Published on Friday, January 8, 2010 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)
Overcoming the Copenhagen Failure
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Pretty speeches can take you only so far. A month after the Copenhagen climate conference, it is clear that the world’s leaders were unable to translate rhetoric about global warming into action.
It was, of course, nice that world leaders could agree that it would be bad to risk the devastation that could be wrought by an increase in global temperatures of more than two degrees Celsius. At least they paid some attention to the mounting scientific evidence. And certain principles set out in the 1992 Rio Framework Convention, including “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” were affirmed. So, too, was the developed countries’ agreement to “provide adequate, predictable and sustainable financial resources, technology, and capacity-building” to developing countries.
The failure of Copenhagen was not the absence of a legally binding agreement. The real failure was that there was no agreement about how to achieve the lofty goal of saving the planet, no agreement about reductions in carbon emissions, no agreement on how to share the burden, and no agreement on help for developing countries. Even the commitment of the accord to provide amounts approaching $30 billion for the period 2010-12 for adaptation and mitigation appears paltry next to the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been doled out to the banks in the bailouts of 2008-09. If we can afford that much to save banks, we can afford something more to save the planet.
The consequences of the failure are already apparent: The price of emission rights in the European Union Emission Trading System has fallen, which means that firms will have less incentive to reduce emissions now and less incentive to invest in innovations that will reduce emissions in the future. Firms that wanted to do the right thing, to spend the money to reduce their emissions, now worry that doing so would put them at a competitive disadvantage as others continue to emit without restraint. European firms will continue to be at a competitive disadvantage relative to American firms, which bear no cost for their emissions.
Underlying the failure in Copenhagen are some deep problems. The Kyoto approach allocated emission rights, which are a valuable asset. If emissions were appropriately restricted, the value of emission rights would be a couple trillion dollars a year -- no wonder that there is a squabble over who should get them.
Clearly, the idea that those who emitted more in the past should get more emission rights for the future is unacceptable. The “minimally” fair allocation to the developing countries requires equal emission rights per capita. Most ethical principles would suggest that, if one is distributing what amounts to “money” around the world, one should give more (per capita) to the poor.
So, too, most ethical principles would suggest that those that have polluted more in the past -- especially after the problem was recognized in 1992 -- should have less right to pollute in the future. But such an allocation would implicitly transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from rich to poor. Given the difficulty of coming up with even $10 billion a year -- let alone the $200 billion a year that is needed for mitigation and adaptation -- it is wishful thinking to expect an agreement along these lines.
Perhaps it is time to try another approach: a commitment by each country to raise the price of emissions (whether through a carbon tax or emissions caps) to an agreed level, say, $80 per ton. Countries could use the revenues as an alternative to other taxes -- it makes much more sense to tax bad things than good things. Developed countries could use some of the revenues generated to fulfill their obligations to help the developing countries in terms of adaptation and to compensate them for maintaining forests, which provide a global public good through carbon sequestration.
We have seen that goodwill alone can get us only so far. We must now conjoin self-interest with good intentions, especially because leaders in some countries (particularly the United States) seem afraid of competition from emerging markets even without any advantage they might receive from not having to pay for carbon emissions. A system of border taxes -- imposed on imports from countries where firms do not have to pay appropriately for carbon emissions -- would level the playing field and provide economic and political incentives for countries to adopt a carbon tax or emission caps. That, in turn, would provide economic incentives for firms to reduce their emissions.
Time is of the essence. While the world dawdles, greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere, and the likelihood that the world will meet even the agreed-upon target of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius is diminishing. We have given the Kyoto approach, based on emission rights, more than a fair chance. Given the fundamental problems underlying it, Copenhagen’s failure should not be a surprise. At the very least, it is worth giving the alternative a chance.

Published on Sunday, December 27, 2009 by The Observer/UK
Copenhagen Has Given Us the Chance to Face Climate Change With Honesty
by James Hansen
Last weekend's minimalist Copenhagen global climate accord provides a great opportunity. The old deceitful, ineffectual approach is severely wounded and must die. Now there is a chance for the world to get on to an honest, effective path to an agreement.
The centrepiece of the old approach was a "cap-and-trade" scheme, festooned with offsets and bribes – bribes that purportedly, but hardly, reduced carbon emissions. It was analogous to the indulgences scheme of the Middle Ages, whereby sinners paid the Church for forgiveness.
In today's indulgences the sinners, developed countries, buy off developing countries by paying for "offsets" to their own emissions and providing reparation money for adaptation to climate change. But such hush money won't work. Yes, some developing country leaders salivated over the proffered $100 billion per year. But by buying in, they would cheat their children and ours. Besides, even the $100 billion hush money is fugacious. The US, based on its proportion of the fossil fuel carbon in the air today, would owe $27 billion per year. Chance of Congress providing that: dead zero. Maybe the UK will cough up its $6 billion per year and Germany its $7 billion per year. But who will collect Russia's $7 billion per year?
Most purchased "offsets" to fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions are hokey. But there is no need to flagellate the details of this modern indulgences scheme. Science provides an unambiguous fact that our leaders continue to ignore: carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning remains in the climate system for millennia. The only solution is to move promptly to a clean energy future.
The difficulty is that fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, if the price does not include the damage they do to human health, the planet, and the future of our children. "Goals" for future emission reductions, whether "legally binding" or not, are utter nonsense as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy. The Kyoto Protocol illustrates the deceit of our governments, which have not screwed up their courage to face down the fossil fuel industry. As the graph here shows, global fossil fuel emissions were increasing 1.5% per year prior to the 1997 Kyoto accord. After "Kyoto" emission growth accelerated to 3% per year. A few developed countries reduced their fossil fuel use. The only important effect of that was to slightly reduce demand for fuel, helping to keep its price down. The fuel was burned in other places, and products made were shipped back to developed countries.
As far as the planet is concerned, agreements to "cap" emissions, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the imagined Copenhagen Protocol, are worthless scraps of paper. As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned somewhere. This fact helps define a solution to the climate problem. Yes, people must make changes in the way they live. Countries must cooperate. Matters as intractable as population must be included. Technology improvements are required. Changes must be economically efficient. The climate solution necessarily will increase the price of fossil fuel energy. We must admit that. But in the end, energy efficiency and carbon-free energy can be made less expensive than fossil fuels, if fossil fuels' cost to society is included. The solution must have honesty, backbone and a fair international framework. We need a rising price on carbon applied at the source (the mine, wellhead, or port of entry). The fee will affect all activities that use fossil fuels, directly or indirectly. The entire fee collected from fossil fuel companies should be distributed to the public. In this fee-and-dividend approach people maintaining a carbon footprint smaller than average will receive more in the dividend than they pay via increased energy costs. The monthly dividend, deposited electronically in their bank account or on their debit card, will stimulate the economy and provide people with the means to increase their carbon efficiency. All that governments need do is divide the collected revenue by the number of shares, with half-shares for children, up to two children per family.
Some economists prefer a payroll tax deduction over a dividend, because taxes depress the economy. The problem is that about half of the public are not on payrolls, because of retirement or involuntary unemployment. I suggest that at most 50% of the collected carbon fee should be used for payroll tax deduction.
Cap-and-trade is the antithesis of this simple system. Cap-and-trade is a hidden tax, increasing energy costs, but with no public dividend. Its infrastructure costs the public, who also fund the profits of the resulting big banks and speculators. Cap-and-trade is advantageous only to energy companies with strong lobbyists and government officials who dole out proceeds from pollution certificates to favoured industries.
Fee-and-dividend, in contrast, is a non-tax – on average it is revenue-neutral. The public will probably accept a rise in the carbon fee rate, because their monthly dividend will increase correspondingly. As fee-and-dividend causes fossil fuel energy prices to rise, a series of points will be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies are cheaper than fossil fuels plus the fee. The market place will choose the best technology. As time goes on, fossil fuel use will collapse, coal will be left in the ground, and we will have arrived at a clean energy future. A rising carbon fee is essential for a climate solution. But how to achieve a fair international framework?
The critical requirement is that the United States and China agree to apply across-the-board carbon fees, at a relative rate to be negotiated. Why would China agree to a carbon fee? China does not want to be saddled with the problems that attend fossil fuel addiction such as those that plague the United States. Besides, China would be hit extraordinarily hard by climate change. A uniform rising carbon fee is the most economically efficient way for China to limit its fossil fuel dependence.
Copenhagen discussions showed that China and the United States can work together. Europe, Japan, and most developed countries would very probably agree to a similar status to that of the United States. Countries refusing to levy an across-the-board carbon fee can be dealt with via an import duty collected on products from that nation in accord with the amount of fossil fuel that goes into producing the product. The World Trade Organisation already has rules permitting such duties.
The international framework must define how proceeds from import duties are used to assure fairness. Duties on products from developing countries will probably dwarf present foreign aid to those countries. These funds should be returned to developing countries, but distributed so as to encourage best practices, for example, improved women's rights and education that helps control population growth. Fairness also requires that distribution of the funds takes account of the ongoing impacts of climate change. Successful efforts in limiting deforestation and other best practices could also be rewarded.

Published on Monday, December 21, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Beyond Ecological Imperialism

Climate change isn't just a battle between rich and poor – it shows how an obsession with economic growth is a dead end

by Jayati Ghosh
So the Copenhagen summit did not deliver any hope of substantive change, or even any indication that the world's leaders are sufficiently aware of the vastness and urgency of the problem. But is that such a surprise? Nothing in the much-hyped runup to the summit suggested that the organisers and participants had genuine ambitions to change course and stop or reverse a process of clearly unsustainable growth.
Part of the problem is that the issue of climate change is increasingly portrayed as that of competing interests between countries. Thus, the summit has been interpreted variously as a fight between the "two largest culprits" - the US and China - or between a small group of developed countries and a small group of newly emerging countries (the group of four - China, India, Brazil and South Africa), or at best between rich and poor countries.
The historical legacy of past growth in the rich countries that has a current adverse impact is certainly keenly felt in the developing world. It is not just the past: current per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world are still many multiples of that in any developing country, including China. So the attempts by northern commentators to lay blame on some countries for derailing the result by pointing to this discrepancy are seen in most developing countries as further evidence of an essentially colonial outlook.
But describing this as a fight between countries misses the essential point: that the issue is really linked to an economic system - capitalism - that is crucially dependent upon rapid growth as its driving force, even if this "growth" does not deliver better lives for the people. So there is no questioning of the supposition that rich countries with declining populations must keep on growing in terms of GDP, rather than finding different ways of creating and distributing output to generate better quality of life. There is no debating of the pattern of growth in "successful" developing countries, which has in many cases come at the cost of increased inequality, greater material insecurity for a significant section of the population and massive damage to the environment.
Since such questions were not even at the table at the Copenhagen summit - even a "successful" outcome with some sort of common statement would hardly have been a sign of the kind of change that is required. But this does not mean that the problem has gone away; in fact, it is more pressing than ever.
Optimists believe that the problem can be solved in a win-win outcome that is based on "green" growth and new technologies that provide "dematerialised" output, so that growth has decreasing impact on the environment. But such a hope is also limited by the Jevons paradox (after the 19th century English economist William Stanley Jevons), which states that the expansion of output typically overwhelms all increases in efficiency in throughput of materials and energy.
This is forcefully elucidated in an important new book by John Bellamy Foster. Foster argues that a rational reorganisation of the metabolism between nature and society needs to be directed not simply at climate change but also at a whole host of other environmental problems. "The immense danger now facing the human species ... is not due principally to the constraints of the natural environment, but arises from a deranged social system wheeling out of control, and more specifically US imperialism." (p 105)
How does imperialism enter into this? "Capital ... is running up against ecological barriers at a biospheric level that cannot be overcome, as was the case previously, through the 'spatial fix' of geographical expansion and exploitation. Ecological imperialism - the growth of the centre of the system at unsustainable rates, through the more thorough-going ecological degradation of the periphery - is now generating a planetary-scale set of ecological contradictions, imperilling the entire biosphere." (p 249)
This does not mean that the interests of people in the centre are inevitably opposed to those of people in the periphery, since both are now adversely affected by the results of such ecological imbalances. Instead, it means that it is now in all of our interests to shift from an obsession on growth that is primarily directed to increasing capitalist profits, to a more rational organisation of society and of the relation between humanity and nature.
So there is indeed a win-win solution, but one that cannot be based on the existing economic paradigm. The good news is that more humane and democratic alternatives are also likely to be more environmentally sustainable.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Jayati Ghosh is Professor of Economics and currently also Chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, India.  With C.P. Chandrasekhar, she co-authored Crisis as Conquest: Learning from East Asia .

Are We Moving from Nanotechnology to Nanotoxicity?

Food & Water Europe Report questions the unseen hazards of nanotechnology

BRUSSELS - December 16 -  Industries claim that nanotechnology is both good for business and good for consumers’ quality of life, a seemingly obvious win-win situation. Yet the less advertised risks of nanotechnology applications require close scrutiny.
The application of nanotechnology began with semiconductors, but the presence of nanomaterials in your laptop and car is not the same as ingesting it from your chocolate bar.
In its new report on the hazards of nanotechnology, released to coincide with the proposal for a Framingnano governance platform at the European Commission, Food & Water Europe believes that basic human needs such as food and water should remain nanotechnology-free, as potential harms may be much greater than the alleged benefits.
Justifying the risk taken in the use of nanomaterials by saying that everything we use contains an element of risk anyway, is a weak argument. The analogy between the risk of driving a nanotechnology powered car and that of consuming a product that we apply to our skin or swallow is over simplistic, as the nature of the risks involved in these two cases differs significantly. Given today’s immense uncertainty with respect to absorbing a nanoparticle (through ingestion or application to hair and skin), the precautionary principle should be enforced through a moratorium on all consumer products whose safety has not been proven beyond doubt.
Food & Water Europe focuses on the risks of nanotechnology applications in areas such as occupational safety, environment and consumer products while pointing out the insufficiency of existing regulations both in the United States and the European Union alike.  In the absence of meaningful regulations that would prioritize consumers’ safety over profit, Food & Water Europe supports the “no data no market” approach of the European Parliament's environment committee, which includes market withdrawal of consumer products containing nanotechnology until reliable and independent safety assessments can be made.
Lawmakers need to scale back the widespread proliferation of consumer products containing nanoparticles until a robust regulatory program is in place.  In the interim, it is essential that regulators require all consumer products containing nanotechnology to be labelled (even when the production process contains less than 1 tonne of nanomaterials) and that an inventory of such products will be available to consumers through the Health and Consumer Protection Directorate General (SANCO) of the European Commission.
The application of nanotechnology takes different forms along the manufacturing chain and each individual holder only remains liable for their stage of the production and not for whatever manipulations are carried out further down the line. Taking this into account, voluntary best practice codes are insufficient; a mandatory code of conduct needs to be enforced among all parties dealing with the application of nanotechnologies.
The European Commission may be increasing its funding for nanotechnology R&D, but should not put the focus on innovation and the commerciality of nanomaterials as was previously done. More attention needs to be given to the pressing matter of risk assessment and exposure hazards of nanoparticles. When products are already on the shelves, we cannot afford a “wait-and-see” approach.

Published on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
This Is Bigger Than Climate Change. It Is a Battle to Redefine Humanity
by The Guardian/UK

It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits

by George Monbiot
This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.
The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.
The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.
This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.
The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged , they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs . All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live.
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
So here we are, in the land of Beowulf's heroics , lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone's demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.
Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.
While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.
For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.
We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.
But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth – must begin. If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest – the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world's ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.

Published on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Copenhagen: Only the Numbers Count – and They Add up to Hell on Earth

Climate Interactive's software speaks numbers, not spin – which is where the true understanding of the Copenhagen summit lies

by Bill McKibben
The Bella centre is a swirl of chatter, the streets of Copenhagen are a swirl of protest. Depending on what hour you listen to the news bulletin, the UN climate negotiations have "come off the rails" or are "back on track" or have "stalled " or are "moving swiftly". Which is why the only people who really understand what's going on may be a small crew of folks from a group of computer jockeys called Climate Interactive . Their software speaks numbers, not spin – and in the end it's the numbers that count.
First number to know: 350 . It's what scientists have been saying for two years is the maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can safely have in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. Those scientists have been joined by an unprecedented outpouring from civil society: in late October, activists put on what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history," with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, all rallying around that number. Three thousand vigils last weekend across the planet spelled out the number in candles. Thousands of churches rang their bells 350 times on Sunday, and yesterday the World Parliament of Religions, meeting in Melbourne and representing the "largest interreligious gathering on earth" sent an emergency 350 declaration here to Copenhagen.
The second number: 100. That's (roughly) how many countries are backing a 350 target here at Copenhagen. That's more than half the nations in attendance – unfortunately, they're the small, poor ones. But it's amazing to see them, in the face of enormous pressure, keeping the idea of real action alive. Yesterday Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives , spoke to a roaring crowd of thousands: "We know what the laws of physics say: the most important number in the world is 350."
The third number: 4%. That's how much the US is offering to cut its emissions from their 1990 levels by 2020 . Scientists tell us that the developed world would need to reduce by at least 40% to get us back on a 350 track, so the American offer is exactly an order or magnitude off. And they're not alone. All the rich countries, not to mention China , are looking to do as little as possible and still escape here with some kind of agreement they can hide behind.
The fourth number – and the most important one. When the folks at Climate Interactive plug in every promise made at these talks (the American offer on the table, the Chinese promise to reduce "energy intensity", the EU pledges, and so on) their software tells them almost instantly how much carbon they would eventually produce. When they hit the button last night, the program showed that by 2100 the world's CO2 concentrations (currently 390) would be – drumroll please – 770. That is, we would live in hell, or at least a place with a similar temperature.
So that's the scorecard. You may hear a lot of happy talk from world leaders over the next few days as they "reach a historic agreement". But that's how it all adds up.

Our Lives Are Filled With Worthless Crap That's Destroying the Earth: Here's What You Can Do

By Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, In These Times
Posted on November 28, 2009, Printed on December 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144204/

As the middle-class daughter of a refugee mother and a Depression-era father, I grew up straddling two worlds. My parents could afford much more than they were willing to buy. Most things that broke could be and were repaired. My German grandmother’s aphorisms lingered in the air: “Waste not, want not,” “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “A stitch in time saves nine.”
By the time my own children were born, America was flooded with cheap and cheaply made goods. So while my parents continued working at the sturdy antique desks they inherited from my grandparents and sleeping beneath a hand-crocheted bedspread, my children and their friends became the first and last owners of a seemingly endless supply of plastic toys and particle-board furniture.

I was part of the transitional generation. Building blocks were still made of wood. Comforters were still filled with down. I recall the meticulously machined pencil sharpeners with “made in West Germany” stamped on their sides that lasted until I lost them. Even the cheap items—the ones “made in Japan”—tended to hold up pretty well.

Now nearly everything is produced in China and made to be discarded. According to a 2008 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the United States imported $320 billion in Chinese goods in 2007. In that year alone, this country imported $26.3 billion in apparel and accessories, $108.5 billion in computers and electronic products, and $15.3 billion in furniture and fixtures from China.

The manufacture, distribution and disposal of an ever-growing mountain of short-lived consumer goods has taken an enormous environmental toll. Annie Leonard’s website “The Story of Stuff,” which has garnered more than 7 million views in less than two years, has helped spread awareness of that cost far beyond the usual environmentalist circles.

We can’t, however, only blame the quantity and quality of Chinese goods for the environmental and other consequences of this transoceanic factory-to-waste stream. For that we can blame the two horsemen of the modern consumer apocalypse: functional obsolescence and fashion obsolescence.

Functional, or planned obsolescence is the purposeful decision by designers and manufacturers to ensure things don’t last, so that consumers must buy new ones. Fashion obsolescence is the related decision to offer new features and aesthetic changes to entice consumers to discard their old items in favor of updated and supposedly better ones.

Ironically, product obsolescence was once seen as the remedy for what ailed our country. Lizabeth Cohen, chair of the History Department at Harvard University and author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Vintage, 2003), traces the origins of mass consumption to the period immediately before and after World War II, when a demand-driven economy was seen as the key to our nation’s recovery and prosperity.

“In the 1940s and ’50s, there was a much closer connection between consumer demand and factories and jobs,” Cohen says. “That was a completed circle more than it is today. When people were buying things, they were buying things that were made by American workers.”

The only way to guarantee continued demand was to ensure that people would keep replacing the things they owned. The literature on planned obsolescence makes frequent reference to statements by industry analysts and strategists of that era. “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption,” retailing analyst Victor Lebow said in 1948. “We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.”

This applied to male as well as female consumers, and to styling lines on cars as well as hemlines on skirts. Allied Stores Corporation’s Chairman B. Earl Puckett, speaking to fashion industry leaders in 1950, said, “Basic utility cannot be the foundation of a prosperous apparel industry. We must accelerate obsolescence.” And General Motors’ design chief Harley Earl said in 1955, “The creation of a desire on the part of millions of car buyers each year to trade in last year’s car on a new one is highly important to the automobile industry.”

Business people and politicians weren’t the only ones pushing this idea, Cohen says. “Labor really bought into this package. Purchasing power was the answer to how people would be employed and have a better life. Consumers would fuel the powers of factories that would provide jobs that would put money in peoples’ pockets.”

Since then, Cohen argues, we’ve conflated our concepts of ourselves as good consumers and as good citizens. The idea of consumption as our country’s economic engine continues to this day. Indeed, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush implored Americans to go shopping. And frugal as I am and as green as I try to be, during the recent economic downturn I’ve found myself feeling that every major purchase I make is a perverse kind of civic duty. The notion of the citizen-as-consumer clearly runs deep.

But things have changed since the 1940s and ’50s. “When people were making goods that lasted [back then], they were benefiting from the explosion of global capitalism and the expanding of markets,” Cohen says. “Now that we have this global recession, it’s problematic. Where do these companies go if they are going to build goods that last? How do they profit if they don’t sell new goods? I don’t know the answer to this, but it’s a problem that policy makers, economic planners, labor unions—everybody has to think about.”
A Radically Obvious Idea
Although the greening of the American consumer has fostered some deceptive greenwashing campaigns seeking to capitalize on our good intentions, it has also made it possible for us to make better ecological and economic choices.

A host of clever websites now enables consumers to calculate their own ecological footprints and offer advice on how to reduce the toll. These include:

•MyFootprint.org, where you can find out how many Earths would be necessary if everybody on the planet shared your lifestyle;

•H20Conserve.org, where you can tally your water footprint;

•Wattzon.com, where you can calculate the energy required to sustain your lifestyle.

Some of these calculations become conceptually complex as they try to measure the energy required for the extraction and transportation of raw materials, and the manufacturing, distribution and ultimate disposal of products. It can all get abstract quite quickly, but there’s a far simpler message embedded in all that complexity: Buy stuff that lasts.

Saul Griffith, a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, serial inventor and co-founder of WattzOn, refers to this as “heirloom design”—a term he introduced during a talk at the February 2009 Greener Gadgets conference in New York. The best way to lower the quantity of energy required to manufacture and distribute consumer goods, he argues, is to make those products not only durable, but repairable and upgradable.

Griffith shares this radically obvious idea with Tim Cooper, head of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, England, and editor of the forthcoming book, Longer Lasting Solutions (Gower, June 2010). The Centre, which Cooper founded in 1996, conducts research into consumers’ behavior as well as the environmental effects of the choices they make.

Cooper argues for “product life extension”—making things more durable, using them properly, and ensuring they are maintained, repaired, upgraded, and reused. A key obstacle, he says, is the perception (supported by public policies) that higher levels of consumption yield greater happiness. After all, an increase in the GNP is considered healthy for the economy and can only be achieved if consumers increase their spending.

Cooper calls for “slow consumption,” the consumer purchasing equivalent of the Slow Food movement (which seeks to build consumer awareness and appreciation of food and its connection to community and the environment). “The issue to address is what kind of economy is going to be sustainable in its wider sense — economically, environmentally and socially,” he says. “The current economy is not sustainable. The sheer throughput of energy and materials cannot be continued.”

If products were more durable, Cooper argues, some jobs lost due to the decrease in consumption would be offset by the addition of more highly skilled maintenance and repair jobs. And whereas the lost jobs might be overseas, the repair jobs would be local. “We need to look at new business models that move away from manufacturing and selling more and more products,” he says. Such models might include “products that last longer but have associated services attached to them, so that the supplier guarantees to maintain, repair and upgrade the products for a certain period.”

This might be a hard sell for consumers, however. Cooper cites the results of a survey in which British homeowners were asked what they considered the disadvantages of longer-lasting appliances. Twenty-three percent stated concerns about price, while 30 percent said they feared these products would become “out of date.” He found that consumers were often disinclined to have products repaired because of the high cost of labor compared with the low cost of replacement, thanks to the quantity of consumer goods manufactured in countries with low wages and lax environmental regulations.

When I mentioned this conundrum to one of my ecologically conscious friends, she sheepishly admitted she had just discarded her old DVD player because the repair estimate was higher than the cost of a new one. “The present economic system does give an advantage to the current economy,” Cooper says, “and for the consumer, replacement is often the cheaper option.” That would have to change.
Close Encounters of the Durable Kind
Most of us have had an heirloom design or product life extension epiphany at one point or another.

Years ago, along with an untold number of other caffeine addicts, I succumbed to the then-ubiquitous ads for Gevalia coffee. Buy a couple pounds of beans and get a free drip coffeemaker. That became the first of a steady stream of plastic automatic drip coffee machines of various makes that took up residence on our countertop, none of which lived to see their second birthdays. Each time one broke, my husband and I found that the features available to us had multiplied. We could buy coffeemakers with built-in bean grinders, brew strength controls and programmable timers. We had been cornered by a combination of functional obsolescence and fashion obsolescence.

Then we discovered what any self-respecting Italian coffee drinker knew all along: A $30 cast aluminum stovetop espresso maker lasts forever. Replace the rubber gasket every couple of years, and you’ll stay happily caffeinated for life. We bought a used ’70s model on eBay several years ago and have been using it every day ever since.

Not everything older is better, of course. Visit your local thrift store, and you’ll be confronted by an exhibit of the unnecessary and the obsolete. Did anybody ever need a bread machine, an ice cream maker or an Atari game console?

And yet, thrift stores are also the repositories of time-tested items. The garments sold there are Darwinian success stories. They’ve survived the wrath of washers and dryers and still have significant life left in them. The dishes may be mismatched, but they are dishwasher and hand-washer safe. And I’m convinced that this is where the world’s missing teaspoons come to rest. If heirloom design has a line of boutiques, this is it.

Heirloom design has its adherents in the design and manufacturing worlds, too.

Patagonia, based in Ventura, Calif., was founded by avid mountain climbers who began selling clothing to support their barely profitable climbing-hardware business. From the start, the company was grounded in concern for the environment, and was an early adopter of several socially and environmentally responsible corporate policies, from donating a percentage of profits to environmental groups to offering employees on-site daycare.

Patagonia products are designed to last, and when they don’t hold up, the company stands behind them. Its “ironclad guarantee” states: “If one of our products does not perform to your satisfaction, return it to the store you bought it from or to Patagonia for a repair, replacement or refund.”

Sixteen years ago, my older brother gave me a Patagonia fleece jacket his children had outgrown. He purchased it around 1987 for his oldest daughter, who wore it until she outgrew it and handed it down to her younger sister. When she outgrew it, my daughter wore it, and then my son. At some point, the zipper broke, so I sent it to Patagonia, which repaired it at no cost. The jacket never wore out. That’s heirloom design.

The alternative to durability and repair is remanufacturing. After more than two decades in the modular carpet business, Ray Anderson, founder and chair of Interface Inc. of Lagrange, Ga., heard a talk by environmentalist Paul Hawken and was inspired to green up his company. In addition to other ecological efforts on the materials and production sides, in 1995 the company introduced an “evergreen lease” arrangement, essentially turning carpet into a service instead of a product. By taking responsibility for retrieving and remanufacturing carpet no longer wanted by its customers, Interface was able to keep used carpet out of the waste stream and reduce the need for new materials.

Unfortunately, the leasing concept proved complicated and expensive. The company eventually gave up on it but continued to aggressively pursue discarded carpet—both its own and that of other companies—so that the materials could be reclaimed and remanufactured. Andrew King, a visiting fellow in mechanical engineering at the University of Bristol and consultant with the Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse, notes that remanufacturing is preferable to recycling because it preserves most of a product’s embodied energy while bringing it back to its original quality. And it creates jobs.

Here’s the kicker: By emphasizing product durability, service and remanufacturing, both of these companies have earned extra dividends in the form of corporate image and customer loyalty.
In Search of Solutions
The question, then, is what would it take to overcome our dependence on cheap goods? Even though obsolescence is no longer a boon for this country’s manufacturers, cheap products are essential for consumers who can barely afford to put food on the table. If a durable coffeemaker costs twice as much as a breakable one but lasts four times as long, it’s still less attractive to someone who doesn’t have the additional cash up front.

Policy would have to play a key role in reversing this unfortunate check-out counter calculation. Legislation on extended producer responsibility (EPR), requiring manufacturers to account for the full life-cycle of their products from extraction to disposal, could affect consumer culture by making disposable items more expensive and reviving an interest in repair.

Such legislation is complicated, however, by the ongoing pressure to protect industrial production. “Legislation tends to get watered and watered until it gets to be almost a hindrance to these breakthrough changes because in order for Big Business to buy into it, it has to become easy for them,” King says. EPR legislation would only be effective if it created a financial incentive for industry to produce more durable goods and for consumers to favor them.

Consumers are certainly influenced by price, but Cooper holds out hope that they also can be persuaded by having more of a connection to the objects they purchase—something referred to as “emotionally durable design.” If that sounds too touchy-feely for a coffee machine, consider the difference between a pair of shoes custom-made for you by your local cobbler and an off-the-rack pair from the shoe store. Which would you be more likely to clean, resole and repair?

Part of the solution might also be having more products available without the burden of ownership. Tool rentals, car-sharing and even laundromats diminish the number of products that need to be manufactured and place a premium on durability and longevity. (This can even be done informally. We’ve shared a lawnmower with one of our neighbors for years.) “We should have much more attachment to certain products but for others we should see that they are services,” King says.

Cooper warns, however, that rental can backfire in some areas, such as electronics. “The danger of the rental model with technology is that as advances are made, people who rent them might upgrade even more quickly than they would at the moment,” he says. But even electronics could have a smaller ecological footprint if they could be updated through the use of modular design instead of being casually discarded. “The trick will be to understand what does and what doesn’t change,” King says.

King sees consumers playing a large role in putting pressure on industry to make the necessary changes. “The real issue is creating the demand,” he says. “I work with a large number of large multinationals. When they assign their designers to the challenge—design this for two lives—they rise to the challenge. They just start to think in a different way.”

Ultimately, environmental and economic sustainability won’t be possible until we become less dependent on consumer spending, which currently comprises 70 percent of the U.S. economy. We can’t just keep churning out, buying and disposing of stuff.

“We can diversify the range of goods that are underpinning our economy and providing us with jobs and some prosperity,” Cohen says. “It doesn’t just have to be commodities for the individual consumer. That would be the best hope.”

Published on Monday, December 7, 2009 by The New York Times
Cap and Fade
by James Hansen
AT the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.
Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain — at levels below what they were in 1980. This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. Great success? Hardly.
Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear.
Worse yet, polluters’ lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be “grandfathered,” avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That’s hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today’s coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975.
Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.
Yet cap-and-trade schemes are still being pursued in Copenhagen and Washington. (Though I head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I’m speaking only for myself.)
To compound matters, the Congressional carbon cap would also encourage “offsets” — alternatives to emission reductions, like planting trees on degraded land or avoiding deforestation in Brazil. Caps would be raised by the offset amount, even if such offsets are imaginary or unverifiable. Stopping deforestation in one area does not reduce demand for lumber or food-growing land, so deforestation simply moves elsewhere.
Once again, lobbyists are providing the real leadership on climate change legislation. Under the proposed law, some permits to pollute would be handed out free; and much of the money actually collected from permits would be used to pay for boondoggles like “clean coal” research. The House and Senate energy bills would only assure continued coal use, making it implausible that carbon dioxide emissions would decline sharply.
If that isn’t bad enough, Wall Street is poised to make billions of dollars in the “trade” part of cap-and-trade. The market for trading permits to emit carbon appears likely to be loosely regulated, to be open to speculators and to include derivatives. All the profits of this pollution trading system would be extracted from the public via increased energy prices.
There is a better alternative, one that would be more efficient and less costly than cap and trade: “fee and dividend.” Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production.
All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.
For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse.
Still need more convincing? Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country’s. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. — because the total emissions are set by the cap.
In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions — and to keep reducing emissions — would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.
The plans in Copenhagen and Washington have not been finalized. It is not too late to trade cap and trade for an approach that actually works.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
James Hansen is the author of the forthcoming "Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity."

Published on Sunday, December 6, 2009 by TomDispatch
Why Copenhagen May Be a Disaster
by Bill McKibben
Most political arguments don't really have a right and a wrong, no matter how passionately they're argued. They're about human preferences -- for more health care or lower taxes, for a war to secure some particular end or a peace that leaves some danger intact.  On occasion, there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most passionate about human affairs recognize that we're on one side of a debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda). We need people taking strong positions to move issues forward, which is why I'm always ready to carry a placard or sign a petition, but most of us also realize that, sooner or later, we have to come to some sort of compromise.
That's why standard political operating procedure is to move slowly, taking matters in small bites instead of big gulps. That's why, from the very beginning, we seemed unlikely to take what I thought was the correct course for our health-care system:  a single-payer model like the rest of the world. It was too much change for the country to digest.  That's undoubtedly part of the reason why almost nobody who ran for president supported it, and those who did went nowhere.
Instead, we're fighting hard over a much less exalted set of reforms that represent a substantial shift, but not a tectonic one. You could -- and I do -- despise the insurance industry and Big Pharma for blocking progress, but they're part of the game. Doubtless we should change the rules, so they represent a far less dominant part of it. But if that happens, it, too, will undoubtedly occur piece by piece, not all at once.
Moving by increments:  it frustrates the hell out of many of us, and sometimes it's truly disastrous. (I just watched Bill Moyers' amazing recent broadcast of the LBJ tapes in the run-up to the full-scale escalation of the Vietnam War, where the president and his advisors just kept moving the numbers up a twitch at a time until we were neck deep in the Big Muddy.)  Usually, however, incrementalism, whatever you think of it, lends a kind of stability to the conduct of our affairs -- often it has a way of setting the stage for the next move. 
We may have to wait years for the next round of health-care reform and, in the meantime, doubtless many people will suffer, but here's the one thing we know:  what we don't do now doesn't foreclose future progress. In fact, it may make it more likely -- if, after all, people grow comfortable with the idea of a "public option," then the next time around the insurance industry won't be able to make actual, honest-to-God public medicine seem so scary.
Climate Change as Just Another Political Problem
When it comes to global warming, however, this is precisely why we're headed off a cliff, why the Copenhagen talks that open this week, almost no matter what happens, will be a disaster. Because climate change is not like any other issue we've ever dealt with. Because the adversary here is not Republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism, or any of the problems we normally face -- adversaries that can change over time, or be worn down, or disproved, or cast off. The adversary here is physics.
Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we've been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first . Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible "with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."  That bottom line won't change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.
And here's the thing: physics doesn't just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don't deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble -- because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we're never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.
Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we're over the edge already.  We're no longer capable of "preventing" global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.
So here's the thing: When Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen, he will treat global warming as another political problem, offering a promise of something like a 17% cut in our greenhouse gas emissions from their 2005 levels by 2020. This works out to a 4% cut from 1990 levels, the standard baseline for measurement, and yet scientists have calculated that the major industrialized nations need to cut their emissions by 40% to have any hope of getting us on a path back towards safety.
And even that 17% cut may turn out to be far too high a figure for the Senate.  Here's what Senator Jim Webb (a coal-country Democrat) wrote to the president last week: "I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed in Copenhagen... The phrase 'politically binding' has been used. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country."
In any case, the Senate has decided that it will not debate any climate-change bill until "the spring," after health care is settled, and maybe entitlement reform, and perhaps even financial regulation. And awfully close to the next election.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are apparently prepared to offer a 40% reduction in the "energy intensity" of their economy by 2020.  In other words, they claim they'll then be using 40% less energy to make each yuan worth of stuff they ship off to WalMart.  Which is better than not doing it, but more or less what the experts think would happen anyway as China's economy naturally becomes more high-tech and efficient. It's at best a minor stretch from "business as usual."
Meanwhile, the Indians almost sacked their environment minister after the newspapers decided he was compromising the national interest by engaging in real negotiations about global warming.
Meanwhile, the Australian opposition last week did sack their leader for being willing to compromise on an already-compromised Emissions Trading Scheme that would have capped carbon -- meaning nothing will pass.
Meanwhile...
A Challenge Unique in History
A new analysis released Thursday by a consortium of European think-tanks shows that the various offers on the table add up to a world in which the atmosphere contains 650 parts per million and the temperature rises an ungodly five degrees Fahrenheit.
What I'm saying is:  even the best politicians are treating the problem of climate change as a normal political one, where you halve the distance between various competing interests and do your best to reach some kind of consensus that doesn't demand too much of anyone, yet reduces the political pressure for a few years -- at which time, of course, you (or possibly someone entirely different) will have to deal with it again.
Obama is doing the same thing with climate change that he did with health care.  He's acting with complete political realism, refusing to make the perfect the enemy of the good (or, really, the better-than-Bush). He's doing what might make sense in almost any other situation.
Here, unfortunately, the foe is implacable. Implacable foes emerge rarely. The best human analog to the role physics is playing here may be fascism in the middle of the last century. There was no appeasing it, no making a normal political issue out of it. You had to decide to go all in, to transform the industrial base of the country to fight it, to put other things on hold, to demand sacrifice.
Yet it's all too obvious that we're not dealing with it that way.  The president hasn't, for instance, been on a nonstop campaign to make everyone realize the danger. When he went to China, he certainly reached some interesting agreements about cooperation on automobile technology, but that's not the same as seeking a wartime partnership.
Nor is the senate meeting late into the night figuring out how to mobilize our country's resources and people in the struggle to save our planet.  Here's how Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill summed up the mood: "I don't think anyone's excited about doing another really, really big thing that's really, really hard that makes everybody mad."
Some of us have been trying hard to open some political space for world leaders to step up to this challenge.  We built a worldwide movement at 350.org that managed to pull off the "most widespread day of political action in the planet's history" (at least according to CNN).  In some places, it even sparked the desired result.  Ninety-two nations, all poor and vulnerable to the early effects of climate change, have endorsed that radical 350 target.
Some of their leaders, like Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a nation made up of more than a thousand islands in the Indian Ocean, have emerged as tigers, ready to fight. No one would be surprised to see him lead some kind of walkout from the Copenhagen negotiations, since he's declared over and over that he won't be party to a "suicide pact" for his low-lying nation; he is, in other words, unwilling to treat global warming as a normal political issue.
We, however, couldn't get even the most minor player in the Obama administration to come to one of the 2,000 rallies we staged across this country.  None of them were interested in jumping into the space we were trying to open.  If the U.S. is this willing to treat climate change as politics-as-usual, most of the other major players will simply follow suit.
They'll sign some kind of paper in Denmark -- that became all but certain on Friday night when Obama announced he'd jet in for the meeting's close.  European leaders and some environmental groups may then call it a "qualified success," and on we will go through more years of negotiation. In the meantime, physics will continue to operate, permafrost will continue to thaw, sea ice to melt, drought to spread.
It's like nothing we've ever faced before -- and we're facing it as if it's just like everything else. That's the problem.
© 2009 Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is the author of many books, including his latest: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future .  McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and cofounder of 350.org .

The Physics of Copenhagen

The Nation

by BILL MCKIBBEN

December 7, 2009

Most political arguments don’t really have a right and a wrong, no matter how passionately they’re argued. They’re about human preferences--for more healthcare or lower taxes, for a war to secure some particular end or a peace that leaves some danger intact.  On occasion, there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most passionate about human affairs recognize that we’re on one side of a debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda). We need people taking strong positions to move issues forward, which is why I’m always ready to carry a placard or sign a petition, but most of us also realize that, sooner or later, we have to come to some sort of compromise.
That’s why standard political operating procedure is to move slowly, taking matters in small bites instead of big gulps. That’s why, from the very beginning, we seemed unlikely to take what I thought was the correct course for our healthcare system:  a single-payer model like the rest of the world. It was too much change for the country to digest.  That’s undoubtedly part of the reason why almost nobody who ran for president supported it, and those who did went nowhere.
Instead, we’re fighting hard over a much less exalted set of reforms that represent a substantial shift, but not a tectonic one. You could--and I do--despise the insurance industry and Big Pharma for blocking progress, but they’re part of the game. Doubtless we should change the rules, so they represent a far less dominant part of it. But if that happens, it, too, will undoubtedly occur piece by piece, not all at once.
Moving by increments:  it frustrates the hell out of many of us, and sometimes it’s truly disastrous. (I just watched Bill Moyers’ amazingrecent broadcast of the LBJ tapes in the run-up to the full-scale escalation of the Vietnam War, where the president and his advisors just kept moving the numbers up a twitch at a time until we were neck deep in the Big Muddy.)  Usually, however, incrementalism, whatever you think of it, lends a kind of stability to the conduct of our affairs--often it has a way of setting the stage for the next move. 
We may have to wait years for the next round of health-care reform and, in the meantime, doubtless many people will suffer, but here’s the one thing we know:  what we don’t do now doesn’t foreclose future progress. In fact, it may make it more likely--if, after all, people grow comfortable with the idea of a “public option,” then the next time around the insurance industry won’t be able to make actual, honest-to-God public medicine seem so scary.
Climate Change as Just Another Political Problem
When it comes to global warming, however, this is precisely why we’re headed off a cliff, why the Copenhagen talks that open this week, almost no matter what happens, will be a disaster. Because climate change is not like any other issue we’ve ever dealt with. Because the adversary here is not Republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism, or any of the problems we normally face--adversaries that can change over time, or be worn down, or disproved, or cast off. The adversary here is physics.
Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible "with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”  That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.
And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble -- because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the US Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.
Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already.  We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.
So here’s the thing: When Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen, he will treat global warming as another political problem, offering a promise of something like a 17 percent cut in our greenhouse gas emissions from their 2005 levels by 2020. This works out to a 4 percent cut from 1990 levels, the standard baseline for measurement, and yet scientists have calculated that the major industrialized nations need to cut their emissions by 40 percent to have any hope of getting us on a path back towards safety.
And even that 17 percent cut may turn out to be far too high a figure for the Senate.  Here’s what Senator Jim Webb (a coal-country Democrat)wrote to the president last week: "I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed in Copenhagen… The phrase 'politically binding' has been used. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country."
In any case, the Senate has decided that it will not debate any climate-change bill until “the spring,” after health care is settled, and maybe entitlement reform, and perhaps even financial regulation. And awfully close to the next election.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are apparently prepared to offer a 40 percent reduction in the “energy intensity” of their economy by 2020.  In other words, they claim they’ll then be using 40 percent less energy to make each yuan worth of stuff they ship off to WalMart.  Which is better than not doing it, but more or less what the experts think would happen anyway as China’s economy naturally becomes more high-tech and efficient. It’s at best a minor stretch from “business as usual.”
Meanwhile, the Indians almost sacked their environment minister after the newspapers decided he was compromising the national interest by engaging in real negotiations about global warming.
Meanwhile, the Australian opposition last week did sack their leader for being willing to compromise on an already-compromised Emissions Trading Scheme that would have capped carbon--meaning nothing will pass.
Meanwhile…
A Challenge Unique in History
A new analysis released Thursday by a consortium of European think-tanks shows that the various offers on the table add up to a world in which the atmosphere contains 650 parts per million and the temperature rises an ungodly five degrees Fahrenheit.
What I’m saying is:  even the best politicians are treating the problem of climate change as a normal political one, where you halve the distance between various competing interests and do your best to reach some kind of consensus that doesn’t demand too much of anyone, yet reduces the political pressure for a few years--at which time, of course, you (or possibly someone entirely different) will have to deal with it again.
Obama is doing the same thing with climate change that he did with health care.  He’s acting with complete political realism, refusing to make the perfect the enemy of the good (or, really, the better-than-Bush). He’s doing what might make sense in almost any other situation.
Here, unfortunately, the foe is implacable. Implacable foes emerge rarely. The best human analog to the role physics is playing here may be fascism in the middle of the last century. There was no appeasing it, no making a normal political issue out of it. You had to decide to go all in, to transform the industrial base of the country to fight it, to put other things on hold, to demand sacrifice.
Yet it’s all too obvious that we’re not dealing with it that way.  The president hasn’t, for instance, been on a nonstop campaign to make everyone realize the danger. When he went to China, he certainly reached some interesting agreements about cooperation on automobile technology, but that’s not the same as seeking a wartime partnership.
Nor is the senate meeting late into the night figuring out how to mobilize our country’s resources and people in the struggle to save our planet.  Here’s how Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill summed up the mood: “I don’t think anyone’s excited about doing another really, really big thing that’s really, really hard that makes everybody mad.”
Some of us have been trying hard to open some political space for world leaders to step up to this challenge.  We built a worldwide movement at350.org that managed to pull off the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history” (at least according to CNN).  In some places, it even sparked the desired result.  Ninety-two nations, all poor and vulnerable to the early effects of climate change, have endorsed that radical 350 target.
Some of their leaders, like Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a nation made up of more than a thousand islands in the Indian Ocean, have emerged as tigers, ready to fight. No one would be surprised to see him lead some kind of walkout from the Copenhagen negotiations, since he’s declared over and over that he won’t be party to a “suicide pact” for his low-lying nation; he is, in other words, unwilling to treat global warming as a normal political issue.
We, however, couldn’t get even the most minor player in the Obama administration to come to one of the 2,000 rallies we staged across this country.  None of them were interested in jumping into the space we were trying to open.  If the US is this willing to treat climate change as politics-as-usual, most of the other major players will simply follow suit.
They'll sign some kind of paper in Denmark--that became all but certain on Friday night when Obama announced he'd jet in for the meeting's close.  European leaders and some environmental groups may then call it a “qualified success,” and on we will go through more years of negotiation. In the meantime, physics will continue to operate, permafrost will continue to thaw, sea ice to melt, drought to spread.

About Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, most recently The Bill McKibben Reader, an essay collection. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is co-founder of 350.org, the largest global grassroots organizing campaign on climate change. more...

Published on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 by The Times/UK
Major Cities at Risk from Rising Sea Level Threat
by Hannah Devlin and Robin Pagnamenta
Sea levels will rise by twice as much as previously predicted as a result of global warming, an important international study has concluded.
The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) calculated that if temperatures continued to increase at the present rate, by 2100 the sea level would rise by up to 1.4 metres - twice that predicted two years ago.
Such a rise in sea levels would engulf island nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific, devastate coastal cities such as Calcutta and Dhaka and force London, New York and Shanghai to spend billions on flood defences.
Even if the average global temperature increases by only 2C - the target set for next week's Copenhagen summit - sea levels could still rise by 50cm, double previous forecasts, according to the report.
SCAR, a partnership of 35 of the world's leading climate research institutions, made the prediction in the report Antarctic Climate Change and Climate. It far exceeds the 0.59 metre rise by the end of the century quoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. This was based on a "business as usual" approach by governments that allowed temperatures to rise by 4 degrees. It will underpin the negotiations in Copenhagen.
SCAR scientists said that the IPCC underestimated grossly how much the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets would contribute to total sea-level rises.
One of the world's leading experts on climate science has called for the world to intensify efforts to control global warming by actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In an interview with The Times, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said that geo-engineering, where carbon is stripped from the atmosphere using specialist technologies, would be necessary to control runaway damage to the climate. "At some point we will have to cross over and start sucking some of those gases out of the atmosphere."
He added that world leaders meeting in Copenhagen should aim for a tighter target of no more than a 1.5C rise in global temperatures.
The IPCC report predicted that the melting of ice sheets would contribute about 20 per cent of the total rise in sea levels, with the majority coming from the melting of glaciers and the expansion of the water as it warms. It said that it was not able to predict the impact of melting ice sheets, but suggested this could add 10-20cm.
The SCAR report uses detailed climate observations over the past century linking temperature to sea levels to produce a more sophisticated estimate. It puts the likely contribution from ice sheets at more than 50 per cent.
The calculations were carried out by Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Sceptics seized upon his figures as further evidence of the unreliability of climate change predictions.
"It's 50cm, 60cm, 100cm - 60m if you ask James Hansen from Nasa," said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation . "The predictions come in thick and fast, but we take them all with a pinch of salt. We look out of the window and it's very cold, it doesn't seem to be warming. We're very concerned that 100-year policies are being made on the basis of these predictions"

Global Warming's Impacts Have Sped Up, Worsened Since Kyoto

SETH BORENSTEIN | 11/22/09 02:54 PM | 

WASHINGTON — Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated – beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.
And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:
_The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.
_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.
_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.
_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.
Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast.
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"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent. Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."
The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.
From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period. When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters – the U.S., China and India – were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.
And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.
"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.
That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.
"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press.
In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.
"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.
The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's all happening far faster than predicted.
Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.
Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves – adding up to the size of Delaware – came off the Antarctic peninsula.
While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.
Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.
Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.
"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."
Also, permafrost – the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane – is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.
Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years.
More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.
In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.
More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.
The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.
Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Spiegel Online/Germany
Obama Has Failed the World on Climate Change
by Christian Schwägerl
US President Barack Obama came to office promising hope and change. But on climate change, he has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush. Now, should the climate summit in Copenhagen fail, the blame will lie squarely with Obama.
The folder labeled "climate change" that George W. Bush left behind for his successor on the desk of the Oval Office in January likely wasn't a thick one. Although Bush once said that America is overly-dependent on oil, he never got beyond that insight. He was too busy waging war on Iraq and searching for a legal basis for extraordinary renditions to pay much attention to the real threat facing humanity. "Forget the climate" seems to have been Bush's unofficial motto.
But few people expected that the Barack Obama, of all people, would continue his predecessor's climate change plan. When he took office at the beginning of 2009, it was clear that the success of the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December depended almost entirely on the US -- that America needed to take a clear leadership role on a problem that could shake civilization to its very core.
Only if the US manages to reduce its excessive energy consumption, commit itself to mandatory CO2 emission reduction targets and help finance the move away from oil for poorer countries, is there still a chance that countries like China and India will do the same and that a dangerous warming of the Earth can be stopped. On the weekend, Obama announced that there would be no agreement on binding rules in Copenhagen. It was the admission of a massive failing -- and the prelude to a truly dramatic phase of international climate policy.
Obama Lied to the Europeans
Barack Obama cast himself as a "citizen of the world" when he delivered his well-received campaign speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008. But the US president has now betrayed this claim. In his Berlin speech, he was dishonest with Europe. Since then, Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely his country's addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change. Health care reform and other domestic issues were more important to him than global environmental threats. He was either unwilling or unable to convince skeptics in his own ranks and potential defectors from the ranks of the Republicans to support him, for example by promising alternative investments as a compensation for states with large coal reserves.
Obama's announcement at the APEC summit that it was no longer possible to secure a binding treaty in Copenhagen, is the result of his own negligence. China, India and other emerging economies have always spoken openly about the fact that the US, as the world's largest emitter of CO2, has to be proactive in commiting itself to targets agreed on by way of international negotiation. But that is not America's style. The US is quite happy to see itself as the leader of the Western world. But when it comes to climate change, America has once again failed miserably -- for the umpteenth time.
If the rest of the world were to follow the US example in their approach to fossil fuels, the oceans would not only heat up, but would probably soon begin to boil. American CO2 emissions per capita are about twice as high as those in comparable industrialized nations and many times greater than those of the developing world. The climate change bill that is currently making its way through Congress does not go nearly far enough -- and that is Obama's fault. The bill proposed reducing CO2 emissions by a ridiculous 4 percent relative to 1990 levels, by 2020. Climate researchers believe that reductions of 40 percent or more are required.
The bill has since been watered down even more -- by exactly the kind of lobbying interests which the new US president had promised to overcome. Obama has neglected to communicate the importance of climate change to his fellow citizens by speaking about it in a major speech or in his much-loved "town hall" meetings. And he has left it to the Europeans to take the lead.
Americans Do Not Look Beyond their Own Borders
Obama's priorities are wrong. Copenhagen is not just any old summit -- it is the long-awaited climax of many years of negotiations, negotiations whose failure was only averted at the last minute at the Bali summit two years ago. Industry and energy companies around the world will use the results of the Copenhagen summit as a benchmark when they are planning their investments for the coming years and decades.
Obama was quite happy to make the trip to Copenhagen in October to support his hometown Chicago's bid to host the Olympic Games. But he is currently leaving open the question of whether he will come to the Danish capital in December for the UN Climate Change Conference. In doing so, he has given other world leaders the signal that they do not need to attend. If the Copenhagen summit, which energy strategists and environmentalists have been preparing for two years, is a failure, then it will mainly be Obama's fault.
Admittedly the Europeans have been slow to make concrete pledges of the billions of euros that are needed to help developing countries combat climate change, but at least they are prepared to make significant CO2 reductions of up to 30 percent by 2020, relative to 1990 levels. The US, however, is dragging its feet, preferring tactics to strategy -- just as was the case under George W. Bush.
Dreamt Up by Hollywood
For most Americans, the world beyond the US's borders is nothing more than an irritating nuisance. Hence arguments based on appeals about drowning Bangladeshis, starving Africans and flooded islands in Indonesia have little effect. In Hollywood, the United States has an industry that continually pushes the materialistic ideal of Western prosperity to billions of people around the world, while at the same time bombarding them with apocalyptic visions in the form of disaster movies.
Many Americans clearly also believe that real climate change is just something dreamt up by the entertainment industry.
Obama has proven himself to be unable to put an end to the lies that modern American society is based on. He is unable to overcome the entrenched lobbyists of the oil and coal industries and make the reality clear to his compatriots: They are the worst energy wasters on the planet -- and are thus indirectly a major threat to world peace in the 21st century. Although they do not enjoy a higher quality of life than Europeans, Americans consume twice as much fossil fuel per capita. Their cars are too big, their homes are not energy efficient and they have yet to focus their talents for innovation away from trivial entertainment gadgets and toward renewable energy technologies.
The Main Culprit
It may seem arrogant to take the Americans to task to such a degree. But at least in Europe, many are willing to question their own lifestyle and to look at events beyond their own borders.
The Copenhagen summit, which is just three weeks away, is not lost yet. But if the worst-case scenario becomes reality at Copenhagen and at the follow-up conferences -- if, in other words, world leaders ignore the findings of the global scientific community -- then the US will find itself in a very uncomfortable position. America will be seen as the primary culprit of global warming -- and this after the US, with its rampant real estate speculation, has given us a global economic crisis which has not only destroyed assets, but pushed 100 million people worldwide into hunger. With that kind of track record, the US hardly has a claim any more to the leadership of the Western world -- let alone a Nobel Peace Prize for its leader.
A world of flooded coasts, dried-up rivers and disappearing rainforests will lead to massive refugee movements and conflict. The Nobel Committee should postpone the award of the Nobel Peace Prize from Dec. 10 to Dec. 20. Only if Obama has achieved a convincing deal at the Copenhagen conference will there be a real reason to honor him.

Published on Friday, November 6, 2009 by Orion Magazine
Would We Listen to Nature if Our Lives Depended on It?
by Derrick Jensen
People who read my work often say, “Okay, so it’s clear you don’t like this culture, but what do you want to replace it?” The answer is that I don’t want any one culture to replace this culture. I want ten thousand cultures to replace this culture, each one arising organically from its own place. That’s how humans inhabited the planet (or, more precisely, their landbases, since each group inhabited a place, and not the whole world, which is precisely the point), before this culture set about reducing all cultures to one.
I live on Tolowa (Indian) land. Prior to the arrival of the dominant culture, the Tolowa lived here for 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time. This story may sound familiar, but its significance has, thus far, been lost on the dominant culture, so it bears repeating: when the first settlers arrived here maybe 180 years ago, the place was a paradise. Salmon ran in runs so thick you couldn’t see the bottoms of rivers, so thick people were afraid to put their boats in for fear they would capsize, so thick they would keep people awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, so thick you could hear the runs for miles before you could see them. Whales were commonplace in the nearby ocean. Forests were thick with frogs, newts, salamanders, birds, elk, bears. And of course huge ancient redwood trees.
Now I count myself blessed when I see two salmon in what we today call Mill Creek. Another Tolowa staple, Pacific lampreys, are in bad shape. Just three years ago you could not hold a human conversation outside at night in the spring, and now I hear maybe five or six frogs at night. Salamanders, newts, songbirds, all are equivalently gone. The rivers are poisoned with pesticides and herbicides. All in less than two centuries.
Why? Or, perhaps more important, how?
Only the most arrogant and ignorant among us would say something that implies that all humans are destructive, and that the dominant (white) culture is the most destructive simply because somehow indigenous peoples around the world were too stupid to invent backhoes and chainsaws, too backward to dominate their human and nonhuman neighbors with the efficiency and viciousness of the dominant culture. They might even try to argue that the Tolowa weren’t actually living sustainably, even though they lived here for at least 12,500 years. But when 12,500 years of living in place won’t convince them, it becomes pretty clear that evidence is secondary, and that there are, rather, ideological reasons the person cannot accept that humans have ever lived sustainably. One of these ideological reasons is very clear: if you can convince yourself that humans are inherently destructive, then you allow yourself the most convenient of all excuses not to work to stop this culture from destroying the planet: it’s simply in our nature to destroy, and you can’t fight biology, so let’s not fuss about all these little extinctions, and could someone please pass the TV remote? It’s an odious position, but a lot of people take it.
If we want to stop this culture from killing the planet, we might instead try asking how so many indigenous cultures lived in place for so long without destroying their landbases.
There are many differences between indigenous and nonindigenous ways of being in the world, but I want to mention two here. The first is that the indigenous had and have serious long-term relationships with the plants and animals with whom they share their landscape. Ray Rafael, who has written extensively on the concept of wilderness, has said that Native Americans hunted, gathered, and fished “using methods that would be sustainable over centuries and even millennia. They did not alter their environment beyond what could sustain them indefinitely. They did not farm, but they managed the environment. But it was different from the way that people try to manage it now, because they stayed in relationship with it.”
That last phrase is key. What would a society look like that was planning on being in that particular place five hundred years from now? What would an economics look like? If you knew for a fact that your descendants five hundred years from now would live on the same landbase you inhabit now, how would that affect your relationship to sources of water? How would that affect your relationship with topsoil? With forests? Would you produce waste products that are detrimental to the soil? Would you poison your water sources (or allow them to be poisoned)? Would you allow global warming to continue? If the very lives of your children and their children depended on your current actions—and of course they do—how would you act differently than you do?
The other difference I want to mention—and essentially every traditional indigenous person with whom I have ever spoken has said that it is the fundamental difference between western and indigenous peoples—is that even the most open Westerners view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to something real. I asked American Indian writer Vine Deloria about this, and he said, “I think the primary thing is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people, especially science, reduce things to objects, whether they’re living or not. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as made up of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, not only is it inevitable that you will destroy the world by attempting to control it, but perceiving the world as lifeless robs you of the richness, beauty, and wisdom of participating in the larger pattern of life.” That brings to mind a great line by a Canadian lumberman: “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.” If when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you’ll treat them one way. If when you look at trees, you see trees, you’ll treat them differently. If when you look at this particular tree you see this particular tree, you’ll treat it differently still. The same is true for salmon, and, of course, for women: if when I look at women I see objects, I’m going to treat them one way. If when I look at women I see women, I’ll treat them differently. And if when I look at this particular woman I see this particular woman, I’ll treat her differently still.
Here’s where people usually ask, “Okay, so how do I listen to the natural world?” When people ask me this, I always begin by asking them if they have ever made love. If so, I ask whether the other person always had to say, “put this here,” or “do that now,” or did they sometimes read their lover’s body, listen to the unspoken language of the flesh? Having established that one can communicate without words, I then ask if they have ever had any nonhuman friends (a.k.a. pets). If so, how did the dog or cat let you know that her food dish was empty? I used to have a dog friend who would look at me, look at the food dish, look at me, look at the food dish, until finally the message would get across to me.
How do we hear the rest of the natural world? Unsurprisingly enough, the answer is: by listening. That’s not easy, given that we have been told for several thousand years that these others are silent. But the fact that we cannot easily hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking, and does not mean they have nothing to say. I’ve had people respond to my suggestion that they listen to the natural world by going outside for five minutes and then returning to say they didn’t hear anything. But how can you expect to learn any new language (remember, most nonhumans don’t speak English) in such a short time? Learning to listen to our nonhuman neighbors takes effort, humility, and patience.
The Tolowa believed the nonhuman world had something to say, and that what the nonhuman world had to say was vital to their own survival. Given that they were living here sustainably for 12,500 years, and given that we manifestly are not, perhaps the least we could do is acknowledge that they were on to something, and maybe even explore just what that kind of relationship might look and feel like.
© 2009 Orion Magazine
Derrick Jensen is an activist and the author of many books, most recently What We Leave Behind and Songs of the Dead .

Published on Saturday, October 24, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Why the Polls on Climate Change Are Wrong
by Richard Sclove
This Saturday, October 24, is 350.org's  International Day of Climate Action. Citizens all over the world will participate in rallies and creative actions to let governments and delegates to the Copenhagen climate change conference know they want real solutions on climate change now, and not incremental steps or half measures that punt to some future day of reckoning.
Here's a little creative action you can do to mark the occasion right now from your computer. Go ahead and News-Google the words: New Survey Climate Change. Watch what happens. At present writing, the top two search results that come up are utterly, irreconcilably contradictory. The first is a writeup of a groundbreaking project that I advised, World Wide Views on Global Warming , which surveyed citizens in the US and 37 other countries; we found that everywhere, including in the U.S., citizens want much more aggressive action on climate change than either the U.S. Congress or the negotiators preparing for the Copenhagen seem prepared to consider. The second is an article about a new Pew poll  that shows the number of Americans who see global warming as a threat has fallen 20% in the last two years.
Who's right? It seems that our representatives in Washington and delegates to the UN COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen are eager to believe the second poll. Congressional debate on climate change legislation and preparations for COP15 are both following a similar pattern of lowering ambitions and expectations , focusing on limited areas of current agreement and incremental steps, and deferring more contentious issues of targets, timetables, funding and enforcement until some later date. We are increasingly hearing from climate policymakers that it will take more time to do things right, that we have to meet people where they are instead of imposing radical reforms from above.
But there is reason to believe that they're dead wrong, and that citizens are way ahead of the policy makers, despite what some polls say. Climate change polls typically spend a few minutes on the phone asking a random sample of people a couple of superficial, often leading questions, frequently interrupting dinnertime. The process elicits off-the-cuff reactions to complex issues that are profoundly consequential to life on our planet. It's a dubious way to gather opinion on a sober subject like climate change, and many understandably shrug it off with some cynicism.
World Wide Views on the other hand is a citizen deliberative process distinct from polling, and expanded for the first time to the global level. Unlike polls or this summer's over-heated Congressional "town halls" on health care, World Wide Views participants received balanced expert information in advance, based on the Fourth Assessment Report of the Nobel Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Then they spent an entire day learning together, in neutrally facilitated deliberations, prior to voting on policy recommendations.
Participants were everyday people selected to reflect general demographic tendencies in their nation or region in terms of age, gender, education, occupation, urban versus countryside, and ethnicity or race. Climate experts and staff from organized stakeholder groups involved with global warming were excluded. "I'm from West Virginia; coal miners don't talk a lot about climate change," explained Larry Ragland, a participant from Methuen, Massachusetts. "I'm not an environmentalist, and two weeks ago I had a completely different impression of what climate change meant."
Thousands of people like Larry gathered on September 26th in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, and throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America. During the course of the day, they voted overwhelmingly that their leaders should do far more and go far faster, not scale back and slow down as they're apparently doing now.
Here are some of the key U.S. results from World Wide Views:

• 90% of U.S. participants say it is urgent to reach a tough, new agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December and not punt to subsequent meetings.
• 87% said that by 2020 greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and other developed nations should be cut 25-40% or even more below 1990 levels (the Kerry-Boxer Senate bill would cut US emissions only 20% below 2005 levels).
• 71% want nations that fail to meet their obligations under a new agreement to be subject to severe or significant economic sanctions.
• 69% believe the price of fossil fuels should be increased.

And among participants worldwide:

• 88% want strict targets for keeping global warming within 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels (half of participants, especially in countries hardest hit by climate change, want measures to hold temperatures at the current level or even bring them down to pre-industrial levels).
• There is strong consensus for more fair and proportionate burden sharing, with 76% favoring 2020 emissions reduction targets for fast-growing economies like India, China and Brazil.
• 83% support significant or severe economic sanctions against countries that do not live up to their emissions reduction commitments (the citizen group in Bangladesh proposed creating an international court to try climate cases and "provide opportunity for negatively affected countries to claim compensation").
• 87% want strong new international financial mechanisms to support these goals.

These are ambitions that you'll either find very much dumbed down or absent entirely in current negotiations on Kerry-Boxer and COP15. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to sense something is wrong with this picture.
Considering the deep concern and striking calls to action evident in World Wide Views' global and U.S. deliberative results, what should we make of conventional polls that say Americans and some others aren't really all that worked up about climate change and don't support robust measures to combat it? Are those polls measuring informed public opinion, or does their approach give political cover to climate incrementalists and climate change deniers? You decide.
So when citizens around the world take to streets on October 24 to demand faster, more aggressive action on climate change from Washington and Copenhagen, don't fall into the trap of dismissing them as somehow on the fringe. The best and most thoughtful vehicle we have for registering considered public opinion indicates that in reality those activists represent the mainstream. If members of Congress and delegates to Copenhagen want to be responsive to public opinion, as they claim they do, then World Wide Views provides the survey results they need to take to heart.
Richard Sclove, Ph. D. is Founder and Senior Fellow of The Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making science and technology responsive to democratically decided social and environmental priorities. He is the U.S. Advisor to the World Wide Views on Global Warming project, the first globe-encompassing, citizen deliberation in history. He has briefed U.S. and other national decision-makers on science and technology policy, and prepared testimony for the House Science Committee of the U.S. Congress. The author of the award-winning bookDemocracy and Technology , his articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Technology Review and Science magazine. Dr. Sclove holds advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and political science, and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

McKibben Versus Hedges' Clash of Worldviews: How Do We Solve the Environmental Crisis?

By Chris Hedges and Bill McKibben, Yes! Magazine and TruthDig
Posted on October 24, 2009, Printed on October 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143481/

Editor's Note: The following two articles below by Bill McKibben and Chris Hedges illustrate a key point of debate in thinking about how to solve our environmental crisis. Environmental activist and writer McKibben, in YES! Magazine on October 15, writes that we can't let the atmosphere contain more than 350 million parts per million of carbon dioxide, or else face total environmental catastrophe, problem being that we've already passed this number. He's helped organize a day of action on October 24 to push and make it happen. Chris Hedges' response in TruthDig channels the radical thinking of Derek Jensen and argues that there is no possible way to address the release of carbon dioxide without addressing the way industrial society without addressing corporate power: "The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits." A very important debate, arguably on potentially the most important issue of our lives --

350: The Most Important Number in the World

by Bill McKibben, YES! Magazine
From Mt. Everest to the Maldives, people worldwide are turning an arcane number into a movement for a stable climate. Bill McKibben asks: Will you join them?
Let’s say you occasionally despair for the future of the planet. In that case, the place you need to be this week is the website for 350.org.
Every few minutes, something new arrives at our headquarters, where young people hunched over laptops do their best to keep up with the pace. News that activists in Afghanistan—Afghanistan—have organized a rally for our big day of action on October 24. They’ll assemble on a hillside 20 kilometers from Kabul to write a huge message in the sand: “Let Us Live: 350.”
Or news that there’s all of a sudden a 350 website in Farsi to help organize the rallies taking shape across Iran. Or maybe a short story exactly 350 words long from the great writer Barry Lopez. Or the news flash that the World Council of Churches has endorsed the 350 target, and is urging its 650 million members to ring their bells 350 times on October 24. Or…
But wait—what’s 350? It’s the most important number in the world, though no one knew it even 20 months ago. When Arctic ice melted so dramatically in the summer of 2007, scientists realized that global warming was no longer a future threat but a very present crisis. Within months our leading climatologists—especially the NASA team led by James Hansen—were giving us a stark new reality check. Above 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, they wrote, the atmosphere would begin to heat too much for us to have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”
That was terrible news. We’re already at 390 parts per million, and rising two parts per million per year. That’s why the Arctic is melting, why deserts are spreading, why the Himalayas are melting. And it’s why we need much faster action than most big governments are currently planning. They’re focused on old, out-of-date targets: 450 ppm, say, which would allow a slower and easier transition to a post fossil-fuel society. But the research is clear that it’s suicidal. Earlier this month, for instance, the journal Science reported on a landmark new study, which showed that when carbon levels got that high in the past, sea levels rose 75 to 120 feet.
So here’s the good news. The planet’s immune system is finally kicking in. When we started organizing 350.org 18 months ago, the task seemed a little ludicrous—we were a small band, mostly recent college graduates, with little money. How were we going to get the world behind an arcane piece of scientific data?
But it turns out that everywhere around the world there are people deeply worried about the planet’s fate, and given even a small platform to stand, on they’re willing to shout their loudest. At this writing, activists have scheduled events in about 170 nations, which is pretty much all the nations there are. (Nothing in North Korea yet). There will be thousands and thousands of rallies: bike rides that cover 350 kilometers, climbers high on the melting slopes of Mount Everest, even the cabinet of the government of the Maldives holding an official underwater meeting to send a 350 resolution to the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen.
Some of these actions are so beautiful they make you weep: around the dwindling Dead Sea, Israeli activists will form a giant human 3 on their shore, and Palestinians a 5 on their beach, and in Jordan a huge 0. The message: even in places with deep divisions, people understand that the crisis that faces us now calls for real unity.
You’re a part of this planet. Feel good about the rippling message now going out around the earth: if we shout it loud enough, even our leaders will hear. Already 92 nations have endorsed a 350 target (albeit the poorest countries on Earth). But we need you involved, too. Right now: figure out an action to join on October 24, or start one of your own. And use your email address book to send out an alert—in a wired age, you can be a useful Paul Revere. Or, to go back to my earlier metaphor, if the earth has an immune system, then you’re an antibody. Get to work!
***

A Reality Check From the Brink of Extinction

by Chris Hedges, TruthDig
We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee.
"If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won't be anything left," author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. "If all we do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet. Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to stop this."
The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is a social problem. It requires a social response.
The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent. But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto. Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring. And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same. It is a huge step backward.
"All of the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given," said Jensen, who wrote "Endgame" and "The Culture of Make Believe." "The natural world is supposed to conform to industrial capitalism. This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. What's real is real. Any social system--it does not matter if we are talking about industrial capitalism or an indigenous Tolowa people--their way of life, is dependent upon a real, physical world. Without a real, physical world you don't have anything. When you separate yourself from the real world you start to hallucinate. You believe the machines are more real than real life. How many machines are within 10 feet of you and how many wild animals are within a hundred yards? How many machines do you have a daily relationship with? We have forgotten what is real." 
The latest studies show polar ice caps are melting at a record rate and that within a decade the Arctic will be an open sea during summers. This does not give us much time. White ice and snow reflect 80 percent of sunlight back to space, while dark water reflects only 20 percent, absorbing a much larger heat load. Scientists warn that the loss of the ice will dramatically change winds and sea currents around the world. And the rapidly melting permafrost is unleashing methane chimneys from the ocean floor along the Russian coastline. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more toxic than carbon dioxide, and some scientists have speculated that the release of huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere could asphyxiate the human species. The rising sea levels, which will swallow countries such as Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and turn cities like New Orleans into a new Atlantis, will combine with severe droughts, horrific storms and flooding to eventually dislocate over a billion people. The effects will be suffering, disease and death on a scale unseen in human history.
We can save groves of trees, protect endangered species and clean up rivers, all of which is good, but to leave the corporations unchallenged would mean our efforts would be wasted. These personal adjustments and environmental crusades can too easily become a badge of moral purity, an excuse for inaction. They can absolve us from the harder task of confronting the power of corporations. 
The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10 percent of the nation's water while the other 90 percent is consumed by agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic structure of the industrial world.
"If your food comes from the grocery store and your water from a tap you will defend to the death the system that brings these to you because your life depends on it," said Jensen, who is holding workshops around the country called Deep Green Resistance [click here and here] to build a militant resistance movement. "If your food comes from a land base and if your water comes from a river you will defend to the death these systems. In any abusive system, whether we are talking about an abusive man against his partner or the larger abusive system, you force your victims to become dependent upon you. We believe that industrial capitalism is more important than life."
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. NASA climate scientistJames Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the biosphere on the "planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." He has determined that the world must stop burning coal by 2030--and the industrialized world well before that--if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number. Coal supplies half of our electricity in the United States.
"We need to separate ourselves from the corporate government that is killing the planet," Jensen said. "We need to get really serious. We are talking about life on the planet. We need to shut down the oil infrastructure. I don't care, and the trees don't care, if we do this through lawsuits, mass boycotts or sabotage. I asked Dahr Jamailhow long a bridge would last in Iraq that was not defended. He said probably six to 12 hours. We need to make the economic system, which is the engine for so much destruction, unmanageable. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Deltahas been able to reduce Nigerian oil output by 20 percent. We need to stop the oil economy." 
The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits. We have allowed the corporate state to sell the environmental crisis as a matter of personal choice when actually there is a need for profound social and economic reform. We are left powerless.
Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of Russian anarchists working to topple the czar, reminded his followers that they were not there to rescue the system. 
"We think we are the doctors," Herzen said. "We are the disease."
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book isEmpire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable F

A Reality Check from the Brink of Extinction

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091019_a_reality_check_from_the_brink_of_extinction/

Posted on Oct 18, 2009

By Chris Hedges

We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee.

“If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won’t be anything left,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensentold me when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. “If all we do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet. Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to stop this.”

The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is a social problem. It requires a social response.

The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent. But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto. Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring. And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same. It is a huge step backward.

“All of the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given,” said Jensen, who wrote “Endgame: The Problem of Civilization” and“The Culture of Make Believe.”“The natural world is supposed to conform to industrial capitalism. This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. What’s real is real. Any social system—it does not matter if we are talking about industrial capitalism or an indigenous Tolowa people—their way of life, is dependent upon a real, physical world. Without a real, physical world you don’t have anything. When you separate yourself from the real world you start to hallucinate. You believe the machines are more real than real life. How many machines are within 10 feet of you and how many wild animals are within a hundred yards? How many machines do you have a daily relationship with? We have forgotten what is real.” 

The latest studies show polar ice caps are melting at a record rate and that within a decade the Arctic will be an open sea during summers. This does not give us much time. White ice and snow reflect 80 percent of sunlight back to space, while dark water reflects only 20 percent, absorbing a much larger heat load. Scientists warn that the loss of the ice will dramatically change winds and sea currents around the world. And the rapidly melting permafrost is unleashing methane chimneys from the ocean floor along the Russian coastline. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more toxic than carbon dioxide, and some scientists have speculated that the release of huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere could asphyxiate the human species. The rising sea levels, which will swallow countries such as Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and turn cities like New Orleans into a new Atlantis, will combine with severe droughts, horrific storms and flooding to eventually dislocate over a billion people. The effects will be suffering, disease and death on a scale unseen in human history.

We can save groves of trees, protect endangered species and clean up rivers, all of which is good, but to leave the corporations unchallenged would mean our efforts would be wasted. These personal adjustments and environmental crusades can too easily become a badge of moral purity, an excuse for inaction. They can absolve us from the harder task of confronting the power of corporations. 

The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10 percent of the nation’s water while the other 90 percent is consumed by agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic structure of the industrial world.

“If your food comes from the grocery store and your water from a tap you will defend to the death the system that brings these to you because your life depends on it,” said Jensen, who is holding workshops around the country called Deep Green Resistance [click hereand here] to build a militant resistance movement. “If your food comes from a land base and if your water comes from a river you will defend to the death these systems. In any abusive system, whether we are talking about an abusive man against his partner or the larger abusive system, you force your victims to become dependent upon you. We believe that industrial capitalism is more important than life.”

Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the biosphere on the “planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” He has determined that the world must stop burning coal by 2030—and the industrialized world well before that—if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number. Coal supplies half of our electricity in the United States.

“We need to separate ourselves from the corporate government that is killing the planet,” Jensen said. “We need to get really serious. We are talking about life on the planet. We need to shut down the oil infrastructure. I don’t care, and the trees don’t care, if we do this through lawsuits, mass boycotts or sabotage. I asked Dahr Jamail how long a bridge would last in Iraq that was not defended. He said probably six to 12 hours. We need to make the economic system, which is the engine for so much destruction, unmanageable. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Deltahas been able to reduce Nigerian oil output by 20 percent. We need to stop the oil economy.” 

The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits. We have allowed the corporate state to sell the environmental crisis as a matter of personal choice when actually there is a need for profound social and economic reform. We are left powerless.

Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of Russian anarchists working to topple the czar, reminded his followers that they were not there to rescue the system. 

“We think we are the doctors,” Herzen said. “We are the disease.”

Countries Are Preparing for Rising Seas But the U.S. Is Far Behind

By Orrin Pilkey and Rob Young, Island Press
Posted on October 7, 2009, Printed on October 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142389/

From The Rising Sea by Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young, Copyright © 2009 Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Sounding Retreat

’Round the World

All around the globe, there is growing awareness of coming sea level rise. To date, the United States appears to be behind in what are still very preliminary efforts of many other countries. In 2008, the EPA released an important document intended to set the stage for the nation’s response to sea level rise, but the stated goal of the report was to add to the nation’s prosperity while responding to sea level rise. Maintaining prosperity may be desirable, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. A report with such conflicting goals cannot be taken seriously. Response to a major sea level rise will, of course, involve economic sacrifice on the part of property owners, government, and society as a whole even though jobs will be created in building relocation and other industries.

Initial major sea-level-rise impacts on U.S. development will likely occur along our barrier island coasts. Eventually, urban problems, especially stormwater and wastewater disposal, will begin to take precedence over preservation of beach communities. When our main population centers are truly threatened, and we begin to build dikes and move ports and other infrastructure, small beachfront communities are likely to become declining public priorities. The end result, decades from now, but certainly in this century, will be abandonment of many island tourist communities and, unfortunately, massive seawalling of others.

Today in the United States, action on sea level rise occurs in scattered pockets on a mostly local scale. In Olympia, Washington, a controversy erupted over the siting of the new city hall. Detractors argued the planned site was on low-elevation land built out into Puget Sound and was sure to be inundated within a few decades. A new site at higher elevation was chosen. In Santa Barbara, California, a citizens group proposed to paint a blue line around the city at the 23-foot (7 m) elevation contour to show a worst-case scenario of sea level rise (melting of the Greenland ice sheet). The voters threw it out. Joseph Riley, the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, said that replacement and upgrading of the city’s stormwater drainage system was a necessity because of rising sea levels.

Florida takes the prize for being the least prepared of all, especially given its extreme vulnerability. The state effectively has no building setback-from-the-shoreline requirement, and yet it is bound to experience numerous powerful hurricanes in coming decades, storms that will have been intensified by global warming, and it has hundreds of miles of high-rise-lined beaches. When insurance companies backed away from insuring coastal property in 2006, the state, instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to slow down hazardous development, simply decided to take over the financial obligation—in spite of the fact that a couple of hurricanes in succession could wipe out the state’s treasury. In early 2009, State Farm Insurance decided to pull out entirely from insuring property in Florida after state regulators denied a request for a rate increase. At a time when sea level rise should be a part of every coastal management program, Florida seawalls are growing by the day. The cost of beach nourishment in the state is skyrocketing, as is the number of people at risk from future storms.

Coastal engineers in the state blame most of Florida’s coastal erosion on coastal engineering activities that interrupt sand transport along beaches rather than on sea level rise. In addition, coastal engineering consulting companies make their living from beach nourishment projects. Why would they ever want to advocate for relocation of buildings? Meanwhile, coastal high-rise construction continues, even though, in a purely geometric sense (because it is so low and flat), Florida is the most endangered state in the nation from sea level rise and Miami the most endangered major city.

Lighthouses, the sentinels of the sea, have a long history of falling into the ocean due to shoreline retreat. Located, as they are, as close to the sea as possible, they are global symbols of the destruction ahead for our society as we face a future of rising seas.

The Eddystone light in Plymouth, United Kingdom, famous in song and legend, went through five iterations between 1696 and 1882 when the current version was built. Each successive lighthouse was destroyed by storm or fire. When the Great Storm of 1703 took out the first lighthouse, its overconfident designer, Henry Winstanley, a famous architect of the time, was inside making repairs. He was never seen again.

Among the U.S. victims of the sea and shoreline retreat are Ponce de Leon Lighthouse, Florida, lost in 1835; successive lighthouses on Sandy Point, Block Island, Rhode Island, in the 1830s and 1840s; Chatham, Massachusetts, twin towers, 1879 and 1888; Cape Henlopen Light in Delaware in 1926; and Tucker Beach Lighthouse, Long Beach Island, New Jersey, 1927. Cape May, New Jersey, is now on lighthouse number three, and perhaps most startling of all is the Morris Island, South Carolina, lighthouse, still standing tall and surrounded by the ocean, 1,600 feet ( 500 m) offshore.

The Morris Island light replaced the original lighthouse that was pulverized by Yankee cannon fire during the 1863 attack on Ft. Wagner in the Civil War (reenacted in the final scenes of the movie Glory). Built in 1876 about 1,600 feet (500 m)behind the beach, it now stands well offshore, leaning at an angle of 2 or 3 degrees. Its foundation is believed to be at least 35 feet (11 m) deep, which may be why it has been able to survive in shallow water in the open ocean.

The saga of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse has all the elements that will face society as a whole in a time of sea level rise. This lighthouse was also built 1,600 feet (500 m) back from the shoreline but the base of its foundation was only 6 feet (2 m) deep, well above sea level. This meant that had the shoreline moved past the lighthouse, the structure would have toppled over. First lit in 1880, this black-and-white spiral-striped lighthouse, the second on the site, had become virtually the symbol of the state of North Carolina by the mid-twentieth century. In a 1980 storm, waves swirled around the base of the structure, and it appeared to be on its way to join the list of felled lighthouses. It was saved by a quick-thinking National Park Service that tore up a nearby parking lot and threw it into the roiling surf while the storm still raged. The erosion-threatened structure was finally moved 2,000 feet (600 m) back from the eroding shoreline in the summer of 1999.

The move came after an onerous two-decades-long societal debate that holds lessons for erosion-threatened communities everywhere. Even though the structure was “protected” by a steel groin and a large sandbag seawall, it was clearly in danger of falling into the sea in a big storm. It was also clear that sea level rise was a factor in the shoreline retreat. The Outer Banks of North Carolina are currently thinning at a rapid rate (several feet per year), as are most of the world’s coastal plain barrier islands, by erosion on both sides, a sure sign of an expanding ocean. Beach nourishment at Cape Hatteras had been tried but it didn’t take, and the large seawall approach was rejected by the National Park Service, which had recently adopted a policy of letting nature roll on at the shoreline.

Despite its obvious precarious existence, there was strong resistance in local communities to moving the lighthouse. “We will be the laughingstock of the coast if we move the lighthouse,” was one often-stated platitude. Experts were found who testified that the lighthouse would fall apart if it were moved and others who testified that the lighthouse was in no particular danger from the sea. Politicians refused to seek federal money for the move. Local proponents of the move were ostracized, and violence was threatened against workers who might be involved in the relocation.

Local resistance may have stemmed primarily from a concern of local politicians that the move would draw international attention to the erosion problem, which might hurt local real estate sales. Some may have been worried that if the idea weren’t stopped at the outset, relocation of structures would become the norm for all oceanfront development. We wish this were the case. The eventual move certainly brought the expected international attention, but real estate sales, especially for beachfront property, continued to prosper.

The logjam of resistance to the move was finally broken by a joint National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences panel, which concluded that the lighthouse had to be moved if it was to be saved and that moving it could be accomplished by off-the-shelf technology. They were right.

Other countries are developing a variety of approaches to respond to the expanding oceans. Over the last few decades, development along the Spanish coast outstripped the rest of Europe’s. The result has been a nightmare of pollution and ugliness. In Spain’s coastal region, there are 273 towns with four million residents without waste-water treatment. In 2007, the country took 365 beaches off an approved swimming site list rather than make efforts to clean them up. Dozens of new marinas have sprung up, and the coastal region has become a haven for mafia, drug traffickers, and money launderers, among other shady elements.

In 2008, the new socialist government declared that the time had come to enforce the 1988 Ley de Costas (Coastal Law) that made it illegal to build within 328 feet (100 m) of Spain’s 3,100-mile ( 5,000 km) coastline. Anticipated shoreline retreat due to sea level rise is a prime motivation behind this drastic move, although the government’s estimate that erosion along the Mediterranean coast by 2050 will extend 60 feet (18 m) inland seems very conservative. Spain’s $7 billion plan, which may affect as many as 500,000 people, is to purchase, relocate, and in some cases demolish buildings that were built after 1988 and flouted the law. Politically, this drastic move is less problematic than it might seem because many of the homes threatened by the removal order are owned by nonvoting foreigners, most of them British and German retirees.

South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, which lies between Spencer Gulf on the west and Gulf St. Vincent to the east, is the site of a landmark decision in the saga of human response to sea level rise. At Marion Bay, near the southwestern tip of the peninsula, Northscape Properties planned to site eighty new homes on approximately 20 acres of land near the shoreline. South Australia development requirements are that buildings along the coast must be set back to where they will not be affected by erosion for the next hundred years. In addition, a coastal reserve of 165 feet (50 m) wide must be preserved for recreation and ecological protection. It was clear that the Northscape development did not meet the law’s requirements. The Yorke Peninsula Council listened to several experts and concluded that sea level would rise about 1 foot (0.3 m) in the next fifty years, the shoreline would retreat 115 to 130 feet (35 to 40 m) over the same time frame, and this erosion would put the shoreline at the edge of the seawardmost lots. The South Australian Supreme Court backed up the local government’s insistence that sea level rise was a basis for restricting development—a first for Australia and perhaps for the world.

The United Kingdom has wisely divided up the English and Welsh coasts into eleven units of manageable length based on geology (called sediment cells) independent of political boundaries. Shoreline management plans are then devised for each cell. It is widely accepted that all of the shoreline can’t be protected and that houses and even some villages will have to be surrendered to the sea.

Abandonment has been recommended for 25 square miles (65 km2) of the flat, low-elevation Norfolk “Broads” along with six villages and five small lakes in Norfolk County, East Anglia. Lady Barbara Young, the chief executive of the U.K. Environment Agency, says that between salinization and greatly increased storm damage potential, the sea should be allowed to breach the shoreline, flood the flats, and form a new bay. Coastal experts believe that seawalls would fail to hold back the shoreline here in a time of rising sea level. Most of the villages date from before medieval times, with historic buildings and bridges still standing, making the decision (not final yet) most difficult. There already is a long history of flooding in the area, including the record of a 1287 storm surge flood that killed nearly two hundred people in the village of Hickling. A few miles to the north of the Broads, the village of Overstrand, a cluster of 135 houses plus several businesses, will also be allowed to fall into the sea in this century. Abandonment of this area had been considered in 1662 after a great storm. Local citizens objected strongly, and as a result two thousand men were press-ganged to build new dunes—an approach that obviously can no longer work.

The Thames River Barrier, on the outskirts of London, was designed to protect $160 billion worth of buildings and infrastructure in London from storm surges moving upriver from the sea. The gates have been closed 108 times since they became operational in 1982, but since they were designed in the 1970s, the local sea level rise rate has doubled and it is assumed that it will accelerate even more. With a modest rate of sea level rise, the gates may remain useful until 2082, but with an extreme rate of sea level rise, the gates’ capacity may be exceeded as soon as 2020. New design efforts are under way. The Dutch, masters of protection from the ravages of the sea, have sheltered themselves in recent years with a variety of storm surge floodgates similar in function to the Thames River Barrier. The two grandest ones are the gates protecting Rotterdam and those across the Eastern Schelde, the latter of which was not designed with sea level rise in mind. If breeched by a storm surge, a large developed area of the Eastern Schelde River distributary valley would flood. In any event, a significant sea level rise of 3 feet (0.9 m) or more will probably negate all of the world’s current storm surge floodgates.

Click here to buy a copy of The Rising Sea

Why Red-Colored Snow on the Rockies Is a Major Warning Sign That the West Is Drying Up

By Chip Ward, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on September 16, 2009, Printed on September 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142607/

Editor's Note: Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:
All of us have been watching drought in action this summer. When it hits the TV news, though, it usually goes by the moniker of "fire." As we've seen, California, in the third year of a major drought, has been experiencing "a seemingly endless fire that has burned more than 250 square miles of Los Angeles County" (and that may turn out to be just the beginning of another fire season from hell).
Southern California has hardly been the only drought story, though. For those with an eye out, the southern parts of Texas, the hottest state in the union this year, have been in the grips of a monster drought. Seven hundred thousand acres of the state have already burned in 2009, with a high risk of more to come.
Jump a few thousand miles and along with neighboring Syria, Iraq has been going through an almost biblical drought which has turned parts of that country into a dustbowl, sweeping the former soil of the former Fertile Crescent via vast dust storms into the lungs of city dwellers.
In Africa, formerly prosperous Kenya is withering in the face of another fearsome drought that has left people desperate and livestock, crops, and children, as well as elephants, dying.
And, if you happen to be on the lookout, you can read about drought in India, where riceand sugar cane farmers as well as government finances are suffering. Or consider Mexico, where the 2009 wet season never arrived and crops are wilting in a parched countryside from the U.S. border to the Yucatan Peninsula.
Everywhere water problems threaten to lead to water wars, while "drought refugees" flee the land and food crises escalate. It's a nasty brew. But here's the strange thing -- one I'vecommented on before: there has been some fine reporting on each of these drought situations, but you can hunt high and low in the mainstream and not find any set of these droughts in the same piece. There's little indication that drought might, in fact, be an increasing global problem, nor can you find anyone exploring whether the fierceness of recent droughts and their spread might, in part, be connected to climate change. The grim "little" picture is now regularly with us. Whatever the big picture may be, it escapes notice, which is why I'm particularly glad that environmentalist and TomDispatch regular Chip Ward has written a drought piece in which, from his perch in Utah, he takes in the whole weather-perturbed American West. -- Tom Engelhardt
 ***
Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.
Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layers that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes alternating against the sky's blue field.
The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud
Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer to as "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust "event" this past spring, I wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny, brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers under opaque windows.
All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery: Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the arid West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and of more than simply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been experiencing these past several years.
The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of high plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlike eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, lakes, and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on snowpack for about 90% of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its headwaters in the snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal water source for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and southern California as well.
While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado became the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Its development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, as well as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors to keep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex infrastructure of dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitious public works project in the nation's history, but it enabled the Southwest states and southern California to boom and bloom.
The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what the Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, and the weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If Portland soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as Sacramento, as some forecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to be more like Death Valley.
If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at most three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it alive. That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with each rise in the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant future when the water finally runs out in one of those cities -- a kind of slow-motion Katrina in reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. If the Colorado River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation's agriculture and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike.
Too Much Too Soon, Then Too Little Too Late
Hot and dry is bad enough; chaotic weather only adds to our problems. As we practice it today, agriculture depends on cheap energy, a stable climate, and abundant water. Those last two are intimately mixed. Water has to be not just abundant, but predictable and reliable in its flow. And the words "predictable," "reliable," and "water" go together ever less comfortably in our neck of the woods.
Here's the problem. Despite the existence of the Colorado River's famous monster-dams like Hoover in Nevada and Glen Canyon in Utah and the mega-reservoirs -- Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- that gather behind them, we really count on the vast snowfields that store fresh water in our mountains to melt and trickle down to us slowly enough that our water lasts from the first spring runoff until the end of the fall growing season. Dust-covered snowpack, however, absorbs more heat, melts sooner, and often runs down into streams and rivers before our farmers can use it. In addition, as the temperature rises, spring storms that once brought storable snow are now more likely to come to us as rain, which only makes the situation worse.
This shift in the way our water reaches us is crucial in the West. Not only is snowpack shrinking as much as 25% in the Cascades of the Northwest and 15% in the snowfields of the Rocky Mountains, but it's arriving in the lowlands as much as a month earlier than usual. Farmers can't just tell their crops to adjust to the new pattern. Even California's rich food basket, the Central Valley, fed by one of the most complex and effective irrigation infrastructures in the country, is ultimately dependent on Sierra snowpack and predictable runoff.
We need a new term for what's happening -- perhaps "perturbulence" would describe the new helter-skelter weather pattern. In my Utah backyard, for example, this past May was unusually hot and unusually cold. At one point, we went from freezing to 80 degrees and back again in three short days. Not so long ago, seasonal changes came on here as if controlled by a dimmer switch, the shift from one season to the next being gradual. Now it's more like a toggle switch being abruptly shut on and off.
To add to the confusion, our summer monsoon season arrived six weeks early this year. A surprisingly wet spring seemed like good news amid the bigger picture of drought, but it turned out to mean that farmers had a hard time getting into their muddy fields to plant. Then when spring showers were so quickly followed by summer storms, some crops were actually suppressed, according to local gardeners and farmers.
The West at Your Doorstep?
Our soggy spring and summer, however, masked an epic drought that has touched almost every corner of the nation west of the Mississippi at one time or another over the past decade. Southern Texas right now is blazingly bone-dry. Seattle had a turn with record-breaking temperatures earlier this summer. In New Mexico, the drought has been less dramatic -- more like a steady drumbeat year after year.
A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern Utah in June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high "bathtub ring" -- the band of white mineral deposits left behind on the reservoir's walls as the waterline dropped -- stretches the almost 200-mile length of the reservoir.
Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to "normal" levels, but it just hasn't happened. Side canyons, once submerged under 100 feet of water, have now been under the sun long enough to have turned into lush, mature habitats filled with willows and brush, birds and pack rats. A view from a cliff high above the once bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on the receding eastern side of Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the retreating shoreline with cement: the water's edge and a much-extended boat-launching ramp now have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs between them.
After decades of frantic urban development and suburban sprawl across the states that draw water from the Colorado, demand has simply outstripped supply and it's only getting worse as the heat builds. Not surprisingly, a debate is building over what to do if there isn't enough water to fill both Lakes Powell and Mead, the principal reservoirs along the Colorado. Should the seven states that depend on the river live with two half-full reservoirs or a single full one, and if only one, which one? River managers have now realized that both massive "lakes" were always giant evaporation ponds in the middle of a desert and only more so as average temperatures climb. There is no sense in having twice as much water surface as necessary, which means twice as much evaporation, too.
Given the stakes, the debate over what to do if there isn't enough water is playing out like the preview to the all-out water war to come when the reality actually hits. Westerners are well aware that, as always, there will be winners and losers. The constituency for Lake Mead will no doubt prevail because of its proximity to Las Vegas and Phoenix, two cities that grew bloated on cheap but, as it has turned out, temporary water from the dammed Colorado. Already desperate to make up for their lost liquid, they will surely muster all their power and influence to keep the water flowing.
Las Vegas is now aiming to tap into an aquifer under the Snake Valley that straddles eastern Nevada and western Utah. Recently, a rancher friend who ekes out a precarious living there mentioned the obvious to me: the dusty surface of that arid high desert is barely held in place by a thin covering of brush, sage, and grass. Drop the water table even a few more inches and it all dies. The dust storms that would be generated by a future parched landscape like that might make it all the way to the Midwest or even farther. After decades in which Easterners ritualistically visited the American West, the West may be traveling east.
Those we pay to look ahead are now jockeying like mad for position in a future water-short West. A new era of ever more pipelines, wells, and dams is being dreamed up by the private contractors and bureaucrats swelling up like so many ticks on the construction and maintenance budgets of the West's heavily subsidized water-delivery infrastructure. It is unlikely, however, that their dreams will be fully realized. The low-hanging fruit -- the river canyons that could easily be dammed -- were picked decades ago and, unlike in the good ol' days when water simply ran towards money, citizens of our western states are now far more aware of the ecological costs of big dams and ever more awake to the unfolding consequences of dependence on unreliable water sources.
Making more water available never led to prudent use. Instead, cheap and easy water led to such foolishness as putting a golf course with expanses of irrigated green in every desert community, not to speak of rice and cotton farming in the Arizona desert.
Rip Your Strip
All of this is now changing. Fast. The airways across the Southwest are loaded these days with public service announcements urging us to conserve our water. "Rip your strip" may be a phrase unknown in much of the country, but everyone here knows exactly what it means: tear out the lawn between your front yard and the street and put in drought-resistant native plants instead.
Everyone is increasingly expected to do his or her part. In my little town of Torrey, Utah, we voluntarily ration our domestic water on weekends when the tourists are in town, taking long showers and spraying the dust and mud off their tires. Xeriscaping -- landscaping with drought-resistant native plants instead of thirsty grasses and ornamental shrubs -- is now fashionable as well as necessary, even required, in some western towns, a clear sign that at long last we get it. Yes, we live in a desert.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this sort of thing, useful as it is, will be nearly enough. Our challenge is only marginally to take shorter showers. After all, 80% of Utah's water goes into agriculture, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed beef cows raised by ranchers heavily subsidized by federal grants and tax write-offs. They graze their cows almost for free on public lands and have successfully resisted even modest increases in fees to cover the costs of maintaining the allotments they use.
Utah legislators passed a law last session that gives agriculture precedence when there's not enough water to go around. Consider that a clear signal that the agricultural interests in the state don't have any intention of changing their water-profligate ways without a fight.
Sure, everyone agrees that we have to change, but we in the West are fond of focusing blame on personal bad habits that waste water -- and they couldn't be more real -- rather than corporate habits that waste so much more. The fact is that we Westerners have never paid anything like what our water truly costs and we lack disincentives to waste water and incentives to conserve it. Behind all that fuss you hear from us about the damn government and how independent-minded we Westerners are, is a long history of massive dam and pipeline projects financed by the American taxpayer, featuring artificially low prices and not a few crony-run boondoggles. Call it welfare water.
The Ruins in Our Future
A visit this summer to the most famous ruins in the West, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park and hollowed out palaces at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, proved a striking, if grim, reminder that we weren't the first to pass this way -- or to face possibly civilization-challenging aridity problems. The pre-Colombian Anasazi culture flourished between 900 and 1150 A.D., culminating in a city in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, that until the nineteenth century contained the largest buildings in the Americas, now uncovered from centuries of drifting sands. Mesa Verde with its "skyscraper" cliffside dwellings, also flourished in the twelfth century and was similarly abandoned and forgotten for hundreds of years.
The mysteries of these deserted cities -- their purpose and the reasons they were abandoned -- may never be fully plumbed. This much is undeniable though, as one walks through cobbled plazas and toppled towers, and past sun-blasted walls: cities, dazzling in their day, arose suddenly in the desert, prospered, and then collapsed. Tree-ring data confirm that an epic drought, one lasting at least 50 years, coincided with their demise. Broken and battle-scarred bones unearthed in the charred ruins indicate that warfare followed drought. What the Anasazi experienced -- scarcity, the need to leave homes, and a struggle for whatever remained -- is getting easier to imagine in a water-short West. Only this time at stake will be Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Archaeologists at Chaco recently uncovered a sophisticated cistern system under the city. Anasazi builders, they now believe, learned how to harvest the runoff from the summer rains that poured down and spilled over the sandstone cliffs behind the ruins. Think of these as the Lake Meads and Powells of their time, capturing the torrential monsoon rains just as those reservoirs do the Colorado River's flash floods.
The cistern system provided temporary water security, but eventually it clearly proved inadequate. In the long run, Chaco couldn't be sustained because turbulent, unreliable flows of water are hard to tame. The descendants of those who left it behind settled the mesa-top villages of the Hopis in Arizona and of the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. They learned to live on a smaller scale, with scant rain, and after many hundreds of years, they (unlike their once living and magnificent cities) remain. There is hope in that. It is no less possible now to understand limits, to practice precaution, and to build resilient communities.
Smoke Season
When it comes to the perturbed weather regime we are now entering, it's not just our agriculture and our sprawling cities that are having trouble adapting. The vitality of whole ecosystems is at stake. Native vegetation suffers, too. When critical moisture arrives before temperatures are warm enough for seeds to germinate, they don't. The native grasses on my land didn't thrive despite our cold, wet spring. Invasive cheat grass, however, blooms early, grows quickly, then dies and dries. It ignites easily and burns hot.
When higher temperatures evaporate the moisture in soils, they become drier in late summer and fall. Plants wither and are vulnerable to insect infestations. The vast expanse of mountain I can see out my window may seem like a classic alpine vista to the tourists who flock here every summer. A closer look, however, reveals expanding patches of gray and brown as beetle infestations kill off entire dried-out mountainsides. More than 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain woodlands have been destroyed by bark beetles so far. The once deep-green top of Grand Mesa in western Colorado is becoming a gray, grim dead zone, a ghostly forest waiting for lightning or some careless human to ignite it.
Dead forests, of course, are fuel for the dramatic, massive wildfires you now see so regularly on the TV news. We had quite a few of those wildfires this summer in Utah, but -- what with southern California burning -- they didn't make the evening news anywhere but here. That statement can be made all over the West. Both the frequency and size of fires are on the rise in our region. Early in the summer of 2008, while more than 2,000 separate wildfires raged across his state, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a point that many Western governors might soon be making. He claimed that California's fire season is now 365 days long. The infernos that licked the edges of the Los Angeles basin this August were at once catastrophic and routine.
Smoke is dust's inevitable twin in a West beset by climate chaos, and the lousy air quality we suffer when fires are raging is part of the new normal. A few years ago we could check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website to see when winds might shift and bring relief. This summer, like last, there were so many fires and they were so widely distributed that it hardly mattered which way the wind blew: smoke was in our lungs and eyes one way or the other.
All of this adds up to a kind of habitat holocaust for wild species, from the tiniest micro-organisms in the soil to the largest mammals at the top of the food chain like elk and bears. Nobody makes it in a dead zone, whether it's a dust bowl or a desiccated forest.
Changes start at the bottom, as is usually true in ecosystems. When soil dries and the microbial dynamic changes, native plants either die or move uphill towards cooler temperatures and more moisture. The creatures that depend on their seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follow the plants -- if they can. Animals normally adapt to slow change, but an avalanche of challenges is another matter. When species begin living at the precarious edge of their ability to tolerate the stress of it all, you have to expect wildlife populations to shift and dwindle. Then invasive species move in and a far different and diminished landscape emerges.
Human populations in the West will also shift and dwindle, with jarring consequences for all of America, if we do not learn quickly that watersheds have limits, especially within arid and unpredictable climates. The land also needs water. And such problems aren't just "Western." Dust storms and smoke won't just stay here.
There are, of course, enlightened and engaged citizens who are doing their best to address the growing challenge of a heated-up, chaotic climate. Conservation groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance are working hard to protect critical habitat for stressed species and urging government land management agencies to include global warming in their plans and projections. The Glen Canyon Institute has raised the specter of a diminished Colorado River and is challenging water managers to get innovative and adopt policies that reward water conservation and punish waste. Across the West, people are waking up and learning about their own watersheds -- where their water comes from and where it goes. This, too, is hopeful. Time, unfortunately, is not on their side.
So, come see the beautiful West, our shining mountains, blue skies, and fabled canyons. It's all still here right now. Take pictures. Enjoy. But hurry...
Andy Kroll is a writer and a staffer at Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco. His pieces have appeared at Salon, the Nation, CNN.com, and AlterNet, among others. He can be reached at his website, andykroll.com.

What is the 2030 Perfect Storm idea?
By Stephen Mulvey 
BBC News 
As the world's population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the worst-affected regions.
That's the simple idea at the heart of the warning from John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, of a possible crisis in 2030.
Specifically, he points to research indicating that by 2030 "a whole series of events come together":

• The world's population will rise from 6bn to 8bn (33%)
• Demand for food will increase by 50%
• Demand for water will increase by 30%
• Demand for energy will increase by 50%

He foresees each problem combining to create a "perfect storm" in which the whole is bigger, and more serious, than the sum of its parts.
"Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years' time?" he asked the SDUK 09 conference in London, in March.
Some of the problems reinforce each other, in obvious ways. For example, intensive agriculture swallows up large amounts of water and energy.
But Professor Beddington also points to other complicating factors and worrying possibilities.
CLIMATE CHANGE
There is a risk that climate change will have drastic effects on food production - for example by killing off the coral reefs (which about 1bn people depend on as a source of protein) or by either weakening or strengthening monsoon rains.
Also, some scientists are predicting that the Arctic will be ice-free by 2030, he points out, which could accelerate global warming by reducing the amount of the sun's energy that is reflected back out of the atmosphere.
URBANISATION
Not only is the world's population predicted to grow (until the middle of the century, at least) but more people are moving to live in cities, Professor Beddington points out. The growth of cities will accelerate the depletion of water resources, which in turn may drive more country dwellers to leave the land.
INCREASING PROSPERITY
As people become wealthier in some parts of the world, such as China and India, their diets are changing. They are consuming more meat and dairy products, which take more energy to produce than traditional vegetable diets. Like city dwellers, prosperous people also use more energy to maintain their lifestyle.
BIOFUELS
The more land is devoted to growing biofuels, in response to climate change, the less can be used for growing food.
Source information: Energy data graphic derived from World Energy Outlook © OECD/IEA, 2008, figure 2.2, p. 81 and modified by BBC News.
Professor Beddington says he is optimistic that scientists can come up with solutions to the problems and that he is encouraged by signs that politicians are listening more to scientific advice.
But he adds: "We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away."
Here three experts give their view of Professor Beddington's warning.
PROFESSOR DAVID PINK, WARWICK UNIVERSITY
"It's definitely one scenario, though it's the worst possible scenario. In general terms, he is right. All these things are coming together. There is some argument over population growth but the bottom line is that it's going up and food supply is going to be more of a problem. The developing world is growing, and its people are getting richer. There will be more demand for foods we have automatically assumed we will have access to. We are not going to be able to buy in everything we need and the price of food will go up. John Beddington is making the argument that we need to do something now and the best way to make that argument is to give the worst-case scenario. It is going to become a problem feeding the world, the question is how big a problem."
PROFESSOR JULES PRETTY, ESSEX UNIVERSITY
"The general premise, that we have a number of critical drivers coming together, is correct. The date 2030 is rhetorical. We don't know whether things will become critical in 2027 or 2047, no-one has any idea, but within the next generation these things are going to come to pass unless we start doing things differently. That is the urgency of this set of ideas. When governments talk about reducing emissions by X% by 2050, I despair. We need to do it by next week. Humankind has not faced this set of combined challenges ever before."
ANTONY FROGGATT, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, CHATHAM HOUSE
"It's true that all these things, and more, are interconnected. I study the connection between climate change and security of energy supply. For example, if you switch from coal to gas to slow the pace of climate change, the energy supply crunch comes more quickly. John Beddington is right to underline the dependence of agriculture on energy - I've heard it said that one in four people in the world is fed on fossil fuel, because gas is fundamental to the production of fertilisers. Climate change also has implications for power stations - nuclear power stations that are cooled by rivers and hydroelectric dams. And whereas changes in Europe could be incremental, in Asia it's potentially more abrupt. Whole regions are dependent on cycles of glacial melts and monsoons and if these start to shift there will be trouble."

James Quinn
Burning Platform, August 28, 2009
“It should be obvious from simple arithmetic that population growth is on a direct collision course with increasingly scarce resources.” - Jeremy Grantham

The notion of peak water probably sounds crazy to most people. The earth is 70% covered by water. The water cycle replenishes water on a continuous basis. The global warming enthusiasts tell us that glaciers are melting and oceans are rising. This should make water more plentiful. But, as they say in the real estate business – Location, Location, Location. Freshwater shortages in the wrong places could have calamitous consequences to those regions, worldwide commodity prices, the economic future of nations with water shortages and possible war. Regional water scarcity means water usage exceeds the annual natural replenishment from the water cycle. The impact of water scarcity can be far reaching. It can lead to food shortages, famine, and starvation. Many nations, regions and states have mismanaged their water resources, and they will have to suffer the long-term consequences.

Published on Monday, August 31, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Water, Water—Not Everywhere

by Olga Bonfiglio
Without water, nothing can live.  And in the Western United States, there isn't much of it because the region is a desert.
"Everything yearns to be alive in the desert," says Riley Mitchell, a park ranger at Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah. 
For example, short, clumpy trees grow in the cracks of rock where they find even the least bit of soil.  Look a little closer and you see vegetation surviving in this land and that includes many flowering plants.  Lizards scurry across your path in order to alter their body temperature, which gets too cold under a rock or too hot in the sun.
In the desert everything living screams for water, including your own body.  You don't sweat in its dry heat.  Your lips crack and your skin dries as your body dehydrates.  If you haven't taken care to consume enough water you'll know it because you'll feel faint.   
Consequently, the key concern of the West is water.  Patient and persistent rivers have largely carved the topography of this region over millions of years until today they are gentle streams or silvery sheens of leftover salt and gypsum lying on a dry riverbed glistening in the sun.  Here a river valley is said to be any place where water might have run through it over the past 100 years. 
More of these dry river valleys are appearing as the decade-long drought continues.  Some people claim this drought is the worst on record--and maybe over the past 1,400 years (http://forestfire.nau.edu/drought.htm). 
For example, the waterfall of Emerald Pool at Zion National Park is supposed to gush over a ledge.  Today it amounts to only a trickle. 
Fires that have raged through the forests are "more catastrophic" than ever before because the forests are unable to recover, according to a University of Northern Arizona website (http://forestfire.nau.edu/statistics.htm) that has tracked fires since 1916. 
Last week California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for Los Angeles and Monterey counties after five wildfires burned 13,000 acres and more than 3,000 people were evacuated from their homes.  The area has been experiencing dry hot, dry weather with temperatures higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) because in reality, California is a semi-arid place that has largely depended on irrigation and other water projects for its sustenance.
The Ogallala Aquifer, which covers 174,000 square miles (450,000 km) of the semi-arid Great Plains and yields about 30 percent of America's ground water for irrigation, can't replenish itself fast enough to meet the increasing demands of agriculture, industry and municipalities.  If withdrawals are not abated soon, some researchers expect its depletion in 25 years (http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Oc-Po/Ogallala-Aquifer.html). 
Meanwhile, a recent study by the Nature Conservancy (http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/features/art29432.html?src=news) predicts that temperatures across the country will increase from 3 to 10 degrees by 2100 due to climate change.  Hardest hit will be Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota, which depend on the Ogallala Aquifer and make this region the "breadbasket of America."  Nevertheless, some senators in those states refuse to sign legislation to address this problem after having supported the "No Climate Tax Pledge" being pushed by the group, Americans for Prosperity (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/27/small-midwestern-states-t_n_270540.html).    
Modern life and prosperity have put yet another strain on the West's water supply.
"Condos are dotting the [southern Utah] landscape with 10-acre ranchettes on land that was formerly the home of coyotes, deer, and other wildlife," said Mitchell.  "Their environmental impact may have potentially a more long-term effect."
Such development also inadvertently hurts people, she said, like when one person's well drilling depletes someone else's water down the line. 
So what attracts people to the dry and dusty deserts?
"I'm an old newcomer after 20 years here," said Mitchell.  "We like it here because we want to live in a clean, remote, crime-free area where we don't have to lock our doors and where community is close." 
Other newcomers have built homes in the desert, some of them second homes or retirement homes, and they want the green lawns, swimming pools, golf courses and fountains they are used to having.  Unfortunately, these amenities require water.
For example, since 1990, St. George, UT, has been one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States.  The city is 119 miles (192 km) northeast of Las Vegas on I-15, one of the major north-south highways of the West.  It provides year-round golf, access to Nevada casinos and scenic vistas with several nearby national parks for outdoor activity.  U.S. News and World Report named this area "one of the best places to retire," which active Baby Boomers have found particularly appealing.  In 2007, the area had 140,908 residents with projections of a sixfold increase by 2040, according to the St. George Chamber of Commerce (http://www.stgeorgechamber.com/EcDev/future_vision.htm). 
While most newcomers have a social or economic connections to the land, others have an emotional or religious one. 
The nineteenth century Mormons, a people nobody wanted, settled on land nobody wanted and turned it into a "Promised Land."  By applying their belief that stewardship required care for the land and its resources, which were put there by God, they created a sustainable life there for themselves.  However, the drought has caused some in the Basin to realize that even God's resources are finite.
Las Vegas, which lies in the southern-most tip of Nevada next door to Utah uses water with reckless abandon despite all the warning signs, according to energy resources journalist Kurt Cobb (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49927). 
Lake Mead, which provides 90 percent of the city's water, is down 120 feet from its peak in October 1998 (http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/hourly/mead-elv.html) and it now holds only 60 percent of its capacity (http://www.azgfd.gov/h_f/edits/lake_levels.shtml).  The white "bathtub ring" around the lake caused by deposition of minerals on the lake floor dramatically illustrates the lake's depletion, which is even visible from the air.    
The Southern Nevada Water Authority (http://www.snwa.com/html/) (SNWA) is working hard to lay pipe for a new intake to provide 40 percent of the city's water by 2012.  However, this project illustrates the desperation officials feel in finding enough water for the city, a desperation that seriously affects the rest of the country. 
For example, the SNWA is also making plans for a $3.5 billion, 327-mile (525-km) underground pipeline to tap aquifers beneath cattle-raising valleys northeast of the city, according to Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a_b86mnWn9.w) and it has even looked into diverting floodwaters from the Mississippi River westward (http://www.snwa.com/assets/pdf/wr_plan_chapter3.pdf). Such plans incite people from the Great Lakes region to quiver over the prospect that their precious water may be tapped for a pipeline to the West. 
According to Mark Reisner in Cadillac Desert, this region initially watered itself through diverted rivers and irrigation ditches.  The 1930s saw the construction of huge water projects like the Hoover Dam that were largely financed with federal tax revenues.  In the 1960s, long-distance pipelines were first conceived by Western-born federal officials, including those donning the environmental mantle.
Where all of this will end up is unknown but the future does not look very promising especially as a variety of adverse environmental forces are now coming together.  However, the American people as a whole are unresponsive, perhaps because they are unaware of the dangers while many Westerners are clearly in denial of the problems.  Perhaps a few suggestions will help.

• We must come to grips with the fact that most of the United States west of the Mississippi River is arid or semi-arid and that attempting to "green it" with water projects is ultimately a losing battle with serious and expensive consequences on the entire country.
• We must learn to organize our communities around regional systems like water and climate rather than only geographical political units in order to respond to regional problems. 
• Sustainability must be everybody's concern.  Making a profit through cheap water resources, for example, must now take a back seat to being able to live well on our planet.
• Schools and colleges must promote sustainability programs both in practice and theory.  The young people in these institutions are the ones who will have to live in the resource-depleted twenty-first century.
• The U.S. Congress must get on board with effective and deliberate water and climate change legislation.

During the June commencement exercises at my college, one student wore a sign:  "We didn't start the fire."  I later learned that the sign referred to the 1989 Billy Joel song of the same name.  The sign also alluded to the environmental problems the next generation will face.
Baby Boomers have benefited the most from twentieth century industrial society, where unlimited supplies of fresh water (and other resources) were taken for granted.  Hoping for technology to fix the depletion of water is no longer a strategy.  The water is running out!
Olga Bonfiglio is a professor at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and author of Heroes of a Different Stripe: How One Town Responded to the War in Iraq. She has written for several national magazines on the subjects of food, social justice and religion. Her website is www.OlgaBonfiglio.com. Contact her at olgabonfiglio@yahoo.com.

Our Last Chance to Preserve Life On Earth Is Slipping Away

By Larry Schweiger, Fulcrum Publishing
Posted on August 17, 2009, Printed on August 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141990/

This excerpt was reprinted from the book Last Chance: Preserving Life on Earth by Larry J. Schweiger with permission from Fulcrum Publishing.
In the Absence of Light
A few years ago, we invited a group of low-income children from urban Pittsburgh to visit a distant natural area in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, for an owl watch. As night fell, the children became startled as they got their first glimpse of the myriad bright stars set in a clear, black sky. These kids had never seen a night sky in the absence of ambient light. Urban haze and light pollution had completely blocked their view of the heavens and dimmed their sense of the magnitude of creation.
Shallow news coverage causes most Americans to underestimate the urgency of the threat of global warming. Television’s failure to adequately cover the climate threat, along with the deliberate opacity created by massive oil and coal advertising, masks the vivid realities of the situation, much like the haze and light pollution blocked out the reality of the night sky for those urban kids.
The television has been described as a weapon of mass distraction. On hearing about the methane leaking from the Siberian Sea, one Canadian blogger mockingly wrote, “Runaway climate change? Massive methane release off Siberia? Nah, let’s talk about Wall Street instead!” Meanwhile, on “the upper decks of our ‘Titanic,’ everyone is worried stiff about a crisis on Wall Street.”
Denial is a too-common human tendency, especially around global warming. On June 23, 2008, twenty years since he first warned Congress that human activity was causing the earth to warm, James Hansen warned that a “wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific communities and what is known by policymakers and the public.”
I have often wondered why so many media outlets have developed an excessive and endless fascination with fallen stars, kidnappings, rapes, and other violent crimes to the exclusion of news that we can actually use. Perhaps it is because Americans en masse watch that mindless stuff over and over again, thus supporting it and demanding more of it. Besides, that type of “news” is simple and cheap to produce and does not take a rocket scientist to present. Tabloid journalism, replayed continuously for days, weeks, and months on end is apparently profitable. “Infotainment” is not journalism. Networks and cable channels focus on making news shows more entertaining to pump up ratings that link to greater advertising revenues. Former vice president Al Gore described this in his bookThe Assault on Reason as “a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.”
Apart from the direct influence of coal and oil advertisers, I fail to understand why the news media ducks or ignores these terribly important stories. In September 2006, Katey Walter, leading a US-Russian team of scientists, published an important paper in Naturewarning that melting permafrost in Siberia, covering more than 10 million square kilometers of Russia, is releasing five times the amount of methane previously estimated by scientists. Walter compared the melting Siberian permafrost and the massive amounts of frozen methane that could be discharged as “a (ticking) time bomb waiting to go off,” threaten the world’s climate.
You would think Walter’s shocking findings would be newsworthy. Well, you would be wrong. While Radio Free Europe, the BBC, and NPR found it newsworthy, the mainstream US media was completely distracted by mindless pursuits. At this same time, network and cable channels were in a frenzy, with satellite trucks gathered in front of the Boulder, Colorado, district attorney’s office to report titillating details of JonBenét Ramsey’s warped admirer and supposed killer, John Mark Karr.
Another instance in a long line of US media failures occurred on December 12, 2007, when Wieslaw Maslowski, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, told a large gathering at the American Geophysical Union meeting that the Arctic will be ice-free sometime during the summer of 2013. Disappearing Arctic ice threatens to amplify global warming, yet Maslowski’s troubling findings were not covered by any of the networks, not even CNN. Instead, US viewers were preoccupied with the strange behavior of Drew Peterson in the disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy.
In an article titled “Dung on All Their Houses,” Danny Schechter summarized the media this way: “Like the word processors found on every desk, there is an idea processor at work, narrowing down what future generations will come to know as the first draft of history. More and more, those stories revolve around some high profile “giga-event”—the O.J. Case, the Death of a Princess, Sex Scandal in the White House, a natural disaster, and so on. Like blackbirds in flight, packs of reporters darken the sky, moving in swarms at the same speed and in predictable trajectory. When one lands, they all land. When one leaves, they all leave.”
Advertising and News Content—Connected?
In these recessionary times, the networks seem desperate for advertising, so it’s not surprising that they will run just about any coal or oil ad no matter how outrageous it may be, because the fossil fuel industry spends so much on pure propaganda. To hide the truth about the industry, huge advertising budgets are used not for selling products but to mislead Americans. Today, coal and oil interests are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to saturate airwaves, television, and websites with advertisements designed to manipulate. Throughout the 2008 elections, the television media ran— almost nonstop—tons of opinion-distorting and flat-out-false advertisements from oil and coal companies and their fossil-fuel power generators.
The ubiquitous and misleading oil ads never disclose who the sponsors are— they just say “sponsored by API.” Imagine the answers Jay Leno would get by asking people on the street to tell him who API is; few, if any, could guess that it is the American Petroleum Institute. These commercial spots convincingly suggest that we have forty-five years of oil and gas left, yet the same ads say that Big Oil is investing in alternative energy research, development, and deployment. They’re betting that most people will buy that contradiction, and so far they’ve bet right. These oil advertisers also spawned the “Drill Baby Drill” campaign that dominated Republican rallies in 2008.
Some media executives have forgotten that the airwaves are commonwealth property belonging to all the people. In granting private use of the public estate, the Federal Communications Commission once required holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced. For decades, a policy known as the Fairness Doctrine was a backstop protecting the airwaves from being captured by propagandists who bought airtime. During the Reagan administration, a systematic effort led primarily by conservatives was made to erode and eventually eliminate the long-held doctrine. With the Fairness Doctrine now gone, networks have no legal obligation to provide any meaningful rebuttal to propaganda, including mass-advertising campaigns.
The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine was one of the most devastating attacks on truth. Do not underestimate the powerful alignment of media owners and talk radio voices committed to keeping it from returning. If you do not believe we need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, read the very words that ABC executives thought were too controversial to run on national television during the election season in 2008:
The solution to our climate crisis seems simple. Repower America with wind and solar. End our dependence on foreign oil. A stronger economy. So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy? Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy. Lobbyists, ads, even scandals. All to increase their profits, while America suffers. Breaking big oil’s lock on our government, now that’s change. We’re the American people and we approve this message.
These are obviously outrageous, even dangerous words because they mention the millions of dollars flowing to the networks from false energy ads. In the spirit of full disclosure, the above-mentioned inflammatory ads came from the Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP), a tripartisan organization founded by a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort composed of Nobel laureate and former vice president Al Gore, four well-known Republicans, three prominent Democrats, and one lowly independent (me). The ACP submitted the above ad to ABC to have it aired on September 26, during 20/20. We paid $85,000 for the airtime, but the morning the ad was to run, the network rejected it.
After the ad was refused, the then Alliance CEO, Cathy Zoi, complained in an e-mail to supporters and donors that ABC, CBS, and CNN aired numerous TV spots for the oil and coal industry during the October 7 presidential debate, but ABC was refusing to air the alliance ad. In an e-mail on October 8, Cathy alerted supporters, “Did you notice the ads after last night’s presidential debate? ABC had Chevron. CBS had Exxon. CNN had the coal lobby. But you know what happened last week? ABC refused to run our Repower America ad—the ad that takes on this same oil and coal lobby.”
The 2008 debates, news, and convention coverage were universally sponsored by the energy industry. ExxonMobil, for example, sponsored the convention coverage of CNN and CBS. It is safe to say that Big Coal and Big Oil owned the advertising space around the 2008 elections coverage. Far too few climate and energy questions were asked during both the primary and general election debates. Those few that were asked by the moderator were not followed up on for needed details on position differences. Since energy was the driving issue at the time of both conventions, you would think news outlets would avoid both the appearance and actual conflict of interests. Imagine how Civil War–era history might have been altered if a wealthy class of slave-trading merchants had funded the newspaper coverage during the Republican National Convention at which Abraham Lincoln was chosen.
Polls show that climate concerns actually diminished during the advertising blitz, when gasoline prices soared. Advertising has created the false impression that the energy industry is doing a good job taking care of the threat of global warming at the same time published science is making it increasingly clear that the actual threats are dire. Clean coal exists only on television and in political promises. Beyond the ads, there is no such thing. Leading up to the 2008 elections, the coal industry spent many millions promoting mythical “clean coal” in television ads and at the political conventions. At the same time, it has fought the very climate security laws that would advance the technological development of clean coal. The industry has long known that mercury pollution, tiny respiratable sulfate particles, and global warming are very serious health and environmental problems; yet the industry has done everything possible to thwart pollution controls while whitewashing coal.
An international poll, conducted just before the December 2008 United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference and funded by the financial institution HSBC, the Earthwatch Institute, and other groups, surveyed people in eleven countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Malaysia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and found that only 47 percent “were prepared to make personal lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions, down from 58 per cent last year…And only one in five respondents…said they’d spend extra money to reduce climate change, [which is] down from 28 per cent in 2007.”

Published on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 by TomDispatch.com
Climate Disobedience: Is a New 'Seattle' in the Making?
by Mark Engler
In the early morning of October 8, 2007, a small group of British Greenpeace activists slipped inside a hulking smokestack that towers more than 600 feet above a coal-fired power plant in Kent, England. While other activists cut electricity on the plant's grounds, they prepared to climb the interior of the structure to its top, rappel down its outside, and paint in block letters a demand that Prime Minister Gordon Brown put an end to plants like the Kingsnorth facility, which releases nearly 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day.
The activists, most of them in their thirties and forties, expected the climb to the top of the smokestack would take less than three hours. Instead, scaling a narrow metal ladder inside took nine. "It was the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done," 35-year-old Ben Stewart said later . "It was like climbing through a huge radiator -- the hottest, dirtiest place you could imagine."
In the end, the fatigued, soot-covered climbers were only able to paint the word "Gordon" on the chimney before, facing dizzying heights , police helicopters, and a high court injunction, they were compelled to abandon the attempt and submit to arrest. They could hardly have known then that their botched attempt at signage would help transform British debate about fossil-fuel power plants -- and that it would send tremors through an emerging global movement determined to use direct action to combat the depredations of climate change.
The case took on historic weight only after the Kingsnorth Six went to court, where they presented to a jury what is known in the United States as a "necessity" defense. This defense applies to situations in which a person violates a law to prevent a greater, imminent harm from occurring: for example, when someone breaks down a door to put out a fire in a burning building.
In the Kingsnorth case, world-renowned climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, flew to England to testify. According to the Guardian, he presented evidence that the Kingsnorth plant alone could be expected to cause sufficient global warming to prompt "the extinction of 400 species over its lifetime." Citing a British government study showing that each ton of released carbon dioxide incurs $85 in future climate-change costs, the activists contended that shutting the plant down for the day had prevented $1.6 million in damages -- a far greater harm to society than any rendered by their paint -- and that their transgressions should therefore be excused.
What surprised both Greenpeace and the prosecution was that 12 ordinary Britons agreed. The jury returned with an acquittal, and the freed defendants made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. The tumult also produced political results. In April, British energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband announced a reversal in governmental policy on power stations, declaring, "The era of new unabated coal has come to an end." Discussing Kingsnorth, Daniel Mittler, a long-time environmental activist in Germany, told me recently, "it was probably one of the most impactful civil disobedience cases the world has ever seen, because it was the right action at the right time."
If Not Now...
The idea that now is the right time for more resolute action to address the climate crisis is spreading fast enough to dot the global map with hot spots of disobedience. As it turns out, the Kingsnorth Six are part of a rapidly growing population. Joining them are the Dominion 11, arrested after forming a humanblockade to stop the construction of a coal plant in Wise County, Virginia, in November 2008, and the Drax 29, who went on trial this summer forboarding and stopping a train delivering coal to a power plant in North Yorkshire, England, last year.
In fact, arrests are piling up quicker than journalists can coin name-and-number nicknames. The Coal Swarm website keeps track of an ever-lengthening list of protests. New headlines now appear weekly:
"Activists scale 20-story dragline at mountaintop removal site in Twilight, WV"
"14 Arrested at TVA headquarters in Knoxville, TN"
"10 activists board coal ship in Kent, England"
"Activists shut down Collie Power Station, Western Australia"
In August 2007, Al Gore, Nobel-prize-winning author of An Inconvenient Truth, told Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, "I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants." By the time Gore made that statement, some young people had already started blocking bulldozers, and many more, young and old, would soon follow.
Still, Gore can be excused for feeling that such measures were overdue. With global warming, perhaps more than any other issue, there is a disjuncture between a widespread acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation we face and a social willingness to respond in any proportionate way.
The landmark 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested that a two degree Celsius rise in average temperature, likely by 2050, would create severe water shortages for as many as two billion people and place between 20% to 30% of all plant and animal species at risk of extinction. It gets worse from there. An April 2009 Guardian poll reported : "Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed." More probable, they believe, is "an average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century," a level that could create hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing areas afflicted by desertification, depleted food supplies, or coastal flooding.
That these consensus predictions may feel remote and improbable to much of the American public does not reflect a real scientific debate, but rather a common reluctance to face unpleasant facts -- and also the considerable success of the coal and oil lobbies in dampening the electorate's sense of urgency about the issue. Those two realities are precisely what direct action intends to confront.
An Inconvenient Politics
When Vice President Gore started endorsing civil disobedience, Abigail Singer, an activist with Rising Tide , a leading network of grassroots climate groups, noted , "It'd be more powerful if he put his body where his mouth is." She had a point.
As it happens, 68-year-old James Hansen, arguably the most famous climate scientist alive, has been less reticent about putting himself on the line. His involvement has furnished a great deal of mainstream respectability to those turning to more confrontational means of expressing dissent, and the trajectory of his political engagement catches an important trend.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hansen published many groundbreaking papers demonstrating the reality of a warming planet. Just as the work scientists had done in the early 1980s proving that human activity was creating a hole in the ozone layer had resulted in a 1987 treaty against chlorofluorocarbons, Hansen assumed that the work of those documenting climate change would result in swift legislative remedy.
"He's very patient," Hansen's wife Anniek told Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker. "And he just kept on working and publishing, thinking that someone would do something." This time around, however, industrial interests proved far more entrenched. In order to help move glacially slow climate negotiations forward, Hansen started speaking out and, more recently, has begun risking arrest at demonstrations.
Of course, there is never a shortage of people who will question the tactics of civil disobedience and direct action. "We're every bit as worried about climate change as the protestors," a spokesperson for the E.On corporation, the energy company that runs Kingsnorth, said upon the announcement of the famous verdict, "but there are ways and means to protest and we would suggest their demonstration was not the way to do it."
There are far less compromised skeptics, too. Many harbor a distaste for social-movement theatrics or operate on the belief that, sooner or later, science will speak loudly enough to force the political situation to sort itself out. Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy expressed such a view when the IPCC released its 2007 report. "The worst stuff is not going to happen," he said, "because we can't be that stupid."
Sadly, the latent hope that politicians will eventually come to their senses cannot suffice as a political strategy. The stark facts of segregation in the American South never put an end to that longstanding injustice; it took an unruly civil rights movement to force change. In this case, presumably less farsighted and more profit-hungry energy companies than the climate-concerned E.On have invested tens of millions of dollars in convincing elected officials and newspaper editorial boards that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is neither practical nor particularly needed. The operative force at work here is not stupidity, but political power.
Hansen and others motivated to confront the industry head on have concluded that, unless there is a public counterbalance to the organized money of those who profit from the status quo, what science has to say will be largely irrelevant, no matter how theoretically convincing it may be. Unless citizens themselves become inconvenient, the truth will remain a minor consideration.
The Disaster You Can See
It is no accident that, on June 23rd, when Hansen was arrested for his first time, it was in West Virginia, the heart of coal country. Because coal is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions both in the United States and worldwide, and because there is enough coal left in the ground to heat the planet to catastrophic levels, that fossil fuel has been the focus of much new protest. As long as U.S. and European power plants continue spewing coal smoke, their governments will have absolutely no credibility in trying to influence the policies of rising economies such as China and India. Nonetheless, current U.S. legislation ensures that coal burning will continue largely unchecked for decades to come.
In West Virginia, concerns about coal's impact on the atmosphere have intersected with a local environmental atrocity known as mountaintop-removal mining , a practice that Senators John McCain and Barack Obama both claimed to oppose in the presidential campaign, but which continues today. This has made Appalachia the heart of direct action on the climate-change issue in the U.S. -- or, as a blog tracking area protests puts it, "Climate Ground Zero."
"You stand at the edge of one of these mountaintop removal sites and you'll never feel the same way again," says Mat Louis-Rosenberg, a staffer at Coal River Mountain Watch in southern West Virginia. The practice turns rolling mountains and valleys into flat, desolate moonscapes. Locals regularly hear the blasts of surface mines from their homes and then drink the resulting contaminants in their well water. When newly created lakes of toxic coal waste give way -- as happened last December as a billion gallons of sludge flooded 300 acres of land near Harriman, Tennessee -- they are the ones whose homes stand immediately downstream.
These dangers have given organizers a chance to create campaigns that connect the abstractions of climate change to specific sites of environmental ruin. "You can get a visceral and immediate sense of how bad this is," says Louis-Rosenberg. "It's not an invisible gas and a bunch of science that most people don't understand."
This year, in a series of escalating initiatives, environmentalists in the area have chained themselves to rock trucks, obstructed coal roads, and climbed up a huge crane-line mining machine to halt its work. A delegation of concerned citizens, including Hansen, crossed a police line onto the property of Massey Energy, a company responsible for mountaintop removals. Louis-Rosenberg places such direct action alongside a raft of other activities: community organizing, research for environmental impact statements, and gathering co-sponsors for a Congressional ban on filling valleys with mining waste. "Ultimately, things will have to see their resolution in some sort of federal regulation or legislation," he says. "But at this point there is not the political will to deal with the crisis. I see it as my role as an activist to create that political will."
The Next "Seattle Moment"?
When the Kingsnorth decision was announced, an E.On representative said the company was "worried that this ruling will encourage other protestors to engage in similar actions at power plants across the country." The worry was justified.
The diverse local protests taking place internationally are starting to feel like part of something larger, especially since they are already beginning to have an impact. Of the 214 new coal plants proposed in the United States since the year 2000, more than half have been cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold . The website Coal Moratorium Now , which tracks public campaigns, shows that citizen dissent played a critical role in many of the cancellations or delays. Other results have been less obvious but no less real. Facing greater resistance, and the prospect of costly public relations battles, power companies are simply proposing to build fewer coal plants than was once the case.
Environmental organizers are planning for still larger mobilizations. In March, hundreds of people, including Hansen and 350.org campaign organizer Bill McKibben, joined in human chains to block the entrances to a target of enticing symbolic importance: Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Power Plant, a coal-burning facility built in 1910 that provides steam and refrigeration power to Capitol Hill. Police avoided making arrests, which could have easily exceeded highs for any previous act of civil disobedience around climate issues in American history. Nonetheless, the gathering produced a desired effect: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Acting Architect of the Capitol Stephen Ayers requesting that the plant switch to natural gas.
On a global level, activists are starting to envision an international day of action that might launch disparate local campaigns into the mainstream spotlight and create a more unified global movement. A buzz of expectation and organizing now surrounds a December U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where environmental ministers and other officials will gather to create a new treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol. The conference is taking place almost exactly 10 years after the 1999 Seattle protests which overwhelmed the ministerial meetings of the World Trade Organization and altered the shape of globalization debates for years after.
Hopes for recreating an event of that magnitude are based on more than just a coincidental anniversary year. Before Seattle, localized activity by global justice advocates had similarly swelled -- with a wave of student anti-sweatshop drives, environmental boot camps, organic food gatherings, corporate ad spoofs, indigenous rights battles, and cross-border labor campaigns already simmering. Seattle united these into a recognized "movement of movements" more potent than the sum of its parts.
Organizers have suggested that as many as 100,000 people might take to the streets in Copenhagen. Among those planning around the Denmark conference, there is currently a debate about whether to converge on the conference itself or to target a heavily polluting company somewhere nearby as an example of bad climate-change behavior.
Likewise, in the United States, where events will be timed to take place in solidarity with the demonstrations in Copenhagen, there is a debate about whether to try to work with the Obama administration or turn up the heat on it. In the end, a range of tactics will no doubt be deployed in Copenhagen and in other cities around the world. A coalition of groups, including the normally satiric Yes Men, is managing a site called BeyondTalk.net , which allows people to sign a pledge expressing their willingness to join in nonviolent civil disobedience as the conference date nears.
As of this writing, 3,210 people have signed on. Compared with the numbers of people who will ultimately have to be persuaded of the need to act in order to force meaningful solutions to climate change, that remains a modest tally. In terms of the growing levels of dedication and personal sacrifice it represents, its significance is far greater. After all, that's more than 3,000 people willing to take the chance that a determined action, even a botched one, might ultimately reverberate far and wide. It's more than 3,000 people who may just be willing to climb for hours through a huge radiator in order to stop the planet from becoming one in all too short a time.
Copyright 2009 Mark Engler
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website DemocracyUprising.com . (An audio interview with him on climate-change activism is available by clicking here .) Research assistance for this article was provided by Sean Nortz

The Dark Side of Climate Change: It's Already Too Late, Cap and Trade Is a Scam, and Only the Few Will Survive

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet
Posted on July 7, 2009, Printed on July 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141081/

The recent narrow passage of the Waxman-Markey energy bill, better known as cap-and-trade, marks halftime in Congress' first attempt to put a lid on national carbon emissions. The bill’s supporters ended the half on top in a squeaker -- 219 yeas to 212 nays. But it’s far from clear what this lead means, either for the bill or the climate. The legislation’s fate remains as uncertain as our own.
We can, however, be sure about one thing. Between now and the autumn Senate debate, cap-and-trade’s right-wing critics will escalate their all-cannons assault on the idea that climate change is real and demands a response. They will call "crap-and-tax" the mother of all scams, a poorly cloaked state power grab, and a major goose step down the road to eco-fascism. Given the hyperbole already on display, it can’t be long before some conservative howler warns that the bill's green facade shares hues with the Koran.
As the fight over cap-and-trade intensifies, human-driven climate change denialists like Rush Limbaugh and James Inhofe will draw the lion's share of the media spotlight reserved for the bill's critics. This is unfortunate. The real debate is not between the bill's supporters and the dead-ender climate clown club. It is between cap-and-trade’s supporters and its critics within the scientific and environmental activist communities. Groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have science if not politics on their side when they decry Waxman-Markey as an industry diluted half-measure with soft gums that falls far short of what is necessary to avoid cataclysmic climate change later this century.
“The giveaways and preferences in the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions,” said Greenpeace in a statement the day before the House vote. “To support such a bill is to abandon the real leadership that is called for at this pivotal moment in history. We simply no longer have the time for legislation this weak.”
This view is shared by leading climate scientists like James Hansen and his peers around the world at leading research centers such as the UK's Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, which urge more significant and immediate cuts than the finance-sector friendly cap-and-trade system can deliver.
There is another, fourth voice in the debate over cap-and-trade, one ringing out from shadows rarely approached by the media. In these shadows dwell scientists who believe the time has passed for any sort of legislation at all, no matter how radical. The best known of these frightening climate gnomes is the legendary British scientist James Lovelock, father of Gaia Theory and inventor of the instrument allowing for the atmospheric measurements of CFC's. In recent years, Lovelock has emerged as the world’s leading climate pessimist, raining scorn on the new fashionable environmentalism and arguing that the time is nigh to accept that a massive culling of the human race is around the corner.
“Most of the ‘green’ stuff is verging on a gigantic scam," Lovelock told the New Scientistshortly before the release of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. "Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning.”
Those who read Lovelock’s controversial 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia, know that hope junkies should keep a safe distance from the 90-year-old scientist. Lovelock, who has been compared to Copernicus and Darwin, years ago arrived at a disturbingly stark conclusion about Earth’s climate future. His prognosis is now starker than ever. The small window of short-term hope he left open in Revenge is closed in this year’s Vanishing. In its place is a long-term hope that humanity in some form will survive the present century, though barely. The result is a dark and contrarian work that seeks to demolish the terms of the climate debate while mocking our response to the crisis at the personal, national, and species level.
Lovelock has not arrived at his views lightly. They are the product of years spent carefully considering the known science through the revolutionary and frequently misunderstood lens he began developing 40 years ago while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena. Gaia Theory holds that Earth possesses a sophisticated planetary intelligence that responds to levels of heat from the sun in such a way as to maintain a climate homeostasis supportive of life. In four decades of research and experiment, the most famous being the “Daisyworld” model, Lovelock has overcome the once-widespread skepticism of his peers to officially move Gaia from a Hypothesis to a Theory. He has established that the various components of the biosphere -- plants, animals, minerals, gases, the sun’s heat -- interact in such a way as to create and maintain a climate amenable to life. Far from a passive collection of independent actors responding to conditions, the biosphere’s contents, including humans, form a living web which actively creates and maintains those conditions. Gaia prefers these conditions and will do her best to maintain them. But there is a limit to how much Gaia can do if we keep running over the safety mechanisms -- negative feedback loops -- she puts in our path. Lovelock believes that we have pushed Gaia beyond the point of return. The cold seas, for example, can only pump down so much of our carbon before they cry mercy and turn to acid.
Lovelock argues that Gaia Theory offers a more holistic understanding of what's happening to the climate than does mainstream climate science, stuck as it is in reductionist thinking and fractured into its constituent fields. Using the Gaia lens, he maintains, allows for a more comprehensive, intuitive, and ultimately more predictive approach. He spends much ofVanishing explaining why he thinks our attempts to accurately model climate change with computers is akin to the blind efforts of a 19th century doctor trying to treat diabetes. He notes that the IPCC and its many powerful computers have successfully undershot all of the indicator trends of climate change so far. Most notably, sea-level rise has outpaced IPCC predictions at a rate of 2 to 1.
Of all the indicators of climate change, Lovelock maintains sea-level rise is the most important. Given the complexity of the millions of interactions within the Gaia system, Lovelock argues it is best to ignore year-to-year temperature fluctuations and instead watch the oceans. The seas, he says, are the lone trustworthy indicator of the earth’s heat balance. “Sea level rise is the best available measure of the heat absorbed by the earth because it comes from only two things,” he writes. “[These are] the melting of glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms. Sea level is the thermometer that indicates true global heating.”
Using Gaia Theory as his lens, Lovelock also examines five dreaded positive feedback loops, those processes now underway that at some point will become ferocious amplifiers of global heating (he finds "warming" too soft a word for the process). Lovelock describes how the most important of these feedback loops already in motion—the loss of reflective ice cover, the death of carbon eating algae as oceans warm, and methane released by thawing permafrost—will soon accelerate the heating trend aready underway, leading to sudden and dramatic shifts in global climate. Rather than the steady rise predicted by the UN’s IPCC, Lovelock is confident the change will resemble economic charts of boom and bust, full of sudden and unexpected discontinuities, dips, and jumps. “The Earth’s history and simple climate models based on the notion of a live and responsive Earth suggest that sudden change and surprise are more likely than the smooth rising curve of temperature that modelers predict for the next ninety years,” he writes.
What this means for us will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention: cities and farmland lost to rising seas, endless heatwaves, and a drastic reduction of Earth’s carrying capacity.
“There is no tipping point, just a slope that gets ever steeper,” writes Lovelock. “Because of the rapidity of the Earth’s change, we will need to respond more like the inhabitants of a city threatened by a flood. When they see the unstoppable rise of water, their only option is to escape to higher ground. We have to make our lifeboats seaworthy now [and] stop pretending there is any way back to that lush, comfortable, and beautiful Earth we left behind sometime in the 20th century.”
Needless to say, this is not a popular message. Lovelock remains a controversial figure, now more for his politics than his science. In recent years he has become the most prominent green critic of mainstream environmentalism, unleashing his heaviest fire on what he regards as the green movement's irrational fear of nuclear power. Before he lost all hope in an energy silver bullet, Lovelock argued that nuclear represented humanity's best chance of transitioning the current civilization onto another, more sustainable track. But it's not just knee-jerk opposition to nuclear energy that gets Lovelock fuming. He has been ruthless in his attacks on politicians and businessmen who peddle hope in the form of meaningless but potentially profitable gestures like cap-and-trade. This has deeply antagonized his fellow greens still scrambling to generate public support for bold solutions to the climate crisis.
Lovelock’s impatience with feel-good “Yes, we can” liberal environmentalism borders on contempt. There are passages in Vanishing that, were it not for their eloquence, could have been uttered by Glenn Beck. The delusional rhetoric about “sustainable development” peddled by green politicians and businessmen, writes Lovelock, just shows that we have “weaved the sound of the alarm clock into our dreams.” In one of the book’s many memorable passages on the green politics of hope, Lovelock compares sustainable development to deathbed snake oil peddled by an alt-medicine quack.
“Just as we as individuals try alternative medicine,” writes Lovelock, “our governments have many offers from alternative business and their lobbies of sustainable ways to ‘save the planet,’ and from some green hospice there may come the anodyne of hope.”
But Lovelock's "final warning" is more than a long and hectoring doctor’s talk about an advanced and inoperable cancer. He brightens up considerably when looking beyond the coming die-off. And once we assume the author’s Darwinian and planetary long view, it’s easy to share Lovelock’s cosmic wonder and long-term optimism. He is cautiously hopeful that as many as several hundred million humans will survive the century and carve pockets of civilization into the coming hot state. Our current global civilization is about to end, but there is every reason to “take hope from the fact that our species is unusually tough and is unlikely to go extinct in the coming climate catastrophe.”
Here enters Lovelock the playful futurist. Those who survive will be responsible for maintaining a high-tech, low-impact, low-energy society advanced enough to keep the flame of progress alive but small and smart enough to carefully husband what arable land remains in the new hot state. Lovelock guesses the rump human race will cluster around a few temperate islands in the far northern hemisphere, including his native U.K. He believes that if emergency preparations are made in time—he compares the present moment to 1939—and if the worst-case scenarios of geopolitical conflict are avoided—namely resource scrambles leading to global thermonuclear war—then something resembling a modern and even urban lifestyle may await the survivors. There may even be food critics in this future, which need not resemble a Soylent Green scenario of cannibalism and state-rationed crackers. This future civilization will synthesize food from CO2, nitrogen, water, and a few minerals. Simple amino acids and sugars, Lovelock cheerfully explains, can be used as feedstock for bulk animal and vegetable tissue created in chemical vats from biopsies.Yum!
A quarter century ago, Carl Sagan issued a strange and compelling plea for nuclear disarmament. He urged the superpowers to abolish their thermonuclear arsenals for the sake of mankind’s future evolution and eventual colonization of the galaxy. Echoing Sagan, Lovelock believes it is our duty as an intelligent race, the only one in the cosmic neighborhod, to survive. Only by carrying the flame of civilization into the next century will we have a chance to evolve beyond our current tribal-carnivore brains, which are dominated by short-term thinking and thus responsible for our current predicament. Whereas Sagan dreamed of alien contact, Lovelock's promised land is more humble: an evolved species capable of living in balance with Gaia. In the meantime, the Earth will grow and change, as it always has. Life will continue, humans included, even though billions will suffer and die. Gaia, an ageing planet, will roll into the new climate as best she can. In her wise generosity, she will even leave some hospitable land for us, the offending species, “to survive and to live in a way that gives evolution beyond us, into a wiser and more intelligent animal, a chance.”

Thanks to Our Fossil Fuel Addiction, We May Be Setting Ourselves Up for a Catastrophic Natural Event

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on July 3, 2009, Printed on July 3, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140912/

What is hydrogen sulfide? It smells like farts and rotten eggs. You can find it in swamps, sewers, landfills, volcanic and natural gases, and pretty much everywhere there is a petroleum refinery. Unfortunately, you can also usually find it whenever and wherever you've got mass extinctions.
In fact, it is hydrogen sulfide, rather than killer asteroids or some other interstellar death-bringer, that has possibly become the go-to kill-shot of most mass extinctions in Earth's history.
"It doesn't take much hydrogen sulfide to kill off anything," Gerry Dickens, professor of earth science and paleoceanography at Rice University, explained to AlterNet by phone.
He should know: It was Dickens' work with methane hydrates that completed the puzzle of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, more aptly known as the Great Dying, in the 2002 BBC Horizon documentary The Day the Earth Nearly Died.
During the Great Dying, over 250 million years ago, flood basalts in the Siberian andEmeishan traps unleashed hell on Earth, spewing titanic walls of lava, ash, debris and greenhouse gases into the sky, blotting out the sun and surrounding hundreds of thousands of miles in a biblical inferno for which there is no contemporary analogue, at least in reality.
But even that wasn't enough to wipe out the 96 percent of Earth's marine, terrestrial and plant species claimed by the Great Dying. A growing scientific consensus explains that the death stroke was probably delivered from Earth's anoxic oceans, whose resultant out-of-whack pH balance, once literally defined as the "power of hydrogen," released catastrophic stores of either methane hydrate or hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere.
Whichever one it was, hydrogen had the power to bring Earth to its knees. And it could happen again.
"It's unannounced stealth nastiness," Peter Ward, professor of biology and paleontology at the University of Washington, declared by phone to AlterNet. "My new book ends with a hydrogen sulfide extinction."
That book, The Medea Hypothesis, posits not one but five hydrogen sulfide extinction events, including the Great Dying, throughout Earth's history. Going further, it flips the Gaia hypothesis on its head by suggesting -- with increasing persuasion, given our current climate crisis of too much carbon dioxide in the air and too little oxygen in the oceans -- that Earth is not seeking an optimal physical and chemical environment for its life.
In fact, Ward argues, its multicellular life is actually suicidal in nature, whose doom will eventually return Earth to the microbes that have dominated most of its history.
Although the truth probably lies somewhere between Gaia and Medea, Ward seems to be right about one thing: Hydrogen sulfide is an unheralded executioner.
"If ancient volcanism raised CO2 and lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and global warming made it more difficult for the remaining oxygen to penetrate the oceans, conditions would have become amenable for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of hydrogen sulfide," Ward wrote in a Scientific American clarion call titled "Impact from the Deep."Virtually no form of life on the earth was safe."
Ward -- who has also written the books Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future; Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe; and the forthcoming Our Flooded World -- concludes his Scientific American piece with the obvious question: Could it happen again?
All the pieces seem to be moving into place. Global warming is a runaway train, carbon dioxide levels are exponentially rising, and oceans are subsequently losing oxygen. There are even hydrogen sulfide blooms being found in Namibia and other places where industrial pollution is spilling waste into the water.
The good news? We know that in the Permian and other mass extinctions that it took levels of around 1,000 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide to rob the oceans of oxygen and kill off most life on Earth. The bad news? We're closer to that devastating concentration than we think.
With CO2 hovering around 385 ppm, but increasing at an annual rate of 2 to 3 ppm, it doesn't take a math teacher to realize that we could hit 900 ppm by the end of next century. Or earlier, given the exponential nature of climate change.
"It's not quite linear," Dickens explained. "As you make the system worse, less carbon gets taken up by the oceans, which are sinks on a global scale. When that has happened in the past, suddenly a whole bunch of carbon has come out of the ocean fast. The magnitude is extraordinary. And there's also a temperature component: As things get warmer, the process amplifies."
Currently, it's amplifying at a fearsome rate. For his part, Ward believes we're headed toward a penultimate moment in Earth's history, one we should be ashamed of.
"We're way beyond anything from the Pleistocene, and heading towards the Cretaceous," Ward told AlterNet. "If we hit 800-1,000 ppm, we're in trouble. The sun is also getting warmer, so 1,000 ppm is really going to be like 2,000 ppm. We're talking about the second-hottest period in the planet's history."
Right now, Ward and other scientists who have proposed parallels between the mass extinctions of the past and the one we could be experiencing now, known as theHolocene extinction event, are lost in the wilderness of geopolitical machination and rampant global consumption. But interest in their destabilizing theories are growing.
"NASA called me about three months ago, and the administrator at Ames Research Center said, 'You've got to be kidding about this stuff!' " Ward said. "So myself and several other scientists put together a white paper on hydrogen sulfide, because this is a matter of national security. Just because its longer-term than other problems doesn't mean it's any less deadly. Our species is going to be in trouble in a hundred to a thousand years from now. What happens if the oceans go anoxic, within this century or by the end of next century? You'll have conditions that might be irreversible for a very long time."
Ward says that the Obama administration has been cool to the possibility of anoxic oceans and the various hydrogen terrors that lie in wait on its floors or its chemical processes.
And for his part, even Dickens is not as worried about mass extinction at the hands of climate change as he is about terrors closer to home.
"I've got more important things to keep me up at night," the good-natured scientist wisecracked over the phone, "like finding the next grant so I can go study this stuff."
But time, and probably not a lot of it, will tell which terror is more worthy of our immediate attention, expense and innovation. But whatever may come and whatever we decide, Ward warned, we better get our lazy asses in gear.
The worst that could supposedly happen is that we could be wrong and lose trillions of dollars to saving the planet, and thereby ourselves, rather than throwing them down the black hole of credit-default swaps and hyper-real derivatives.
But the worst that could really happen is that anthropogenic global warming could throw the planet's pH balance into chaos, as the combination of CO2-choked skies and anoxic oceans release the mother of all mass-extinction farts into the atmosphere, a killing joke we could never recover from. And who wants to go out like that?
"There's bad stuff before you even get to hydrogen sulfide," Ward concluded. "And there's not much you can do about any of it, in terms of geoengineering. The simple solution is to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions, and do it now. Here's the scary thing that can happen: Human extinction. Let's get serious."
Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

The Global Warming Lie Detector

Monday 29 June 2009
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    The House's passage of the Waxman-Markey bill raises the possibility that the United States will finally do something on global warming. This prospect has the industry hacks screaming at top volume about the horrible fate that awaits the economy. Everyone should know not to take them seriously, as I will explain in a moment.
    First, we should acknowledge the obvious: The bill is awful. It gives away permits to greenhouse gas emitters that should instead be auctioned. As a result, money that could be rebated to taxpayers or used to fund the development of clean technologies instead goes to the industries that are the source of the problem.
    Second, the use of tradable permits rather than a tax is a rather questionable policy. Permits will almost certainly require more government enforcement bureaucracy than a system of taxes and subsidies. And, incidentally, permits will allow Goldman Sachs and our other Wall Street friends to make tens of billions of dollars on trading fees in the coming decades, a high priority for all Americans.
    But a bad bill is almost certainly better than no bill. If Waxman-Markey doesn't get through, it is very difficult to see another bill getting through this Congress. And there is no reason to believe that the Congress that gets elected in 2010 will be any less indebted to the corporate lobbyists.
    The Waxman-Markey bill should be viewed as a foot in the door. It is a modest first step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions that both demonstrates a commitment and provides an opportunity to show the public that emissions can be lowered without imposing an enormous economic burden on the country.
    Of course, the only reason that so many people believe that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will impose an enormous burden on the economy is that the oil and coal industry, and their friends in the media, have been pushing this tripe for more than a decade. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the cost of the Waxman-Markey bill at $22 billion a year in 2020. That will be equal to less than 0.1 percent of projected GDP in that year, or about $70 out of the pocket of each person in the country.
    The coal and oil companies are greatly anguished over this prospective burden on American families, but let's compare this burden to the burden posed by Iraq war levels of defense spending. Two years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight to use its model to project the economic impact of Iraq war levels of military spending. They projected the effect on the economy of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percent of GDP, an amount slightly less than the increase sustained in the years following the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
    Global Insight was selected because it is one of the oldest econometric forecasting firms in the country. Its model has been widely used for a wide variety of analyses and it certainly is not associated with progressive or anti-defense politics. Its model is also very much in the mainstream of the economics profession. It will not produce results that are qualitatively different than any other mainstream model.
    The model projected that after 10 years of higher spending, GDP would be down by about $17 billion from baseline levels. After 20 years (2021 if defense spending stays high), GDP would be down by more than $60 billion from baseline levels, approximately three times CBO's projection of the cost of the Waxman-Markey bill.
    Of course, these projections don't show the full loss to households, since they don't include the money that must be diverted from taxes or obtained by borrowing to support the higher level of defense spending. These figures are just the lost output.
    Global Insight projected that after 20 years of higher defense spending, annual car sales would be down by more than 700,000. Housing starts would be almost 40,000 lower. Exports would be 1.8 percent lower and imports would be 2.7 percent higher, leading to a trade deficit that would be almost $200 billion larger. The model also projected that there would be nearly 700,000 fewer jobs as a result of the higher level of defense spending.
    In short, the economic harm projected from high levels of military spending is far larger than the damage projected from the Waxman-Markey bill. Given this situation, we would have expected that all the oil and coal industry folks, who are now so concerned about the average family's well-being, would have been screaming about the economic pain that would result from sustaining the Iraq war levels of military spending.
    Did anyone ever hear them raise this issue? Does anyone recall members of Congress giving speeches about how the job loss from the Iraq war levels of spending would be devastating? Does anyone recall any newspaper columns or editorials making this point? How about a news story that analyzed the economic impact of higher levels of military spending?
    For some reason, job loss and economic pain associated with the military are just not worth mentioning. These items only become newsworthy when the issue is saving the environment. And the elites wonder why the public has so little confidence in the country's institutions.

Published on Monday, June 29, 2009 by The New York Times
Betraying the Planet
by Paul Krugman
So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.
But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason - treason against the planet.
To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.
The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe - a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable - can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.
Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there's growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing - that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves - the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation - may become annual or biannual events.
In other words, we're facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?
Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking - if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided - they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.
But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn't see people who've thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don't like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they've decided not to believe in it - and they'll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.
Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday's debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a "hoax" that has been "perpetrated out of the scientific community." I'd call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists - a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.
Yet Mr. Broun's declaration was met with applause.
Given this contempt for hard science, I'm almost reluctant to mention the deniers' dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill's economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.
Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual?
Yes, it is - and that's why it's unforgivable.
Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an "existential threat" to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole - but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.
Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is.
© 2009 The New York Times
Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal , and his most recent,The Return of Depression Economics . 

Published on Saturday, June 27, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Global warming: 350 or Bust
by Bill McKibben
Ex-New Yorker writer and now environmental campaigner Bill McKibben has a simple, but very difficult message. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has to be reduced back to 350 parts per million, or the planet will change irrevocably. He explains to Guardian editor Natalie Bennett how he's getting that message across.
One of the other big insights we've had is that the age of a single, huge event is over. We might have tried to organise a march on Washington back in 2007, when we organised the biggest demonstrations against global warming in American history, but to move all of those people together would have been off-message. We realised that we could work in a dispersed way and all of the small actions would add up to more than the sum of their parts.
So we had divers off Key West, hundreds of people in blue shirts forming a human tide line in Manhatten, climbers on the glaciers of the America West that won't be there for much longer. Pictures from all of these actions were uploaded to a website and we were showing them in a hall in Washington.
Far more people than we could get to Washington were involved, and we could bring, say, the Senator from Kansas into the hall and show him what his voters were doing: that had far more impact than a march on Washington in which only a few of his voters would be involved.
We were feeling very smug on April 14 2007 - then immediately afterwards the Arctic started to melt. Scientists who had been sober and concerned were suddenly panicked, and we realised that even our targets were not tough enough.
But it means that we are now getting people together around the world (and best of all in the developing world) to campaign. We've seen Chinese kids marching off with their 350 banners, Buddhist monks and nuns forming the numbers against the background of a melting glacier in Ladakh.
We remain outsiders in a sense: Al Gore has endorsed our quite radical numbers, and so has the alliance of small island states, but we are still making a statement that many are reluctant to hear: this is not a future problem for which solutions are being put in place: we have to act immediately and radically to prevent a clear, present emergency.
The rhetoric is of warding off future threats, insurance policies, but that is not what is going on now. Some scientists, like my old friend James Lovelock, say it is too late, but consensus science says we have a small window left, although it is closing rapidly.
But we are already past 350ppm, and that comes with its own set of realities. We have to move much more quickly and much more powerfully than we are at the moment. We have, for example, to stop burning coal by 2030, and quicker in the Western world.
The negotiations are not really between the US and China, industry and environmentalists, or whatever. They are between human beings and physics and chemistry, and they are poor bargainers. They won't agree to suspend the laws of nature for a decade or so, so that humans can get back on their feet.
You could argue that focusing on 350ppm of carbon is too specialised, too technical, but it is perhaps the most important number on earth. It is a boundary condition. Any value greater than 350 is not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed. What the scientists are saying is like a doctor saying to a patient: "if your cholesterol is higher than this figure, you will have a heart attack."
What our campaign is doing is trying to instill physical reality into a highly politicised regulatory process, to allow a lot more people to have a say than the experts haggling over commas.
When we talk to the White House, we keep hearing: "Make us do it. Build the kind of movement that will make us do it." For Obama to deliver a treaty he has to get 67 senators on his side, which is an extraordinarily high bar, given the realities of American politics.
The upside is that it is really extraordinary, the number and range of people who are getting involved. It is as if the antibodies are finally kicking in within our own immune system; finally, if a little late. The young people especially - almost everyone I work with is half my age - are magnificent. And we are seeing the global south take the lead, and that's about time. In international negotiations, for the first time the global south has enormous leverage.
I've just spent a week in New Zealand, where I gave 25 or 30 speeches that these kids had set up. New Zealand really is too small to make any difference with their emissions, but they are figuring out that politically they can make a difference.
I've also just been meeting with faith communities. On October 24 hundreds of churches will be ringing their bells 350 times; 350 scuba divers will be on the Great Barrier reef; in Spain a guy is going to cook 350 paellas in solar ovens: there will be pictures for editors right around the globe from the moment the sun first comes up on that date.
As all of that suggests, I've been doing a very bad job of work-life balance this year. I've been home for just three or four days. I love the place where I live, in the mountains of the northeastern US, and I love my family, but my 16-year-old daughter - she's at some level the reason why I am here. I'm pleased that she'll be campaigning in India with me next month.
And the Copenhagen talks in December are in some ways our last good bite at the apple. I feel like I'm running a marathon and I expect at the end of the Copenhagen talks I'll collapse. And I'll be able to spend time outside, and time writing, to myself that's how I define myself. To be spending time speechmaking, to be on the other side of the notebook, is a very curious business.

Manhattan floods, Chicago heatwaves and withering Californian vines: how scientists see the US in 75 years

Hard-hitting report describes how America will be affected region by region if no action is taken on climate change

• Suzanne Goldenberg
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 June 2009 10.47 BST
•  
• The Obama administration's long-awaited scientific report on the sweeping and life-altering consequences of a failure to act on global warming – Global climate change impacts in the United States – is released today.

It provides the most detailed picture to date of the impacts on the US in the worst case scenarios, when no action is taken to cut emissions. Examples include: floods in lower Manhattan; a quadrupling of heatwave deaths in Chicago; withering on the vineyards of California; the disappearance of wildflowers from the slopes of the Rockies; the extinction of Alaska's wild polar bears in the next 75 years.
What lies ahead by region
North-east
The winter snow season could be cut in half in southern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine — maybe as short as a week or two, under the higher emissions scenario. This would destroy winter traditions like skiing and skating and outdoor ponds. Native cranberries and blueberries would disappear; dairy herds, the biggest agricultural industry, would decline under the higher emissions scenario.
South-east
Summer temperatures in Florida could rise by 4.1C (10.5F), with the heat effect multipled by decreased rainfall under the higher emissions scenario. There would be increased hurricane intensity and rising sea levels leads to loss of wetlands and coastal areas. It would lead to a severe decline in quality of life.
Mid-west
Frequent, severe and longer lasting heatwaves in cities – as many as three a year in Chicago under the higher emissions scenario.
Water levels in the Great Lakes could fall by up to two feet by the end of the century under the higher emissions scenario.
South-west
Continued strong warming will threaten flow of Colorado river.
Alaska
Has been warming at twice the rate of the rest of the US over last 50 years.
Temperatures could rise up to a further 5.4C (13F) under the higher emissions scenario. The region should be prepared for drought and increased risk of wildfire.
North-west
Declining snowpack is already threatening agriculture. Many salmon species are already threatened
Costs
Human health: Rise in deaths due to heatwaves, decline in health because of poor air quality and increase in water borne and insect borne diseases.
Agriculture: Although some crops will benefit from the longer growing season, heavy downpours could wreak havoc on others. Farmers will be forced to use more pesticides and weed killers against invasive plants. Poison ivy will bcome more abundant and more toxic. Higher emissions scenario would cause a 10% decline in dairy herd in Appalachia.
Energy: Rising heat index will increase demand on electricity for air conditioning. But water shortages could restrict electricity generation.
Oil infrastructure, along coast of Louisiana and Florida, is also vulnerable to rising sea levels and intensifying hurricanes.
Transport: Storm surges and rising sea levels could block the use of ports and coastal airports, roads and rail lines. Six of the top 10 freight gateways are threatened by rising sea levels. Entire road networks on the Gulf Coast could be at risk.
Ecosystems: Large-scale shifts in species likely to continue. Deserts will become hotter and drier, oceans more acidic. Salmon and trout populations will contract.

Global Warming Consensus Challenged: "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide''

Global Warming Petition Signed by 31,478 Scientists

By Ron Paul

Global Research <http://www.globalresearch.ca> , June 17, 2009

LewRockwell.com

Statement before the US House of Representatives, June 4, 2009

Madam Speaker, before voting on the "cap-and-trade'' legislation, my colleagues should consider the views expressed in the following petition that has been signed by 31,478 American scientists:

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.''

Circulated through the mail by a distinguished group of American physical scientists and supported by a definitive review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, this may be the strongest and most widely supported statement on this subject that has been made by the scientific community. A state-by-state listing of the signers, which include 9,029 men and women with PhD degrees, a listing of their academic specialties, and a peer-reviewed summary of the science on this subject are available at www.petitionproject.org.

The peer-reviewed summary, "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide'' by A. B. Robinson, N. E. Robinson, and W.
Soon <http://www.oism.org/pproject/GWReview_OISM150.pdf>  includes 132 references to the scientific literature and was circulated with the petition.

Signers of this petition include 3,803 with specific training in atmospheric, earth, and environmental sciences. All 31,478 of the signers have the necessary training in physics, chemistry, and mathematics to understand and evaluate the scientific data relevant to the human-caused global warming hypothesis and to the effects of human activities upon environmental quality.

In a letter circulated with this petition, Frederick Seitz – past President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, President Emeritus of Rockefeller University, and recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from 32 universities throughout the world – wrote:

"The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds.

This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful.
To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.

The proposed agreement we have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world; especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries.

It is especially important for America to hear from its citizens who have the training necessary to evaluate the relevant data and offer sound advice.

We urge you to sign and return the enclosed petition card. If you would like more cards for use by your colleagues, these will be sent.''

Madam Speaker, at a time when our nation is faced with a severe shortage of domestically produced energy and a serious economic contraction; we should be reducing the taxation and regulation that plagues our energy-producing industries.

Yet, we will soon be considering so-called "cap and trade'' legislation that would increase the taxation and regulation of our energy industries. "Cap-and-trade'' will do at least as much, if not more, damage to the economy as the treaty referred by Professor Seitz! This legislation is being supported by the claims of "global warming'' and "climate change'' advocates – claims that, as demonstrated by the 31,478 signatures to Professor Seitz' petition, many American scientists believe is disproved by extensive experimental and observational work.

It is time that we look beyond those few who seek increased taxation and increased regulation and control of the American people. Our energy policies must be based upon scientific truth – not fictional movies or self-interested international agendas. They should be based upon the accomplishments of technological free enterprise that have provided our modern civilization, including our energy industries. That free enterprise must not be hindered by bogus claims about imaginary disasters.

Above all, we must never forget our contract with the American people – the Constitution that provides the sole source of legitimacy of our government. That Constitution requires that we preserve the basic human rights of our people – including the right to freely manufacture, use, and sell energy produced by any means they devise – including nuclear, hydrocarbon, solar, wind, or even bicycle generators.

While it is evident that the human right to produce and use energy does not extend to activities that actually endanger the climate of the Earth upon which we all depend, bogus claims about climate dangers should not be used as a justification to further limit the American people's freedom.

In conclusion, I once again urge my colleagues to carefully consider the arguments made by the 31,478 American scientists who have signed this petition before voting on any legislation imposing new regulations or taxes on the American people in the name of halting climate change.