Believers IAS Academy

Cautionary tale #GS2 #Governance

Vizag gas leak must be probed quickly, accountability enforced. Other chemical plants restarting operations must be checked.

• Two thousand people affected in a 5 km radius in a densely populated city, hundreds in hospital and 11 dead — the?gas leak in Visakhapatnam?revives dark memories of?Bhopal in 1984 when the Union Carbide plant there caused one of the biggest industrial disasters ever.
• By all accounts, recurring instances of human oversight and callousness appear to have precipitated the disaster at the LG Polymers India unit.
• The original owners of the plant, McDowell & Co, had sold it when the fast-developing city of?Visakhapatnam?drew uncomfortably close to it.
• It would have been wise to relocate since the hazardous feedstock of styrene was in use, but LG took it over in 1997 and continued production, admitting last year that it had exceeded the capacity permitted by its environmental clearance.
• It had then sought permission for expansion from the state authorities, though the central ministry of environment and forests is the competent authority. The ministry later dropped the matter in the belief that the company had lost interest.

Role & Responsibility

• This series of unfortunate events may have laid the ground for the accident on May 7 — it is being said that the leak occurred because the?styrene?had been stored for a long time, due to the lockdown.
• A failure to check hazardous chemicals and storage vessels is no less mystifying than the failure to secure environmental clearance before restarting operations — the role and responsibility of the company, the state administration, and the Union ministry must be probed and accountability must be enforced.
• The managers of the company should have known that starting a production line that has lain dormant for a long period is not a trivial process. Before throwing the switch, they should have run through the entire safety drill.
• The probe report should be called in as soon as possible, action must be taken against the guilty, and authorities issuing environmental clearances must identify any other defaulters and prevent them from restarting.

Burning trees never a good idea #GS3 #Environment #Biodiversity #ClimateChange

Felling forests in the guise of reducing carbon emissions may result in an irreparable loss of biodiversity.

• If the world is a pack of cards, then climate change is the new joker. It has shuffled the familiar patterns, rules, and stratagems of the old in such unexpected ways that one is no longer sure what a good hand might look like.
• For instance, take the idea of burning trees to make electricity thrown up by the climate change circus. Weren’t trees (or forests), that ubiquitous symbol of the environmental movement, supposed to be preserved for their moral, ecological and aesthetic worth?
• Those in favour argue that wood- fuel emits much less carbon dioxide than coal or natural gas.
• Besides, carbon lost when trees are axed is replenished by those planted in their place. This, they claim, makes wood-fuel carbon-neutral.
• But carbon accounting is a more complex business than it appears, say critics. It depends on a host of not-so-amenable factors such as the species being chopped and its successors; the time it would take the successor tree to restore the carbon lost; and the effect of cutting a forest on the ecosystem’s carbon stock as a whole.
• It takes a very long time to restock the carbon lost, the wood-fuel model will result in a net increase of carbon emissions, thus adding to the existing conundrum of climate change-related global impacts.
• Rather, the world would be better off by investing the same money in inherently carbon-neutral renewables like wind and solar.
• Last but not the least, some biologists fear that felling forests in the guise of reducing carbon emissions may result in an irreparable loss of biodiversity. Add to this that it takes a century for a forest to regenerate, and thereby, restore its carbon stock.
• In a world besieged by climate change, black art seems to be the only winnable trump (pun intended). There is no way out but to keep calling the bluff on a bad hand when you sense one.

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