Fwd: Iran war oil spills on the rise
Loretta Lohman
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The war in Iran is causing more oil to leak into the sea. It’s a cause of concern for ecologists and experts using satellite images to track the increasing amount of slicks. Today’s newsletter looks at the risk of an environmental disaster in the Persian Gulf, a part of the world that’s been heavily polluted from previous wars. We also look at shareholder activism, with some groups pressing Big Tech giants to use green energy sources for data centers — and others shutting down. Subscribe to Bloomberg for unlimited access to all our stories. Persian Gulf slicks growBy Laura Millan Ecologists are concerned that the war in the Middle East risks creating an environmental disaster, as satellite images show that the number of oil slicks in the Persian Gulf has increased significantly since the beginning of the conflict in the region in late February. “If it disperses towards a coastal system, that’s going to have detrimental impacts to any bird species, fishing resources and communities that are dependent on them,” said Liz Atwood, a senior scientist at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, a UK-based research center. Experts said the slicks could be the result of attacks on ships or on oil and gas infrastructure, or caused by technical problems during loading and unloading operations of fuel.  An oil
spill that originated in Iran’s Kharg island
Source: ESA
Analytics, Orbital
The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage that links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, has been effectively shut for most of the past three months, leaving hundreds of vessels trapped and unable to transit into the open ocean. Several ships have been struck with projectiles and fragments from intercepted drones and missiles since the conflict began. Onshore energy facilities have also been attacked across the region, increasing the risk of spills. “When there are attacks on oil tankers or infrastructure on land, like refineries, the possibility that there is a spill is much higher,” said Juan Peña, chief executive officer at Orbital, a Spain-based company specializing in detecting oil spills through satellite images including from the European Union’s Earth observation agency Copernicus. While physically verifying incidents in the region remains challenging due to the ongoing conflict, non-profits and private companies have been using satellites to track events. The spills that have been observed so far go from a few dozen barrels of oil to larger incidents that would typically lead to cleanup operations anywhere else in the world. The largest spills detected so far originated in Iran’s Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export facility — one on May 6, which Orbital estimated had a volume of between 300 and 3,000 barrels of oil, and another on May 16, with a volume of 200-2,000 barrels.  A crew man
secured oil drums on the deck of an oil tanker as it
transported crude oil from Kharg Island to India in
2018.
Photographer:
Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg
Orbital’s ranges are wide because it’s impossible to know the exact amount of oil released in the Persian Gulf just with satellite images, Peña said. The size of the spills are not enormous compared to major disasters, but even so “it is a very large amount of oil,” Peña said. “It’s in Iranian waters and we don’t know if there are any operations on the way to clean it up — there is no evidence that there has been one.” During the first Gulf war in 1991, 11 million barrels of oil were spilled into the sea, according to a 2018 research paper published in the journal Environment and Natural Resources Research. The resulting oil slick extended across the Kuwaiti and northern Saudi coastlines, polluting soil and groundwater in both countries. Up to 10,000 tons of fish were found to be unsuitable for consumption and 30,000 birds died, according to the paper. Marine ecosystems in the Gulf are being studied by ecologists because the corals there are able to withstand high sea temperatures, making them key to understanding the impacts of global warming in other parts of the world. “This is where the rest of the planet, or parts of it, are heading towards,” she said. “It’s an area that we should be protecting because it potentially holds the keys for how we’re going to deal with very hot, heatwave-like conditions within the next hundred years.” Get
full coverage
Toxic legacy260 sunken ships The wrecks from previous wars clutter the sea bottom of the Persian Gulf. Many still hold petroleum products, toxic chemicals and unexploded devices. Top priorities“Energy production, energy security and revenue generation drivers are going to be far more important to almost any player around the world” Mark Davis Chief executive officer at data company Capterio Activist investors press on data centersActivist investors are pushing technology companies to explain how they’re reconciling surging electricity demand for AI with their climate commitments. Shareholders at Amazon.com Inc. voted on a proposal asking the firm to disclose more information. Voting is open for shareholders at Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. and will conclude later this month and in early June at each company’s annual meeting. Support for such initiatives has declined in recent years amid underwhelming outcomes and a broader political backlash in the US against environmental, social and governance investing. Heavyweight investment firms, including BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group Inc. and State Street Corp., have also pulled back from these types of measures.  Fencing
around Meta’s Eagle Mountain data center in Utah
Photographer:
George Frey/Bloomberg via BLOOMBERG NEWS
The new effort shows that green shareholder activism, while quieter than in its heyday in the early 2020s, persists. The proposals were filed by the nonprofit As You Sow, along with Presbyterian Life & Witness, Mercy Investment Services and Trillium Asset Management. All three companies recommended that shareholders vote against the proposals in their annual proxy statements, arguing that they already make relevant climate disclosures to shareholders. Meta and Alphabet declined to comment further. Amazon said support for the proposal was lower than that for a similar measure last year. Meanwhile Canadian shareholder activist group Investors for Paris Compliance, also known as I4PC, is shutting down after concluding that investor pressure alone isn’t enough to meaningfully influence financial and energy firms to address climate risks. The group was created five years ago with a plan to review corporate environmental filings and use shareholder proposals to call on banks, insurers and oil and gas companies to provide more detailed disclosure on carbon emissions and outline credible net-zero transition plans. This week, the group said it will cease operations, noting that it believed “investor accountability has reached its limits.” Read the full story on how shareholders are pressing Big Tech giants, and the article on Canada’s I4PC shutting down on Bloomberg.com. Subscribe
Superpollutant rulesBy Zahra Hirji and Jennifer A Dlouhy The Trump administration on Thursday intends to delay compliance with two rules on refrigerants as it looks to dismantle former President Joe Biden’s environmental agenda. The moves, described by a White House official who requested anonymity to discuss the plan before it was made public, would affect grocers, semiconductor manufacturers and other companies that use the potent greenhouse gases known as hydroflurocarbons or HFCs. The requirement was imposed in a 2023 rule. In addition, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will also propose rolling back other restrictions on the superpollutants as part of separate rule affecting transporters of refrigerated goods. USA Today first reported the planned changes. Trump is set to announce the decision on Thursday at a White House event alongside EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Read
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This week’s ZeroReform UK is currently the most popular party in Britain. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi asks Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice about the party’s climate and energy plans, and why he calls it “net stupid zero.” Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday. Adapting to megafloodsFlooding is rising worldwide, driving a global push for climate adaptation. From tunnels to seawalls to fly farms, can these solutions keep up with accelerating global warming? 
 More from GreenPhoto finish An African
elephant in Namibia.
Photographer:
Nadine Hutton/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
via NBCUniversal
Namibia secured more than N$1 billion ($60 million) in financing from Namibia for Life, a new conservation initiative that aims to protect wildlife and sustaining rural livelihoods as traditional donor funding declines. The package brings together international public and private conservation partners to support Namibia’s community based natural resource management system, which covers 91 conservancies and forests covering more than 230,000 square kilometers (88,800 square miles) of land. Keep
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