Oil Drilling Contaminated Western Amazon Rainforest, Study Confirms

[Bill USA]

http://www.livescience.com/46319-oil-drilling-contaminated-amazon.html
(emphases my own)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Peru's Amazon rainforest is extensively contaminated from decades of oil and gas drilling, researchers reported yesterday (June 12) here at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference.

In the past decade, volatile demonstrations by indigenous groups and tangled lawsuits against oil companies have exposed the toxic legacy of decades of oil drilling in the Western Amazon. People living in the rainforest say they are suffering health effects from the nearby polluted drilling and waste sites, and from eating plants and wildlife laced with heavy metals and petroleum compounds.

But lax government regulations during the early years of oil exploration, combined with a lack of environmental monitoring, mean there's little data on the true extent of contamination in the richly diverse rainforest.

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About 30 percent of the world's rainforests overlie fossil fuel reservoirs, Rosell-Melé said. Huge oil and gas reserves have been discovered under the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and western Brazil. Oil drilling in the Western Amazon peaked in the 1970s, with exploration funded by both private companies and national governments. The rise in oil prices during the 2000s sparked a new drilling boom in the area. More than 180 areas zoned for new exploration and development now cover a section of Amazon rainforest the size of Germany.
(more)

.. so despite all the hypotheticals about Ethanol's Indirect Land use changes despoiling the rainforests of Brazil (for which the there is no available empirical evidence). In actuality, to the extent that we commit to renewable fuels such as ethanol, these fuels by replacing gasoline and driving down the prices of gasoline with the increased supply of fuel - will make the more expensive petroleum such as that from the Amazon and the Alberta tar sands - less feasible as a business undertaking --- and thus renewable fuel will contribute to PROTECTING the rainforests. IF, that is, we commit to ethanol and methanol (which can be made from agricultural and forestry - the legal North American industry, that is - waste materials right now).

Based upon how effective the Oil Industry lobbying and anti-ethanol propaganda campaign has been, I wouldn't make any bets on this going the right way though.

[font size="5"]The oil industry's success at conning Americans would be laughable .... if it wasn't so tragic.

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