- Michael M.: Too much going on. Life in flux, etc..
- Sunshine: Wow, I was soooo happy to see a new post in my rss reader. I was hopping this is already the comeback! :(...
- gandalf: Did you only get caffeine through Dr.p or did you drink coffee as well? I’m interested, since...
- neeka: nine kilos… wow… :) happy holidays to you, michael, and to all your loved ones! veronica
- m: It was a bargain. No strings attached.
Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Maribor, Slovenia.
Portoroz, Slovenia.
• AlienMelon
• Burger.si
• Heck
• Izklop
• si.blogs
• Sloblogi
• Blogorola
• Natalija Verboten
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!)
Comments
Comments for this post are closed.
I was so disturbed by this news that I apparently signed the petition twice ;o) Damn malfunctioning computer!
hey, why not sign the entire neighbourhood while i’m at it.
internet petition, no digital signature? it makes absolutely no sense to me.
Well, this is not a binding petition - it is just a civil show of discontent. Yes, you can sign on an entire neighbourhood. Or even make up names. But that’s not the point. It’s just to show that some people (20.000+ as of last count) don’t agree with turning the Northern Adriatic into a gas chamber.
I signed. The cool part was that I recognized many of the other names on there. It’s true that internet petitions may not count for much–so the next step would be to get all those bodies that go with the names to attend a demonstration.
How about getting a swim in the Adriatic? 20k people, forming a stop sign in the sea?
The question is how big impact would that have on the environment. I’d still like to see a valid study of this, a study that would cover everything from cold water dumped back in the sea to the water being warmed up due to increased ship traffic.
If you guys are so concerned about this gas factory on water, you obversely not been to Krsko! They have this paper factory which was build in the communist days and no joke the place smells too high heaven. Don’t get me wrong my parents come from there, but boy the Slovenian Government needs to clean up the mess.
Michael have you ever been to Krsko?
The dumpyard near Ilirska Bistrica also smells like a big pile of doo-doo. But a paper factory is much less dangerous to the enviroment than a gas terminal at sea.
pengovsky; I guess you have never seen the sava river of late in Krsko, or the chemicals that this factory dumps into it, I guess its harmless to the enviroment - not, it hasnt been upgrade for 30 years, it a disgrace, and no one cares. Put something in the ocean and all hell breaks. At he end of the day if this gas terminal makes billions of $, the government won’t listen.
@Paul: OK, point taken. I admit I was rather hasty with my answer. But that’s not an argument for putting a gas terminal in the Adriatic. Furthermore: the terminal will make $$$ only for Italy. And while I agree that Videm Krško papermill should be at least upgraded if not closed down, the thing with the gas terminal is that is clashes with other industries in the area like tourism and fishery.
Pengovsky; your right it would stuff up tourism and peoples livelyhood will be probably ruined as a result, the italian aways find a way to piss Slovenians off!! I remember the old days crossing the broader, they would always hassle me for no reasons.
Ha, Carniola has gone political.
Anyway, I signed the petition (the thing is planned just beneath the hill where my grandmother’s house near Koper is). However, I don’t think they’ll actually build it. The Slovenian Ministry for Enviroment opposes it, as well as the local sommunities in Italy. The only one who favours it, is the mayor of Trieste … I just hope he doesn’t get reelacted next week.
@Luka: True! However, our eternal Foreign Minister has said that Slovenia supports the construction of the terminal. Now I wonder, whose opinion bears more gravity with JJ. Rupel’s or Podobnik’s? :)))
@Paul: Yeah, Italians really know how to make their presence known
“However, our eternal Foreign Minister has said that Slovenia supports the construction of the terminal.”
I don’t think so. Check out this article
@Luka: as always, it depends on how you look at it. Sometimes silence is more telling than words. Check this out. :))
I don’t think an LNG terminal would be such a bad thing; absent a major accident I doubt it would pollute much more than the average cruise ship. And it might even be a plus, environmentally; natural gas is pretty clean-burning, way better than oil or coal. Encouraging the its use as a substitute for the latter two would probably be an ecological benefit overall.
I also don’t see much of a tourism impact. A few dozen km due west of where I am sitting right now there are dozens of offshore oil rigs, clearly visible from some of the most popular beaches and expensive real estate on Earth. The LNG terminal might even become a local landmark, like the wreckage of the Rex off Žusterna was in the early 50’s.
As for the fishermen, screw them. The Mediterranean is already badly overfished, and the industry is only kept afloat by artificial government subsidies anyway. Let it sink.
Ok, apparently the link doesn’t work. It’s an item ran on TV SLO, on March 27 - if anyone cares to take a look at it, you’ll notice that Ricarcdo Illy talks of the terminal being built for sure, while Rupel doesn’t oppose not one bit.
@senix: It ain’t that simple, I’m afraid. The fact is that the thing has enormous proportions and what it does, it is warming up the gas with marine water. Then, enormous quantities of extremely cold water are being flush back into the sea. And of course, the sea water used for warming has to be desinfected with chlorine (to kill all algs or organisms) and it is this, chlorated water that gets flushed back into the sea. And we are talknig of enormous quantities (in fact, the whole platform is a big pump) of chloride that gets flushed into the sea, day after day, for 30 years. And chlorine is, as you may know from high school science class, a pretty poisenous substance …
Kinda like sodium chloride. That’ll kill ya. Or the chlorine in the swimming pool, you know, the one that’s supposed to keep that one clean.
Quantities don’t mean shit, it’s the concentration that’s important. Besides, they might even have some kind of reduction filters at the end, to reduce the chlorine to chloride. And if we are talking cold water being pumped back into the sea, that might not even be that bad. If I remember correctly the overabundance of nasty algae about 10 years ago might have been because the water was too warm.
I can’t say that I approve the LGT, but I think a lot of the stuff that’s said about it is totally overblown and spread by some envionmentalists who are definitely not any kind of experts on the technical points.
I’ve been through Krško but didn’t notice any smell. Oddly enough, the only place that offended my nostrils was Trieste, which reeked of rotten fish. Maybe it was just a bad day.
Luka:
of course, the sea water used for warming has to be desinfected with chlorine (to kill all algs or organisms) and it is this, chlorated water that gets flushed back into the sea. And we are talknig of enormous quantities (in fact, the whole platform is a big pump) of chloride that gets flushed into the sea, day after day, for 30 years. And chlorine is, as you may know from high school science class, a pretty poisenous substance …
Really? I would have thought there would be a sealed double loop, like with nuclear reactors. Nonetheless, with all the chlorinated wastewater produced by 200 million Europeans–plus another 100 mil. North Africans–winding up in the Med., one LNG platform is still small potatoes.