable level on a level on planet that has 6 billion people and will rise to 9 over the next 30, 40, 50 years.
Most people aren’t aware of something called bycatch, where up to half or two thirds of the fish in a particular catch are not actually what the fisher was looking for and they’re simply thrown overboard. And when people go swimming or surfing along the coast, often they don’t realize that pollution has led to more than 500 dead zones in the ocean, areas where life simply cannot exist, and that together those dead zones add up to an area roughly the size of the state of Michigan here in the United States. When people walk through an aquarium and they see and learn about the marine world, they usually don’t realize that because of climate change, the basic chemistry of our ocean is changing faster than it has ever changed in the history of the planet. And if it continues much longer, a significant chunk of marine life may simply die out because it can no longer live, no longer survive in the ocean’s waters.
The bottom line is that most people don’t realize that if the entire world doesn’t come together to try to change course and protect the ocean from unsustainable fishing practices, unprecedented pollution, or the devastating effects of climate change, then we run the risk of fundamentally breaking entire ecosystems. And as you’ll hear throughout the course of this conference, that will translate into a serious consequence for the health and the economies and the future of all of us.
The good news is that at this point we know what we need to do to address the threats facing the ocean. It’s not a mystery. It’s not beyond our capacity. Everyone in this room is aware of the effective steps that people are taking already, both large and small around the world.
In Latin America, NGOs like Paso Pacifico are helping fishers to improve their sustainability by engaging those fishers both in monitoring their catches and in the process of selecting new marine-protected areas.
In Africa, local volunteers – volunteers – take it on themselves to collect the trash that floods from the streets to the beaches during the periods of intense rain. There’s an amazing group of volunteers in Guinea who call themselves “Les Sacs Bleus” after the blue trash bags that they use to collect the garbage, an incredible self-spontaneous combustion effort to be responsible.
In the Asia Pacific, half a dozen nations have come together with U.S. support to protect the Coral Triangle, a part of the ocean that has been called the Amazon of the seas because of its incredible biodiversity. The Coral Triangle Initiative has led to improved management of a marine area that’s almost the size of one of our states, North Dakota, and it has inspired more than 90 policies, regulations, laws, and agreements to protect the local coastal and marine resources. Here in the United States, we have taken very significant strides to end overfishing in U.S. fisheries. We’ve rebuilt a record number of fish stocks back from depleted levels, and at the same time promoted and increased the economic viability of our fisheries, trying hard to actually give meaning to the word “sustainable fisheries.”
These are just a few examples of a great deal of work that you’re all familiar with, that many of you have created that is taking place around the world. But so far, all of these efforts have only been applied on a relatively small scale and only applied in one region or another. If we want to honor – if we are going to be able to honor our shared responsibility to protect the ocean, the ad hoc approach we have today with each nation and community pursuing its own independent policy simply will not suffice. That is not how the ocean works. We’re not going to meet this challenge unless the community of nations comes together around a single, comprehensive, global ocean strategy. That is the only way that we can clean up our ocean today and make sure that it remains what it needs to be for generations to come. That is what this conference is all about.
Over the past few years, even over the past few months, there have been an encouraging number of reports, summits, meetings, even conventions convened to examine the various threats of our ocean and – are facing and potential ways to address those threats. And many of you here have been part of those meetings. I hope you have found them as valuable as we have. They’ve been instructive and they’re critical, but now is the time for us to build on this groundwork of these past years. Now is the time to build on the knowledge-base that we have created through these meetings, and that is why we have invited you here now, not just to have an important conversation, but to reach important conclusions, to try to put together a plan of action.
I want us to walk away from this conference with more than ideas. I want us to walk away from here with a plan, a plan that puts an end to overfishing through new rules based on the best available science. And may I add one of the things that Ted Stevens – Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska who teamed up with me on the Commerce Committee in the Senate – one of the things we always were fighting was getting more, better science so that we could convince fishermen and convince countries, governments of the imperative of making decisions.
Too often we hear, “Well, we don’t really see that,” or, “We don’t really feel that,” or I’d hear from captains of the boats, “When I go out and fish, I see plenty of stocks out there. There’s no reason to be restricted.” We need science, and globally we could put our heads together and our governments together and come up with both the budget and the capacity to be able to do what we need to be able to help convince people of the urgency of this.
We need a plan that requires fisheries to use gear and techniques that dramatically reduce the amount of fish and other species that are caught by accident and discarded; a plan that ends subsidies to fisheries, which only serves to promote overfishing; a plan that makes it near impossible for illegally-caught fish to actually come to the market anywhere, whether you’re in Boston or Beijing or Barcelona or Brasilia or any other city that doesn’t begin with a B. (Laughter.) Let’s develop a plan that protects more marine habitats, and we will have an announcement regarding that. I believe President Obama will make such an announcement.
Today, less than 2 percent of our ocean is considered a marine protected area, where there are some restrictions on human activity in order to prevent contaminating the ecosystem, less than 2 percent of the entire ocean. There isn’t anybody here who doesn’t believe we can’t do better than that. So let’s start by finding a way to perhaps bring that number up to 10 percent or more as soon as possible.
And let’s develop a plan that does more to reduce the flow of plastic and other debris from entering into the ocean. Everybody’s seen that massive array of garbage in the Pacific and elsewhere. We need a plan that helps cut down the nutrient pollution, that runs off of land and is miles from the shore, and that contributes to the dead zones that I mentioned earlier. I learned about that back when I was running for president out in Iowa and Minnesota and the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and you learn about the flow of these nutrients that go down the Mississippi out into the gulf, and we have a great, big dead zone as a result.
We need to develop a plan that gives us a better understanding of the acidification effect that carbon pollution is having on our ocean, that we know that in the Antarctic, for instance, there was a regurgitation of carbon dioxide. Have we reached a saturation point? I don’t know. But I know that it’s a question that is critical to our capacity to deal with climate change and to maintain the oceans. We ought to be able to know where it’s happening, how quickly it’s happening so we can find the best way to slow it down. And we need to push harder, all of us, for a UN agreement to fight carbon pollution in the first place because the science proves that’s the only way we’ll have a chance of reducing the impact of climate change, which is one of the greatest threats facing not just our ocean, but our entire planet.
Finally we need to develop a plan that not only lays out the policies we need to protect our ocean, but that also considers how we are going to enforce those policies on a global scale. Because without enforcement, any plan we create will only take us so far. I think it was back in the ’90s, if I recall correctly, that Ted Stevens and I joined forces to take driftnet fishing to the United States. And we had become aware of literally tens of thousands of miles of monofilament netting that was dragged behind a boat that would literally strip-mine the ocean with vast proportions of the catch thrown away and clearly not sustainable.
So Senator Stevens and I managed to go to the UN. Ultimately it was banned by the UN. But guess what? There are still some rogue vessels using driftnets to strip-mine the ocean because they get more money, it’s faster, and there’s nobody out there to enforce out – no one out there to enforce it.
So we need to change this. That’s our charge here, all of us. Over the next two days, let’s put our heads together and work on a plan for how we can preserve fish stocks, manage coastlines, and protect ecosystems, a way for us to try to preserve fisheries, a way for us to come to a common understanding of our common interests and find a consensus that we could take to the UN – take this plan to the UN, take it to other international organizations. All of us begin talking the same language off the same page about the same objective, and if we make this a plan that all countries must follow by helping all of them to understand that no country can afford not to, whether you’re on the ocean or not on the ocean.
I know all of this sounds pretty ambitious. It’s meant to be. I know that some of you are probably thinking, “Well, what did I get myself into here?” But look around the room. Every one of you is here for a reason. We have government leaders from around the world at the highest levels, including three heads of state. We have experts from international organizations, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, others. We have private sector leaders who are committed to our oceans’ future, people like Chris Lischewski from Bumble Bee Foods. The best ocean scientists in the world are here. All of us can come together and each can help the other to ensure that every solution that we discuss is directly tied to the best science available.
Ask yourself: If this group can’t create a serious plan to protect the ocean for future generations, then who can and who will? We cannot afford to put this global challenge on hold for another day. It’s our ocean. It’s our responsibility. So I hope that over these next two days, we will maximize the time we are here. I am really delighted that you all came to be part of this. And I hope this will be a new beginning, a new effort to unify and to create a concerted pressure which is necessary to make a difference.
It’s now my pleasure to introduce one final speaker before we open the program up, and there’s going to be a great deal of information coming at you in short order. But President Anote Tong of Kiribati is one of the loudest voices, one of the clearest voices in the world in the call for global action to address climate change. And there’s a simple reason why he has a special interest. It is because climate change is already posing an existential threat to his country. But he’s also one of the world’s greatest advocates for the protection of the ocean well beyond the interests of his own country. Under his leadership, Kiribati has established one of the largest marine-protected areas in the world in the Phoenix Islands in the Pacific. It’s an honor to have him here to share his thoughts with us this morning.
Ladies and gentlemen, President Anote Tong. (Applause.)
Monday, May 26, 2014
AG HOLDER'S REMARKS AT ETHEL KENNEDY BRIDGE DEDICATION
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Attorney General Holder Delivers Remarks at the Dedication of the Ethel Kennedy Bridge
~ Wednesday, May 21, 2014
As we’ve heard this afternoon, Ethel Kennedy is no less than an American icon, and nothing short of a living legend. But she is also a steadfast friend to those in need, a staunch advocate for those at risk, and a principled leader in this community. From those singular years at Hickory Hill, half a century ago, when she and her husband regularly convened gatherings of luminaries from around this city and across the globe, to her example of grace and resilience in the face of great tragedy; from her leadership and extensive travels on behalf of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, to her tireless work on behalf of the people of Southeast Washington – she has devoted her life to the betterment of others. And like her late husband, my most accomplished predecessor as Attorney General – and like so many other members of the storied Skakel and Kennedy families – she has never been afraid to roll up her sleeves, rally those around her, and lead from the front lines of the fight for change.
Nowhere is this more evident than here on the banks of the Anacostia, in vibrant neighborhoods that have been too often forgotten – amid a fragile environment that’s been too long neglected. During my service as a judge – and later as United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, in the mid-1990s – I saw firsthand the intractable public safety challenges, and the vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration, that have gripped this community and stolen far too many promising futures.
Indeed, as we’ve heard this afternoon, a shocking number of ECC members – the best and the brightest; the future of this city – have fallen victim to senseless violence since this effort began. But as a result of the courage, the resolve, and the tireless work of community activists, Corps members, and leaders like Ethel Kennedy, over the last two decades, we have seen tremendous progress and brought about lasting, positive change. There’s no question that significant challenges remain before us – but thanks to the principled stands you’ve taken, the fight Mrs. Kennedy is helping to lead, and the work of community members who have rallied to build the brighter futures that every D.C. resident deserves – countless lives have been improved and even saved. And these beautiful natural areas are being preserved.
That’s why it’s fitting that we gather today – alongside ECC leaders and proud residents of Wards 6, 7 and 8 – to thank Ethel Kennedy for the work she has championed. To bestow just a small measure of the recognition, and the public acclaim, that she richly deserves. And to honor her indelible contributions to this community by naming one of the original connectors that links Anacostia to greater Washington in her honor.
Throughout her extraordinary life, Ethel Kennedy has shown us – by word and by deed – that every American has not just the power, but the responsibility, to help improve and transform the world around them. And through her service, she has inspired countless individuals in and far beyond this crowd – including me – to follow her example. She has never pursued the national spotlight. But she has also never failed to embrace the considerable duties – and the substantial burdens – that circumstance and history have placed squarely on her shoulders.
Today, we pay tribute to this remarkable leader. We thank her for bearing these burdens, and leading these efforts, with grace and with poise. We declare that she is not merely one of the best among us – she is a national treasure. And we pledge that we will honor her achievements by rededicating ourselves – here and now – to the work that must remain our common cause; by carrying on the fight for juvenile and environmental justice; and by continuing to support and empower those who need our help the most, across the country as well as here in Washington – on both sides of the bridge that will forever bear her name.
Thank you once again, Mrs. Kennedy, for all that you have done, and meant, to this community and to our nation. I am honored to share this auspicious moment with you. And I look forward to all that we will do and achieve together in the months and years to come.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
DOJ RELEASES ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES DIVISION 2013 ACCOMPLISHMENTS
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Environment and Natural Resources Division Releases FY 2013 Accomplishments Report
In the last fiscal year, the Justice Department continued carrying out its commitment to environmental justice to ensure the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental and natural resources laws and policies. The division’s work advancing the goals of environmental justice is illustrated in a separate chapter of the report.
“The Environment Division’s work to protect our air, land and water from pollution is as critical to our nation’s health, security, and sustainability as it has ever been,” said Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole. “As we face significant challenges from climate change, in developing alternative and sustainable sources of energy and addressing pollution to protect public health and the environment, we are grateful to the division and its attorneys for the work they do each day on behalf of the American people and future generations of Americans.”
“As this report shows, every day, the division works with client agencies, U.S. Attorneys’ offices, and state, local and tribal governments to enforce federal environmental, natural resources, and wildlife laws,” said Robert G. Dreher, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division. “It also defends federal agency actions and rules when they are challenged in the courts, keeping the nation’s air, water, and land free of pollution, promoting military preparedness and national security, and supporting responsible stewardship of America’s forests, wildlife and other natural resources. The division also handles a broad array of important matters affecting Indian tribes and their members. Across all this work, we strive to ensure that all Americans enjoy clean air, water and land, implementing the department’s deep commitment to environmental justice.”
In FY 2013, the division secured over $1.78 billion in civil and stipulated penalties, cost recoveries, natural resource damages and other civil monetary relief, including almost $637 million recovered for the Superfund. The division obtained almost $6.5 billion in corrective measures, through court orders and settlements, to protect the nation’s air, water and other natural resources. It concluded 53 criminal cases against 87 defendants, obtaining nearly 65 years in confinement and over $79 million in criminal fines, restitution, community service funds and special assessments. Finally, the handling of defensive and condemnation cases closed in fiscal year 2013 saved the United States an estimated $6.8 billion.
Among other highlights included in the FY 2013 Accomplishments report:
Accountability for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
The division’s top civil enforcement priority remains the ongoing civil litigation and trial stemming from the April 20, 2010 explosion and fire that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico and triggered a massive oil spill. In December 2010, the United States brought a civil suit against BP, Anadarko, MOEX, and Transocean for civil penalties under the Clean Water Act and a declaration of liability under the Oil Pollution Act, as part of multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Thus far, the department has secured over $1 billion in civil penalties through Deepwater Horizon settlements (with MOEX and Transocean), as well as far-reaching injunctive relief that should make Transocean’s deepwater drilling safer in the Gulf of Mexico.
The department tried the first phase of the U.S. case against the remaining defendants (addressing the cause of the disaster and liability) for nine weeks from February through April 2013, as part of a mass trial in which thousands of private plaintiffs also tried parts of their cases relating to liability and fault. The second phase of the U.S. case (principally addressing how much oil was discharged into the Gulf) took place over three weeks in September and October 2013. Both phases have been submitted to the district court for decision. The district court in New Orleans has scheduled the third phase of trial in this matter, addressing assessment of civil penalties, to begin in January 2015.
Addressing Climate Change
Over the past year, the division made important contributions to combating the effects of climate change. In January 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) regulations governing motor vehicle emissions of greenhouse gases took effect, triggering not only mobile source regulation, but also regulation of the largest stationary sources in accordance with EPA’s greenhouse gas tailoring rule. As of September 2012, the D.C. Circuit in Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA upheld the agency’s greenhouse gas-related regulatory actions in their entirety. Challengers filed nine separate petitions for writs of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court. In July 2013, the Department’s Office of the Solicitor General, working closely with Division and client agency attorneys, filed an opposition to the petitions for certiorari. On Oct. 15, 2013, the Supreme Court granted certiorari on six of the petitions, which were consolidated and limited to a single issue: “Whether EPA permissibly determined that its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles triggered permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources that emit greenhouse gases.” The court denied the remaining three petitions, and rejected consideration of numerous additional issues raised by the petitions that were partially granted. In February 2014, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case.
In March 2013, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision in In re Polar Bear Endangered Species Act Listing, thereby upholding the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2008 listing of the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species throughout its range. The listing decision was based primarily on the polar bears’ dependence on arctic sea ice for their survival, existing and projected reductions in the extent and quality of sea ice habitat due to global climate change, and the inadequacy of existing regulatory measures to preserve the species.
In a settlement reached with the United States in September 2013, Safeway, the nation’s second largest grocery store chain, agreed to pay a $600,000 civil penalty and to implement a corporate-wide plan to significantly reduce its emissions of ozone-depleting substances from refrigeration equipment at over 650 of its stores nationwide, at an estimated cost of $4.1 million. The settlement resolves allegations that Safeway violated the Clean Air Act by failing to promptly repair leaks of HCFC-22, a hydrochlorofluorocarbon that has a global warming potential that is 1,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide. This first-of-its-kind settlement should also serve as a model for comprehensive solutions across a company.
Combating Wildlife Trafficking
The department has long been a leader in the fight against wildlife trafficking. Over the last year, the department engaged fully in the administration’s effort to combat wildlife trafficking through its role as one of the three agency co-chairs of the Presidential Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking, established by President Obama’s July 2013 Executive Order—Combating Wildlife Trafficking. In the past decade, wildlife trafficking has escalated into an international crisis, making it both a critical conservation concern and a threat to global security. Beyond decimating the world’s iconic species, this illegal trade threatens international security. Transnational criminal organizations, including some terrorist networks, armed insurgent groups and narcotics trafficking organizations, are increasingly drawn to wildlife trafficking due to the exorbitant proceeds from this illicit trade.
The task force emphasizes the need for a “whole of government” approach to combating this problem and identifies three key priority areas: (1) strengthening domestic and global enforcement; (2) reducing demand for illegally traded wildlife at home and abroad; and (3) strengthening partnerships with foreign governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, local communities, private industry, and others to combat illegal wildlife poaching and trade.
The division works with U.S. Attorneys’ offices around the country and federal agency partners (such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to combat wildlife trafficking under the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act, as well as statutes prohibiting smuggling, criminal conspiracy and related crimes. In fiscal year 2013, a prominent example of the division’s robust prosecution of illegal wildlife trafficking was “Operation Crash,” an ongoing multi-agency effort to detect, deter and prosecute those engaged in the illegal killing of rhinoceros and the illegal trafficking of endangered rhinoceros horns. This initiative has resulted in multiple convictions, significant jail time, penalties and asset forfeiture.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
NSF REPORTS DROUGHT, FIRE IN AMAZON LEADS TO MORE DEAD TREES
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| Photo: Amazon Forest. Credit: Wikimedia. |
Drought and fire in the Amazon lead to sharp increases in forest tree mortality
Deforestation and fragmentation of forests help create tinderbox conditions
Ongoing deforestation and fragmentation of forests in the Amazon help create tinderbox conditions for wildfires, contributing to rapid and widespread forest loss during drought years, according to a team of researchers.
Their findings show that forests in the Amazon could reach a "tipping point" when severe droughts coupled with forest fires lead to large-scale loss of trees, making recovery more difficult, said Jennifer Balch, a geographer at Penn State University.
"We documented one of the highest tree mortality rates witnessed in Amazon forests," Balch said. "Over the course of our experiment, 60 percent of the trees died with combined drought and repeated fire.
"Our results suggest that a perfect firestorm, caused by drought conditions and previous fire disturbance, crossed a threshold in forest resistance."
The researchers conclude in today's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that "efforts to end deforestation in the Amazon must be accompanied by programs and policies that reduce the accidental spread of land management fires into neighboring forests--and effectively control forest fires when started."
Balch noted that climate change is expected to warm the air in the Amazon region by several degrees and substantially reduce regional precipitation, making understanding the interactions between droughts and fires even more important.
"However, before any prediction of Amazon climate warming occurs, our study demonstrates that drought and fire are already driving forest dieback," she said.
The eight-year study is the largest and longest-running fire experiment in tropical forests. The researchers burned 50-hectare forest plots in the Southeastern Amazon, a region prone to the effects of climate change.
"If drought and wildfires happen in the same time-frame, there are far-reaching consequences for the health of Amazon forests," said Henry Gholz, a program director in the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. "When climate change becomes part of the mix, questions for these forests loom yet larger."
The plots were burned every year, every three years, or not at all. The timeframe for the study included 2007, a year of severe drought.
By comparing the tree deaths for the plots each year, the researchers could assess the effect of drought on fire intensity and tree deaths.
"Drought causes more intense and widespread fires," said lead PNAS paper author Paulo Brando of the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia, Carnegie Institution for Science, and Woods Hole Research Center.
"Four times more adult trees were killed by fire during a drought year, which means that there was also more carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere, more tree species loss and a greater likelihood of grasses invading the forest."
The researchers found that fragmented forests are more susceptible to the effects of drought and fire, and that drought leads to an increase in fuel such as leaves and branches.
The findings are key, in part, because most climate change models have not included the effects of fires on Amazon forests.
"Basically, none of the models used to evaluate future Amazon forest health includes fire, so most of these predictions underestimate the amount of tree death and overestimate overall forest health," said Michael Coe, a scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center.
Fire as a forest management tool can contribute to an increase in severe fires because the resulting thinner canopy leads to drier forest conditions.
This lack of humidity does not dampen fires but does encourage airflow between fields and forests. Fragmented forests also have more edge space, which is susceptible to both fire and invasive grasses, another potential fuel.
"These forests are tough and can take a lot, but if drought reaches a certain level, big trees begin to die," said Daniel Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute, who also co-led the project. "We now know that severe drought makes fires more intense, creating a second tree mortality threshold."
The results are important because large portions of the Amazon forest already experience droughts and are susceptible to fire--they are broken into smaller blocks by agriculture and are close to human settlements, the predominant source of fire in the Amazon.
The researchers analyzed NASA satellite data to provide regional context for results from the experimental burns.
"In 2007, fires in Southeast Amazonia burned 10 times more forest than in an average climate year -- an area equivalent to a million soccer fields," said scientist Douglas Morton of NASA.
"These smaller forest fragments have more edges than large blocks of forest, which expose them to the hotter, drier conditions in the surrounding landscape and make them more vulnerable to escaped fires," said researcher Marcia Macedo of the Woods Hole Research Center.
By 2011, about eight percent of Southeast Amazonia's forests were less than 328 feet from an agricultural or pasture clearing. This lattice-like network of degraded forest edges is now very susceptible to future fires.
The research was also funded by the Packard Foundation, NASA and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.
-NSF-
Saturday, March 22, 2014
EARLY VENOMOUS SNAKE FOSSILS FOUND IN AFRICA
FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Snakes Alive! NSF-funded researchers find oldest fossil evidence of modern African venomous snakes
Seasonal habitats may have given rise to active hunters earlier than previously reported
National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers at Ohio University have found the oldest definitive fossil evidence of modern, venomous snakes in Africa. The newly discovered fossil was unearthed in the Rukwa Rift Basin of Tanzania. The research results were published in PLOS ONE.
The lead author, Jacob McCartney, and his coauthors note that these findings demonstrate that elapid snakes, such as cobras, kraits and sea snakes--were present in Africa as early as 25 million years ago.
Elapids belong to a larger group of snakes known as colubrids--active foragers that use a variety of methods, including venom to capture and kill prey.
The team was surprised to discover higher-than-expected concentrations of colubroid snakes, suggesting the local environment was more open and seasonally dry, thus more hospitable to these types of active hunting snakes that don't require cover to ambush prey like boas and pythons do.
They say it also points to a fundamental shift toward more rapid venom delivery mechanisms to exert very different pressures on the local fauna.
-- Dena Headlee, National Science Foundation
Snakes Alive! NSF-funded researchers find oldest fossil evidence of modern African venomous snakes
Seasonal habitats may have given rise to active hunters earlier than previously reported
National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers at Ohio University have found the oldest definitive fossil evidence of modern, venomous snakes in Africa. The newly discovered fossil was unearthed in the Rukwa Rift Basin of Tanzania. The research results were published in PLOS ONE.
The lead author, Jacob McCartney, and his coauthors note that these findings demonstrate that elapid snakes, such as cobras, kraits and sea snakes--were present in Africa as early as 25 million years ago.
Elapids belong to a larger group of snakes known as colubrids--active foragers that use a variety of methods, including venom to capture and kill prey.
The team was surprised to discover higher-than-expected concentrations of colubroid snakes, suggesting the local environment was more open and seasonally dry, thus more hospitable to these types of active hunting snakes that don't require cover to ambush prey like boas and pythons do.
They say it also points to a fundamental shift toward more rapid venom delivery mechanisms to exert very different pressures on the local fauna.
-- Dena Headlee, National Science Foundation
Saturday, March 15, 2014
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY USES FUEL CELLS TO INVESTIGATE ORIGINS OF LIFE
FROM: NASA
How Did Life Arise? Fuel Cells May Have Answers
How life arose from the toxic and inhospitable environment of our planet billions of years ago remains a deep mystery. Researchers have simulated the conditions of an early Earth in test tubes, even fashioning some of life's basic ingredients. But how those ingredients assembled into living cells, and how life was first able to generate energy, remain unknown.
A new study led by Laurie Barge of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., demonstrates a unique way to study the origins of life: fuel cells.
Fuel cells are found in specialized cars, planes and NASA's human spacecraft, such as the now-retired space shuttle. The cells are similar to batteries in generating electricity and power, but they require fuel, such as hydrogen gas. In the new study, the fuel cells are not used for power, but for testing chemical reactions thought to have led to the development of life.
"Something about Earth led to life, and we think one important factor was that the planet provides electrical energy at the seafloor," said Barge. "This energy could have kick-started life -- and could have sustained life after it arose. Now, we have a way of testing different materials and environments that could have helped life arise not just on Earth, but possibly on Mars, Europa and other places in the solar system."
Barge is a member of the JPL Icy Worlds team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, based at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The team's paper appears online March 13 in the journal Astrobiology.
One of the basic functions of life as we know it is the ability to store and use energy. In cells, this is a form of metabolism and involves the transfer of electrons from one molecule to another. The process is at work in our own bodies, giving us energy.
Fuel cells are similar to biological cells in that electrons are also transferred to and from molecules. In both cases, this results in electricity and power. In order for a fuel cell to work, it needs fuel, such as hydrogen gas, along with electrodes and catalysts, which help transfer the electrons. Electrons are transferred from an electron donor (such as hydrogen) to an electron acceptor (such as oxygen), resulting in current. In your cells, metal-containing enzymes -- your biological catalysts -- transfer electrons and generate energy for life.
In the team’s experiments, the fuel cell electrodes and catalysts are made of primitive geological material thought to have existed on early Earth. If this material can help transfer electrons, the researchers will observe an electrical current. By testing different types of materials, these fuel cell experiments allow the scientists to narrow in on the chemistry that might have taken place when life first arose on Earth.
"What we are proposing here is to simulate energetic processes, which could bridge the gap between the geological processes of the early Earth and the emergence of biological life on this planet," said Terry Kee from the University of Leeds, England, one of the co-authors of the research paper.
"We're going back in time to test specific minerals such as those containing iron and nickel, which would have been common on the early Earth and could have led to biological metabolism," said Barge.
The researchers also tested material from little lab-grown "chimneys," simulating the huge structures that grow from the hydrothermal vents that line ocean floors. These "chemical gardens" are possible locations for pre-life chemical reactions.
When the team used material from the lab-grown chimneys in the fuel cells, electrical currents were detected. Barge said that this is a preliminary test, showing that the hydrothermal chimneys formed on early Earth can transfer electrons – and therefore, may drive some of the first energetic reactions leading to metabolism.
The experiments also showed that the fuel cells can be used to test other materials from our ancient Earth. And if life did arise on other planets, those conditions can be tested, too.
"We can just swap in an ocean and minerals that might have existed on early Mars," said Barge. "Since fuel cells are modular -- meaning, you can easily replace pieces with other pieces -- we can use these techniques to investigate any planet’s potential to kick-start life."
At JPL, fuel cells are not only for the study of life, but are also being developed for long-term human space travel. Hydrogen fuel cells can produce water, which can be recycled and used as fuel again. Researchers are experimenting with these advanced regenerative fuel cells, which are highly efficient and offer long-lasting power.
Thomas I. Valdez, who is developing regenerative fuel cells at JPL, said, "I think it is great that we can transition techniques used to study reactions in fuel cells to areas such as astrobiology."
Other authors of the paper are: Ivria J. Doloboff, Chung-Kuang Lin, Richard D. Kidd and Isik Kanik of the JPL Icy Worlds team; Joshua M. P. Hampton of the University of Leeds School of Chemistry, Mohammed Ismail and Mohamed Pourkashanian at the University of Leeds Centre for Fluid Dynamics; John Zeytounian of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and Marc M. Baum and John A. Moss of the Oak Crest Institute of Science, Pasadena.
JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for NASA.
How Did Life Arise? Fuel Cells May Have Answers
How life arose from the toxic and inhospitable environment of our planet billions of years ago remains a deep mystery. Researchers have simulated the conditions of an early Earth in test tubes, even fashioning some of life's basic ingredients. But how those ingredients assembled into living cells, and how life was first able to generate energy, remain unknown.
A new study led by Laurie Barge of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., demonstrates a unique way to study the origins of life: fuel cells.
Fuel cells are found in specialized cars, planes and NASA's human spacecraft, such as the now-retired space shuttle. The cells are similar to batteries in generating electricity and power, but they require fuel, such as hydrogen gas. In the new study, the fuel cells are not used for power, but for testing chemical reactions thought to have led to the development of life.
"Something about Earth led to life, and we think one important factor was that the planet provides electrical energy at the seafloor," said Barge. "This energy could have kick-started life -- and could have sustained life after it arose. Now, we have a way of testing different materials and environments that could have helped life arise not just on Earth, but possibly on Mars, Europa and other places in the solar system."
Barge is a member of the JPL Icy Worlds team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, based at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The team's paper appears online March 13 in the journal Astrobiology.
One of the basic functions of life as we know it is the ability to store and use energy. In cells, this is a form of metabolism and involves the transfer of electrons from one molecule to another. The process is at work in our own bodies, giving us energy.
Fuel cells are similar to biological cells in that electrons are also transferred to and from molecules. In both cases, this results in electricity and power. In order for a fuel cell to work, it needs fuel, such as hydrogen gas, along with electrodes and catalysts, which help transfer the electrons. Electrons are transferred from an electron donor (such as hydrogen) to an electron acceptor (such as oxygen), resulting in current. In your cells, metal-containing enzymes -- your biological catalysts -- transfer electrons and generate energy for life.
In the team’s experiments, the fuel cell electrodes and catalysts are made of primitive geological material thought to have existed on early Earth. If this material can help transfer electrons, the researchers will observe an electrical current. By testing different types of materials, these fuel cell experiments allow the scientists to narrow in on the chemistry that might have taken place when life first arose on Earth.
"What we are proposing here is to simulate energetic processes, which could bridge the gap between the geological processes of the early Earth and the emergence of biological life on this planet," said Terry Kee from the University of Leeds, England, one of the co-authors of the research paper.
"We're going back in time to test specific minerals such as those containing iron and nickel, which would have been common on the early Earth and could have led to biological metabolism," said Barge.
The researchers also tested material from little lab-grown "chimneys," simulating the huge structures that grow from the hydrothermal vents that line ocean floors. These "chemical gardens" are possible locations for pre-life chemical reactions.
When the team used material from the lab-grown chimneys in the fuel cells, electrical currents were detected. Barge said that this is a preliminary test, showing that the hydrothermal chimneys formed on early Earth can transfer electrons – and therefore, may drive some of the first energetic reactions leading to metabolism.
The experiments also showed that the fuel cells can be used to test other materials from our ancient Earth. And if life did arise on other planets, those conditions can be tested, too.
"We can just swap in an ocean and minerals that might have existed on early Mars," said Barge. "Since fuel cells are modular -- meaning, you can easily replace pieces with other pieces -- we can use these techniques to investigate any planet’s potential to kick-start life."
At JPL, fuel cells are not only for the study of life, but are also being developed for long-term human space travel. Hydrogen fuel cells can produce water, which can be recycled and used as fuel again. Researchers are experimenting with these advanced regenerative fuel cells, which are highly efficient and offer long-lasting power.
Thomas I. Valdez, who is developing regenerative fuel cells at JPL, said, "I think it is great that we can transition techniques used to study reactions in fuel cells to areas such as astrobiology."
Other authors of the paper are: Ivria J. Doloboff, Chung-Kuang Lin, Richard D. Kidd and Isik Kanik of the JPL Icy Worlds team; Joshua M. P. Hampton of the University of Leeds School of Chemistry, Mohammed Ismail and Mohamed Pourkashanian at the University of Leeds Centre for Fluid Dynamics; John Zeytounian of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and Marc M. Baum and John A. Moss of the Oak Crest Institute of Science, Pasadena.
JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for NASA.
Friday, February 28, 2014
SECRETARY KERRY'S REMARKS WITH COLOMBIAN FOREIGN MINISTER HOLGUIN
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Remarks With Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Holguin at the Fourth Annual U.S.-Colombia High-Level Partnership Dialogue
Remarks
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Benjamin Franklin Room
Washington, DC
February 28, 2014
ASSISTANT SECRETARY JACOBSON: Well, good morning, everyone. Buenos dias, bienvenido. I hope that everybody’s here ready to work.
I’m delighted this morning to inaugurate, to kick off this next round of the high-level partnership dialogue that we have with Colombia in which we have many working groups today that will discuss everything from environment to energy to culture and education to human rights. This really demonstrates the breadth of our relationship with Colombia. And I’m also delighted to have Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin here to head the Colombian delegation.
So without further ado, I will turn this over to our headliners and introduce Secretary of State John Kerry.
SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, thank you. (Applause.) Thank you.
Buenos dias, good morning, everybody. Welcome. We are really very, very happy to have this bilateral meeting here today and this opportunity to continue the dialogue with ourselves and Colombia. And I am particularly happy to welcome Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin and the distinguished delegation that is accompanying her. We’re happy to have you all here.
Last summer I had the great pleasure of meeting Minister Holguin in Colombia and experiencing the incredible dynamism of the country, the generous welcome that they gave me visiting, a number of different activities. One particularly struck me. I went to a training center where physically challenged athletes, particularly veterans of their efforts against narcotics and also in the insurgency, were gaining new skills and learning how to train and work together as a team and deal with their new physical challenges. And it was really very, very moving, extremely professional, and fun. And I got to play a couple of games with them and it was a good exchange. So I really enjoyed it, and overall, could not have had a more generous welcome to a country that I know well by virtue of years of working in the Senate on Plan Colombia and going through a number of presidential races.
And I can remember going back in time to serious, serious security challenges. I mean, there are still challenges, but this was existential to the government. And it was great courage – great courage – leadership and courage by the Colombian people that really brought Colombia to a place now of incredible energy, growth, increased stability, and really playing a very significant role in the hemisphere and elsewhere. And we are very admiring of this journey, I must tell you.
So it’s a pleasure for me to be able to return the favor of that welcome and be able to host the delegation here today. President Obama spoke about Colombia’s bold and brave efforts to bring about a lasting and just peace. And I had an opportunity to see that courage firsthand. I met with the troops at the airport, saw how they deploy, what they do, got firsthand briefings, met with many of the Colombian people themselves. And so for me, it was a moving visit and one which really cemented in my mind the importance of what we’re doing here today and of this relationship.
I’m particularly proud of two major investments that the United States is announcing today to help transform all of our hopes into greater opportunities for Colombia’s citizens. And today, we are making a four-year, $15 million investment to some of the regions that are hardest hit by conflict in order to improve access to justice and to support local governments as they combat corruption and human rights violations. We’re announcing an additional $7 million in support to help implement Colombia’s landmark Victims’ Law, because we believe that addressing difficult issues like land restitution is absolutely essential for an enduring peace to be able to take hold.
Now, sometimes, when you talk about large investments like these, it’s easy to lose sight of the real people that this money will affect, the lives that it may have an opportunity to be able to transform, literally. So I want to give you an example.
Fanny del Socorro Valencia and her husband, Elid, who were some of the first Colombians to benefit from the Victims’ Law, years ago, because of the violence, they had to abandon everything that they held dear – their land, their livelihood, and even many of their loved ones. And because of the efforts that we are helping to support today, Fanny and Elid are back on their land. And Fanny said that years ago she stopped listening to the radio because all she heard was announcements of funerals for her friends and her neighbors. Now, she says, she can get back to listening to music, and like so many other Colombians, she can get back to living in peace.
As the lives of more Colombians change for the better, so does our partnership. No longer is that partnership defined solely by confronting criminality and subversion, but frankly, by working on the lasting prosperity that we are working to provide for people together in our efforts. And the kind of progress that we’re making on trade is really a preview of what is possible for a whole range of areas that we’re discussing today. I want you just to think for a moment about what we have accomplished. In the two short years of the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, since it’s been on the books, trade has increased 18 percent. Today, because of the Andean Free Trade Preference Act, nearly all Colombian goods benefit from duty-free access to our markets, and 775 new Colombian companies are exporting to the United States.
We’re also creating new opportunities working together on energy and the environment. Since Colombia put forward its Copenhagen targets in 2010, we have collaborated on a strategy that has helped Colombia to meet ambitious targets for both emissions mitigation and economic growth at the same time. They don’t have to contradict each other. The truth is that moving to reduce emissions and moving to implement good environmental practices actually opens up enormous economic opportunity and can create jobs as well as new procedures, new technologies. And with our larger efforts to link energy markets and develop unconventional energy sources and deliver affordable power across the Americas, our partnership can actually prove what is possible when you take environment and energy and put them together and make the right choices.
We also show a shared commitment to preserving our resources for future generations with the MOU that we sign today linking our national park services. I think we can also look to the future by deepening our partnership in areas that are critical in a more interconnected and competitive global economy by expanding cooperation on information and communications technology. And launching a senior-level steering group today in order to advance those efforts, we are delivering on some of the most important commitments that Presidents Obama and Santos made last December.
As we expand our relationship in these new areas, the United States is also expanding our engagement with the Colombian people directly. Our Economic and Social Opportunities Working Group is reviewing how we can support that goal by reaching out to vulnerable populations, including Afro-Colombians, indigenous communities, and women. And we’re also deepening connections between our two peoples through the educational exchange with 100,000 Strong in the Americas, the Fulbright Scholarships, the Martin Luther King Fellow Program, and the English Access Microscholarships.
Underlying all of our cooperation is our shared commitment to protecting fundamental human rights. And today, we will continue our ongoing dialogue on strengthening democratic governance, combating impunity, protecting victims of conflict, and cooperating to affirm a human rights within the OAS and beyond our hemisphere.
The fact that Colombia is the only nation in South America which, like the United States, faces both the Atlantic and the Pacific, it really serves as a reminder of an important perspective and an important set of principles that we share in common. As we look on our sort of shared horizons – two of them – and the enormous opportunities that they present us for the future, there’s no question in my mind that this relationship has special value, special importance, has a special place in this hemisphere, and we really look forward to developing further this partnership and this friendship.
I think it’s my pleasure – am I introducing – well, without further ado, let me introduce my colleague and cohort and partner and friend, Maria Angela Holguin. (Applause.)
FOREIGN MINISTER HOLGUIN: Thank you very much, Secretary Kerry.
(Via interpreter) Thank you so much, Secretary Kerry. Ladies and gentlemen, delegates, officials of the Government of the United States, Mr. Ambassador of Colombia, dear friends – Mr. Secretary, the fact that I’m here starting this high-level dialogue is something very pleasant for me, for my delegation, and for Colombia. We have been able to diversify our bilateral agenda, including other topics such as technology, communications, telecommunications, the environment. We have been able to have an agenda with cooperation and securities.
We’re extremely thankful to the United States, thanks to the support it gave to Colombia in very difficult times. I am convinced that my delegation is in agreement when I say that we are very thankful to the United States, because today, we have a country full of opportunities, a country that opens up to the world, a country that wants progress, stability, the opportunities for all its inhabitants – it’s thanks also to that great effort that you made because you followed us during some very difficult times for us in Colombia during the government of President Santos.
We have promoted a very profound transformation in our country with growth, with equality and prosperity, and we have found reconciliation amongst Colombians. You talked about the law on land, of the victims, and I think that this is one of the most important steps that we have taken toward reconciliation. This is something that the state had to give its victims, and which fortunately, President Santos was able to make that necessary step and today, little by little. You mentioned a case, as many other thousands of cases. This is the path towards the reconciliation of all Colombians. We want a peaceful Colombia. We want opportunities for everybody with justice, equality, open to the region and the entire world.
The changes that we’ve had in the last few years have allowed us to find a position whereby we have greater investments. We have grown our production and our tourism. I would like to mention some of these attainments. We have created 2,300,000 jobs and 1,300,000 people have left extreme poverty, and as well as many other people – 2,500,000 have left poverty. Obviously, we have to give all this sustainability, and the government has created a series of programs that are focused on the generation of employment, training, education, health, and so on. We have had four of these high-level dialogues with the United States. We want to keep this high-level. And of course, we’ve had tangible results. We have also made our relationship even deeper.
Let’s talk about some of our attainments in the energetic field. We signed the Memorandum of Agreement between the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Department of Energy, where we have tried to make sure that the exploitations of hydrocarbons is very important, the nonconventional ones. This is a work plan that is important to us because we want to be more competitive in terms of energy, and what better than having you with us in this undertaking? Colombia is totally convinced of the importance of the electrical interconnection in the Americas – we’ve talked about this with your delegation – to diversify our energetic forces. We want to take electricity, hydro-electricities from our Andean Mountains to California, going through Central America and the Caribbean. We do not want a single one of our citizens to live without energy in their home. This is one of our attainments. In the 21st century, we have to make sure that this never happens.
In terms of the environment – the environment and the climate change – we want to remember the memorandum of cooperation in 2013. As you were saying, the climate change has been terrible and we have had severe damage that we’ve all lived through. We have to take the necessary measures. We’re working in a very committed fashion and we want to make sure that we collaborate with you.
In terms of opportunities in order for our third dialogue at – high-level dialogue, the United States presented a small business network program, SBNA. This is an initiative that the United States shared with us, and it has a very positive repercussion in our country. We also signed a memorandum in 2012 and 2013. We created the Center for Development and Job Creation in Aguablanca in Cali. This is a model that also included the small- and medium-sized industries with the community, academia, the private enterprise with an investment of about $1 million with the ministry of commerce, industry and tourism, and the town administration of Cali.
These are the efforts that we have to continue with so that we can help our small businessmen and businesswomen. We also have to create techniques whereby we can train a number of people. We want to replicate the model of the 400 units for business creation in our country so that they can become centers for small businesses.
In terms of human rights, we also had a memorandum which was signed in the Presidential Program for Human Rights, USAID, and this – and we were able to use – we were able to do this with the observatory for the national system of information in Colombia. In the next few years, we know that we still have quite a lot to do in terms of making sure that this moves ahead. Our country was also part of the Cancer Research Network with the United States and Latin America as part of its commitment, and the – with our National Institute of Health and the Ministry of Health.
These are the type of projects that we hope to be able to take forth because these are all of great help for Colombia. This version of the high-level dialogue brings to fruition many of the initiatives that were discussed by President Santos and Obama – in particular, technologies, information technology, and telecommunications.
Today, I would like to talk about the launch of the executive committee for the plan of action and the group of – the work group between Colombia and the United States in terms of technologies, the information technologies and telecommunications. This is an initiative that started during the meeting between our presidents in December. Through this committee, we know that we will have the participation of big companies, technological companies, academia, and so on. We hope to be able to have this type of exchange so that we can reach the development of better applications and digital solutions so that the Colombian population, especially those people that have lower incomes, are able to have access to this technology.
We also have signed an agreement whereby 15 percent of our natural parks are protected, and we have great potential here because our natural parks can promote tourism. Mr. Secretary, we have to work so that there is more and more people – there are more and more people from the United States that come to visit Colombia and its national parks. The 2014 science, technology, and innovation plan will be the roadmap for our scientists, and linking up our scientists, the research centers and universities between our countries so that they can focus on the sector of agriculture and health. We want to become a totally bilingual country in terms of education, where English is taught in all of our schools. We also want to attract Colombians that come to Colombia to learn Spanish. We want to make sure that we can simplify all the procedures for us to be able to do this. We want to make sure that there are quite a few student exchanges between students in Latin America.
I would also like you to take advantage of this wonderful meeting so that we can follow up on all the activities that we started, so that we can promote new areas where we can strengthen our cooperation. Colombia is undoubtedly an example of how a country that has lived through decades of violence, yet we have been able to maintain and strengthen our institutions. We have kept a solid democracy, and we have found a way to grow, overcoming poverty. This has been done thanks to the cooperation of the United States. We have been able to recover our national security.
Mr. Secretary, thank you kindly for your hospitality. Thank you to all the officials who made this meeting possible. I would like to reiterate my conviction that this will only make our bilateral relationship deeper. Thank you. (Applause.)
ASSISTANT SECRETARY JACOBSON: I thank the Secretary and the Foreign Minister, and I think with those words of inspiration we all need to get to work. Thank you all very much, and good luck today.
SECRETARY KERRY: I’d like to just mention very quickly – I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about visas and things. I don’t know. (Laughter.) Anyway, I want you to know that the foreign minister has a good judgment – or her son has a great judgment – to be studying in Boston. He’s part of the 100,000 Strong – (laughter) – so we’re in great shape. (Applause.)
Remarks With Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Holguin at the Fourth Annual U.S.-Colombia High-Level Partnership Dialogue
Remarks
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Benjamin Franklin Room
Washington, DC
February 28, 2014
ASSISTANT SECRETARY JACOBSON: Well, good morning, everyone. Buenos dias, bienvenido. I hope that everybody’s here ready to work.
I’m delighted this morning to inaugurate, to kick off this next round of the high-level partnership dialogue that we have with Colombia in which we have many working groups today that will discuss everything from environment to energy to culture and education to human rights. This really demonstrates the breadth of our relationship with Colombia. And I’m also delighted to have Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin here to head the Colombian delegation.
So without further ado, I will turn this over to our headliners and introduce Secretary of State John Kerry.
SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, thank you. (Applause.) Thank you.
Buenos dias, good morning, everybody. Welcome. We are really very, very happy to have this bilateral meeting here today and this opportunity to continue the dialogue with ourselves and Colombia. And I am particularly happy to welcome Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin and the distinguished delegation that is accompanying her. We’re happy to have you all here.
Last summer I had the great pleasure of meeting Minister Holguin in Colombia and experiencing the incredible dynamism of the country, the generous welcome that they gave me visiting, a number of different activities. One particularly struck me. I went to a training center where physically challenged athletes, particularly veterans of their efforts against narcotics and also in the insurgency, were gaining new skills and learning how to train and work together as a team and deal with their new physical challenges. And it was really very, very moving, extremely professional, and fun. And I got to play a couple of games with them and it was a good exchange. So I really enjoyed it, and overall, could not have had a more generous welcome to a country that I know well by virtue of years of working in the Senate on Plan Colombia and going through a number of presidential races.
And I can remember going back in time to serious, serious security challenges. I mean, there are still challenges, but this was existential to the government. And it was great courage – great courage – leadership and courage by the Colombian people that really brought Colombia to a place now of incredible energy, growth, increased stability, and really playing a very significant role in the hemisphere and elsewhere. And we are very admiring of this journey, I must tell you.
So it’s a pleasure for me to be able to return the favor of that welcome and be able to host the delegation here today. President Obama spoke about Colombia’s bold and brave efforts to bring about a lasting and just peace. And I had an opportunity to see that courage firsthand. I met with the troops at the airport, saw how they deploy, what they do, got firsthand briefings, met with many of the Colombian people themselves. And so for me, it was a moving visit and one which really cemented in my mind the importance of what we’re doing here today and of this relationship.
I’m particularly proud of two major investments that the United States is announcing today to help transform all of our hopes into greater opportunities for Colombia’s citizens. And today, we are making a four-year, $15 million investment to some of the regions that are hardest hit by conflict in order to improve access to justice and to support local governments as they combat corruption and human rights violations. We’re announcing an additional $7 million in support to help implement Colombia’s landmark Victims’ Law, because we believe that addressing difficult issues like land restitution is absolutely essential for an enduring peace to be able to take hold.
Now, sometimes, when you talk about large investments like these, it’s easy to lose sight of the real people that this money will affect, the lives that it may have an opportunity to be able to transform, literally. So I want to give you an example.
Fanny del Socorro Valencia and her husband, Elid, who were some of the first Colombians to benefit from the Victims’ Law, years ago, because of the violence, they had to abandon everything that they held dear – their land, their livelihood, and even many of their loved ones. And because of the efforts that we are helping to support today, Fanny and Elid are back on their land. And Fanny said that years ago she stopped listening to the radio because all she heard was announcements of funerals for her friends and her neighbors. Now, she says, she can get back to listening to music, and like so many other Colombians, she can get back to living in peace.
As the lives of more Colombians change for the better, so does our partnership. No longer is that partnership defined solely by confronting criminality and subversion, but frankly, by working on the lasting prosperity that we are working to provide for people together in our efforts. And the kind of progress that we’re making on trade is really a preview of what is possible for a whole range of areas that we’re discussing today. I want you just to think for a moment about what we have accomplished. In the two short years of the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, since it’s been on the books, trade has increased 18 percent. Today, because of the Andean Free Trade Preference Act, nearly all Colombian goods benefit from duty-free access to our markets, and 775 new Colombian companies are exporting to the United States.
We’re also creating new opportunities working together on energy and the environment. Since Colombia put forward its Copenhagen targets in 2010, we have collaborated on a strategy that has helped Colombia to meet ambitious targets for both emissions mitigation and economic growth at the same time. They don’t have to contradict each other. The truth is that moving to reduce emissions and moving to implement good environmental practices actually opens up enormous economic opportunity and can create jobs as well as new procedures, new technologies. And with our larger efforts to link energy markets and develop unconventional energy sources and deliver affordable power across the Americas, our partnership can actually prove what is possible when you take environment and energy and put them together and make the right choices.
We also show a shared commitment to preserving our resources for future generations with the MOU that we sign today linking our national park services. I think we can also look to the future by deepening our partnership in areas that are critical in a more interconnected and competitive global economy by expanding cooperation on information and communications technology. And launching a senior-level steering group today in order to advance those efforts, we are delivering on some of the most important commitments that Presidents Obama and Santos made last December.
As we expand our relationship in these new areas, the United States is also expanding our engagement with the Colombian people directly. Our Economic and Social Opportunities Working Group is reviewing how we can support that goal by reaching out to vulnerable populations, including Afro-Colombians, indigenous communities, and women. And we’re also deepening connections between our two peoples through the educational exchange with 100,000 Strong in the Americas, the Fulbright Scholarships, the Martin Luther King Fellow Program, and the English Access Microscholarships.
Underlying all of our cooperation is our shared commitment to protecting fundamental human rights. And today, we will continue our ongoing dialogue on strengthening democratic governance, combating impunity, protecting victims of conflict, and cooperating to affirm a human rights within the OAS and beyond our hemisphere.
The fact that Colombia is the only nation in South America which, like the United States, faces both the Atlantic and the Pacific, it really serves as a reminder of an important perspective and an important set of principles that we share in common. As we look on our sort of shared horizons – two of them – and the enormous opportunities that they present us for the future, there’s no question in my mind that this relationship has special value, special importance, has a special place in this hemisphere, and we really look forward to developing further this partnership and this friendship.
I think it’s my pleasure – am I introducing – well, without further ado, let me introduce my colleague and cohort and partner and friend, Maria Angela Holguin. (Applause.)
FOREIGN MINISTER HOLGUIN: Thank you very much, Secretary Kerry.
(Via interpreter) Thank you so much, Secretary Kerry. Ladies and gentlemen, delegates, officials of the Government of the United States, Mr. Ambassador of Colombia, dear friends – Mr. Secretary, the fact that I’m here starting this high-level dialogue is something very pleasant for me, for my delegation, and for Colombia. We have been able to diversify our bilateral agenda, including other topics such as technology, communications, telecommunications, the environment. We have been able to have an agenda with cooperation and securities.
We’re extremely thankful to the United States, thanks to the support it gave to Colombia in very difficult times. I am convinced that my delegation is in agreement when I say that we are very thankful to the United States, because today, we have a country full of opportunities, a country that opens up to the world, a country that wants progress, stability, the opportunities for all its inhabitants – it’s thanks also to that great effort that you made because you followed us during some very difficult times for us in Colombia during the government of President Santos.
We have promoted a very profound transformation in our country with growth, with equality and prosperity, and we have found reconciliation amongst Colombians. You talked about the law on land, of the victims, and I think that this is one of the most important steps that we have taken toward reconciliation. This is something that the state had to give its victims, and which fortunately, President Santos was able to make that necessary step and today, little by little. You mentioned a case, as many other thousands of cases. This is the path towards the reconciliation of all Colombians. We want a peaceful Colombia. We want opportunities for everybody with justice, equality, open to the region and the entire world.
The changes that we’ve had in the last few years have allowed us to find a position whereby we have greater investments. We have grown our production and our tourism. I would like to mention some of these attainments. We have created 2,300,000 jobs and 1,300,000 people have left extreme poverty, and as well as many other people – 2,500,000 have left poverty. Obviously, we have to give all this sustainability, and the government has created a series of programs that are focused on the generation of employment, training, education, health, and so on. We have had four of these high-level dialogues with the United States. We want to keep this high-level. And of course, we’ve had tangible results. We have also made our relationship even deeper.
Let’s talk about some of our attainments in the energetic field. We signed the Memorandum of Agreement between the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Department of Energy, where we have tried to make sure that the exploitations of hydrocarbons is very important, the nonconventional ones. This is a work plan that is important to us because we want to be more competitive in terms of energy, and what better than having you with us in this undertaking? Colombia is totally convinced of the importance of the electrical interconnection in the Americas – we’ve talked about this with your delegation – to diversify our energetic forces. We want to take electricity, hydro-electricities from our Andean Mountains to California, going through Central America and the Caribbean. We do not want a single one of our citizens to live without energy in their home. This is one of our attainments. In the 21st century, we have to make sure that this never happens.
In terms of the environment – the environment and the climate change – we want to remember the memorandum of cooperation in 2013. As you were saying, the climate change has been terrible and we have had severe damage that we’ve all lived through. We have to take the necessary measures. We’re working in a very committed fashion and we want to make sure that we collaborate with you.
In terms of opportunities in order for our third dialogue at – high-level dialogue, the United States presented a small business network program, SBNA. This is an initiative that the United States shared with us, and it has a very positive repercussion in our country. We also signed a memorandum in 2012 and 2013. We created the Center for Development and Job Creation in Aguablanca in Cali. This is a model that also included the small- and medium-sized industries with the community, academia, the private enterprise with an investment of about $1 million with the ministry of commerce, industry and tourism, and the town administration of Cali.
These are the efforts that we have to continue with so that we can help our small businessmen and businesswomen. We also have to create techniques whereby we can train a number of people. We want to replicate the model of the 400 units for business creation in our country so that they can become centers for small businesses.
In terms of human rights, we also had a memorandum which was signed in the Presidential Program for Human Rights, USAID, and this – and we were able to use – we were able to do this with the observatory for the national system of information in Colombia. In the next few years, we know that we still have quite a lot to do in terms of making sure that this moves ahead. Our country was also part of the Cancer Research Network with the United States and Latin America as part of its commitment, and the – with our National Institute of Health and the Ministry of Health.
These are the type of projects that we hope to be able to take forth because these are all of great help for Colombia. This version of the high-level dialogue brings to fruition many of the initiatives that were discussed by President Santos and Obama – in particular, technologies, information technology, and telecommunications.
Today, I would like to talk about the launch of the executive committee for the plan of action and the group of – the work group between Colombia and the United States in terms of technologies, the information technologies and telecommunications. This is an initiative that started during the meeting between our presidents in December. Through this committee, we know that we will have the participation of big companies, technological companies, academia, and so on. We hope to be able to have this type of exchange so that we can reach the development of better applications and digital solutions so that the Colombian population, especially those people that have lower incomes, are able to have access to this technology.
We also have signed an agreement whereby 15 percent of our natural parks are protected, and we have great potential here because our natural parks can promote tourism. Mr. Secretary, we have to work so that there is more and more people – there are more and more people from the United States that come to visit Colombia and its national parks. The 2014 science, technology, and innovation plan will be the roadmap for our scientists, and linking up our scientists, the research centers and universities between our countries so that they can focus on the sector of agriculture and health. We want to become a totally bilingual country in terms of education, where English is taught in all of our schools. We also want to attract Colombians that come to Colombia to learn Spanish. We want to make sure that we can simplify all the procedures for us to be able to do this. We want to make sure that there are quite a few student exchanges between students in Latin America.
I would also like you to take advantage of this wonderful meeting so that we can follow up on all the activities that we started, so that we can promote new areas where we can strengthen our cooperation. Colombia is undoubtedly an example of how a country that has lived through decades of violence, yet we have been able to maintain and strengthen our institutions. We have kept a solid democracy, and we have found a way to grow, overcoming poverty. This has been done thanks to the cooperation of the United States. We have been able to recover our national security.
Mr. Secretary, thank you kindly for your hospitality. Thank you to all the officials who made this meeting possible. I would like to reiterate my conviction that this will only make our bilateral relationship deeper. Thank you. (Applause.)
ASSISTANT SECRETARY JACOBSON: I thank the Secretary and the Foreign Minister, and I think with those words of inspiration we all need to get to work. Thank you all very much, and good luck today.
SECRETARY KERRY: I’d like to just mention very quickly – I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about visas and things. I don’t know. (Laughter.) Anyway, I want you to know that the foreign minister has a good judgment – or her son has a great judgment – to be studying in Boston. He’s part of the 100,000 Strong – (laughter) – so we’re in great shape. (Applause.)
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