Archives for April 13th, 2006

Not as nice as a coal factory, but oh well. (source)

Last November, during a meeting of the Barcelona Convention in Portorož, representatives from Slovenia, Croatia and Italy signed an agreement on cleaning up the Adriatic Sea and working together to prevent pollution. As anyone who’s been in the Adriatic will tell you, this is a good idea. I have yet to meet a Slovene who’s never swum in the Adriatic, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks the Adriatic would be better if "only it was a little bit dirtier." So, hats off to the Barcelona Convention.

Unfortunately, they forgot all about Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that for every action there is "an equal and opposite reaction." That’s why, just a few weeks later, plans appeared for the Alpi Adriatico offshore regasification project in the Gulf of Trieste, or in plain English: big ol’ gas terminals in the water. Its capacity is projected at 8 billion cubic meters of liquified natural gas. Construction is scheduled to begin next year; it would begin operating in 2010.

Slovenian fishermen bitterly oppose the plan, saying it would be devestating for the ecosystem and just plain bad for tourism. The project leaders counter that money is awesome, especially when they stand to get a lot of it.

The magazine Mladina is hosting a petition against this thing. It’s in English as well, so you can read what it’s about. It’s not very well written, unfortunately, and made worse by the fact that it’s online. Still, I hate the idea of gunking up the Adriatic even more than online petitions, so I signed. As of this writing, so have another 18,000 people.

(Thanks Primož!)