Terror Alerts

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine Notebook (March 2007)


One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.
-- J M Coetzee


Count the number of movies these days that play to America's fear of losing its way in the world, and it's a wonder that Congress doesn't appoint an Iraq Study Group drawn from the company of studio executives seated poolside in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. The Hollywood field commanders might not know the difference between an Arab and a Turk, or how much to tip the lieutenant for valet parking the tank, but Western civilization they know to be running low on its stores of weapons-grade triumphalism, and dystopia they recognize as a travel destination no farther away than next month's bomb blast in Paris or Wichita Falls. Such at least was the holiday message brought to Manhattan's Cineplex screens last Christmas with the big-ticket movies storming the objective of an Academy Award, among them Babel, Apocalypto, Blood Diamond, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Good Shepherd, and Children of Men. Twinkling with the glitter of box-office celebrity (Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Clint Eastwood, Clive Owen, Angelina Jolie, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mel Gibson, Robert De Niro), the images of disaster came wrapped in the ribbons of critical acclaim - "nervously plausible future", "frighteningly, violently precarious", a "glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking".

The superlatives speak to the art of reformatting news bulletins as fashion statements. The set designs strive to match the CNN broadcasts from Baghdad, Ramallah, and Darfur, the foregrounds decorated with dead children, burning cars, fortified checkpoints, shattered glass, dismembered corpses, pillars of smoke. The cinematography dotes lovingly on the blood-smeared streets envisioned by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as "the face of the early part of the twenty-first century", the Moroccan desert and the jungles of West Africa seen as projections of the not-too-distant future slouching towards the suburbs of San Diego. Intent upon the composition of metaphors deserving a place in the Book of Revelation, the filmmakers don't give much thought to the problems of character and plot, which is just as well because many of the actors speak in strange tongues (Japanese, Yucatec, Berber, Spanish, Krio), their voices heard as sounds indistinguishable from the twittering of birds in a godforsaken wilderness.

In the absence of coherent narrative or intelligible speech, how then to respond to the elevated terrorist alerts? If in Hollywood as in Washington the authors of political pulp fiction shape the product to reassure or entertain as many people as possible, it's safe to assume that the postcards from the frontiers of the apocalypse admit of at least two interpretations, one of them likely to be preferred by audiences that wish to withdraw our troops from Iraq, the other by theatergoers who support the Bush Administration's plan to send more and heavier hired guns.

The first variant offers the gift redemption. The doomed heroes of Blood Diamond and Children of Men appear in the opening sequences marked with the stigmata of cynicism and despair - Leonardo DiCaprio as a heartless, former mercenary soldier engaged in the illegal diamond trade in Sierra Leone during the civil war in 1999, Clive Owen as an alienated intellectual in the city of London fast-forwarded to the year 2027 and there imagined as a pyramid of industrial wreckage and desolation of lost souls. Owen feels "like shit, all day every day"; DiCaprio inhabits a "shit world" in which "killing is a way of life" embraced by the multinational corporations and revolutionary gangs pillaging a country that "God left a long time ago". Neither man believes himself capable of an act of charity or conscience. The movies prove them wrong; against their will and better judgment both men find themselves transformed into imitations of Christ. From the dead moon of England, Owen rescues a young black woman pregnant with what in the year 2027 has become the miracle of a human birth. He attends the delivery of her daughter in a prison camp reminiscent of present day Gaza, brings mother and child through a shroud of machine-gun fire to a small boat that he rows offshore to a mysterious ship named Tomorrow. The movie ends with Owen dying at the oars, the prow of the ship barely visible in the mist but the music floating up into a major key ripe with the promise of civilization reborn.

DiCaprio also gives up his life for the sake of a child, an eight-year-old African boy captured by rebels, programmed to mouth agitprop, and trained to the practice of serial murder. The boy's father, a simple fisherman, stumbles across a diamond so valuable and rare that its price on the market in Amsterdam must admit the seller to the gardens of an earthly Paradise. DiCaprio sets out to steal the stone, but halfway through the film he meets a beautiful American journalist and succumbs to a change of heart. Love blooms, DiCaprio turns his talent for killing against his former associates and arranges the boy's escape from Africa (together with the father and the diamond) in a light plane lifting off into a Norman Rockwell sunset. DiCaprio stays behind to die of his wounds, but the beautiful journalist doesn't let the world forget the meaning of his sacrifice. She writes a magazine article in which she exposes the wickedness of the African resource wars. The movie ends with an exhortation to the buyers of engagement rings at Cartier and Tiffany to remember that it is up to the consumer to insist that the diamond is conflict-free.

Although most clearly stated in Blood Diamond and Children of Men, the theme of redemption wanders through the existential gloom of Babel, infiltrates the headquarters of the CIA in The Good Shepherd, lurks in the forests of Apocalypto, hides in caves in Letters from Iwo Jima. In The Good Shepherd, Matt Damon discovers the capacity for true emotion taken from him during his long years of service in America's bodyguard of lies; Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Babel come to recognize in the person of a Moroccan villager the presence of a fellow human being, thus stumbling upon the discovery that there's more to life than money. On Iwo Jima in March 1945, the death of Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, like the death of Leonidas the Spartan at Thermopylae in 480 BC, invests the horror of war with the meaning of immortal sacrifice; Mel Gibson's noble savage learns from his trials by combat that the time has come for what the subtitles translate as "a new beginning".

In one way or another, the storylines reiterate Hollywood's Christmas message to worried environmentalists and concerned human-rights activists: Yes, maybe it's true that America is busy at the task of devouring the earth, our global financial markets blind to the wretchedness of the naked and undernourished poor, deaf to the cries of drowning polar bears, but all is not lost. We might know that America is doing things that good people shouldn't be doing, but because we feel bad about it, sorry for the luckless victims of unfortunate circumstance, we haven't been robbed of our humanity. We have feelings, feelings as innocent and fine as the ones worn on the sleeves of this year's Democratic presidential candidates, and because we have feelings, our moral perfections remain intact, and our conscience, like the flag at old Fort McHenry, is still there. The guarantee presumably comes as a comfort to theatergoers looking for the cinematic equivalents of a federal witness protection program.

Audiences seated further to the Republican or Christian right don't need to be told that their hearts are pure or that their cause is just. Both propositions they take on faith and know to be a fact. Through no fault of its own, America now finds itself surrounded by sinister enemies as numberless as the names for grief - by communicable diseases and corrupt Russians as well as by angry Muslims and poisoned oceans - and therefore we're justified in the use of any and all means necessary (no matter how brutal or seemingly barbaric) to cleanse the world of its impurities. To theatergoers secure in the righteousness that all Americans inherit at birth, Hollywood's glorious bummers invite interpretation not as assuagings of doubt but as calls to arms. Behold the world for what it is, a raging of beasts and a writhing of serpents. Get used to it; harden thy resolve; defend the homeland against the deadly imports of unlicensed evil. Know that the war on terror will be with us for the next forty years and that the way forward, in Iraq as in Apocalypto and Children of Men, is through the splashing of blood and the trampling out of the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

The stronger line of film appreciation accords with the geopolitical thinking of President George W Bush, also with the enthusiasms of the Washington warrior intellectuals who continue to hold fast, despite the results of last November's election, to the neoconservative doctrines of forward deterrence and preemptive strike - obliterate Iran's nuclear-weapons laboratories before the mullahs can assemble a bomb, intimidate North Korea, punish China, deploy the tactic of targeted assassination. On the latter point, National Review last August published an article entitled "An Arrow in Our Quiver", in which the author, Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that it was foolish on the part of the United States to make unlawful the loosing of the assassin's arrow, so useful a "policy tool", against foreign heads of state clearly identified as the scum of the earth. Rubin conceded that in some quarters of American opinion "there remains a gut-level revulsion to assassination", but he found the squeamishness more prevalent among the country's effete academics than among "ordinary Americans".

The observation has become a commonplace around Dick Cheney's campfires in Wyoming. As often as not it leads to a series of further remarks about how as a people we've become too rich and too comfortable for our own good, that having gone soft in the head as well as the heart, we've misplaced our joie du combat, forgotten how to take casualties, lost touch with our inner barbarian. John Podhoretz, one of the more ferocious apostles of American empire, addressed the problem in a newspaper column published last summer in the New York Post during the weeks when Israel was sending its raiding parties into southern Lebanon. The Israelis were being condemned in the world press for inflicting disproportionate damage on the city of Beirut, also for leaving behind in the Lebanese countryside a plantation of as many as one million unexploded cluster bombs - small objects resembling a child's toy, stuck in the branches of olive trees, buried in the rubble of what once were villages, strewn across farm fields, orchards, roads, school playgrounds. Taking offense at the suggestion that somehow Israel had committed atrocities, Podhoretz asked a number of momentous questions that could as easily have occurred to Lieutenant General Kuribayashi:

"Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"

"What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?"

"And as for the United States, what if we have every tool at our disposal to win a war - every weapons system we could want manned by the most superbly trained military in history - except the ability to match or exceed our antagonists in ruthlessness?"


Neither Mr Rubin nor Mr Podhoretz should have much trouble finding work in Hollywood, if not as technical advisers updating the list of America's enemies, then as library scouts looking for doomsday scenarios (the sack of Corinth, the Albigensian Crusade) that haven't already been made into dystopian romance by Steven Spielberg or converted into self-fulfilling prophecies by the military strategists in Washington. During the same week that I was making the rounds of Manhattan's movie screens, the New York Times was reporting a boom in the American arms trades - next year's Pentagon budget pegged at $560 billion, together with an additional $100 billion in supplemental spending that President Bush is likely to seek this spring for Iraq and Afghanistan; gains of thirty and forty percent in last year's stock prices for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. None of the industry spokesmen foresaw a dwindling of the profit margins as a result of the unhappiness in Congress about the bungling of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The gentleman from Lockheed Martin figured that the Democrats couldn't bear the risk of being seen as disloyal Americans abandoning our troops in time of war: "You certainly cannot deny that there is a lot of uncertainty in the world-North Korea, Iran, Iraq. The Democratic Congress will see the reality of the dangerous world we live in, and will make decisions accordingly".

So strong is the demand for the myth of the apocalypse that the Pentagon is giving away or selling at steep discounts its old, unused, or unwanted weapons (secondhand helicopters, torpedoes, M16 rifles, utility landing craft, missiles, ammunition, patrol boats, jet aircraft, and a wind tunnel) to smaller countries (Pakistan, Jordan, Guatemala, Yemen, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Portugal) that otherwise might be forced to content themselves with conflict-free merchandise and therefore be unable to stage the blood-smeared spectacles that inspire Hollywood to feats of glorious filmmaking.

Whether made in Washington or California, the images of disaster confirm the presence of a monstrous enemy in opposition to whom or what or which America can define itself both as the Old Testament Father in Heaven and the New Testament Son on the Cross. Both interpretations assume that we're the world's designated good guys, released from the prison of history and therefore free to imagine that our era will never pass, that our day will never die. The delusion constitutes the necessary instrument of power than no self-respecting military empire can afford to be without.
_____

Lewis H Lapham is the National Correspondent for Harper's Magazine.


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Sail Transport for the Good/s of the Future

by Juniper Elk

For ten years, the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium has been committed to the halting of car culture expansion. Bicycles are rather familiar to the readers of the Auto-Free Times, as are buses and other mass-transit alternatives. Unfortunately, even if our individual transportation needs are met sustainably, many of us find ourselves using products and services delivered many miles to our locale aboard polluting tankers and semi-trucks.

Trans-oceanic shipping via sail is a viable alternative for our sustainable future. In the past, for centuries, traders and explorers used the power of Mother Nature's breath to propel them great distances over sea. This art, lifestyle and economic keystone has been reduced in recent times to a mere recreational activity. As we look towards the day when toxic gases are no longer habitually spilled from the apparatus of our human culture, and people are reinvested in their local strengths and ecosystem, we must consider the role sail freight and transport will play in maintaining healthy connections around the world. Here in Arcata, California we see the potential for sail trading, as navigable waters stretch towards citrus, coffee and cocoa regions to the South, tropical fruits to the Southeast, treasured spices and culture to the East, and a wealth of indigenous crafts and flourishing sea foods to the North. These products serve to enrich our lives. Receiving them under real time conditions and with the understanding that they are sent from the hands which produced them, in exchange for that which we as recipients have to offer, promises to rekindle our human potential for creation and pride.

When we reduce the scale of such a project to a self-contained marine bio-region such as the Puget Sound area of Washington State and British Columbia, we see that launching such a venture now is feasible, inspiring and helpful in beginning to untangle the corporate knot of global "free" trade. Without alternatives to big-business' exploitive labor and policies and their pollutive shipping, we are either at the mercy of their reforms or cut off from these goods via conscious abstinence. And besides, before the mass forced extinction of native livelihoods, boat trade and cultural exchange in this area had been traditional via kayaks and canoes for millennia.

Let us all truly consider a fossil-fuel free world. May we have the capacity and know-how to venture to distant places and maintain healthy, mutually beneficial relations with local economies around the globe. Hemp may return for canvas and rope. Let us start to visualize the role that sails, and the wind that drives them, will play in the glorious future we fight for. The Earth and her atmosphere are ready for us to live amongst her and in awe and praise of her power. Sail freight and transport are integral to our sustainable future.

For more information contact the Sail Transport Network at http://www.culturechange.org/sail_transport_network.html


Culture Change mailing address: Post Office Box 4347 , Arcata , California 95518 USA
Telephone (and fax) 1-215-243-3144

Web: http://www.culturechange.org

E-Mail info@culturechange.org

Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.

http://www.culturechange.org/issue17/sailing.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

A Stunning Contrast

The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America

by Philip Agee in Havana

CounterPunch (March 14 2007)


Anyone following the news in recent times cannot be unaware of the wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean. For many lonely years Cuba held high the torch through its exemplary programs to provide universal health care and education, both gratis, along with world class cultural, sports and scientific achievements. Although you won't find a Cuban today who says things are perfect, far from it, probably all would agree that compared with pre-revolutionary Cuba there is a world of improvement. All this they did against every effort by the United States to isolate them as an unacceptable example of independence and self-determination, using every dirty method including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and biological warfare and incessant lies in the cooperating media of many countries. I know these methods too well, having been a CIA officer in Latin America in the 1960s. Altogether nearly 3500 Cubans have died from terrorist acts, and more than 2000 are permanently disabled. No country has suffered terrorism as long and consistently as Cuba.

All through the years, beginning even before taking power in 1959, the Cuban revolution has needed to have intelligence collection capabilities in the US for defensive purposes. Such was the fully justified mission of the Cuban Five, jailed since 1998 with long sentences after conviction for various crimes in Miami where they had no chance for a fair trial. Convictions were for conspiracy to commit espionage to murder. Nevertheless their sights were exclusively set on criminal terrorist planning in Miami for operations against Cuba, activities ignored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. They neither sought nor received any classified US government information. Their cases are still on appeal, and will be for years to come, but their completely biased convictions rank with the legal lynching in the 1920's of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist immigrants, as among the most shameful injustices in US history. Freedom for the Cuban Five should be the cause of everyone for whom fairness, human rights and justice are important, both in the United States and around the world, joining in the activities of the 300 Free the Five solidarity committees in ninety countries.

Current US policy with its means and goals can be found in the nearly 500-page 2004 report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba together with an update published in 2006 that has a secret annex. A fundamental goal, the same in 2007 as I remember it was in 1959, is isolation of Cuba to keep this bad example from spreading, and the current policy if successful, would mean no less than Cuban annexation to the US and complete dependence, in fact if not in law, as Cubans rightfully claim. Other fundamental goals from 1959 are still, nearly fifty years later, to foment an internal political opposition and to cause economic hardship in Cuba leading to desperation, hunger and despair. It is no exaggeration to call these goals genocidal.

Yet, US economic warfare of nearly fifty years against Cuba hasn't worked even though the Cubans who keep book estimate its cost at more than $80 billion. After the Cuban economy's free fall in the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it began to recover in 1995. By 2005 growth was 11.8% and in 2006 it was 12.5%, the highest in Latin America. Some sectors have surpassed their development levels of the late 80s, before the collapse, and others are nearly back. Cuba's exports of services, nickel, pharmaceutical and other products are booming, and try as it may, the US has not been able to stop this.

In the end US efforts to isolate Cuba have also totally failed. In September 2006 Cuba was elected, for the second time, to lead the Non-Aligned Movement of 118 countries, and two months later, for the 15th consecutive year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the US economic embargo of Cuba, this time 183 to 4. In 2007 Cuba has diplomatic or consular relations with 182 countries. Havana meanwhile is the site of seemingly endless international conferences on every imaginable theme with thousands of people from around the world attending. And not least, Cuba in recent years has been hosting more than two million foreign tourists annually at its world-class resorts. Far from isolating Cuba, the US has isolated itself.

More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health workers are saving lives and preventing disease in 69 countries, many in the most remote and difficult areas where few or no local doctors will go. Meanwhile 30,000 young foreigners from dozens of countries are studying medicine in Cuba on full scholarships. All were selected from areas lacking doctors, and all are committed to return to these areas in their home countries to practice.

In education the Cuban literacy program known as "Yes I can" has been adopted in nearly thirty countries on five continents where thousands more Cuban volunteers are teaching. Through this program, in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Creole, Quechua and Aymara, some two million people have learned to read and write, most of whom continue their education afterwards through a variety of other programs.

Thanks to these international assistance programs, Cuban prestige and influence, and international solidarity with Cuba, have never been greater. It was to defend these worthy programs that the five Cubans, unjustly convicted, went to Miami in the 1990s.

Then in 1999 came Hugo Chavez, the US's latest worst nightmare in the region, admittedly following the Cuban example in Venezuela, with its enormous income from petroleum, to establish what he calls a Socialism for the 21st Century with a foreign policy of regional integration under his innovative Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, ALBA, excluding the United States altogether. The program is already underway through institutions such as Mercosur in trade, Petrocaribe, Petroandino and Petrosur in the energy sector, the Banco del Sur in finance, and Telesur in electronic media.

Another program under ALBA is Operacio'n Milagro (Operation Miracle) for offering free eye surgery to people unable to afford it for cataracts, glaucoma, diabetes and other vision problems. It began in 2004 as a joint Cuban-Venezuelan effort to bring Venezuelans by air to Cuba cost free for operations. Within two years 28 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean were participating, and operations restoring sight numbered 485,000 of whom 290,000 were Venezuelans. Jet liners loaded with patients come and go from Havana everyday, but by early 2007 thirteen modern eye clinics were being built in Venezuela, and several had already performed thousands of operations there. Other clinics were being established in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti, all with Cuban planning and staffing. The ten-year goal of Operacio'n Milagro is to restore sight to six million people of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the program is expanding to Africa.

The Cuban example of so many years, and now Venezuela, have also recently inspired the peoples of Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Nicaragua to elect progressive leaders. Most have rejected the 1990's "Washington Consensus" and the neo-liberal model along with determined US efforts to establish a hemispheric free trade zone. All are developing grassroots social and economic programs, each in its own way, aimed at improving the quality of life for all, especially the long-excluded majorities of their populations where this injustice prevailed. Although achievements in Cuba continue to shine, the torch of revolution in the region has effectively passed from the towering figure of Fidel, ailing at eighty, to Chavez, a military man and teacher inspired by Simo'n Boli'var and Jose' Marti'.

Reflecting on these new hopes for hundreds of millions in such a vast region, one cannot avoid recalling the old professor, Pro'spero, addressing his class for the last time in Ariel, the classic essay by Jose' Enrique Rodo', still read by students in Latin America. In borrowing from The Tempest, and urging his students to follow the soaring spirit of virtue and good, represented by Ariel, and to reject the crass materialism of the US personified by Caliba'n, Pro'spero drew a contrast between Latin American idealism and the United States that is as valid today as in 1900 when the essay first appeared.

While Latin America is fast moving in progressive directions, almost unimaginable less than ten years ago, in contrast the United States, at least since the Reagan era, has been moving step by step toward a Fascism for the 21st Century. And the pace has quickened in the last six years of Republican government under George W Bush with passage of the Patriot Act under emergency circumstances just after the attacks on the Twin Towers in September 2001, and then adoption in 2006 of the Military Commissions Act, both with substantial support from Congressional Democrats. Other legislation supports this trend.

The US Federal Government now has legal powers to secretly monitor one's communications, whether by telephone, ordinary mail, e-mail, or fax, plus your bank accounts, credit cards, the web sites you visit, and the books you buy or read in libraries. Torture, secret prisons, kidnapping, and jailing indefinitely without trial or recourse to courts through habeas corpus - all are now legal. So is "extraordinary rendition" whereby US captives are delivered to other governments where they will likely be tortured and possibly assassinated. Investigations by the European Parliament have identified around 1200 secret CIA flights carrying these people through European airports to secret prisons. To qualify for this treatment, anyone in the world, US citizens and any others, only need be designated by the government as an "illegal enemy combatant" whose only definition is someone who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States". Hostilities or a hostile act can be interpreted as almost anything that opposes US policies, from a speech expressing solidarity with Cuba to a picket line protesting the war in Iraq. If an "enemy combatant" ever gets a trial, it will not be by a jury of peers but by a US military court that can use hearsay and evidence obtained under torture.

These powers reminiscent of the Nazi regime are not just a global US Sword of Damocles waiting to fall on perceived enemies. The full range of repression has been going on since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 with plenty of evidence coming from the prisons and concentration camps of Bagram, Abu Graib and Guanta'namo as well as from testimony of various released innocents swept up in the process. It is an on-going worldwide application of fascist power in a non-defined, nebulous "war on terrorism" that has no end or geographical limits. Since September 2001 the Bush government has given one specious reason after another for what it believes are the motives of Islamic terrorism, never admitting that it is a reaction and resistance to US imperial policies, starting with US support for Israel's continued occupation and colonization of Arab lands and Israel's refusal to return to its borders before the Six-Day War in 1967.

By 2006 the US had designated some 17,000 people around the world as "enemy combatants", according to press reports. Combine this repression with gargantuan contracts to private US firms, as in Iraqi security and "reconstruction", along with forcing the Iraqi government, always with eyes on the prize, to contract highly prejudicial thirty-year "production sharing agreements" to American and British oil majors, excluded from Iraq before the invasion, plus historic lows in trade union power, and you have the marriage of government and corporate power that Mussolini, who invented the word in 1919, described as the essence of fascism. The one bright spot are the recent indictments of thirteen CIA people in Germany and 26 others in Italy for kidnapping and other violations of their laws. They will never be brought to trial, of course, but the indictments are refreshing developments.

Protection of terrorists who serve US interests is still another feature of American Fascism of the 21st Century. There are many examples, especially among Cuban exiles, but two stand out from the others: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both have long, well-documented pedigrees as international terrorists, but one of their joint crimes was historic: the first bombing in flight of a civilian airliner in the Western Hemisphere. It was Cubana flight 455 that on October 6th 1976 exploded just after takeoff from Barbados killing all 73 people on board.

Bosch and Carriles, both of whose CIA careers began around 1960, planned the bombing in Caracas and provided the explosives to two Venezuelans recruited by Posada. These two were discovered, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms. Not so with Bosch and Posada who were protected by then-Venezuelan President Carlos Andre's Pe'rez who has his own history of working with the CIA. Although they were both arrested and tried separately in Venezuelan courts as the intellectual authors of the crime, neither was convicted.

Bosch was found not guilty and released in 1988, returned to Miami but was arrested for an old parole violation. The Justice Department then ordered his deportation as an "undesirable" and as "the most dangerous terrorist" of the Western Hemisphere. But Jeb Bush, son of then-President Bush, persuaded his father in 1990 to quash Bosch's deportation order. Since then Bosch has lived freely in Miami where he gives television interviews in which he makes every effort to justify terrorism against Cuba.

For his part Posada's trial in Venezuela never ended because in 1985 he escaped from prison, fled the country, and soon turned up in El Salvador working in the CIA's Contra terrorist operation against Nicaragua. When this ended he stayed underground in Central America and from the early 1990's organized more terrorist operations against Cuba. In 2005 he was arrested in Miami for illegal entry to the US, and although he admitted to the New York Times to terrorist bombings of hotels and other tourist facilities in Cuba, in one of which an Italian tourist died, he has only been indicted for lying to the FBI and in his request for naturalization. The Bush administration refuses to certify him as a terrorist so that he can be tried as such, at the same time ignoring Venezuela's extradition request as a fugitive from justice, alleging absurdly that he might be tortured there. His treatment suggests that he will eventually be pardoned by Bush, perhaps on Christmas Eve of 2008 just before leaving the White House, just as his father on Christmas Eve of 1992 pardoned former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and various CIA officers for crimes in the 1980's Iran-Contra scandal, thus precluding their trials scheduled to begin the following month.

One need not dwell on the obvious. The conviction of the Miami Cuban Five for their anti-terrorist efforts, in contrast with the official protection of terrorists like Bosch and Posada, speaks volumes on the US as the pre-eminent state sponsor of international terrorism.

The major disguise used to cloak this US program of worldwide aggression from the 1980s to the present has been "promotion of democracy", a hypocritical claim used ad nauseum by Presidents, Secretaries of State and others that has never fooled anyone. It has always been clear that the "democracy promotion" programs of the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, the Agency for International Development and associated foundations and agencies are nothing more that attempts to foment and strengthen internal political forces in countries around the world that will be under US control and will protect and cater to US interests. Their origins are in the CIA's political operations starting in the 1940s, and they have included the overthrow of democratically elected governments and the institution of unspeakable repression as in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973 to name only two of many examples.

To be sure there has been, and is, important and worthy resistance in the US to this developing fascism both within Congress and among private organizations and individuals. But it has been mostly isolated attempts of a defensive and rear-guard nature, with little mention in the corporate media. Bills have been introduced in Congress to ease or end the economic blockade of Cuba, to amend the worst of the repressive laws, even to impeach Bush and Cheney, but they seem unlikely ever to prevail or become law. The two parties, actually competing branches of a one-party state, have simply adopted ever more extreme measures to maintain their monopoly of power.

Even the judicial system, once perhaps the last hope for enforcing the Constitution, has been riddled with neo-conservatives who ignore it. Take only the appeal of the Miami conviction by the Cuban Five. The original three appellate judges of Atlanta's 11th Circuit issued a compelling 93-page unanimous decision upholding the defense position that no fair trial of self-admitted Cuban agents was possible in Miami's prevailing anti-Cuban atmosphere and that the trial venue should have been moved. Nevertheless the other ten judges of the Circuit voted to hear another appeal and then unanimously overturned the first decision with only two of the original three judges voting against (the third had retired). That ten of the thirteen Circuit Court judges would uphold Miami as a place where Cuban agents could get a fair trial is a good example of how morally and intellectually corrupt the federal judiciary has become.

So these are grim days indeed for the United States and by extension for its allies, starting with its junior partner, the UK, and extending through NATO. There have been other periods of shameful repression in the US, like the years following World War I, but never with a global reach like this.

Predictably US prestige around the world, what there ever was of it, has disappeared, replaced by contempt and scorn. Testimony to this is the repudiation of Bush and what he stands for expressed by so many thousands in the streets protesting his presence as he traveled around Latin America attempting to lure five countries away from regional integration. What a contrast with the enlightened, idealistic, and progressive social and political movements now flowering in Latin America!

_____

Philip Agee, 72, was a CIA secret operations officer in Latin American from 1960 to 1969. He is the author of the best-selling Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Penguin Books, 1975) plus other books and articles. Deported in 1977 by the UK and four other NATO countries, he has lived since 1978 with his wife in Hamburg, Germany. He travels frequently to Cuba and South America for solidarity and business activities, and in 2000 he started an online travel service to Cuba: www.cubalinda.com.

http://www.counterpunch.org/agee03142007.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

A Lethal Solution

We need a five-year freeze on biofuels, before they wreck the planet.

by George Monbiot


Published in the Guardian (March 27 2007)


It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.

In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burnt. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks.

In the budget last week, Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the UK will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants - if not, they must pay a penalty of 15 pence a litre. The obligation rises to five per cent in 2010 {1}. By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops {2}. Last month George Bush announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels {3}: by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation's transport fuel {4}.

So what's wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 this column warned that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats {5}. I received more abuse than I've had for any other column, except when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn't materialise for many years. They are happening already.

Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled {6}. The price of wheat has also reached a ten-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows {7}. Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US department of agriculture warns that "if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year". {8} According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from both maize and wheat {9}.

Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.

Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022 {10}. Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn't happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang utan in the wild. But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as petroleum produces {11}. I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes TEN TIMES as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

There are similar impacts all over the world. Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil and soya farmers are ripping up the Amazon rainforests. As President Bush has just signed a biofuel agreement with President Lula, it's likely to become a lot worse. Indigenous people in South America, Asia and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land by fuel planters. A petition launched by a group called biofuelwatch, begging western governments to stop, has been signed by campaigners from 250 groups {12}.

The British government is well aware that there's a problem. On his blog last year the environment secretary David Miliband noted that palm oil plantations "are destroying 0.7% of the Malaysian rain forest each year, reducing a vital natural resource (and in the process, destroying the natural habitat of the orang-utan). It is all connected". {13} Unlike government policy.

The reason governments are so enthusiastic about biofuels is that they don't upset drivers. They appear to reduce the amount of carbon from our cars, without requiring new taxes. It's an illusion sustained by the fact that only the emissions produced at home count towards our national total. The forest clearance in Malaysia doesn't increase our official impact by a gram.

In February the European Commission was faced with a straight choice between fuel efficiency and biofuels. It had intended to tell car companies that the average carbon emission from new cars in 2012 would be 120 grams per kilometre. After heavy lobbying by Angela Merkel on behalf of her car manufacturers, it caved in and raised the limit to 130 grams. It announced that it would make up the shortfall by increasing the contribution from biofuel {14}.

The British government says it "will require transport fuel suppliers to report on the carbon saving and sustainability of the biofuels they supply". {15} But it will not require them to do anything. It can't: its consultants have already shown that if it tries to impose wider environmental standards on biofuels, it will fall foul of world trade rules {16}. And even "sustainable" biofuels merely occupy the space that other crops now fill, displacing them into new habitats. It promises that one day there will be a "second generation" of biofuels, made from straw or grass or wood. But there are still major technical obstacles {17}. By the time the new fuels are ready, the damage will have been done.

We need a moratorium on all targets and incentives for biofuels, until a second generation of fuels can be produced for less than it costs to make fuel from palm oil or sugarcane. Even then, the targets should be set low and increased only cautiously. I suggest a five-year freeze.

This would require a huge campaign, tougher than the one which helped to win a five-year freeze on growing genetically modified crops in the UK. That was important - GM crops give big companies unprecedented control over the foodchain. But most of their effects are indirect, while the devastation caused by biofuel is immediate and already visible.

This is why it will be harder to stop: encouraged by government policy, vast investments are now being made by farmers and chemical companies. Stopping them requires one heck of a battle. But it has to be fought.

You can join the campaign at www.biofuelwatch.org.uk.

www.monbiot.com


References:

1. HM Treasury, March 2007. Budget 2007, Chapter 7.

2. Department for Transport, 21st December 2005. Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report. Executive Summary.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/secrtfoprogdocs/renewabletransportfuelobliga3849?page=1

3. George W Bush. 23rd January 2007. State of the Union Address. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html

4. The US Energy Information Administration gives US gasoline consumption for October 2006 (the latest available date) at 287,857,000 barrels. If this month is typical, annual consumption amounts to 3.45 billion barrels, or 145 billion gallons. http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_m.htm

In the state of the union address, Bush proposed a mandatory annual target of 35 billion gallons.

5. George Monbiot, 23rd November 2004. Feeding Cars, Not People. The Guardian. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

6. Nils Blythe, 23rd March 2007. Biofuel demand makes food expensive. BBC Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/business/6481029.stm

7. Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007. Food prices to rise as biofuel demand keeps grains costly. Financial Times.

8. Keith Collins, chief economist, US Department of Agriculture. Quoted by Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007, ibid.

9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, December 2006. Food Outlook 2. http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/j8126e/j8126e01a.htm

10. UNEP and UNESCO, February 2007. The Last Stand of the Orangutan. State of Emergency: Illegal Logging, Fire and Palm Oil in Indonesia's National Parks. http://www.unep-wcmc.org/resources/PDFs/LastStand/full_orangutanreport.pdf

11. Wetlands International, 8th December 2006. Bio-fuel less sustainable than realised http://www.wetlands.org/news.aspx?ID=804eddfb-4492-4749-85a9-5db67c2f1bb8

12. http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/resources.php#2007Jan31


13. David Miliband, 14th July 2006. Malaysian Diary.
http://www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk/blogs/ministerial_blog/archive/2006/07/14/1497.aspx

14. Commission Of The European Communities, 7th February 2007. Results of the review of the Community Strategy to reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars and light-commercial vehicles. COM 19 final. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/co2/pdf/com_2007_19_en.pdf

15. HM Treasury, ibid.

16. E4Tech, ECCM and Imperial College, London, June 2005. Feasibility Study on Certification for a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation. Final Report.

17. Robert F Service, et al, 16th March 2007. Cellulosic Ethanol: Biofuel Researchers
Prepare to Reap a New Harvest. Science 315, 1488. DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1488


Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/#more-1051


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Dangerous denial

If all the people of the world had the same living style as the average American, the holocaust would have already visited us.

by C E Karunakaran

Frontline (Volume 24 Issue 04 (February 24 2007)

India's National Magazine, from the publishers of The Hindu


"I'll tell you one thing I'm not going to do is, I'm not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world's air, like the Kyoto Treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty." So said the then presidential hopeful, George W Bush, in October 2000, to Al Gore, in a televised debate. Al Gore could have responded, "I am sure you would be happy to let the United States carry the responsibility for polluting the world's air the most". He did not, being the other presidential hopeful.

After all, Al Gore, who only three years earlier represented the US in the Kyoto discussions and had authored a book on global warming, could not have been unaware of what Andrew Kerr of the World Wide Fund for Nature pointed out: "The United States is responsible for almost half of the increase in world carbon dioxide in the past decade. That increase is greater than the increase in China, India, Africa and the whole of Latin America."

Nor could he have been unaware that with a little over four per cent of the world's population, the US was responsible for 35 per cent of the total historic emissions of carbon dioxide - the principal driver of global warming - in the post-industrial era. Or about the fact that the average American was then emitting seven times as much carbon dioxide as the average Chinese and twenty times as much as the average Indian. But then, he refrained from pointing this out in the debate, or for that matter any time after that, including in his latest movie An Inconvenient Truth - a commendable effort that has initiated more public debate in the US on the seriousness of the climate change issue than probably any other single trigger before it.

To describe climate change as serious is now generally accepted to be an understatement - catastrophic is more like it. It is variously described as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and a threat worse than terrorism or nuclear war. To understand why it is so, one should look at some basic facts. Global warming is caused primarily by the very foundation on which modern civilisation is built - the burning of coal, oil and gas. So much so, a real solution to the problem would include lifestyle changes, something that goes against the grain of the consumer culture and the socio-economic system built on it. Our earth has not seen anything like this build-up of carbon dioxide for over half a million years. If this continues, by the end of the century the earth will be hotter than at any other time in the last two million years.

It is already too late to avoid major consequences because of the inertia of the ecosystem - even if no more carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases are emitted by humankind from tomorrow, the earth will continue to warm up for some decades, the sea will continue to rise for some centuries and the ice sheets will continue to adjust for thousands of years. The world is already facing up to increasing sea intrusions, floods, storms, droughts, heat waves, disease transmissions and environmental refugees. The percentage of the world's population affected by weather disasters has doubled between 1975 and 2001 and the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that climate change of the last thirty years already claims 150,000 lives annually.

The coming years - resulting from what has already been done, not to speak of further emissions - will be worse, even catastrophic in some instances. An insurance specialist estimates that insurance losses due to extreme weather events are increasing by ten per cent a year against the world economic growth of three per cent, and that even by 2010 insurance companies could be charging annual rates of twelve per cent, forcing many to drop out.

There is the additional threat of runaway warming because of warming crossing some threshold and triggering positive feedback - such as frozen peat bogs thawing and releasing huge quantities of methane, which is twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide in causing global warming.

The magnitude of the impending crisis is best expressed in the words of Dr James Hansen, the highly regarded director of the NASA Institute for Space Studies, that we are "near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built-in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet". He also points out: "The earth's history suggests that with warming of two to three degrees Celsius the new equilibrium sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising sea level of the order of 25 metres (80 feet)".


How far can we go?

If the damage is so threatening and the risk so foreboding, how does one assess the future of this planet and where does one draw the line and say, this far we can pollute our atmosphere and somehow manage its consequences - keeping fingers crossed about positive feedbacks - but beyond this would be unacceptable chaos? Does the developing situation provide a window and a plausible time frame for humankind to mend its ways and step back before this line?

Scientists, activists and policymakers have been grappling with this issue and have now come to a broad understanding of where this line is to be drawn, taking into account all relevant factors. This consensual Lakshman Rekha is a two degrees Celsius warming over and above the pre-industrial global average temperature. Of this, the earth has already reached the 0.8 degrees Celsius mark and is currently warming up by 0.2 degrees Celsius a decade. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body entrusted by the nations of the world to guide them on the science of climate change, forecasts that by the end of this century the probable temperature rise will be in the range of 1.8 to 4.0 degrees Celsius if we go along business as usual.

It cannot, obviously, be business as usual. Far from it. In fact, far even from the Kyoto Protocol - agreed to in 1997 but coming into force only in 2005 with the US opting out - which asked the industrial North to bring down its emissions from its 1990 levels by 5.2 per cent before 2012; the developing South was exempted. One scenario, which holds a risk of 9 to 26 per cent of crossing the two degrees Celsius mark, demands that the total man-made emissions should start declining from 2010 and reach one quarter of the starting level within thirty years and keep declining further - a mind-boggling challenge. Other, less demanding, scenarios have a higher risk of crossing the Lakshman Rekha. It is unfortunate that even major environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are falling into the trap of advocating the less demanding scenarios on the grounds that more than that would not be politically acceptable. "How much reality can you take?" George Monbiot asks them in his book Heat.

Reality takes time to sink in, but it is happening. Comments such as "in the years to come this issue will dwarf all the others combined. It will become the only issue" and "forty years from now George Bush will not be remembered for Iraq, but will be remembered in near apocalyptic terms. He'll be the denier-in-chief who failed to acknowledge, much less confront, the coming ecological catastrophe" are no longer considered outlandish.

Many would wonder what makes the denier-in-chief such a denier in the face of such tremendous challenge from the environment; in the face of a scientific consensus so wide that a review of all - more than 900 - peer-reviewed articles on climate change published over a ten-year period ending 2003 did not throw up a single one that contradicted the IPCC position on human-induced global warming. Such a denier that he would go to the extent of pressuring scientists of federal agencies to fudge climate science in their reports.

The long and short answer to the question is corporate profits. It was to be expected in this neoliberal world that in the months before the Kyoto conference, an industry association of the fossil industry would spend $13 million on a series of television advertisements to alarm the American public about an economic collapse if emission commitments were taken on, and a representative of this association, present at Kyoto as part of a huge industry lobby, would say with satisfaction: "We think we have raised enough questions among the American public to prevent any numbers, targets or timetables to achieve reductions in gas emissions being agreed here ... What we are doing, and we think successfully, is buying time for our industries by holding up these talks". It was to be expected that they would contribute far more to the election kitty of Bush and Dick Cheney than to any presidential campaign until then. It is to be expected that buying time - and buying politicians and pliable scientists - is still on their agenda, climate-friendly posturing notwithstanding.

It is in this overall context of the urgent need for phase-shift action - and of the forces ranged against it - that one should assess how multinational and multidimensional action to contain climate change can move forward and be effective. Even one intransigent nation - as the US is now - can spoil the show for everybody. But, first, the question whether it is technically, socially and economically feasible to achieve a drastic reduction in energy use in such a short time needs to be addressed. The consensus is that it is. The efficient use of energy, renewable energy, hybrid and hydrogen cars, revised taxes and incentives, lifestyle changes such as more use of public transport, and many other measures are possible if there is a will. The much-quoted Stern Review, prepared for the United Kingdom government by the former chief economist of the World Bank, makes the point that it would cost much less to lessen climate change than to live with it.

This is self-evident, but the real question is who is to bear this cost of lessening as well as living with climate change. The atmosphere can take only so much more pollution by greenhouse gases if the warming is not to cross the two-degree mark, and this scarce space is being filled up sixty per cent of the time by the industrialised countries, which hold less than twenty per cent of the world's population. Those countries would like to see the grandfathering approach, by which, if one had polluted the most in the past - such as occupying eighty per cent of the space so far - one gets the largest share of the dumping ground.

There is only one small problem. Industrial countries have reached their level of development riding on low-cost fossil fuels, while developing countries need to do the same to reduce their poverty levels and cannot afford the higher cost climate-friendly technologies in the short to medium term. Their economic growth rates, and therefore their emissions growth, are also of a higher order compared with industrial countries. Grandfathering does not suit them.

It is this dichotomy between luxury emissions and survival emissions that led to the principle of 'common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities', which was agreed to by the nations of the world - the US included - in the historic 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first collective step the nations of the world took to deal with this issue.

There is then the responsibility approach. In other words, the polluter pays. After all, the average American consumed and emitted 43 times as much carbon as the average Indian during the ninety years after 1900. There is also the capability approach, by which those who are more capable of handling mitigation and adaptation take on the larger share of the burden. Then there is the global commons approach - the atmosphere, the dumping ground of carbon dioxide - is a common resource that belongs to all citizens of the world. A free ride on it is possible only if it has unlimited capacity, which is certainly not the case. Most countries have laws that recognise equal rights to common pool resources.


Carbon debt

One can look at the dimensions of this principle of equal rights to global commons through a simple exercise of allocating the atmospheric dumping space equally among the 6.5 billion people on the earth and saying to each one: here is your box, you are allowed to park your emissions there for the rest of the century. This is because the world will run out of its available carbon emission budget for this century - under the precautionary scenario of not exceeding two degrees Celsius warming - in just a quarter of the time under normal circumstances. So, if such boxes are allocated, the average American will run out of his box in much less than ten years and will have no option but to pile into those of everybody else around.

There is no international policeman yet to guard anyone's box. If there is one, the average Chinese might say, "Don't come anywhere near my box, its size is too small for my future need of development, as I am growing very fast" and the Bangladeshi might say, "At my current level of emission, I will take quite a few centuries to fill up my box. So, why don't I rent part of my box to you and use the money for my development?"

Countries like India and China are finding that at the rate at which they are growing - at three times the growth rate of developed nations - and the rate at which their atmospheric space is getting poached by larger emitters, there is just not enough space for them to reach their development goals even if a per capita allocation is made now and some rent collection is made possible. If only the boxes had been allotted in the 1950s - when human-induced emission build-up was even measured - and were well guarded, the world would be a very different place today, even in terms of societal structures.

The Asians, the Africans and the Latin Americans are, therefore, entitled to ask the G-8 nations to pay back the carbon debt owed to them because of occupying the global commons disproportionately. An assessment made by Christian Aid in 1999 pointed out that the debt owed on this count by the rich nations to the highly indebted poor countries is of the order of three times the conventional debt the latter owe the former, and the rich countries continue to incur a debt of $13 trillion a year to the poorer nations.

Such considerations of equity in sharing global commons are nowhere in the picture in serious negotiations between countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change even as several environmentalists have been campaigning actively for equity in broader terms. India's Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) was among the earliest to flag the issue by pointing out the inequity in per capita emissions.

The most visible campaign is by the UK-based Global Commons Institute on the concept of contraction and convergence, by which the international community first agrees to a single per capita allowance to converge on and the time for convergence. The North countries will have to contract their emissions and the South countries can increase their emissions and converge to that agreed level within the agreed time; thereafter, all countries together will reduce the per capita emissions uniformly to levels needed to avoid climate disaster.

There are two issues with this formula for equity. It does not take into account the atmospheric emission space already grabbed by the North and it does not provide adequate room for the essential development needs of the South. As was pointed out by Christian Aid at the recent 12th Conference of Parties in Nairobi, the South's rapid growth trajectory is such that its emissions alone will cross the line of total global emissions allowable under the precautionary two-degree scenario by the year 2020 even if the North's emissions suddenly become zero. In other words, the situation has reached such a stage - mainly because of the historic emissions and also because of the scandalous neglect of critical action by the Northern nations in the last decade or so - that the South has no room to manoeuvre now and has to choose between its development and saving the planet.


Emissions & development

EcoEquity, the campaigner for a realistic approach to devising a climate framework, considers the basket of equity principles relevant to mitigation-sharing to be equal rights to global commons, polluter pays, capacity-based burden-sharing and need-based resource-sharing. On the basis of these principles, it has developed the concept of Greenhouse Development Rights, by which the first priority of a Southern nation will be its development and all the mitigation action taken by it will be paid for by the North until the former reaches a certain level of development. The North will, of course, drastically cut down on its own emissions as also pay for the emission reductions all over the globe.

A point to note is that the current linkage between emissions and economic development needs to be broken as quickly as possible, for developing countries like India and China cannot hope to reach anywhere near the current levels of per capita North emissions before peaking in a couple of decades and getting on to the down slope. Investment in such a drastic shift to newer technologies is beyond the capacity of developing countries and can only be borne by the developed world.

This is but one possible framework. But the real question is, how is any framework to be agreed upon and implemented in a world where the largest polluter is still in a denial mode, other developed countries make cosmetic reductions and demand that developing countries start shouldering responsibility, and the developing countries steadfastly refuse to do so? The G-77 countries and China have a deep distrust of the progressive-sounding European Union and refuse to fall for any bait to take on emission commitments for fear that it will be a 'bait and switch' strategy - as pointed out by one analyst - to land them finally with grandfathered commitments.

It is dawning gradually on the Northern countries that anything less than equal rights to the atmosphere will not take the negotiations anywhere. There is a realisation that time is running out fast. According to one projection, if global emissions are peaked in 2010 and taken downward thereafter, a 2.6 per cent per annum reduction would help the world to keep within the two degrees Celsius warming limit. If, however, this peaking is delayed by ten years, the reduction will have to be by a drastic 6.7 per cent per annum to achieve the same result.

Some activists hope that this exigency will now drive all countries to move towards an acceptable solution, and practical wisdom suggests that it can only be an equity-based one to be endurable. It is this realisation that led the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution of the UK to recommend the contraction and convergence strategy in its report of 2000 and the government's Energy White Paper of 2003 to accept it implicitly in projecting future UK emissions.

The insurance industry is the earliest in the business community to recognise the seriousness of global warming and the most concerned to find a quick solution because it impacts its bottom line directly. Looking for a real-world solution that will truly work, The Chartered Insurance Institute of the UK had no hesitation in accepting per capita emission convergence.

But there is a more pressing concern, often ignored - the threat of social disruptions and warfare. Large sections of the global population will get displaced by the impact of climate change and will have to compete for resources. A 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon warned that nuclear arms will proliferate as people fight for resources as a result of global warming. "Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid". Pointing out that "disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life", it cautioned the Bush administration that climate change could "challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately".


India laid back

It is in this context that India's laid-back attitude in international negotiations - our emissions are small, our per capita emissions are very small and we cannot divert attention from other priorities - does not stand scrutiny any longer. If India thinks it should grab as much atmospheric space for as long as possible, it should remember that the advanced countries are grabbing much larger spaces at the same time, making future restrictions a fait accompli for one and all. Besides, the economy gets more and more entangled in path dependence - the more you invest in fossil technologies, the less viable it becomes to switch to a non-carbon path.

More importantly, its people stand to lose heavily if climate change gets out of hand. The fate of a-sixth of the world's population cannot be left in the hands of a few self-absorbed politicians of the West. It is high time the Government of India took on a proactive role in shaping the future order of greenhouse emissions and climate adaptations. It should, along with China, work to build a consensus among G-77 to put on the table a radically new approach to emissions sharing and adaptation as compared with Kyoto.

Some experts have already divided the Southern countries into four groups, ranging from newly industrialised to the least developing - with China in Group 2 (rapidly industrialising) and India in Group 3 (other industrialising) - to devise differential commitments and resources for them. There is nothing essentially wrong in this, though it would suit the North very well to see the G-77 split. It is in the interests of India and China to work out a formula that is seen as equitable by the poorest nations of the world and thus preserve the unity of the South in future parleys.

There is no escaping that any future parley should focus on not merely emissions reductions and sharing of reductions but very largely on just recompense for the damage already done to the atmosphere, which is now hurting the poor of the world through increased droughts and storms and vector diseases, and will unavoidably hurt them more in the future, and has compromised their future development as well by depriving them of their atmospheric space. In other words, pay back of carbon debt. This needs to be strongly established as a matter of right and not as charity or aid.

It follows that any fund set up for climate change adaptation should contribute directly to poverty reduction and development of the affected nations and not depend on complicated formulae to establish climate change-related damage or adaptation need. Development is the best instrument to build adaptation capability.

There is cynicism among some environmental activists of the North that any resource ploughed into the Southern countries as settlement of carbon debt will be largely gobbled up by the privileged groups of those countries - even as they have swallowed most of the benefits of globalisation - and will not reach the real poor of those countries who need it most and, more than that, who have earned the largest part of the carbon credit.

The cynicism is justified, even if it sounds paternalistic when linked to emission sharing among nations. The huge social divide that exists in India and several other countries is also a huge carbon divide. It is not very difficult to imagine how much of a carbon debt the urban upper middle class Indian who runs two cars and four air-conditioners owes to the rural working woman who treks for hours to fetch head-loads of shrub every day for the kitchen fire and whose daughter uses a flickering kerosene lamp to pore over her schoolwork. It is the latter who has saved, and continues to save, this planet and all of us from a worse disaster than we all face now. If all the people of the world had the same living style as the average American, the holocaust predicted for the distant future would have already visited us.

Is there a chance that she will one day stand up and demand her carbon debt? She will, one day. One must hope that the day comes soon, as only then there is hope for the climate change issue to be finally addressed. No government under the present world order can be expected to take the courageous step to foreground intergenerational as well as intra-generational equity - the only solution that will work - in addressing this complex issue unless it is forced to do so from below.

It is the ordinary people of different countries, collaborating with each other, who can ultimately bring about the social change needed to prevent effectively the environmental disaster that looms ahead, a problem caused by "the greatest market failure the world has seen", according to Sir Nicholas Stern, the author of the Stern Review, a problem sought to be tackled through the same market forces in this neoliberal world.

Civil society in the developing world has a key role to play in creating among the common man awareness of the magnitude, complexity and social dimensions of this crisis, in which the very future of humankind is at stake unless urgent action is taken.
_____

C E Karunakaran is an activist with the Centre for Ecology and Rural Development, Puducherry.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20070309003802500.htm

http://www.stwr.net/content/view/1648/37/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Singing the Vegetable Opera

by Jim Kunstler

www.kunstler.com (March 05 2007)



The jive-finance economy had a few acidic burps last week - or, at least, that's how it may seem in the days ahead as the equity markets finally upchuck the toxic notional junk "money" they have been gorging on in recent years. Has there ever been a financial collapse with brighter or louder warning signals?

I suppose the expectation (or hope) is that the quasi-mythical "plunge protection team" - a "working group" of federal reserve officials and bankers - will jump in and administer some soothing pepto-bismol, but frankly I don't see how that's possible this time. The poison at the bottom is a fetid mass of "non-performing" mortgages, billions upon billions of loans that strapped borrowers are not paying back, loans which, in the meantime, have been rolled over, rebundled into jive "securities" (ha!) and sold, and rolled over again and used as "leverage" for massive exotic bets and bloated arbitrages involving mere abstract figments of electronic digital pulses completely removed from any reality-based productive investment activity.

Among the leaders at the supply end of this racket has been General Motors - that's right, the company that used to manufacture cars, the company about which one plutocrat once remarked what was good for [it] was good for the country. In fact, General Motors' main source of earnings for a long time now has been money-lending, not car-making (which only loses money). They started decades ago with GMAC, their own car-loan operation - which makes sense if you are serious about selling cars - but in the 1990s, with foreigners way out-selling GM's shitty cars, the company's financial wizards decided to venture into home loans and thus Ditech was born.

That's right, Ditech, the outfit that advertised incessantly on TV, promising that house-buyers could sleepwalk their way into mortgage approvals - and thus frustrate all the smarmy, over-fed, punctilious bankers who obstructed such requests with pain-in-the-ass qualifying protocols and burdensome paperwork. Last week GM put off filing regular required financial reports because of disarray in its Ditech operation. Ditech is responsible for as much as $80 billion in mostly sub-prime house loans - that is, given to people with dubious prospects for repayment. But GM's Ditech is but one of scores of entities now choking on non-performing paper (and many of Ditech's rivals are now bankruptcy road kill).

What makes matters far worse is that all this wildly reckless lending has been in the service of a suburban sprawl-building juggernaut that will itself represent another layer of grotesque liability for the United States. The crash of the house-selling bubble, based on absurd asset inflation for things built badly in the wrong places, is coinciding exactly with a permanent oil crisis that will only exacerbate the locational disadvantages of houses built in the newest and furthest suburbs.

Evidence now conclusively shows that Saudi Arabia's oil production was down eight percent in 2006 over 2005 {1}, even while the number of oil rigs went up substantially - indicating that the Kingdom is drilling as fast as it can and still losing ground. (Production slipped from 9.9 to about 8.4 million barrels a day.) Mexico's Cantarell field is crashing (minimum fifteen percent annual decline and possibly much steeper rate, meaning in a year or two the US will cease getting oil imports from its number two foreign supplier). The North Sea is crashing, too. Russia is about show steep decline. Iran is past peak. Iraq, as every six-year-old knows, is the world's clusterfuck poster child. Indonesia (OPEC member) is now a net oil importer. Venezuela is past peak and full of loathing for the US. Nigeria is collapsing politically. No amount of corn is going save the Happy Motoring utopia, and that's really all our economy is now based on.

When the financial markets factor all this in - and they really haven't yet - I think we'll see a lot more of what they like to call "downside action". These things are all connected. The housing bubble was set into motion by $10-a-barrel oil at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps as much as half the jobs created since then have been in house-building, house-selling, house-buyership-enabling, house furnishing, and other things house-related. The whole final suburban blow-out enterprise has been a fantastic blunder. Now it's unraveling and the only "performing" loans will be the ones paid to the accounts receivable department in hell.

It ought to be an interesting week in the markets.


Note:

{1} http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2325

_____

See also "Subprime bust forces families from homes" by Adam Geller, Associated Press (March 25 2007) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070325/ap_on_bi_ge/house_of_cards_5


http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Is Wikipedia the New Town Hall?

by Pat Aufderheide

In These Times (March 12 2007)


Public broadcasting everywhere is in crisis, and in part it's because technology seems to be turning pubcasters into dinosaurs. In fact, not just them, but all broadcasters. Consider the business leaders: NBC formally declared itself an "Internet company" and is slashing its analog TV investments. Mega-media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace last year and is now considering dumping his satellite assets because he's looking forward to wireless digital TV. Pubcasters used to be providers of trusted information. But when bloggers are so busy linking to each other that they hardly have time to watch television or read newspapers, is the mainstream media - even the PBSes and NPRs - becoming irrelevant?

No wonder pubcasters are suffering heartburn these days. But why should the rest of us care about their problems? Because communications make up the circulatory system of public life in a democracy - and for almost a century mass media have been central to the public sphere.

The public sphere is the informal part of our lives where we manage the quality of our shared culture. Church, the post office, sidewalks, Starbucks, the water cooler - they are all places in the physical world (or what our digerati friends like to call "meat space") where people bring along their experience with the media. It is an informally structured set of social relationships, where power can be mobilized against large institutions such as the state and large corporations.

Mass media have acted as a pseudo-public sphere. Broadcast news services were stand-ins for our collective, top-priority concerns of public life. Popular programs were, similarly, pseudo-public culture, distilled examples of how a culture understands itself - or at least as corporate broadcasters would like it to.

Public broadcasting has been a protected, if compromised, zone that provides some higher-quality opportunities for people to learn about each other and their problems, and to share a common cultural experience of consuming the same media. But public broadcasting is still a stand-in for public communication, because it is a mass medium. The broadcasters speak to the many, who then talk to each other.

Can digital media change this? Can new technologies bring media made by, with and for the public? Could pubcasters be part of it?

Certainly new technologies have created such opportunities for "many-to-many" communication, and people are leaping upon it. The pace of change is extraordinary. The blogosphere is doubling every six months, as measured in the number of weblogs. It's a multilingual and multicultural environment. Social networking has exploded. Traffic on MySpace, which two years ago was insignificant, had already by early 2006 far outstripped traffic to traditional news Web platforms such as the New York Times and CNN.

What used to be the audience is gradually being supplanted by a new entity - a wildly fluctuating set of networks of people engaged in issues and topics and passions who seize upon communications media to make their networks real and make things happen. Yesterday's screen talked to you; you talk through today's screens, whether through Skype or on your video-enabled cellphone. Yesterday you listened to the news; now you link to it on your blog. Yesterday you watched the movie; now you make a video, put it on YouTube and link it to your Facebook account. Never before have there been so many opportunities for publics to communicate, critique and create media.

But will this new open environment actually generate public media - media for public knowledge and action, media that helps a public into being and nourishes it? There's reason for some enthusiasm. In a new book, The Wealth of Networks {1}, legal scholar Yochai Benkler makes a powerful argument that DIY (do it yourself) media offer unprecedented opportunities for truly public communication. Communications can now, finally, visibly be the constitutor of public life.

This is not merely an idea. Today, everybody has a blog - there are at least seventy million. They are growing by the minute, and they are growing around the world. Blogs, it turns out, are socializing machines. Writers want readers and get them by linking up with other bloggers, and so blogs form complex clouds of social relationships.

What about the public part, though? Are they actually fueling conversations about issues that affect the public in ways that allow publics to form and act? Consider a traditional role of public media: to serve as a watchdog on power. The blogosphere has acted in this way, transcending at times political partisanship.

For instance, when Senators Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) and Barack Obama (D-Illinois) proposed the creation of a searchable database of all federal government contracts and grants over $25,000, political bloggers of all stripes loved the idea. It would be a treasure trove for anti-corruption research. Then suddenly one senator put a "secret hold" on the bill, stalling it.

The blogosphere erupted, especially Republicans and libertarians. Bloggers told people to contact their senators. Everyone did. Bloggers also pooled efforts to flush out the secret-holder - Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) - and the outcry forced him to lift the hold. Mainstream media reported on the event. The bill was passed. And the Office of Management and Budget, which will maintain the database, had a meeting with bloggers to ask for their continued support for efforts to monitor spending.

How about the provision of reliable information, another function of public media? Wikipedia is surprisingly good proof that collaborative work by amateurs can provide balanced and reliable information, and even become a vigorous site of public debate and negotiation. Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia of whatever information people want to explain to other people. It's wide open to anyone, has more than three million articles in 125 languages ... and only three employees, counting founder Jimmy Wales. Everyone else is a volunteer, donating money, time and energy - many of them briefly. They follow a few clear rules, including one that calls for a "neutral point of view" - not objectivity but a fair representation of different perspectives.

A Wikipedia entry is a living and constantly changing organism, reflecting the current state of negotiations between people of vastly differing opinions on a subject. For instance, the entry on abortion reflects constant input, monitored and edited by others of differing views.

How accurate is Wikipedia? That depends on the strength of the publics that gather around the topics that are covered. But what's shocking is how accurate it is. Science entries are more accurate than entries in history. Facts that stand alone do better than those for which the meaning changes dramatically in context. But the community of active contributors does a lot for accuracy. When Alex Halavais, a professor of interactive communication at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, deliberately entered errors - some minor, some middling - into thirteen widely differing Wikipedia entries, all were corrected within three hours.

What is so exciting about Wikipedia isn't just the generation of new information, but the creation of active publics around the creation of knowledge for publics. People who have certain entries on their watch lists are part of a public in which there can be vigorous disagreement but shared interest in addressing an issue.

Wikipedia and blog actions take some explaining. How can you get reliability out of a mass of unreliable actions? James Surowiecki, an economics writer at the New Yorker, gives it away in the title of his book, The Wisdom of Crowds {2}. He analyzed the research literature on group decision-making and exposed the counter-intuitive fact that crowds can in fact be wise, under certain conditions. In fact, time and again when asked to solve a problem, groups of people who individually and without consultation pool their opinions - even when their expertise varies widely and includes real experts - seem regularly to come up with answers that are at least as good as that of the most accurate member of the group.

Not all crowds or groups, though. They need to be diverse, not in a politically correct sense but in the sense of a great variety of kinds of knowledge. You need the ignoramuses along with the smart alecs. They need to guard against being influenced by what they think others are going to say. They need to have ways to aggregate their knowledge. They need to be able to coordinate their actions based on that knowledge.

Now people can make their own media, share it with others and aggregate what interests them, and rank this material. That is a "wisdom of crowds" recipe for decentralized, collaborative media creation.

Plenty of policy roadblocks remain in the way: How will we allocate this spectrum in the future? How will commercial and noncommercial providers of Internet access structure their networks? How will today's inequalities be translated into the online environment? How will we safeguard the public from violation of privacy and fraud while maintaining equality of access? But this is a thrilling if also terrifying time for public media. Pubcasters could be leaders in developing new platforms.

And some pubcasters are toying with the idea of playing a role as facilitator of open public media spaces. For instance, Minnesota Public Radio has turned its listeners into sources and generators of new stories with Public Insight Journalism. StoryCorps is generating grassroots oral histories for public radio. The Independent Television Service and Boston TV station WGBH are both hosting "mashup" sites for online video. They're all demonstration sites that let us glimpse the possibilities of public media made by and for the public itself.

Notes:

{1} http://www.powells.com/biblio/4-0300110561-0?&PID=24075

{2} http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-9780385503860-8

_____

Patricia Aufderheide, a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, was culture editor of In These Times from 1978 to 1982. Now a senior editor of the magazine, her most recent book is The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat.

(c) 2007 In These Times

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3067/is_wikipedia_the_new_town_hall/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Amazing Mental Rot

by Jim Kunstler

www.kunstler.com (March 19 2007)


From the Florida Sun-Sentinel:

Retired Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking at a Futures Industry Association annual conference here on Thursday, said the problems of the subprime mortgage market had more to do with home prices than easy credit.

"If we could wave a wand and housing prices go up ten percent, the subprime mortgage problem would disappear", he said.


What kind of a rock does this fucking idiot Alan Greenspan live under?

The median price for a house in my region of the US (northeast) was $380,000 in the third quarter of 2006. Median annual income, meanwhile, was about $46,000. If, by some miracle (in a land of negative savings) someone with an income of $46,000 had managed to save enough to make a twenty percent down payment ($76,000) on the aforesaid median-priced house and got a thirty-year mortgage for the remainder ($314,000) at seven percent interest, his monthly payment would be $2089. Add to that $250 a month in local property and school taxes and insurance and that brings it up to $2339. That adds up to $28,068 a year in house payments. Let's say the poor bastard pays $8,000 a year in combined income tax and FICA witholding. That leaves him with a grand total of $9,932 for everything else. Then there's the yearly cost of owning a car, including installment payments, insurance, gasoline, and maintenance: around $6,000 a year. Oh yeah, if he's a prudent fellow, he's got health insurance, let's say a practically useless high-deductible policy costing $3,000 a year. That leaves approximately $57 a week for groceries, laundry, the collection plate at church, and everything else. (Too bad he can't afford cable TV and the Internet.)

So, if housing prices went up ten percent, how fucked would Mr Median Income be?

Of course, the scenario above was based on the most conservative type of mortgage. If Mr Median Income had gotten a creative mortgage, let's say a no money down, interest only, payment option, adjustable rate mortgage, he would have been a little more solvent until the re-set. Then after enjoying the place for a year or so, he'd either have to sell it pronto, or default on his payments. And because all his payment option shortfalls would have been back-loaded onto the principal, the mortgage obligation would be more like $400,000 now. This is a bummer, selling into a down market.

I guess Alan Greenspan is right. If the price of houses only went up ten percent a year, or every half a year, or maybe every month, guys like Mr Median Income could stay ahead of the game. Of course, sooner or later under conditions of perpetually rising house prices, houses would have to be priced out of everybody's range except for Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, and a handful of other lucky, beautiful people who dwell in the perfumed ethers above the pathetic lumpenprole median zone. Perhaps by then, Mr Median Income would have won the grand prize on American Idol - or better yet, crapped out and won an Oscar for best supporting actor instead - and then he would be a beautiful, rich-and-famous celebrity with the ability to buy as many houses as he ever wanted.

I wonder if the new Fed Chairman, Mr Ben Bernanke is as wise as Mr Greenspan? Let's hope so.
_____

See also "Subprime bust forces families from homes" by Adam Geller, Associated Press (March 25 2007) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070325/ap_on_bi_ge/house_of_cards_5


http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Open source closes backdoors

by Nicholas Petreley

LinuxWorld.com (November 10 2000)


When a software company will not make the source code for a product available, one must put one's faith in something called security through obscurity. The argument for security through obscurity is simple. If crackers could get to the source code, it would be easy for them to find ways to exploit weaknesses in the product.

While that sounds like a logical argument, it is easily refuted. If you are not already convinced by the numerous Windows, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Outlook exploits, then pay a visit to Game Copy World {1} sometime. You'll see just how easy it is for people to break the copy protection for games without having to see the source code. The site often publishes copy protection workarounds the same day a game is released. (By the way, I believe Game Copy World is actually providing a legitimate and valuable service. As someone with young children, I can confirm the need to make backup copies of games that get scratched and ruined by reckless little fingers.)

Ironically, we open source advocates have confidence in the security of open source software for the same reason others defend security through obscurity - open source code actually does make it easier to spot weaknesses in a product. We simply take the next step in the logic. If having the source code makes it easy to spot weaknesses, then the best way to find and plug security holes is to make the source code as widely available as possible and solicit the input of those who use it.


NSA key revisited

A greater security risk than system cracking concerns me, one that is only possible through source code obscurity: intentional backdoors.

A couple years ago, researchers discovered that Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 include two cryptographic keys. When a Windows service pack accidentally failed to cloak the identity of the keys, Andrew Fernandes discovered that the second key was called _NSAKEY. The implication is that Microsoft provided the National Security Agency (NSA) a way to crack into or decrypt information on any Windows box for surveillance or data-recovery purposes. {2}

Microsoft denies providing the NSA with a backdoor, of course, and says the NSA label only indicates that the key meets the cryptographic requirements of the NSA. {2} Unfortunately, there is no way to know if Microsoft is telling the truth. After all, if it is true that the NSA has a backdoor into every Windows system, then what could one expect Microsoft to say? Such an admission might as well be followed by instructions on how to remove Windows and replace it with just about anything else.

It's bad enough that Microsoft and the NSA may have peepholes into our desktops and servers. But what about the crackers who broke into Microsoft recently? Do they now have those same peepholes? Did the crackers who broke into Microsoft modify any source code in order to introduce new backdoors into Windows, or expand existing ones? Did the crackers steal any of the source code? Is there enough information in the source code to provide the crackers a backdoor into Windows systems? Is there enough information there to provide the crackers with a way to decrypt information on any given system without having to know a password?

Just as important are the following questions: Who are the crackers? Are they operating alone or with the aid of a rival company or nation? With whom will the crackers share the source code, assuming it has been stolen?

Depending on the answers, the recent security breach could lead to some alarming possibilities. Given enough information, unknown people, companies, or even nations could soon easily crack into Windows systems and decrypt the information there. If Microsoft knows this is the case, it is not in a position to admit it. To do so would create an embarrassment from which not even Microsoft could recover. An admission would also compromise any relationship Microsoft may have with the NSA.

It's time for Microsoft to face reality and open Windows' source code. Aside from encouraging customers to go into denial, that is the only way Microsoft can restore confidence in the security of Windows. People must have the ability to examine, modify, recompile and reinstall the code on their own. Then, and only then, can Windows customers have any assurance that their systems are safe from prying eyes.


Paranoia or reality?

When I worked on a defense project many years ago, I was required to get secret clearance. An FBI agent briefed many of us who received clearance on the techniques foreign governments may use to get information from us.

One of those techniques is blackmail. The process is simple. The spies get someone to entice you into his or her hotel room and seduce you. Naturally, someone takes pictures of the hotel room activities, and uses those pictures to blackmail you for secrets. According to the FBI agent who briefed us, that sort of thing takes place only in Europe. I asked the fellow exactly where in Europe I could go for such blackmail. He actually did give me directions, but he didn't think my question was very amusing. FBI people have no sense of humor.

The agent also walked us through the tactics that a spy would use in the US to try to obtain secrets. I dismissed it all as silly paranoia.

Then one day while I was riding the train home from work, I made the mistake of whining about government waste to the passenger next to me, someone who claimed to be a Russian translator for the Library of Congress.

It took me completely by surprise when he then followed exactly the pattern the FBI agent had said spies would use to gain your confidence. I hadn't befriended this person - I hadn't even given him my last name - but he mysteriously found my phone number and called to invite me to meet his wife. Despite the fact that I declined every invitation and rarely even talked to him, he sent me a letter offering to bring me in on the ground floor of a new business venture, because I seemed like such a "sharp guy". Those and other actions over the next few weeks so perfectly reflected the FBI agent's version of "how it is done" - right down to the catch phrases the agent said those people use - that it nearly scared me out of my wits. Fortunately, when I finally told the guy to buzz off, he took the hint and I never heard from him again.


Open source closes doors

My point is simple. That experience made me a lot less flippant about security. I am convinced that it is not paranoia to assume that foreign governments (or even our own government agencies) are capable of invading our privacy and willing to do so. And you can get fodder for blackmail much more easily by digging through people's computers than you can by trying to seduce someone in Europe.

Fortunately, open source closes backdoors, as ironic as that may sound. I am reasonably sure that my Linux-based machines have no NSA-enabled or other secret backdoors. Even if it were possible to insert such patches without Linus Torvalds or the other kernel maintainers noticing, those secret patches would be discovered by many other Linux kernel hackers.

So I advise you or your company to commit to open source to the extent that it is possible for you. That means putting pressure on companies like Microsoft to provide the source code for Windows and other applications in a form that allows us to recompile and reinstall them. If Microsoft refuses to do so and we must abandon it altogether, so be it.

We may not have enough power over our own privacy, but we do have some. I strongly recommend that we exercise what power we have by committing to open source.


Resources:

{1} Game Copy World: http://www.gamecopyworld.com

{2} How NSA Built Security Access Into Windows by Duncan Campbell (TechWeb News, September 03 1999): http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990903S0014

{3} Debate Flares Over MS "Spy Key" by James Glave (Wired News, September 04 1999):
http://www.wirednews.com/news/print/0,1294,21589,00.html

____

Nick Petreley is the founding editor of VarLinux.org, www.varlinux.org .


http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/1303/lw-11-penguin_2/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Nausea Rules

by Jim Kunstler

www.kunstler.com (March 12 2007)


Here's an idea: when the securities markets go south along with the rest of the US economy in 2007, maybe the smoothies on Wall Street should receive end-of-year "cash-negative" bonuses, meaning instead of a check for, say, $25 million the day before Christmas, they get an invoice saying "please remit $25 million". Who to? Good question. One might suggest the nearest firefighters' or teachers' pension fund - except the idiots who run those retirement funds bought mortgage-backed paper with their eyes open. Okay then, let's say the Wall Street boys send their checks into Amtrak. Maybe then the cafe car between Albany and New York City will re-open so that in the course of a 2.5 hour trip a person might get a drink of water.

A tsunami of nausea seems to be sweeping across the media now in recognition that the Potemkin edifice of mortgage finance is imploding like a discarded Las Vegas casino. What it comes down to is that several species of newly-engineered financial Frankenproducts have been based on loans for houses that will never be paid back. Not just a few loans. Massive numbers. These, in turn, have been bundled, swapped around, and leveraged into other plays which now depend, for instance, on x-number of unemployed car dealers and underpaid busboys ponying up the "vig" for some piece-of-crap collateral that will soon be a third its previously appraised value. It will be easier for the car dealers and busboys to walk away from these deals than it will be for the smoothies who used all this bundled bullshit to hedge credit default swaps and play the yen-to-Euro carry trade game to wiggle out of their positions. And the unwinding of all this fraud will almost certainly leave the nation economically spavined.

The amazing thing is how standards and norms for lending collapsed as completely as they did the past five years. One day you had bankers who retained a notion that lending per se required some prudent evaluation of the borrower's character and of the thing or enterprise borrowed for - and the next day these protocols vanished. Once again I challenge the punctilious physicists out there by asserting that this astounding transformation is the product of entropy. Basically, you get a given system - for example the US economy - over-stoked on cheap energy (and even at $3 a gallon gasoline is cheap), and the system will throw off gobs of entropy. The more profligate the energy consumption, the more entropy results. It then expresses itself in various kinds of disorder, meaning anything from the immersive ugliness of the American built-up landscape to the behavior of people formerly attuned to such governing principles as moral hazard to retain the functional legitimacy of their livelihoods.

It is really a sort of systemic disease, generating poisons that seep into the far corners of the organism affected, in this case the USA. It will be manifest in the personal ruin of individual families, the collapse of institutions, the rising crime rate, and the rapid physical decay of things built too carelessly to be worth caring for.

I went around some neighboring towns here in upstate New York to look at the real estate yesterday. I was impressed by how uniformly crummy everything was - and not only because it is nearly spring and layers of old dog shit are being revealed in the melting snowbanks. In the old houses priced above $300,000, the rotting sills and delaminating surfaces are plain to see. Of course, the buildings are worth something, but my guess is less than a third of the asking price by any realistic valuation. But at least these things were made of materials generally found in nature. The new houses were all glue and vinyl, and of course they were mostly built in places dissociated from any town itself, meaning the hapless owners will have to own multiple cars to live there and make multiple trips per day - not a good prospect for the years ahead.

The story will be the same all over the nation. The owners of these things will get into terrible personal financial trouble. The property market will re-value the buildings, discounting all the previous wishful thinking about price. And the financial markets will stagger and collapse as the process thunders through the mendacious operations that all this wishful thinking spawned.
_____

See also "Subprime bust forces families from homes" by Adam Geller, Associated Press (March 25 2007) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070325/ap_on_bi_ge/house_of_cards_5


http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Only NSA can listen, so that's OK

Export version of Lotus Notes provides trapdoor for NSA.

by Duncan Campbell (01.06.1999)

Telepolis

Giant US software manufacturer Lotus has been lowering the profile of information about how they have installed an NSA-only trapdoor into e-mail and conference systems used by many European governments, including the German Ministry of Defence, the French Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Education in Latvia.


Last week in Brussels, Lotus staged a lavish "Global Government Forum" to try and gain more government customers for its software. They succeeded in striking a new 500,000 user deal with the Russian Ministry of Higher and Professional Education for the development of a new information infrastructure for the Russian education system. Yet another conference, Lotus Eurosphere '99, will be held in Berlin in October.

Lotus claims that its systems are inherently more secure than those from its main rival, Microsoft. However, although details of how the NSA trapdoor works can still be found in some corners of the web {1}, the key technical papers and press releases which reveal how Lotus worked with NSA to build a special trapdoor into the International Edition of Lotus Notes have disappeared from the web.

Visitors to the security pages on Lotus's website {2} are now told that the export version of Lotus Notes uses "a system approved by the US government called "Workgroup Differential" and "encrypt(s) information using 64 bit keys".

The name "Workgroup Differential" is meaningless. The correct title is "Differential Workfactor Cryptography". The "differential workfactor" means that the US National Security Agency can break the code on Lotus Notes private messages sixteen million times faster than anyone else.

How "Differential Workfactor Cryptography" works was revealed by Lotus itself three years ago. Although the documents concerned have now disappeared from the web, Telepolis has obtained copies.

In a keynote speech to the RSA Data Security Conference on 17 January 1996, Ray Ozzie, President of Lotus designers Iris Associates revealed how Lotus had come to terms with American government export controls, which prohibited the export of cryptographic systems with a key length over forty bits.

He told them that no-one regarded this as secure:

"Our customers have lost confidence in forty-bit crypto. They told us that, if we were going to continue to market forty-bit Lotus Notes overseas, we should stop marketing it as a secure system - that we should start to call it "data scrambling" or "data masking" instead of encryption."


Lotus's answer was a system that let NSA easily read foreign users' e-mail, while improving security against other eavesdroppers. In a paper distributed to the RSA conference, Security Project Leader Charles Kaufman explained in detail how the system worked.

When sending e-mail messages, Lotus uses a 64 bit key. But in export editions, 24 bits of the key are broadcast with the message, reducing the effective key length to forty bits. The 24 bits are encrypted using a public key created by the NSA. This is called the Workfactor Reduction Field. Only NSA can decrypt the information in the Workfactor Reduction Field. Once the key length is reduced to forty bits, fast modern computers can break the code in seconds or minutes.


Only Americans could think that this was an advantage for the Lotus system.


In 1996, Kaufman also revealed that Notes had to be weakened even further to prevent users from simply removing the NSA backdoor from being sent along with their messages. To prevent foreign users tampering with the workfactor reduction field, the International Edition of Lotus Notes will refuse to decipher any message which does not contain the correct field. To check this means that the entire key to the message has to be transmitted in the message. The recipient's software then checks that the workfactor reduction field is present and correct. The fact that the full key is sent along with the message creates the possibility of a second backdoor, reducing further.

Since these papers were presented openly, European governments have become aware of the enormous scale of communications monitoring by the NSA, and by the Echelon {3} network in particular. The loophole in Lotus Notes made front page news in Sweden in November 1997. Although the company did not deny the allegation, they claimed that the American government would not "misuse" them.

Since the row in Sweden, both Lotus and RSA have removed the 1996 papers from their web sites. Another Lotus employee claimed "we haven't weakened the security of international encryption, but actually made it equal to the US security (to everyone but the NSA). We are proud of this arrangement" (our emphasis).

Only Americans could think that this was an advantage for the Lotus system. From the European perspective, the greatest threat may be economic and political espionage by NSA. With Lotus bent on increasing its markets in Europe, there must be serious questions about whether users are being told the whole truth about security.


Notes:

{1} See IBM Redbook, Page 80 at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg245341.html

{2} http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/home.nsf/welcome/security

{3} http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2889/1.html


Copyright (c) Heise Zeitschriften Verlag

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2898/1.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

How NSA access was built into Windows

by Duncan Campbell (September 04 1999)

via digglicious.blogspot.com (January 01 2007)


A careless mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA "help information" trapdoor into its Notes system {1}, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.

The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA.

Computer security specialists have been aware for two years that unusual features are contained inside a standard Windows software "driver" used for security and encryption functions. The driver, called ADVAPI.DLL, enables and controls a range of security functions. If you use Windows, you will find it in the C:\Windows\system directory of your computer.

ADVAPI.DLL works closely with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but will only run crypographic functions that the US governments allows Microsoft to export. That information is bad enough news, from a European point of view. Now, it turns out that ADVAPI will run special programmes inserted and controlled by NSA. As yet, no-one knows what these programmes are, or what they do.

Dr Nicko van Someren reported at last year's Crypto 98 conference that he had disassembled the ADVADPI driver. He found it contained two different keys. One was used by Microsoft to control the cryptographic functions enabled in Windows, in compliance with US export regulations. But the reason for building in a second key, or who owned it, remained a mystery.


A second key

Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5 {2}. He found that Microsoft's developers had failed to remove or "strip" the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY".

Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their secret meaning, to "Advances in Cryptology, Crypto 99" conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did not deny that the "NSA" key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge.


A third key?!

But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even Microsoft's top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was "stunned" to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and report on the "entropy" of programming code.

Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code is said to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for modifications to be inserted without the knowledge of even the respective product managers.

Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be intended to let US government users of Windows run classified cryptosystems on their machines or whether it is intended to open up anyone's and everyone's Windows computer to intelligence gathering techniques deployed by NSA's burgeoning corps of "information warriors".

According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system "is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system". The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards.

"For non-American IT managers relying on Windows NT to operate highly secure data centres, this find is worrying", he added. "The US government is currently making it as difficult as possible for "strong" crypto to be used outside of the US. That they have also installed a cryptographic back-door in the world's most abundant operating system should send a strong message to foreign IT managers".

"How is an IT manager to feel when they learn that in every copy of Windows sold, Microsoft has a 'back door' for NSA - making it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer?" he asked.


Can the loophole be turned round against the snoopers?

Dr van Someren feels that the primary purpose of the NSA key inside Windows may be for legitimate US government use. But he says that there cannot be a legitimate explanation for the third key in Windows 2000 CAPI. "It looks more fishy", he said.

Fernandez believes that NSA's built-in loophole can be turned round against the snoopers. The NSA key inside CAPI can be replaced by your own key, and used to sign cryptographic security modules from overseas or unauthorised third parties, unapproved by Microsoft or the NSA. This is exactly what the US government has been trying to prevent. A demonstration "how to do it" program that replaces the NSA key can be found on Cryptonym's website {3}.

According to one leading US cryptographer, the IT world should be thankful that the subversion of Windows by NSA has come to light before the arrival of CPUs that handles encrypted instruction sets. These would make the type of discoveries made this month impossible. "Had the next-generation CPU's with encrypted instruction sets already been deployed, we would have never found out about NSAKEY".

Notes:

{1} http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2898/1.html

{2} http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/downloads/winnt.mspx?mfr=true

{3} http://www.cryptonym.com/hottopics/msft-nsa/ReplaceNsaKey.zip

_____

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990903S0014

http://digglicious.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-nsa-access-was-built-into-windows.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

America's Perpetual Nuclear War

by Robert Weitzel

CommonDreams.org (March 13 2007)


On the evening of July 25 1945, President Truman confided to his diary that the atomic bomb "seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful". Twelve days later it was "useful" in Hiroshima, and again three days later it was "useful" in Nagasaki.

In a radio speech the day Nagasaki was obliterated, Truman told his American audience, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

The world took note that as many as 140,000 civilians were killed instantly or later died of injuries and radiation poisoning at Hiroshima.

To prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power in the Middle East, President Bush has tasked the Pentagon with developing plans for a surgical strike on Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz, which is buried under 75 feet of earth and rock.

One option on the table is the B61-11, the smallest tactical nuclear weapon in the US arsenal. The B61 is a variable yield bomb. It can be calibrated to yield as low as 0.3 kilotons or has high as 170 kilotons of atomic power. Its maximum yield is ten times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

In keeping with our country's "humanitarian" effort to minimize civilian casualties in a nuclear strike, "low" yield tactical nuclear weapons, such as the B61, have been reclassified by the Pentagon as "safe for the surrounding civilian population". Because these weapons are now considered as "safe" as conventional munitions, their use is at the discretion of the theater commander. Presidential approval is no longer needed to start a nuclear war.

But the world should note that America has been waging a "low yield" nuclear war that has been killing civilians for almost two decades. Missing from this war are mushroom clouds and very loud booms. Present is nuclear fallout with its insidious long-term effects on both combatant and civilian and its perpetual contamination of land and water resources.

The United States began waging nuclear war in Kosovo in 1990 and has continued through the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The "nuclear tipped" weapon of choice in each of these theaters of war has been depleted uranium (DU) munitions.

To build atomic bombs, and later to fuel nuclear reactors, the US began enriching uranium ore mined from the earth's surface. In the process, the fissionable isotope Uranium 235, which accounts for 0.7 percent of the ore, is extracted, while the remaining 99.3 percent of the unfissionable isotope, Uranium 238, becomes "low yield" radioactive waste. By the middle of the 1950s there was approximately 600,000 tons of DU waste being stored at various facilities throughout the United States.

Depleted uranium has several properties that attracted the US military-industrial complex. It is cheap and plentiful and 1.7 times denser than lead, which makes it an idea metal for armor piercing bullets and tank rounds, armor plating on tanks, and ballast for cruise missiles and aircraft. Consequently, much of what has been dropped, launched, fired or destroyed during combat operations involving the US and its allies in the last two decades is radioactive and will remain so for as long as the Earth exists.

When a "nuclear tipped" DU tank round, containing ten pounds of uranium, strikes the armor plating of an enemy tank, it ignites and burns through to the interior, setting off the tank's ammunition. The resulting fire and explosion creates a radioactive dust cloud of submicroscopic insoluble uranium oxide particles, which is suspended in the air and ultimately settles on the ground to be inhaled and ingested by combatant and civilian alike.

Depleted uranium, though it sounds safe, is still one-third as radioactive as the original natural uranium, and will lose only half of its radioactivity in 4.5 billion years - the age of the solar system. Depleted uranium emits alpha and gamma radiation, which can be mutagenic and carcinogenic in the human body and result in cancers and birth defects. It is a nuclear-plated Trojan Horse that continues to kill civilians long after the fighting has moved on.

In April 1991, only one month after the end of the first Gulf War, a secret report prepared by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was leaked to The Independent of London. The report described the hazards of the radioactive dust from expended DU munitions and destroyed DU-armored tanks getting into the food chain and water supply. The report warned that forty tons of radioactive DU debris left on the battlefield could, in the decades ahead, cause as many as 500,000 civilian deaths.

The US left behind 375 tons of DU debris in the Gulf War, 800 tons in Afghanistan, and 2,200 tons during the current invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Children are particularly susceptible to DU poisoning and the resulting cancers due to a higher absorption rate in their blood, which is instrumental in building bones and soft tissue. In March 2001, Dr Aws Albait, a physician practicing in Baghdad from 1990 to 1999, reported a twelve-fold increase in leukemia and lymphomas in Iraqi children and a six-fold increase in adults during that decade. In 2004 it was estimated that children under the age of five accounted for 56 percent of all cancer patients in Iraq, compared with thirteen percent fifteen years ago.

It is not only Iraqi children who are the victims of our perpetual nuclear war, but American children as well. A Veteran's Administration study of 251 Gulf War veterans in Mississippi found that 67 percent of their children born since the war had birth defects and severe illnesses. In addition, 90,000 veterans suffer from the chronic, debilitating effects of the Gulf War Syndrome, which many researchers believe may be related to exposure to DU fallout.

In 1995, a US Army Environmental Policy Institute report stated, "If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences. The risks associated with DU in the body are both chemical and radiological." Regardless, the Pentagon steadfastly refuses to conduct studies of its effects on both military personnel and civilians exposed to DU fallout. In fact, its policy is to silence those who would sound an alarm.

Dr Asaf Durakovic, founder of the Uranium Medical Research Centre and the former Chief of the Nuclear Sciences Division at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, was fired from his position as Chief of Nuclear Medicine at the veterans' hospital in Wilmington, Delaware when he refused to terminate his research on Gulf War veterans with symptoms of radiation exposure.

Dr Durakovic stated, "The Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body ... uranium does cause cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill ... [It] is a threat to humanity".

If the Bush administration follows through with its plan to attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, they will, in essence, only be adding a sound track to the silent nuclear war America has been waging for decades.

But this perpetual nuclear war is not a clash of ideology or religion, nor is it to spread democracy or to fight the long war on terrorism. It is about the immoral war profiteering of the US military-industrial complex, and the even more morally repugnant dumping of its radioactive waste in someone else's backyard. It is about the maiming and killing of civilians who are not yet born.

_____

Robert Weitzel is a freelance writer whose essays appear in The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He has been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Skeptic Magazine, and Freethought Today. He can be contacted at: rweitz@tds.net

http://www.countercurrents.org/us-weitzel130307.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

What You Think You Know

about Happiness and Why You're Wrong

Some number-crunching to accompany Bill McKibben's Reversal of Fortune in the March/April 2007 issue of Mother Jones.

by April Rabkin

MotherJones.com (February 28 2007)


You might think that richer countries are happier. But there's actually no correlation beyond about $10,000 per capita income. See how each country compares on this scatter chart: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/10/03/science/20051004_HAPP_GRAPHIC.html

One surprise is that Vietnam, with a per capita income of less than $5,000, has been just as happy as France, with a per capita income of about $22,000. The happiest country surveyed was Puerto Rico. The unhappiest were Indonesia, the Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. Within Europe, the happiest countries were Denmark, Ireland, and Iceland.


All that data comes from the World Values Survey: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.com/

You can play around with the dataset online. (Great for a class project, kids.) And definitely check out the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World and the other graphs that cluster cultural values by nation, all to be found by clicking the "Findings" tab. See how life satisfaction correlates with democracy and other ideologies. North America, for example, is more traditional than Northern Europe. Relatively speaking, the miserable former Soviet bloc focuses more on survival than on self-expression.


For those with a longer attention span, it's worth reading Beyond Money, the most authoritative scholarly summary; 300 academic studies on happiness packed into 25 pages.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/pspi/pspi5_1.pdf To see how the "satisfaction index"

To see how the "satisfaction index" has changed over your lifetime, check out the graph on page three. Though the GDP has tripled, the average person is no more contented with life now than the average person was in 1950.

____

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

(c) 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/happiness_extra.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Reversal of Fortune

The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us?

by Bill Mckibben

MotherJones.com (March / April 2007 Issue)


For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. Smith's core ideas - that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth - have indisputably worked. They've produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They've built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith's ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or Better.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound - like climate change and peak oil - that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current dogma, that's as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward. But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shifted to acknowledge Einstein's more complicated universe.


1. "We can do it if we believe it": FDR, LBJ, and the invention of growth

It was the great economist John Maynard Keynes who pointed out that until very recently, "there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth". At the utmost, Keynes calculated, the standard of living roughly doubled between 2000 BC and the dawn of the 18th century - four millennia during which we basically didn't learn to do much of anything new. Before history began, we had already figured out fire, language, cattle, the wheel, the plow, the sail, the pot. We had banks and governments and mathematics and religion.

And then, something new finally did happen. In 1712, a British inventor named Thomas Newcomen created the first practical steam engine. Over the centuries that followed, fossil fuels helped create everything we consider normal and obvious about the modern world, from electricity to steel to fertilizer; now, a 100 percent jump in the standard of living could suddenly be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia.

In some ways, the invention of the idea of economic growth was almost as significant as the invention of fossil-fuel power. But it took a little longer to take hold. During the Depression, even FDR routinely spoke of America's economy as mature, with no further expansion anticipated. Then came World War II and the postwar boom - by the time Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House in 1963, he said things like: "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do. Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all ... We can do it if we believe it." He wasn't alone in thinking this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, "Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system".

Yet the bad news was already apparent, if you cared to look. Burning rivers and smoggy cities demonstrated the dark side of industrial expansion. In 1972, a trio of MIT researchers released a series of computer forecasts they called "limits to growth", which showed that unbridled expansion would eventually deplete our resource base. A year later the British economist E F Schumacher wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful {1}. (Soon after, when Schumacher came to the United States on a speaking tour, Jimmy Carter actually received him at the White House - imagine the current president making time for any economist.) By 1979, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that only thirty percent of Americans were "pro-growth", 31 percent were "anti-growth", and 39 percent were "highly uncertain".

Such ambivalence, Etzioni predicted, "is too stressful for societies to endure", and Ronald Reagan proved his point. He convinced us it was "Morning in America" - out with limits, in with Trump. Today, mainstream liberals and conservatives compete mainly on the question of who can flog the economy harder. Larry Summers, who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, at one point declared that the Clinton administration "cannot and will not accept any 'speed limit' on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible." It's the economy, stupid.


2. Oil bingeing, Chinese cars, and the end of the easy fix

Except there are three small things. The first I'll mention mostly in passing: Even though the economy continues to grow, most of us are no longer getting wealthier. The average wage in the United States is less now, in real dollars, than it was thirty years ago. Even for those with college degrees, and although productivity was growing faster than it had for decades, between 2000 and 2004 earnings fell 5.2 percent when adjusted for inflation, according to the most recent data from White House economists. Much the same thing has happened across most of the globe. More than sixty countries around the world, in fact, have seen incomes per capita fall in the past decade.

For the second point, it's useful to remember what Thomas Newcomen was up to when he helped launch the Industrial Revolution - burning coal to pump water out of a coal mine. This revolution both depended on, and revolved around, fossil fuels. "Before coal", writes the economist Jeffrey Sachs, "economic production was limited by energy inputs, almost all of which depended on the production of biomass: food for humans and farm animals, and fuel wood for heating and certain industrial processes". That is, energy depended on how much you could grow. But fossil energy depended on how much had grown eons before - all those billions of tons of ancient biology squashed by the weight of time till they'd turned into strata and pools and seams of hydrocarbons, waiting for us to discover them.

To understand how valuable, and irreplaceable, that lake of fuel was, consider a few other forms of creating usable energy. Ethanol can perfectly well replace gasoline in a tank; like petroleum, it's a way of using biology to create energy, and right now it's a hot commodity, backed with billions of dollars of government subsidies. But ethanol relies on plants that grow anew each year, most often corn; by the time you've driven your tractor to tend the fields, and your truck to carry the crop to the refinery, and powered your refinery, the best-case "energy output-to-input ratio" is something like 1.34 to 1. You've spent 100 Btu of fossil energy to get 134 Btu. Perhaps that's worth doing, but as Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa points out, "it's not impressive" compared to the ratio for oil, which ranges from 30 to 1 to 200 to 1, depending on where you drill it. To go from our fossil-fuel world to a biomass world would be a little like leaving the Garden of Eden for the land where bread must be earned by "the sweat of your brow".

And east of Eden is precisely where we may be headed. As everyone knows, the past three years have seen a spate of reports and books and documentaries suggesting that humanity may have neared or passed its oil peak - that is, the point at which those pools of primeval plankton are half used up, where each new year brings us closer to the bottom of the barrel. The major oil companies report that they can't find enough new wells most years to offset the depletion in the old ones; rumors circulate that the giant Saudi fields are dwindling faster than expected; and, of course, all this is reflected in the cost of oil.

The doctrinaire economist's answer is that no particular commodity matters all that much, because if we run short of something, it will pay for someone to develop a substitute. In general this has proved true in the past: Run short of nice big sawlogs and someone invents plywood. But it's far from clear that the same precept applies to coal, oil, and natural gas. This time, there is no easy substitute: I like the solar panels on my roof, but they're collecting diffuse daily energy, not using up eons of accumulated power. Fossil fuel was an exception to the rule, a one-time gift that underwrote a one-time binge of growth.

This brings us to the third point: If we do try to keep going, with the entire world aiming for an economy structured like America's, it won't be just oil that we'll run short of. Here are the numbers we have to contend with: Given current rates of growth in the Chinese economy, the 1.3 billion residents of that nation alone will, by 2031, be about as rich as we are. If they then eat meat, milk, and eggs at the rate that we do, calculates ecostatistician Lester Brown, they will consume 1,352 million tons of grain each year - equal to two-thirds of the world's entire 2004 grain harvest. They will use 99 million barrels of oil a day, 15 million more than the entire world consumes at present. They will use more steel than all the West combined, double the world's production of paper, and drive 1.1 billion cars - 1.5 times as many as the current world total. And that's just China; by then, India will have a bigger population, and its economy is growing almost as fast. And then there's the rest of the world.

Trying to meet that kind of demand will stress the earth past its breaking point in an almost endless number of ways, but let's take just one. When Thomas Newcomen fired up his pump on that morning in 1712, the atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We're now up to 380 parts per million, a level higher than the earth has seen for many millions of years, and climate change has only just begun. The median predictions of the world's climatologists - by no means the worst-case scenario - show that unless we take truly enormous steps to rein in our use of fossil fuels, we can expect average temperatures to rise another four or five degrees before the century is out, making the globe warmer than it's been since long before primates appeared. We might as well stop calling it earth and have a contest to pick some new name, because it will be a different planet. Humans have never done anything more profound, not even when we invented nuclear weapons.

How does this tie in with economic growth? Clearly, getting rich means getting dirty - that's why, when I was in Beijing recently, I could stare straight at the sun (once I actually figured out where in the smoggy sky it was). But eventually, getting rich also means wanting the "luxury" of clean air and finding the technological means to achieve it. Which is why you can once again see the mountains around Los Angeles; why more of our rivers are swimmable every year. And economists have figured out clever ways to speed this renewal: Creating markets for trading pollution credits, for instance, helped cut those sulfur and nitrogen clouds more rapidly and cheaply than almost anyone had imagined.

But getting richer doesn't lead to producing less carbon dioxide in the same way that it does to less smog - in fact, so far it's mostly the reverse. Environmental destruction of the old-fashioned kind - dirty air, dirty water - results from something going wrong. You haven't bothered to stick the necessary filter on your pipes, and so the crud washes into the stream; a little regulation, and a little money, and the problem disappears. But the second, deeper form of environmental degradation comes from things operating exactly as they're supposed to, just too much so. Carbon dioxide is an inevitable byproduct of burning coal or gas or oil - not something going wrong. Researchers are struggling to figure out costly and complicated methods to trap some carbon dioxide and inject it into underground mines - but for all practical purposes, the vast majority of the world's cars and factories and furnaces will keep belching more and more of it into the atmosphere as long as we burn more and more fossil fuels.

True, as companies and countries get richer, they can afford more efficient machinery that makes better use of fossil fuel, like the hybrid Honda Civic I drive. But if your appliances have gotten more efficient, there are also far more of them: The furnace is better than it used to be, but the average size of the house it heats has doubled since 1950. The sixty-inch TV? The always-on cable modem? No need for you to do the math - the electric company does it for you, every month. Between 1990 and 2003, precisely the years in which we learned about the peril presented by global warming, the United States' annual carbon dioxide emissions increased by sixteen percent. And the momentum to keep going in that direction is enormous. For most of us, growth has become synonymous with the economy's "health", which in turn seems far more palpable than the health of the planet. Think of the terms we use - the economy, whose temperature we take at every newscast via the Dow Jones average, is "ailing" or it's "on the mend". It's "slumping" or it's "in recovery". We cosset and succor its every sniffle with enormous devotion, even as we more or less ignore the increasingly urgent fever that the globe is now running. The ecological economists have an enormous task ahead of them - a nearly insurmountable task, if it were "merely" the environment that is in peril. But here is where things get really interesting. It turns out that the economics of environmental destruction are closely linked to another set of leading indicators - ones that most humans happen to care a great deal about.


3. "It seems that well-being is a real phenomenon": Economists discover Hedonics

Traditionally, happiness and satisfaction are the sort of notions that economists wave aside as poetic irrelevance, the kind of questions that occupy people with no head for numbers who had to major in liberal arts. An orthodox economist has a simple happiness formula: If you buy a Ford Expedition, then ipso facto a Ford Expedition is what makes you happy. That's all we need to know. The economist would call this idea "utility maximization", and in the words of the economic historian Gordon Bigelow, "the theory holds that every time a person buys something, sells something, quits a job, or invests, he is making a rational decision about what will ... provide him 'maximum utility'. If you bought a Ginsu knife at 3 am a neoclassical economist will tell you that, at that time, you calculated that this purchase would optimize your resources". The beauty of this principle lies in its simplicity. It is perhaps the central assumption of the world we live in: You can tell who I really am by what I buy.

Yet economists have long known that people's brains don't work quite the way the model suggests. When Bob Costanza, one of the fathers of ecological economics and now head of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, was first edging into economics in the early 1980s, he had a fellowship to study "social traps" - the nuclear arms race, say - in which "short-term behavior can get out of kilter with longer broad-term goals".

It didn't take long for Costanza to demonstrate, as others had before him, that, if you set up an auction in a certain way, people will end up bidding $1.50 to take home a dollar. Other economists have shown that people give too much weight to "sunk costs" - that they're too willing to throw good money after bad, or that they value items more highly if they already own them than if they are considering acquiring them. Building on such insights, a school of "behavioral economics" has emerged in recent years and begun plumbing how we really behave.

The wonder is that it took so long. We all know in our own lives how irrationally we are capable of acting, and how unconnected those actions are to any real sense of joy. (I mean, there you are at 3 am thinking about the Ginsu knife.) But until fairly recently, we had no alternatives to relying on Ginsu knife and Ford Expedition purchases as the sole measures of our satisfaction. How else would we know what made people happy?

That's where things are now changing dramatically: Researchers from a wide variety of disciplines have started to figure out how to assess satisfaction, and economists have begun to explore the implications. In 2002 Princeton's Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics even though he is trained as a psychologist. In the book Well-Being {2}, he and a pair of coauthors announce a new field called "hedonics", defined as "the study of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant ... It is also concerned with the whole range of circumstances, from the biological to the societal, that occasion suffering and enjoyment". If you are worried that there might be something altogether too airy about this, be reassured - Kahneman thinks like an economist. In the book's very first chapter, "Objective Happiness", he describes an experiment that compares "records of the pain reported by two patients undergoing colonoscopy", wherein every sixty seconds he insists they rate their pain on a scale of one to ten and eventually forces them to make "a hypothetical choice between a repeat colonoscopy and a barium enema". Dismal science indeed.

As more scientists have turned their attention to the field, researchers have studied everything from "biases in recall of menstrual symptoms" to "fearlessness and courage in novice paratroopers". Subjects have had to choose between getting an "attractive candy bar" and learning the answers to geography questions; they've been made to wear devices that measured their blood pressure at regular intervals; their brains have been scanned. And by now that's been enough to convince most observers that saying "I'm happy" is more than just a subjective statement. In the words of the economist Richard Layard, "We now know that what people say about how they feel corresponds closely to the actual levels of activity in different parts of the brain, which can be measured in standard scientific ways". Indeed, people who call themselves happy, or who have relatively high levels of electrical activity in the left prefrontal region of the brain, are also "more likely to be rated as happy by friends", "more likely to respond to requests for help", "less likely to be involved in disputes at work", and even "less likely to die prematurely". In other words, conceded one economist, "it seems that what the psychologists call subjective well-being is a real phenomenon. The various empirical measures of it have high consistency, reliability, and validity".

The idea that there is a state called happiness, and that we can dependably figure out what it feels like and how to measure it, is extremely subversive. It allows economists to start thinking about life in richer (indeed) terms, to stop asking "What did you buy?" and to start asking "Is your life good?" And if you can ask someone "Is your life good?" and count on the answer to mean something, then you'll be able to move to the real heart of the matter, the question haunting our moment on the earth: Is more better?


4. If we're so rich, how come we're so damn miserable?

In some sense, you could say that the years since World War II in America have been a loosely controlled experiment designed to answer this very question. The environmentalist Alan Durning found that in 1991 the average American family owned twice as many cars as it did in 1950, drove 2.5 times as far, used 21 times as much plastic, and traveled 25 times farther by air. Gross national product per capita tripled during that period. Our houses are bigger than ever and stuffed to the rafters with belongings (which is why the storage-locker industry has doubled in size in the past decade). We have all sorts of other new delights and powers - we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels, consume food from every corner of the world. Some people have taken much more than their share, but on average, all of us in the West are living lives materially more abundant than most people a generation ago.

What's odd is, none of it appears to have made us happier. Throughout the postwar years, even as the gnp curve has steadily climbed, the "life satisfaction" index has stayed exactly the same. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center has surveyed Americans on the question: "Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days - would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" (This must be a somewhat unsettling interview.) The "very happy" number peaked at 38 percent in the 1974 poll, amid oil shock and economic malaise; it now hovers right around 33 percent.

And it's not that we're simply recalibrating our sense of what happiness means - we are actively experiencing life as grimmer. In the winter of 2006 the National Opinion Research Center published data about "negative life events" comparing 1991 and 2004, two data points bracketing an economic boom. "The anticipation would have been that problems would have been down", the study's author said. Instead it showed a rise in problems - for instance, the percentage who reported breaking up with a steady partner almost doubled. As one reporter summarized the findings, "There's more misery in people's lives today".

This decline in the happiness index is not confined to the United States; as other nations have followed us into mass affluence, their experiences have begun to yield similar results. In the United Kingdom, real gross domestic product per capita grew two-thirds between 1973 and 2001, but people's satisfaction with their lives changed not one whit. Japan saw a fourfold increase in real income per capita between 1958 and 1986 without any reported increase in satisfaction. In one place after another, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and depression have gone up dramatically, even as we keep accumulating more stuff. Indeed, one report in 2000 found that the average American child reported higher levels of anxiety than the average child under psychiatric care in the 1950s - our new normal is the old disturbed.

If happiness was our goal, then the unbelievable amount of effort and resources expended in its pursuit since 1950 has been largely a waste. One study of life satisfaction and mental health by Emory University professor Corey Keyes found just seventeen percent of Americans "flourishing", in mental health terms, and 26 percent either "languishing" or out-and-out depressed.


5. Danes (and Mexicans, the Amish, and the Masai) just want to have fun

How is it, then, that we became so totally, and apparently wrongly, fixated on the idea that our main goal, as individuals and as nations, should be the accumulation of more wealth? The answer is interesting for what it says about human nature. Up to a certain point, more really does equal better. Imagine briefly your life as a poor person in a poor society - say, a peasant farmer in China. (China has one-fourth of the world's farmers, but one-fourteenth of its arable land; the average farm in the southern part of the country is about half an acre, or barely more than the standard lot for a new American home.) You likely have the benefits of a close and connected family, and a village environment where your place is clear. But you lack any modicum of security for when you get sick or old or your back simply gives out. Your diet is unvaried and nutritionally lacking; you're almost always cold in winter.

In a world like that, a boost in income delivers tangible benefits. In general, researchers report that money consistently buys happiness right up to about $10,000 income per capita. That's a useful number to keep in the back of your head - it's like the freezing point of water, one of those random figures that just happens to define a crucial phenomenon on our planet. "As poor countries like India, Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, and South Korea have experienced economic growth, there is some evidence that their average happiness has risen", the economist Layard reports. Past $10,000 (per capita, mind you - that is, the average for each man, woman, and child), there's a complete scattering: When the Irish were making two-thirds as much as Americans they were reporting higher levels of satisfaction, as were the Swedes, the Danes, the Dutch. Mexicans score higher than the Japanese; the French are about as satisfied with their lives as the Venezuelans. In fact, once basic needs are met, the "satisfaction" data scrambles in mindlnding ways. A sampling of Forbes magazine's "richest Americans" have identical happiness scores with Pennsylvania Amish, and are only a whisker above Swedes taken as a whole, not to mention the Masai. The "life satisfaction" of pavement dwellers - homeless people - in Calcutta is among the lowest recorded, but it almost doubles when they move into a slum, at which point they are basically as satisfied with their lives as a sample of college students drawn from 47 nations. And so on.

On the list of major mistakes we've made as a species, this one seems pretty high up. Our single-minded focus on increasing wealth has succeeded in driving the planet's ecological systems to the brink of failure, even as it's failed to make us happier. How did we screw up?

The answer is pretty obvious - we kept doing something past the point that it worked. Since happiness had increased with income in the past, we assumed it would inevitably do so in the future. We make these kinds of mistakes regularly: Two beers made me feel good, so ten will make me feel five times better. But this case was particularly extreme - in part because as a species, we've spent so much time simply trying to survive. As the researchers Ed Diener and Martin Seligman - both psychologists - observe, "At the time of Adam Smith, a concern with economic issues was understandably primary. Meeting simple human needs for food, shelter and clothing was not assured, and satisfying these needs moved in lockstep with better economics." Freeing people to build a more dynamic economy was radical and altruistic.

Consider Americans in 1820, two generations after Adam Smith. The average citizen earned, in current dollars, less than $1,500 a year, which is somewhere near the current average for all of Africa. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey explains in a 2004 article in the magazine Christian Century, "Your great-great-great-grandmother had one dress for church and one for the week, if she were not in rags. Her children did not attend school, and probably could not read. She and her husband worked eighty hours a week for a diet of bread and milk - they were four inches shorter than you." Even in 1900, the average American lived in a house the size of today's typical garage. Is it any wonder that we built up considerable velocity trying to escape the gravitational pull of that kind of poverty? An object in motion stays in motion, and our economy - with the built-up individual expectations that drive it - is a mighty object indeed.

You could call it, I think, the Laurdlgalls Wilder effect. I grew up reading her books - Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods - and my daughter grew up listening to me read them to her, and no doubt she will read them to her children. They are the ur-American story. And what do they tell? Of a life rich in family, rich in connection to the natural world, rich in adventure - but materially deprived. That one dress, that same bland dinner. At Christmastime, a penny - a penny! And a stick of candy, and the awful deliberation about whether to stretch it out with tiny licks or devour it in an orgy of happy greed. A rag doll was the zenith of aspiration. My daughter likes dolls too, but her bedroom boasts a density of Beanie Babies that mimics the manic biodiversity of the deep rainforest. Another one? Really, so what? Its marginal utility, as an economist might say, is low. And so it is with all of us. We just haven't figured that out because the momentum of the past is still with us - we still imagine we're in that little house on the big prairie.


6. This year's model home: "Good for the dysfunctional family"

That great momentum has carried us away from something valuable, something priceless: It has allowed us to become (very nearly forced us to become) more thoroughly individualistic than we really wanted to be. We left behind hundreds of thousands of years of human community for the excitement, and the isolation, of "making something of ourselves", an idea that would not have made sense for 99.9 percent of human history. Adam Smith's insight was that the interests of each of our individual selves could add up, almost in spite of themselves, to social good - to longer lives, fuller tables, warmer houses. Suddenly the community was no longer necessary to provide these things; they would happen as if by magic. And they did happen. And in many ways it was good.

But this process of liberation seems to have come close to running its course. Study after study shows Americans spending less time with friends and family, either working longer hours, or hunched over their computers at night. And each year, as our population grows by one percent we manage to spread ourselves out over six to eight percent more land. Simple mathematics says that we're less and less likely to bump into the other inhabitants of our neighborhood, or indeed of our own homes. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, "Major builders and top architects are walling people off. They're touting one-person 'Internet alcoves', locked-door 'away rooms', and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of the house. The new floor plans offer so much seclusion, they're 'good for the dysfunctional family', says Gopal Ahluwahlia, director of research for the National Association of Home Builders". At the building industry's annual Las Vegas trade show, the "showcase 'Ultimate Family Home' hardly had a family room", noted the Journal. Instead, the boy's personal playroom had its own 42-inch plasma TV, and the girl's bedroom had a secret mirrored door leading to a "hideaway karaoke room". "We call this the ultimate home for families who don't want anything to do with one another", said Mike McGee, chief executive of Pardee Homes of Los Angeles, builder of the model.

This transition from individualism to hyper-individualism also made its presence felt in politics. In the 1980s, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher asked, "Who is society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women, and there are families." Talk about everything solid melting into air - Thatcher's maxim would have spooked Adam Smith himself. The "public realm" - things like parks and schools and Social Security, the last reminders of the communities from which we came - is under steady and increasing attack. Instead of contributing to the shared risk of health insurance, Americans are encouraged to go it alone with "health savings accounts". Hell, even the nation's most collectivist institution, the US military, until recently recruited under the slogan an "Army of One". No wonder the show that changed television more than any other in the past decade was Survivor, where the goal is to end up alone on the island, to manipulate and scheme until everyone is banished and leaves you by yourself with your money.

It's not so hard, then, to figure out why happiness has declined here even as wealth has grown. During the same decades when our lives grew busier and more isolated, we've gone from having three confidants on average to only two, and the number of people saying they have no one to discuss important matters with has nearly tripled. Between 1974 and 1994, the percentage of Americans who said they visited with their neighbors at least once a month fell from almost two-thirds to less than half, a number that has continued to fall in the past decade. We simply worked too many hours earning, we commuted too far to our too-isolated homes, and there was always the blue glow of the tube shining through the curtains.


7. New friend or new coffeemaker? Pick one

Because traditional economists think of human beings primarily as individuals and not as members of a community, they miss out on a major part of the satisfaction index. Economists lay it out almost as a mathematical equation: Overall, "evidence shows that companionship ... contributes more to well-being than does income", writes Robert E Lane, a Yale political science professor who is the author of The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies {3}. But there is a notable difference between poor and wealthy countries: When people have lots of companionship but not much money, income "makes more of a contribution to subjective well-being". By contrast, "where money is relatively plentiful and companionship relatively scarce, companionship will add more to subjective well-being". If you are a poor person in China, you have plenty of friends and family around all the time - perhaps there are four other people living in your room. Adding a sixth doesn't make you happier. But adding enough money so that all five of you can eat some meat from time to time pleases you greatly. By contrast, if you live in a suburban American home, buying another coffeemaker adds very little to your quantity of happiness - trying to figure out where to store it, or wondering if you picked the perfect model, may in fact decrease your total pleasure. But a new friend, a new connection, is a big deal. We have a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second becomes more valuable.

Indeed, we seem to be genetically wired for community. As biologist Edward O Wilson found, most primates live in groups and get sad when they're separated - "an isolated individual will repeatedly pull a lever with no reward other than the glimpse of another monkey". Why do people so often look back on their college days as the best years of their lives? Because their classes were so fascinating? Or because in college, we live more closely and intensely with a community than most of us ever do before or after? Every measure of psychological health points to the same conclusion: People who "are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who do not", says Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz. "People who participate in religious communities are happier than those who are not". Which is striking, Schwartz adds, because social ties "actually decrease freedom of choice" - being a good friend involves sacrifice.

Do we just think we're happier in communities? Is it merely some sentimental 'good night John Boy' affectation? No - our bodies react in measurable ways. According to research cited by Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his classic book Bowling Alone {4}, if you do not belong to any group at present, joining a club or a society of some kind cuts in half the risk that you will die in the next year. Check this out: When researchers at Carnegie Mellon (somewhat disgustingly) dropped samples of cold virus directly into subjects' nostrils, those with rich social networks were four times less likely to get sick. An economy that produces only individualism undermines us in the most basic ways.

Here's another statistic worth keeping in mind: Consumers have ten times as many conversations at farmers' markets as they do at supermarkets - an order of magnitude difference. By itself, that's hardly life-changing, but it points at something that could be: living in an economy where you are participant as well as consumer, where you have a sense of who's in your universe and how it fits together. At the same time, some studies show local agriculture using less energy (also by an order of magnitude) than the "it's always summer somewhere" system we operate on now. Those are big numbers, and it's worth thinking about what they suggest - especially since, between peak oil and climate change, there's no longer really a question that we'll have to wean ourselves of the current model.

So as a mental experiment, imagine how we might shift to a more sustainable kind of economy. You could use government policy to nudge the change - remove subsidies from agribusiness and use them instead to promote farmer-entrepreneurs; underwrite the cost of windmills with even a fraction of the money that's now going to protect oil flows. You could put tariffs on goods that travel long distances, shift highway spending to projects that make it easier to live near where you work (and, by cutting down on commutes, leave some time to see the kids). And, of course, you can exploit the Net to connect a lot of this highly localized stuff into something larger. By way of example, a few of us are coordinating the first nationwide global warming demonstration - but instead of marching on Washington, we're rallying in our local areas, and then fusing our efforts, via the website stepitup07.org, into a national message.

It's easy to dismiss such ideas as sentimental or nostalgic. In fact, economies can be localized as easily in cities and suburbs as rural villages (maybe more easily), and in ways that look as much to the future as the past, that rely more on the solar panel and the Internet than the white picket fence. In fact, given the trendlines for phenomena such as global warming and oil supply, what's nostalgic and sentimental is to keep doing what we're doing simply because it's familiar.


8. The oil-for-people paradox: Why small farms produce more food

To understand the importance of this last point, consider the book American Mania {5} by the neuroscientist Peter Whybrow. Whybrow argues that many of us in this country are predisposed to a kind of dynamic individualism - our gene pool includes an inordinate number of people who risked everything to start over. This served us well in settling a continent and building our prosperity. But it never got completely out of control, says Whybrow, because "the marketplace has always had its natural constraints. For the first two centuries of the nation's existence, even the most insatiable American citizen was significantly leashed by the checks and balances inherent in a closely knit community, by geography, by the elements of weather, or, in some cases, by religious practice." You lived in a society - a habitat - that kept your impulses in some kind of check. But that changed in the past few decades as the economy nationalized and then globalized. As we met fewer actual neighbors in the course of a day, those checks and balances fell away. "Operating in a world of instant communication with minimal social tethers", Whybrow observes, "America's engines of commerce and desire became turbocharged".

Adam Smith himself had worried that too much envy and avarice would destroy "the empathic feeling and neighborly concerns that are essential to his economic model", says Whybrow, but he "took comfort in the fellowship and social constraint that he considered inherent in the tightly knit communities characteristic of the 18th century". Businesses were built on local capital investment, and "to be solicitous of one's neighbor was prudent insurance against future personal need". For the most part, people felt a little constrained about showing off wealth; indeed, until fairly recently in American history, someone who was making tons of money was often viewed with mixed emotions, at least if he wasn't giving back to the community. "For the rich", Whybrow notes, "the reward system would be balanced between the pleasure of self-gain and the civic pride of serving others. By these mechanisms the most powerful citizens would be limited in their greed."

Once economies grow past a certain point, however, "the behavioral contingencies essential to promoting social stability in a market-regulated society - close personal relationships, tightly knit communities, local capital investment, and so on - are quickly eroded". So re-localizing economies offers one possible way around the gross inequalities that have come to mark our societies. Instead of aiming for growth at all costs and hoping it will trickle down, we may be better off living in enough contact with each other for the affluent to once again feel some sense of responsibility for their neighbors. This doesn't mean relying on noblesse oblige; it means taking seriously the idea that people, and their politics, can be changed by their experiences. It's a hopeful sign that more and more local and state governments across the country have enacted "living wage" laws. It's harder to pretend that the people you see around you every day should live and die by the dictates of the market.

Right around this time, an obvious question is doubtless occurring to you. Is it foolish to propose that a modern global economy of six (soon to be nine) billion people should rely on more localized economies? To put it more bluntly, since for most people "the economy" is just a fancy way of saying "What's for dinner?" and "Am I having any?", doesn't our survival depend on economies that function on a massive scale - such as highly industrialized agriculture? Turns out the answer is no - and the reasons why offer a template for rethinking the rest of the economy as well.

We assume, because it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense, that industrialized farming is the most productive farming. A vast Midwestern field filled with high-tech equipment ought to produce more food than someone with a hoe in a small garden. Yet the opposite is true. If you are after getting the greatest yield from the land, then smaller farms in fact produce more food.

If you are one guy on a tractor responsible for thousands of acres, you grow your corn and that's all you can do - make pass after pass with the gargantuan machine across a sea of crop. But if you're working ten acres, then you have time to really know the land, and to make it work harder. You can intercrop all kinds of plants - their roots will go to different depths, or they'll thrive in each other's shade, or they'll make use of different nutrients in the soil. You can also walk your fields, over and over, noticing. According to the government's most recent agricultural census, smaller farms produce far more food per acre, whether you measure in tons, calories, or dollars. In the process, they use land, water, and oil much more efficiently; if they have animals, the manure is a gift, not a threat to public health. To feed the world, we may actually need lots more small farms.

But if this is true, then why do we have large farms? Why the relentless consolidation? There are many reasons, including the way farm subsidies have been structured, the easier access to bank loans (and politicians) for the big guys, and the convenience for food-processing companies of dealing with a few big suppliers. But the basic reason is this: We substituted oil for people. Tractors and synthetic fertilizer instead of farmers and animals. Could we take away the fossil fuel, put people back on the land in larger numbers, and have enough to eat?

The best data to answer that question comes from an English agronomist named Jules Pretty, who has studied nearly 300 sustainable agriculture projects in 57 countries around the world. They might not pass the US standards for organic certification, but they're all what he calls "low-input". Pretty found that over the past decade, almost twelve million farmers had begun using sustainable practices on about ninety million acres. Even more remarkably, sustainable agriculture increased food production by 79 percent per acre. These were not tiny isolated demonstration farms - Pretty studied fourteen projects where 146,000 farmers across a broad swath of the developing world were raising potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cassava, and he found that practices such as cover-cropping and fighting pests with natural adversaries had increased production 150 percent - seventeen tons per household. With 4.5 million small Asian grain farmers, average yields rose 73 percent. When Indonesian rice farmers got rid of pesticides, their yields stayed the same but their costs fell sharply.

"I acknowledge", says Pretty, "that all this may sound too good to be true for those who would disbelieve these advances. Many still believe that food production and nature must be separated, that 'agroecological' approaches offer only marginal opportunities to increase food production, and that industrialized approaches represent the best, and perhaps only, way forward. However, prevailing views have changed substantially in just the last decade."

And they will change just as profoundly in the decades to come across a wide range of other commodities. Already I've seen dozens of people and communities working on regional-scale sustainable timber projects, on building energy networks that work like the Internet by connecting solar rooftops and backyard windmills in robust mini-grids. That such things can begin to emerge even in the face of the political power of our reigning economic model is remarkable; as we confront significant change in the climate, they could speed along the same kind of learning curve as Pretty's rice farmers and wheat growers. And they would not only use less energy; they'd create more community. They'd start to reverse the very trends I've been describing, and in so doing rebuild the kind of scale at which Adam Smith's economics would help instead of hurt.

In the 20th century, two completely different models of how to run an economy battled for supremacy. Ours won, and not only because it produced more goods than socialized state economies. It also produced far more freedom, far less horror. But now that victory is starting to look Pyrrhic; in our overheated and underhappy state, we need some new ideas.

We've gone too far down the road we're traveling. The time has come to search the map, to strike off in new directions. Inertia is a powerful force; marriages and corporations and nations continue in motion until something big diverts them. But in our new world we have much to fear, and also much to desire, and together they can set us on a new, more promising course.


Notes:

{1} http://www.powells.com/biblio/72-0060916303-0

{2} http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780871544230-1

{3} http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780300091069-2

{4} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780743203043-0

{5} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780393059946-4

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Want to see how the "satisfaction index" has changed over your lifetime? Find some of the data mentioned in this article - and a few other numbers that will surprise you - at http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/happiness_extra.html


This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

(c) 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

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Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Cassandra

Our end-time prophet attends a Tory-run seminar, where the climate of opinion still hotly favours trade and power

The Ecologist (March 2007)


'Trade In a Changing Climate' was the title of a seminar I attended in London last month, run by the Conservative Party. If you want to know why we are in such a mess and why there is not the remotest prospect of any government doing anything constructive to alleviate it or its consequences, you should have been there.

All the platform people seemed to share a common delusion that trade was a good thing regardless, and climate change was an unfortunate marginal matter of which we ought to take proper notice where we can, but meanwhile let us get on with the serious job of developing the economies of the poor countries so that they can enjoy the same standards of living (they really mean the same standards of material consumption) as we in the rich countries.

One speaker, a Julian Morris of an International Policy Network, as well as being a Visiting Professor of some luckless university, produced a stream of statistics to show that, over the past century or so, millions more people had been enjoying better health, better education, better life expectancy, lower infant mortality and so on - all of which, he appeared to urge, was the result of development and of free markets and that we could look for the same results from the poor countries if they would only brave the same route.

I listened in a sort of daze of disbelief that anyone professing to profess anything at all in matters academic could be so divorced from the realities around him and so blind as to where we were heading.

The rich countries have reached their current unsteady and utterly unsustainable apex of 'development' by bankrupting our posterity of basic resources such as oil; by perpetrating crimes against the natural world in terms of species poisoning and elimination, of soil and oceanic degradation that will beggar humanity for generations; by promoting the biological hoodlumism of global warming; and by disintegrating our local community structures, the oldest social unit in all human history, to such a degree that our prisons and hospitals are full to overflowing and that figures for such ills as cancer, venereal infections, juvenile behaviour disorders and psychotic forms of social dislocation and family breakdown are climbing to ever higher levels as millions resort increasingly to drugs and opiates to relieve the stresses all this wonderful development is imposing on them.

There is, of course, not the remotest prospect that the billions of people living in 'undeveloped' countries will ever experience anything remotely akin to the affluent consumerist lifestyle of the West.

The resources are just not there and global warming is but one of a scream of planetary protests at the ways we have already abused our biological eminence to indulge our boardroom-dominated abandonment of social and ethical responsibility.

The signs are multiplying around us that global warming excesses - in terms of resource squandering, biological abuse, social disruption and psychic disbalance have reached the limits that a finite planet can afford. Any attempt to pursue our current policies of 'development' can only hasten the onward ride of the horsemen of the apocalypse: of war, resource bankruptcy, an oceanic population flood, climatic catastrophe and economic breakdown as the global boardroom bubble goes pop, and the social immiseration of millions trapped in economic and political structures they have no way at all of controlling.

At heart, the problem confronting us, one which has bedevilled human scholarship and seeking for centuries, is not one of resources or of economic planning, it is one of morality.

What is the purpose of economic activity? The accumulated moral wisdom of humankind makes it clear that empires, especially modern boardroom ones, are too huge and too immersed in power struggles to even begin to entertain such questions. They are questions that pertain rather to the sphere where human relationships take their natural pre-eminence within the jealously guarded confines of small, localised human communities, ones where restraint and discipline can prevail on a consensual basis involving no loss of liberty.

The seminar was held in the Royal Society of Arts, which professes, I am glad to report, 'a tradition of challenging thinking'. I have to say I saw not a glimmer of this challenge here, not a hint of recognition that the coming decades are likely to see food riots in major cities of the West even more common than they are in Africa today, and that if we are serious about meeting the challenge of global warming with any concern for reality, we should be embarking on a massive global programme of de-industrialisation.
One chairman of a discussion appealed for practical proposals; I could give him nothing more practical and imperative that that we should do just about the opposite of almost everything we are doing now.

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In his 85 years, Cassandra has been an orphan, runaway, communist, cook, beggar, editor, presidential advisor, prisoner and priest. In a former life she was a Greek prophetess whose unerring prophecies of impending disaster were cursed to go unheeded.

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Global Warming: Exxon Money vs Scientific Evidence

Consumer Advocates Call on Congress to Subpoena Exxon's Funding Records As Oil Giant Underwrites Efforts to Deny Reality of Global Warming

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights

News Release (February 02 2007)

Santa Monica, California - The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) today called on Congress to subpoena ExxonMobil's records and probe the oil giant's funding of organizations involved in disputing the reality of global warming.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation's call came as a widely respected international report warned that climate change cannot be stopped and is "very likely" caused by human activity.

FTCR urged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to launch the investigation after a report in the respected British newspaper, The Guardian, that the Exxon-financed American Enterprise Institute (AEI) was offering scientists and economists $10,000 each to write articles undercutting the report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses were also being offered.

The AEI has received more than $1.6 million from Exxon Mobil and more than twenty of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration, which has resisted reports of global warming. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees, The Guardian reported.

"ExxonMobil made a profit of $40 billion last year - more than any company ever - not just on the on the backs of overcharged motorists, but at the expense of human life on earth itself. Now it's using the profits to bury the evidence and distract attention from the most serious problem the world faces", said John Simpson, FTCR consumer advocate. "Profiteering is one thing, but willfully undermining serious scientific research to maintain those profits simply cannot be allowed".

According to the Los Angeles Times the IPCC report released today in Paris says scientists' "best estimate" is that temperatures will rise 3.2 to 7.8 [Fahrenheit] degrees by 2100. In contrast, the increase from 1901 to 2005 was 1.2 degrees. The report also projects that sea levels could rise by 7 to 23 inches by the end of the century.


The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. More information is available on the web at: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org.

(c) 2000-2006 FTCR. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/pr/?postId=7352


_____


Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

by Ian Sample, science correspondent

The Guardian (February 02 2007)


Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded think tank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6 million from ExxonMobil and more than twenty of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims", said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

"The IPCC process is probably the most thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments to take on sound scientific advice", he said.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised", he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy".

One American scientist turned down the offer, citing fears that the report could easily be misused for political gain. "You wouldn't know if some of the other authors might say nothing's going to happen, that we should ignore it, or that it's not our fault", said Steve Schroeder, a professor at Texas A&M university.

The contents of the IPCC report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. It says there is a ninety per cent chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8 degrees Celsisu this century, depending on emissions.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific institute, said: "The IPCC is the world's leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue. It is expected to stress, more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to human actions, and that 'business as usual' would lead to unacceptable risks, underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. However, yet again, there will be a vocal minority with their own agendas who will try to suggest otherwise".

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a think tank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."

On Monday, another Exxon-funded organisation based in Canada will launch a review in London which casts doubt on the IPCC report. Among its authors are Tad Murty, a former scientist who believes human activity makes no contribution to global warming. Confirmed VIPs attending include Nigel Lawson and David Bellamy, who believes there is no link between burning fossil fuels and global warming.

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2004399,00.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Big Enviro Groups 'Holding Back' Anti-Warming Movement

Some critics call the best mainstream proposals too little, too late

While the US government and some corporations are finally acknowledging global climate change, some critics say partnering with such forces may “tame” the movement's goals and strategies.

by Megan Tady

The NewStandard (February 09 2007)


The heat is on environmental groups and politicians to churn out proposals for stabilizing the planet's rising temperatures, but some environmentalists say existing plans to cool climate change are timid. Their criticism reveals a rift between two approaches: preserving the American way of life at the expense of quicker solutions, or changing the structure of US society to counter an unprecedented threat.

The dominant approach to human-induced global warming revolves around slow but dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by mid-century. The mainstream environmental community, along with a handful of politicians and corporations, is calling for various regulations and market-based actions to reduce greenhouse-gas output by sixty to eighty percent over the next 43 years.

This goal is based on what some scientists have estimated the United States needs to do to help the world limit the rise in global temperatures to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The goal presupposes that some climate change is inevitable. In 2006, a government-commissioned report in the United Kingdom called the "Stern Review" said that the "worst impacts of climate change can be substantially reduced" by cutting greenhouse emissions to meet the two-degree goal.

Even if climate warming is kept to two-degrees or lower, the report said there will still be "serious impacts" on "human life and on the environment". For instance, the report predicted the disappearance of drinking water in the South American Andes and parts of Southern Africa and the Mediterranean, up to ten million people affected by yearly coastal flooding, and ten to forty percent of species on Earth going extinct.

Noting that "2050 is a long time away", David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said he wants to see action right away. "So what I want to know is, what are [environmental groups and politicians] going to do tomorrow?"

Morris and others who want to see more-immediate and deeper action fear such incremental changes are downplaying the urgency of the situation. "They're really holding the whole movement back by setting their sights so low", said Brian Tokar, Biotechnology Project director at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont.


Market-based solutions

The basic premise behind long-term plans for emissions reduction is that moving away from a fossil-fuel-based energy system will take time because market forces will take a while to make renewable technology prices competitive.

"It's still possible that we can avoid dangerous climate change and cut emissions in half by mid-century through a process that doesn't require an immediate shutdown of all of our coal-powered plants", said John Coequyt, Greenpeace energy policy analyst. "We can still do this in a phased - and as a result - economically beneficial manner".

In January, Greenpeace published what it called a "blueprint for solving global warming". The plan calls for eighty percent of electricity to be produced from renewable energy, 72 percent less carbon dioxide emissions, and for the US's oil use to be cut in half - all by 2050.

The timeline is based on removing the market barriers to green energy, while making dirty energy more expensive. It does not call for significant public funding of renewable energy or government investments in new energy infrastructure or public transportation.

Tokar dismissed the 2050 timeline, saying the US could cut greenhouse-gas emissions more quickly if pressure groups took a different stance and instead called for immediate government intervention.

"The only thing that can change it is a significant investment in public funds to really jumpstart the industry", Tokar said. "There's no reason we can't get there within the next five to ten years with significant funding".

Coequyt of Greenpeace agreed with Tokar that the United States could reach emissions-reduction goals sooner if not for the perceived need to depend primarily on the market to make renewable energy the best choice for consumers. "That's definitely the case; we could see faster action", Coequyt said. "It's hard for us to be a lot faster than what we put in our scenario, but if the government made it a true national priority, I don't think there's any doubt that we could go faster".

Despite this admission, Greenpeace is not pushing for the government to get heavily involved in funding and distributing renewable energy, but instead promotes weaker reforms like removing subsidies for fossil-fuel industries and forcing prices to reflect the actual costs of environmental damage. To reduce market barriers faced by clean-energy technology, Greenpeace advocates offering producers of sustainable power priority access to the electricity grid and reducing the governmental red tape that inhibits their startup.

"What would be the other option?" asked Coequyt. "Mandate that every house has to have solar panels on it and that coal plants have to shut down?"

According to Tokar, Greenpeace and other groups should be calling for the funding of public transportation and subsidies to make housing more energy efficient. "We can do all of these things immediately", he said.

Dissidents also rebuke the mainstream environmental community for not pushing hard for a less-energy-intensive lifestyle in the United States.

Coequyt acknowledged Greenpeace is not yet urging Americans to fundamentally change the way they live to fight climate change. "What we're saying right now is that we have the technology, and we can reduce our energy through efficiency use so much, and we can do it without having to completely change our lifestyle", he said. "But it is certainly possible that in the near future we may have to have a more-urgent call".

But for some environmentalists, making the urgent call for lifestyle changes - from something as tame as driving less to more radical changes like adopting a vegetarian, localized diet - should go hand in hand with the push for larger, system-wide greenhouse-gas reductions and energy efficiency. They say radically scaling back consumption is needed to ensure global environmental sustainability and equity.

Mark Hertsgaard, an environmental journalist, told The NewStandard that to avoid "irrevocably cooking" the planet, "we cannot continue this resource-intensive life". Given a rising global population and unmet energy needs of poorer countries, he said: "At the end of the day, we also have to cut back on our appetite. That's just arithmetic."

Morris, of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said environmentalists need to start pushing large-scale changes into the public discourse. "We need to start asking for the kind of sacrifice that will be required", he said.


Political Disconnect

Another plan published by the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of corporations and environmental groups, calls for legislation to rapidly enact a "mandatory emission-reduction pathway", with an ultimate goal of sixty to eighty percent carbon reductions by 2050.

The partnership includes the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the World Resources Institute. They are joined by nine corporations - including DuPont, BP America and General Electric.

Vicki Arroyo, who is with the Pew Center, said their proposal is "ambitious".

But, Arroyo said, the plan "can't start today" because passing legislation takes time. "There really is no way in our system to move any faster than what's being recommended here", Arroyo told The NewStandard.

Many of the proposals reflect the need to court the Bush administration and politicians, who have refused to call for tough measures on climate change.

Bill McKibben, an environmentalist organizing national demonstrations against climate change with the new "Step It Up" campaign, likened the United States's stance on global warming to an "ocean liner heading in the other direction entirely". He said, "[Eighty percent reductions by 2050] seems to be at the moment the outer limit of what's politically possible".

For author and radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen, the obstacles to faster changes presented by the US political system, illustrate the need for more-holistic measures.

"None of [the solutions presented by mainstream groups] address the power structures", Jensen told The NewStandard. "None of them address corporations. None of them address a lack of democracy ... The environmental groups are not questioning this larger mentality that's killing the planet."
_____

(c) 2007 The NewStandard. All rights reserved. The NewStandard is a non-profit publisher that encourages noncommercial reproduction of its content. Reprints must prominently attribute the author and The NewStandard, hyperlink to http://newstandardnews.net (online) or display newstandardnews.net (print), and carry this notice. For more information or commercial reprint rights, please see the The NewStandard reprint policy.

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/4293


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Electric Car Maker ZAP Adds Solar Option

to Truck Design to Combat Global Warming

www.zapworld.com (March 06 2007)


After a positive response for its XEBRA XERO, electric car pioneer ZAP has designed a solar option for its truck design, a photovoltaic panel that ZAP says can offer short-distance driving on sunlight alone.

XEBRA XERO Solar Electric TruckTo help fight Global Warming and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ZAP launches its new electric car designed with a solar panel called XEBRA XERO truck. Learn more at www.zapworld.com.

ZAP intends to showcase the new XEBRA XERO (pronounced 'zebra zero') Truck at its March 23 dealer training as well as some up-coming industry events for automotive fleets. Company officials like to say that ZAP stands for 'Zero Air Pollution' and the solar panels on the XEBRA can allow drivers a true 'Zero Air Pollution' form of transportation.

"If the XEBRA XERO is exposed to sunlight during the day, and your commute is short, you can get pure solar powered driving", says ZAP Chairman Gary Starr. "If you want to ensure 100 percent solar generated commuting, you can purchase a larger system that can sit on your rooftop".

The XEBRA truck has attracted interest from several large fleets, according to ZAP. They call the design a 'city-car', available as a four-door sedan or two-passenger truck, good for city-speed driving up to 40 MPH. Starr says the XEBRA Truck with the XERO Solar Panel Option will cost about $12,000. The car recharges normally by plugging into a standard 110 volt outlet for a full charge in up to six hours and a fifty percent charge in 1.5 hours. The ZAP Truck converts into a flatbed or dump-bed that can tilt to allow maximum exposure to the sun.

Starr believes the XEBRA is the first production electric vehicle that incorporates solar power and adds that the main reasons people are choosing alternative fuel transportation are the growing relevance of the environment and the feeling of energy independence. There are also other advantages of using solar panels with your electric car. Studies have shown that solar power charging systems can double the life of batteries. Panels consume no fuel and have no moving parts to wear out. The only maintenance is to occasionally wash for highest performance.

The ZAP XEBRA complies with zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) regulations in the United States. Studies show that electric cars can reduce automotive emissions by more than ninety percent, including emissions from power plants, and carbon dioxide emissions by 10,000 pounds per year.


About ZAP

ZAP has been a leader in advanced transportation technologies since 1994, delivering over 90,000 vehicles to consumers in more than 75 countries. At the forefront of fuel-efficient transportation with new technologies including energy efficient gas systems, hydrogen, electric, fuel cell, ethanol, hybrid and other innovative power systems, ZAP is developing a high-performance crossover SUV electric car concept called ZAP-X engineered by Lotus Engineering. The Company recently launched a new recharge-it-all technology that provides power for mobile electronics, including cell phones, digital recorders and laptops. For more product, dealer and investor information, visit http://www.zapworld.com.

Forward-looking statements in this release are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, continued acceptance of the Company's products, increased levels of competition for the Company, new products and technological changes, the Company's dependence upon third-party suppliers, intellectual property rights, and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

MULTIMEDIA AVAILABLE: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5348698

Contact ZAP:

Eveline Souza, +1-707-525-8658 extension 216 (Media)
esouza@zapworld.com

or

Sherri Haskell, +1-707-525-8658 extension 232 (Investors)
shaskell@zapworld.com

Copyright (c) 2006 - 2007 ZAP. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.zapworld.com/ZAPWorld.aspx?id=4628


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Engineers Design Affordable, Clean Car Using Existing Technology and Fuels

New Vehicle Design Surpasses State Global Warming Standards

Union of Concerned Scientists

Citizens and Scientists for Environmental Solutions

www.ucsusa.org (March 01 2007)


Automotive engineers at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) today unveiled a minivan design that shows automakers can build affordable vehicles with existing technology that would meet or exceed global warming pollution standards for cars and trucks adopted by California and ten other states. Automakers are currently fighting these standards in court.

The minivan, dubbed the UCS Vanguard, features off-the-shelf engine, transmission and fueling systems and other technologies that would save consumers money, maintain vehicle safety and performance, and cut global warming pollution by more than forty percent. All of the technologies in the Vanguard are in vehicles on the road today, but automakers have yet to combine them all in one single package. (For a computer-generated animation of the Vanguard's features and the full report, go to www.ucsusa.org/UCSVanguard .)

"Today's announcement confirms that we already have the technology and the tools to combat climate change and that now it is simply a question of the political will", said Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski. Oregon adopted the California tailpipe standard in 2005. "Oregon is committed to transitioning to a new generation of cleaner vehicles, and this project demonstrates a clear path forward. It is my hope this will encourage the rest of the nation to join Oregon and the other states already pledged to reduce auto emissions."

Installing the Vanguard package of existing technologies fleetwide could significantly reduce global warming pollution for all car and truck size classes. Operational savings would make up for relatively small increases in purchase price. For example, the Vanguard minivan package would add about $300 to the price but result in more than $1,300 in lifetime consumer savings, with a payback time of less than two years.

The standard requiring cuts in global warming pollution from cars and trucks was originally established in California in 2002. California is the only state allowed under federal law to set air pollution standards higher than those imposed by the federal government. Other states have the authority to follow California's lead.

"California has been a leader in cutting air pollution from cars for the past thirty years", said Tom Cackette, chief deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board, the state agency implementing California's vehicle global warming pollution standard. "As more and more states look for ways to cut global warming pollution, they're following California's lead and demanding cleaner cars".

California's standard requires a 34-percent reduction in global warming pollution for cars and light trucks and a 25-percent reduction for larger trucks and SUVs within the next ten years. The Vanguard design shows that existing technology could deliver those benefits now.

"Meeting state laws for fighting global warming should be no sweat for the automakers", said Spencer Quong, a senior UCS vehicles engineer and former automaker consultant who designed the Vanguard. "They already have the solution to pollution right under the hoods of their own cars and trucks".

The Vanguard minivan design has eight key components - including improvements in the engine, transmission, air conditioner, fuel system, tires and aerodynamic design - that can be found piecemeal in more than 100 vehicle models on the road today. The Vanguard is not a hybrid. It uses conventional technology to achieve significant reductions in global warming pollution. For example:

The Vanguard engine features variable valve timing, currently used in most Toyota and Honda models as well as many Ford vehicles, which better controls the flow of air and fuel into the engine, leading to more efficient combustion and improved performance.
The Vanguard's six-cylinder engine can deactivate two cylinders when it requires less power, a feature currently found in twenty vehicle models.

The minivan's "automatic manual" transmission electronically adjusts its six gears to increase performance and efficiency.

Stronger hoses and tighter connections in the Vanguard's air conditioning system reduce the amount of concentrated global warming pollutants, called hydrofluorocarbons, which leak into the air. The minivan also uses a less-polluting refrigerant.

The Vanguard is designed to run on either pure gasoline or a mixture of gasoline and as much as 85-percent ethanol. Using 85-percent corn-based ethanol can reduce global warming pollution from ten percent to thirty percent. Using "cellulosic" ethanol could cut global warming pollution by as much as ninety percent. There are currently 32 types of flex-fuel vehicles on the road.

In the absence of federal policies to curb global warming emissions from vehicles, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington have adopted the California clean car standard. Several other states, including Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Tennessee and Texas, are considering or about to adopt the standard. Combined, these states represent nearly half the US population.

In response, auto industry trade groups have filed lawsuits in California, Rhode Island and Vermont to block implementation.

"The automakers are sticking to their traditional 'can't do' philosophy", said David Friedman, clean vehicles research director at UCS. "Years ago they cried the sky was falling when they were required to install seat belts and airbags. Now, instead of building cleaner vehicles like the Vanguard, they're fighting global warming pollution laws in the courts. To get the job done, they should bench their lawyers and call in the engineers."

www.ucsusa.org


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Target Wreckers

Two ministries seem determined to scupper the government's plans to combat global warming.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (March 15 2007)


First the good news: the "green arms race" David Cameron promised last year {1} has begun. Who would have imagined we'd get two green speeches from Gordon Brown in two days? Or that we would hear him say that "Chancellors of the Exchequer will now count the carbon as they currently count the pounds"? {2} The draft climate change bill is also better than expected. Its ultimate target - of a sixty per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050 - is too little, too late; but its means of getting there have improved. For the first time, the government proposes another legally binding target - for 2020. It will also appoint a committee of independent auditors. About time too: as the report commissioned by the Dispatches programme I presented showed last week, the government has been fudging its figures {3}. On current trajectories, it will miss its targets by half.

Now the less good news. The new target for 2020 is "26 to 32%" {4}. That's not a target; it's a whole shooting range. What it means is that the legal target is really 26%, well below the level required to get the government on track towards its 2050 goal. As usual, shipping and international aviation are left out altogether. The excuse that they are not considered in international agreements wears ever thinner. What has that got to do with our domestic target?

The government still insists that it won't set annual carbon budgets: instead they will cover five-year periods {5}. This means that if one administration fails to meet its five-year target, it's likely to be the next government that gets taken to court. Worse still is the proposal to permit the government to make its cuts by buying carbon credits from overseas {6}. The global trade in hot air has already helped to vitiate the Kyoto Protocol. It will do the same for the climate change bill.

Now for the really bad news. Two government departments are actively undermining everything this bill seeks to achieve. Unsurprisingly, one of them is the Department for Transport. It's not just that it is building 4,000 kilometers of new trunk roads {7} and telling the airports to produce "master plans" for a doubling of capacity {8}. It has also sought to frustrate any effort - central to the climate change bill - to quantify the impact of its policies.

In May last year the transport minister, Stephen Ladyman, was asked for an estimate of how much carbon dioxide the government's new trunk road schemes produce every year. The figures he gave were meaningless {9}. Another minister was asked about the impact of local roads, and claimed it would be impossible to quantify, on the grounds of "disproportionate cost" {10}. So Rebecca Lush of Transport 2000 wrote to the department, offering to carry out the work for GBP 150. She was turned away.

She also sent over a dozen emails to the Highways Agency asking for clarification of Ladyman's figures. She received no useful reply. Then the minister promised parliament that the full figures would arrive in December {11}. December came and went. In January Rebecca Lush sent in a freedom of information request. The Highways Agency provided an answer in February, but it contained accurate figures for only thirteen per cent of the schemes. She again asked the department for figures for local roads, and was told that her request was "manifestly unreasonable". She appealed three more times without result, then on March 5th spoke about her frustrations on national television. The trunk road figures magically appeared a week later. But the transport department still refuses to release the data for local roads.

The identity of the other offending department is more surprising. In December Ruth Kelly, secretary of state for Communities and Local Government, announced that by 2016 every new home should be "zero-carbon" {12}. Since then, she and her deputies have done their best to make sure it won't happen.

Her planning statement on climate change, published the same day, banned local authorities from setting higher energy efficiency standards for homes than national building regulations require {13}. As the Association for the Conservation of Energy points out, this means that they are not allowed to implement Kelly's own code for sustainable homes, which was meant to blaze the trail for her 2016 target.

Then, on January 19th, Kelly's deputy, Phil Woolas, talked out a Labour MP's bill in the House of Commons, which would have permitted councils to set higher standards. On the same day, after pretending to support it, Kelly told the Labour whip to instruct MPs to talk out the Sustainable Communities Bill, which also seeks to reduce emissions. It survived; so Phil Woolas has now tabled a series of wrecking amendments.

It looks like a bad case of regulatory capture. Just as the Department for Transport seems to be working for the road builders it is meant to be regulating, the communities department appears to be working for the house builders. Together they threaten to bust the government's brave new bill before it has even been launched.

www.monbiot.com


References:

1. David Cameron, 15th June 2006. Address to the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, Royal Geographical Society. http://www.ashdenawards.org/files/press_releases/David_Cameron_Speech_June_15_Awards_RGS.doc

2. Gordon Brown, 12th March 2007. Speech to the Green Alliance. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/newsroom_and_speeches/press/2007/press_28_07.cfm3.

Mark Maslin et al, 5th March 2007. UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions: are we on target? UCL Environment Institute.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/environment-institute/pdfs/UCLEI-report.pdf4.

HM Government, March 2007. Draft Climate Change Bill, para 5.3.5. para 5.15.

6. para 5.28.

7. Department for Transport, July 2004. The Future of Transport White Paper.

8. Department for Transport, December 2003. The Future of Air Transport White Paper.

9. Table lodged in House of Commons Library in response to PQ 4888 05/06: Assessment of Carbon Dioxide Emissions.

10. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm060620/text/60620w1085.htm#column_1732W%20

11. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm061128/text/61128w0006.htm#column_517W

12. Department for Communities and Local Government, December 2006. Code for Sustainable Homes. http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/uploads/code_for_sust_homes.pdf

13. DCLG, 13th December 2006. Planning Policy Statement: Planning and Climate Change - Supplement to Planning Policy Statement 1. http://www.communities.gov.uk/pub/142/ConsultationPlanningPolicyStatementPlanningandClimateChangeSupplementtoPlanning1_id1505142.pdf

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/15/the-target-wreckers/#more-1049


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

I'm no global warming expert, but ...

Surely the majority of the world's climate change scientists can't be wrong - can they?

by Simon Singh

New Statesman (March 19 2007)


Last Thursday night I watched Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle. I have been convinced for quite a while that human carbon emissions are causing global warming, so I was shocked that the producer Martin Durkin was able to present an apparently convincing set of counter arguments. I went to bed that night puzzled. If Durkin was right, then the overwhelming majority of climate scientists were either stupid or deceitful.

The following morning I awoke to find that Armand Leroi had copied me in on an email to Durkin. Leroi, a media-savvy biologist, admitted that he was not an expert on global warming, but that nevertheless he was sceptical about some assertions in the programme. A few minutes later, my PC went ping and I saw Durkin's brief five-word reply. I am paraphrasing for decency, but essentially he called Leroi an intellectually challenged penis.

I immediately emailed Durkin in an effort to engage him in a more sensible debate. Although he replied with a few coherent sentences, they were rather blunt: ("Since 1940 we have had four decades of cooling, three of warming ... Why have we not heard this in the hours and hours of shit programming on global warming shoved down our throats by the BBC?"), and he ended with the instruction that I should engage in a sexual act with my own body that was physically impossible. All this and I had not even had breakfast.

I spent the rest of the day trying to find out the truth about the documentary. Despite the producer's potty mouth, maybe he was right? I sent a few emails, but before I could get any reliable answers I was heading to Venice to attend a conference on mathematics and culture.

Towards the end of the conference I bumped into mathematician and crime writer Catherine Shaw. We stood outside a lecture as she explained how she had recently met the legendary Alexander Grothendieck. Having revolutionised maths in the 1960s, Grothendieck became disillusioned with society. He was a pacifist and protested against the war in Vietnam by lecturing in the forests surrounding Hanoi while bombs were falling nearby. Then, in 1988, convinced that the world was evil, he withdrew to the French countryside. In 1990, he disappeared, abandoning the only woman he had loved and setting fire to his manuscripts.

Shaw had tracked him down and built a fragile relationship with him. As we discussed whether he would ever return to the mathematical community, we were interrupted by a flurry of froth. The last conference lecture was all about bubbles, which mathematicians call minimal surfaces. Its end was being marked by 200 academics frantically blowing bubbles. Never one to miss a bubble-blowing opportunity, I joined in.

Back in London, the truth about the Channel 4 documentary was becoming apparent. The Observer had published a letter by a group of eminent scientists who were angered because the programme had "misrepresented the state of scientific knowledge on global warming". They did not spell out the distortions, but my friend Gabrielle Walker, who has just written a book about the atmosphere, had emailed me with some information explaining that Durkin had been somewhat economical with the truth.


Debunking claims

For example, he is right to say that temperatures fell slightly for a few decades in the mid-20th century, which might seem peculiar as lots of carbon was being burned. However, Durkin forgets to say that the resulting soot reflected sunlight and caused cooling that compensated for the warming effects of carbon dioxide. In recent decades, because we have cleaned up the soot, global warming has taken off unchecked.

I could continue debunking Durkin's claims, but it is a new week and I am behind schedule on what I ought to be doing. My problem is that global warming is a serious issue, so I am easily distracted and irritated by programmes that fool viewers with incomplete arguments, and it is particularly annoying if the producer also lacks manners.

Simon Singh is author of Fermat's Last Theorem
http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=28585&cgi=product&isbn=0-385-49362-2#product_details


http://www.newstatesman.com/200703190012


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air

How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to "Manufacture Uncertainty" on Climate Change

Union of Concerned Scientists

Citizens and Scientists for Environmental Solutions

www.ucsusa.org (January 03 2007)


A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

"ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer", said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Director of Strategy & Policy. "A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over forty years".

Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to "Manufacture Uncertainty" on Climate Change details how the oil company, like the tobacco industry in previous decades, has

* raised doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence

* funded an array of front organizations to create the appearance of a broad platform for a tight-knit group of vocal climate change contrarians who misrepresent peer-reviewed
scientific findings

* attempted to portray its opposition to action as a positive quest for "sound science" rather than business self-interest

* used its access to the Bush administration to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming

ExxonMobil-funded organizations consist of an overlapping collection of individuals serving as staff, board members, and scientific advisors that publish and re-publish the works of a small group of climate change contrarians. The George C Marshall Institute, for instance, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil, recently touted a book edited by Patrick Michaels, a long-time climate change contrarian who is affiliated with at least eleven organizations funded by ExxonMobil. Similarly, ExxonMobil funds a number of lesser-known groups such as the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Both groups promote the work of several climate change contrarians, including Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist who is affiliated with at least nine ExxonMobil-funded groups.

Baliunas is best known for a 2003 paper alleging the climate had not changed significantly in the past millennia that was rebutted by thirteen scientists who stated she had misrepresented their work in her paper. This renunciation did not stop ExxonMobil-funded groups from continuing to promote the paper. Through methods such as these, ExxonMobil has been able to amplify and prop up work that has been discredited by reputable climate scientists.

"When one looks closely, ExxonMobil's underhanded strategy is as clear and indisputable as the scientific research it's meant to discredit", said Seth Shulman, an investigative journalist who wrote the UCS report. "The paper trail shows that, to serve its corporate interests, ExxonMobil has built a vast echo chamber of seemingly independent groups with the express purpose of spreading disinformation about global warming".

ExxonMobil has used the laudable goal of improving scientific understanding of global warming - under the guise of "sound science" - for the pernicious ends of delaying action to reduce heat-trapping emissions indefinitely. ExxonMobil also exerted unprecedented influence over US policy on global warming, from successfully recommending the appointment of key personnel in the Bush administration to funding climate change deniers in Congress.

"As a scientist, I like to think that facts will prevail, and they do eventually", said Dr James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's working group on climate change impacts. "It's shameful that ExxonMobil has sought to obscure the facts for so long when the future of our planet depends on the steps we take now and in the coming years".

The burning of oil and other fossil fuels results in additional atmospheric carbon dioxide that blankets the Earth and traps heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased greatly over the last century and global temperatures are rising as a result. Though solutions are available now that will cut global warming emissions while creating jobs, saving consumers money, and protecting our national security, ExxonMobil has manufactured confusion around climate change science, and these actions have helped to forestall meaningful action that could minimize the impacts of future climate change.

"ExxonMobil needs to be held accountable for its cynical disinformation campaign on global warming", said Meyer. "Consumers, shareholders and Congress should let the company know loud and clear that its behavior on this issue is unacceptable and must change".


The full report is at http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon_report.pdf



In recent years, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information. To document this abuse, the Union of Concerned Scientists has created the A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science at:
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/a-to-z-guide-to-political.html


(c) Union of Concerned Scientists

Page Last Revised: 02/12/07

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

When Climate Message is Strong,

Attack the Messenger!

by Joe Brewer

www.commondreams.org (March 14 2007)


An article published today in the New York Times {1} clearly demonstrates the importance of framing when discussing important political issues. William J Broad's article "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype" in the science section already ranks as one of the most popular articles of the day. This widely read article is filled with misuses and abuses of language designed to undermine the credibility of Al Gore as a messenger for global warming.

As an individual trained in both the atmospheric sciences (I have a masters degree from the University of Illinois) and cognitive sciences my skills are well suited to the task of demonstrating Broad's misrepresentation of human-caused climate change through clever manipulations of language. Through the analysis that follows, we shall see that he has worked very hard to spread doubt and skepticism about one of the most important issues humanity must face in the days and years ahead.

Before jumping into the offensive assertions plaguing the article, it may be helpful to elucidate his agenda, which is to undermine Al Gore's message by attacking the credibility of the messenger. In chapter 3 of Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision {2, 3}, George Lakoff discusses the message frame as an important way of structuring information. Common elements of all message frames are certain semantic roles: messengers, audience, issue, message, medium, and images. Crucial to the message is the messenger. The messenger must have both integrity and credibility. People will not give merit to messages that come from dubious sources, even when the message itself is trustworthy.


Plant Seeds of Doubt and Watch What Grows

As we shall see below, William J Broad has worked long and hard to cast shadows over Gore's credibility. I suppose when the message is this firmly grounded in truth, albeit an inconvenient one, the only way to discourage people from taking action is to redirect attention away from the facts. He starts by stating that part of Gore's "scientific audience is uneasy". This is his central claim, which we shall see does not correspond very well with reality. He goes on to say that "Mr Gore's central points are exaggerated and erroneous" (emphasis added) and that many scientists are "alarmed ... at what they call his alarmism". He sets the whole thing off in this way to establish a basis for concern that Gore is not supported by scientists.

He then quotes Don J Easterbrook, a geology professor at Western Washington University and critic of the human causes of global warming, as saying "there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing" (emphasis added). It is interesting to note two things here:

1. No actual inaccuracies are mentioned anywhere in the article

2. Even Professor Easterbrook doesn't directly confront Gore's message. We are left to ask ourselves whether "we are seeing" the message presented by Gore or the message presented in the media (which is often exaggerated and erroneous!)

A great way to strategically plant seeds of doubt is to suggest that a piece of work was revised after something was found to be wrong and then not tell anyone where the revision was made. Broad applies this technique when he tells us that Gore "perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work", but that he "received some comments about items that should be changed". Then Broad goes on to say "he gave no specifics on which points he revised" to leave the reader with the impression that all of Gore's points are suspect. Instead of increasing our confidence by realizing Gore was open to suggestions by experts, we are left with suspicion that any one of his points might be the fateful secret mistake.


Build a Strawman So You Can Burn it Down

The next thing Broad does is tell us that "although Mr Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science". This is a pivotal strategic move because he can now transfer the role of messenger from Gore to an unnamed authority of science, which is a role that can readily be filled by people who hold radical views or by people whose comments are taken out of context. If the authority of science does not support Gore, his message loses its validity. (Contrast this with an alternative framing where the focus is on climate change standing its ground regardless of who talks about it.)

Two examples of radical mis-representatives of science in the article are Professor Easterbrook (who stands at odds with the strong consensus of the scientific community by not believing in global warming ) {4} and Richard Lindzen {5} who is a well known climate skeptic and, according to Harper's magazine, has ties {6} to the oil industry. Lindzen is quoted as accusing Gore of "shrill alarmism".


Technical Scientific Points Easily Muddled

When attempting to introduce doubt where it has no rightful place to be, it is helpful to have subtle technical points at your disposal that are easy to misconstrue. Luckily for Broad, climate science is complicated and nuanced such that is easy to misunderstand. For example, when quoting Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the University of Colorado, we are told that Gore is "overselling our uncertainty about knowing the future". If you pay close attention while watching An Inconvenient Truth you will find that Gore never once claimed to know the future. Climate scientists (and weather forecasters) never predict the future. The physical processes involved are incredibly complicated and defy prediction. Instead, scientists use their vast knowledge of these processes to explore scenarios to see how likely different outcomes are to occur.

Another instance of misquoting comes when we hear a climatologist from the University of Alabama, Roy Spencer, tell us that An Inconvenient Truth did "indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios" but that "all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years". This combination of quotes frames what we know as being much more limited than Gore suggests. Piecing information together in this way is very misleading because it excludes all forms of knowledge that are not observable data. This framing would exclude the bulk of scientific knowledge because most of what we learn from science comes from inferences drawn from the data. Theories, principles, and laws of science are left out entirely when the situation is framed in this way.


Divide and Conquer

While people all over the world are coming together to tackle global warming, tactics are still being used to try to divide us. Gore is described as being "a very polarizing figure in the science community" by Roger Pielk {7}, who is presented as an environmental scientist (he is actually a policy analyst at the University of Colorado). Gore has polarized people, but not in the way we are being lead to believe here. He compels people to take the decisive stance of standing strongly in solidarity. This does create a stark contrast between those who are committed to addressing global warming and those who are committed to meddling with public perceptions of it. In other words, he polarizes us against many members of the conservative community! Though not all, since we now know that many evangelical fundamentalist Christians have come around. {8}


Message Comes Away Unscathed

Despite all of these attempts (and many more that I left out of this analysis) Broad has not managed to make a single claim against the message. After bleeding my highlighter all over his article I came away with no reason to dispel the conclusion we are meant to draw from An Inconvenient Truth. The conclusion we are meant to draw (and we have the "authority of science" to back it up!) is that our planet's climate system has been altered in harmful ways that we as a community need to address. Greenhouse gases have polluted our atmosphere and major changes need to be made in the way we structure our societies to minimize the harm from this pollution.

Each day we fail to take responsibility for the mess we are in compromises our communities. Each day we fail to empathize with all creatures great and small we damage the health of our planet. Each day we fail to recognize our common good reduces the common wealth we have to share with each other. Why isn't this message printed in the New York Times today? That's what I want to know.

Isn't it finally time to transcend this kind of madness?

_____

Joe Brewer is a Fellow at the Rockridge Institute.


Notes:

{1} http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?ex=1331438400&en=2df9d6e7a5aa6ed6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

{2} http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/thinkingpoints/ThinkingPoints_Chapter3.pdf/view

{3} http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780374530907

{4} http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/2006/pr/wwu.htm

{5} http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/2006/pr/wwu.htm

{6} http://dieoff.org/page82.htm

{7} http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/meet_us/roger_pielke/

{8} http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/national/08warm.html?ex=1297054800&en=c3998565b07f9657&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss



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(c) Copyrighted 1997-2007 www.commondreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0314-30.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Faking Action Against Global Warming

by Bill Totten

More than two thousand scientists from 130 nations unanimously and unequivocally stated last month that (1) global climate is warming due to our excessive burning of fossil fuels, and (2) if we don't immediately reduce our burning of fossil fuels substantially, we soon will reach a "tipping point" whereby our atmosphere will continue warming (and our oceans will continue rising) for a thousand years regardless of any and all efforts made by mankind after the tipping point is reached.

Facing such unanimous and unequivocal scientific evidence, neither the governments nor the mass media of industrial nations, which burn the most fossil fuels and contribute most to global warming, can evade the issue any longer. But neither the industrial nations' governments nor their mass media can do or say anything meaningful to curtail burning of fossil fuels because both are owned by the giant corporations that profit most from the burning fossil fuels and causing global warming. So the governments and mass media of the advanced industrial nations equivocate on this issue of global warming. Governments equivocate by debating meaningless laws; the mass media equivocate by trying to convince us that the meaningless debates are something more than pure nonsense.

The following article illustrates this fakery vividly. While scientists tell us that we must cut our burning of fossil fuels by seventy percent within ten years to avoid the tipping point, this article reports on parliamentary debates about laws to reduce burning of fossil fuels four decades from now - when none of the politicians, reporters, editors, or publishers involved will be around to be held accountable for anything they say or do now. The article clearly gives the false impression that we can wait four decades to reduce substantially our burning of fossil fuels instead of reducing them substantially (by seventy percent) now (within ten years). - Bill


_____

Global warming: The climate has changed

Prime Minister hails 'historic day' in the battle against climate change

by Andrew Grice, Political Editor

from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

www.Independent.co.uk (March 14 2007)


The Government has become the first in the world to commit itself to legally binding reductions in carbon dioxide emissions but will come under strong pressure to agree to bigger cuts when its landmark Climate Change Bill goes though Parliament.

In a draft Bill published yesterday, ministers promised to enshrine into law their commitment to cut emissions by sixty per cent by 2050. Opposition parties and Labour MPs joined forces in calling for an eighty per cent reduction.

But even the Government's critics gave the Bill a broad welcome. Hailing a "historic day", Tony Blair said: "This is a revolutionary step in confronting the threat of climate change. It sets an example to the rest of the world but, as important as anything else, it listens and responds to the strong desire on the part of the British people to take the lead and keep it."

The Bill also sets an interim target of reducing emissions by between 26 per cent and 32 per cent by 2020. Legally binding five-year "carbon budgets" will be fixed fifteen years ahead to keep it on course.

A new Committee on Climate Change, appointed by the Government, will provide independent expert advice. Although ministers have rejected calls for annual targets, they promised to make an annual progress report to parliament.

David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, said the Bill provided a "robust and durable" framework and expected it to become law by Easter next year. He admitted that ministers would not end up "at the Old Bailey" if the targets were missed but said the Government could face a judicial review. His officials said pressure groups would be able to apply for such a review, allowing judges to "name and shame" the Government or force it to buy more "carbon credits" to permit higher emissions.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats criticised the absence of annual targets but environmental campaigners on the Labour benches said they were unlikely to rebel over that. However, they said they might make common cause with opposition MPs in trying to amend the Bill so that it committed the Government to an eighty per cent cut.

Colin Challen, a Labour MP who is to become a climate change campaigner after the next general election, said the latest evidence pointed to the need to go further than sixty per cent. "The Bill is excellent but we need to have a higher emissions cut by 2050. We have got to aim high", he said, adding that ninety per cent might be required.

Peter Ainsworth, the shadow Environment Secretary, welcomed the measure but said that the Tories' policy review might conclude that an eighty per cent cut was needed. "There are areas where the Bill will need toughening up", he said.

Chris Huhne, the environment spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said: "The science is suggesting that we have to go higher than sixty per cent, probably around eighty per cent". He criticised the delay in introducing a full Bill rather than a draft, warning that Gordon Brown, if he becomes Prime Minister, might try to water down a measure to which Mr Blair was more committed. The Tories and Liberal Democrats expressed concern about the five-year targets period, saying that one government could try to pin the blame for missing them on its successor.

Sian Berry, principal speaker for the Green Party, said: "A target of sixty per cent by 2050 is not nearly enough - we need to achieve ninety per cent cuts by this date. Scientists say that anything less makes it probable that global temperatures will rise by more than two degrees Celsius, which will have disastrous consequences."

The draft Bill marks a victory for pressure groups who have fought a long campaign for legally binding targets. Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "We are delighted the Government has recognised the need for a new law to tackle climate change. But the draft Bill must be strengthened if the UK is to set a global example. It must include bigger cuts in carbon dioxide emissions and make all future governments accountable for their role in delivering these cuts."

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, hailed Mr Blair as an "action hero" for inspiring him to introduce a law committing California to an eighty per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. In a joint interview with Mr Blair for ITV News, Mr Schwarzenegger said: "It is very clear the Prime Minister has been a great inspiration to many, many countries all over the world ... I think he is a pioneer, because he has had the guts to sign the Kyoto treaty and to show to the world that you can protect the environment and protect the economy at the same time."


The Climate Change Bill's main points

* Britain is to become the first country in the world to set legally binding targets for cutting its carbon dioxide emissions. The targets will be aimed at cutting emissions of the gas which causes global warming by between 26 per cent and 32 per cent by 2020, and sixty per cent by 2050.

* New system of five-year "carbon budgets" to cap total emissions. Limits set fifteen years in advance to help business planning. Ministers say that the caps will set a "trajectory" for hitting longer term Government carbon dioxide emissions targets.

* Courts are to be given powers to "name and shame" ministers if targets are missed.

* An Independent Committee on Climate Change will be established to advise on progress towards hitting emissions targets.

* The committee will be tasked with making annual reports to Parliament on progress towards emissions targets.

* Ministers required to produce five-year reports on the potential impact of climate change and their responses.

* Government will be granted new powers to introduce regulations to help ministers impose future controls on emissions, such as a possible future domestic emissions trading scheme.


Key Dates ...

1827 French scientist Jean-Baptiste Fourier compares the warming effect of the atmosphere to a greenhouse.

1863 John Tyndall, an Irish scientist, shows how water vapour in the atmosphere can act as a greenhouse gas by trapping heat.

1890s Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggests that burning fossil fuels may lead to a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which could exacerbate the greenhouse effect.

1957 David Keeling, a US scientist, begins to monitor carbon dioxide on a long-term basis and soon finds a year-on-year rise.

1979 First World Climate Conference highlights the possibility of global warming.

1985 The first world conference on the greenhouse effect his held at Villach in Austria.

1987 Warmest year on record.

1988 US congressional hearings blame major drought in the United States on the influence of global warming. The World Meteorological Organisation set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

1990 First report of the IPCC finds that the planet has warmed by 0.5 degree Celsius on average since the start of the 20th century.

1992 Climate Change Convention signed in Rio by 154 nations sets initial targets to reduce the scale of carbon dioxide emissions, based on emissions in 1990.

1995 The hottest year to date.

1997 Kyoto protocol agrees binding cuts in emissions but US says it will not ratify unless Third World countries are included.

1998 Hottest year on record, in the hottest decade.

2001 George Bush abandons Kyoto, saying the science is uncertain. IPCC publishes its third assessment report. Link strengthened between man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and global warming.

2002 The EU and Japan ratify Kyoto but Russia delays. The world experiences second hottest year on record.

2003 Heatwave kills thousands across Europe. Scientists link it directly with global warming.

2004 Russia signs up to Kyoto, so it can now come into force in 2005.

2005 Second warmest year on record globally. Kyoto protocol comes into force. Economist Nicholas Stern publishes his report saying that we cannot afford to do nothing about climate change. In August, New Orleans is devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

2006 The IPCC confirms that global warming is real and that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are at least partly responsible. Former US vice-president Al Gore wins an Oscar for the film An Inconvenient Truth, warning about global warming.

Steve Connor

Also in this section

* A Bill which makes reducing carbon emissions a legal duty
* The real global warming swindle
* UK 'to lead world' in climate change fight
* Light pollution rubs out stars
* How Liz put her (carbon) foot in it

(c) 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355957.ece


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Channel 4's Problem with Science

It doesn't give a damn about whether the facts stack up - as long as it creates a controversy.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (March 13 2007)


Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the Dark Ages. All the great heroes of the discipline - Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein - took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today's crank has often proved to be tomorrow's visionary.

But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed that AIDS can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will one day be hailed as a genius. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have "any measurable effect" on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself to Galileo {1}.

The problem with "The Great Global Warming Swindle", which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the British government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands of people have been misled into believing that there is no problem to address.

The film's main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the Sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on earth are in "strikingly good agreement" with the length of the cycle of sunspots {2}.

Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the "agreement" was the result of "incorrect handling of the physical data" {3}. The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has in fact declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results {4}. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes they had made - in this case in their arithmetic {5}.

So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the Sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the Sun and global cloud cover {6}. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that when the right data are used, a correlation is not found {7}.

So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen's co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared that there was in fact a correlation - not with total cloud cover but with "low cloud cover" {8}. This too turned out to be incorrect {9}. Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show that cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere {10}. Accompanying it was a press release which went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and current climate events are the result of cosmic rays {11}.

As Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA has shown on www.realclimate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. "We've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work", Schmidt says, "but this example is by far the most blatant 'extrapolation beyond reasonableness' that we've seen". {12} None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.

The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the earth's surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine {13,14,15}.

Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the lead authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. "Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human- induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global- average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected." {16}

Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went quietly back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the global denial industry, some of them, like the film makers, shriek "censorship!" This is the best example of manufactured victimhood I have ever come across. If you demonstrate that someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Professor Wunsch says that he was "completely misrepresented" by the programme, and "totally misled" by the people who made it {17}.

This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director, Martin Durkin. In 1998 the Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had "misled" his interviewees about "the content and purpose of the programmes". Their views had been "distorted through selective editing" {18}. Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology.

Cherry-pick your results, choose work which is already outdated and discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The Twin Towers were brought down by controlled explosions; MMR injections cause autism; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence which appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question.

But for the people who commissioned this film, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited - like Martin Durkin and a certain nutritionist of our acquaintance. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.

www.monbiot.com


References:

1. David Bellamy, 14th August 2004. An ill wind blows for turbines. Letter to the Guardian.

2. Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, 1991. Length of the solar cycle: an indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate. Science, Vol 254, 698-700.

3. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, 2004. Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data. Eos, Vol. 85, No. 39.

4. Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 2000. Reply to "Solar cycle lengths and climate: A reference revisited" by P Laut and J Gundermann. Journal of Geophysical Research Vol 105, No 27, 493-495.

5. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, ibid.

6. Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 1997. Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage: A missing link in solar-climate relationships. The Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Vol 59, 1225-1232.

7. Peter Laut, 2003. Solar activity and terrestrial climate: an analysis of some purported correlations. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics Vol 65, 801-812.

8. Nigel Marsh and Henrik Svensmark, 2000. Low cloud properties influenced by cosmic rays. Physical Review Letters Vol 85, no 23. 5004-5007.

9. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, ibid.

10. Henrik Svensmark et al, 2007. Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions. Proceedings of the Royal Society Volume 463, Number 2078, 1364-5021.

11. Danish National Space centre, October 2006. Getting closer to the cosmic connection to climate.
http://spacecenter.dk/publications/press-releases/getting-closer-to-the-cosmic-connection-to-climate

12. Gavin Schmidt, 16th October 2006. Taking Cosmic Rays for a spin. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/taking-cosmic-rays-for-a-spin/

13. Carl A Mears and Frank J Wentz, 2nd September 2005. The Effect of Diurnal Correction on Satellite-Derived Lower Tropospheric Temperature. Science. Vol 309, pages 1548-1551.

14. B D Santer et al, 2nd September 2005. Amplification of Surface Temperature Trends and Variability in the Tropical Atmosphere. Science. Vol 309, pages 1548-1551.

15. Steven J Sherwood, John R Lanzante and Cathryn L Meyer, 2nd September 2005. Radiosonde Daytime Biases and Late-20th Century Warming. Science. Vol 309, pages 1556-1559.

16. Tom Wigley et al, April 2006. Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere - Understanding and Reconciling Differences: Executive Summary. The US Climate Change Science Program.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-execsum.pdf

17. Geoffrey Lean, 11th March 2007. An inconvenient truth ... for C4. Independent on Sunday.

18. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel 4 to apologise to four interviewees in "Against Nature" series. Press release.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/13/channel-4s-problem-with-science/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Shopper, Repent!

The leader of the Church of Stop Shopping explains how consumerism corrupts us - and how "not-buying" is our salvation.

by Bill Talen, aka Reverend Billy


In our strange worship at the Church of Stop Shopping we recently took a shiny Sunbeam toaster and put it in the center of the altar.

A young man named Jonah walked up the aisle of the church for his exorcism. As he walked toward the Sunbeam his obvious admiration for it, competing with his faith in the potential of his own buylessness, was very clear. The congregation prayed that he would somehow not grab that sleek chrome bread heater (it resembled a Mercedes coupe and had computerized controls, including a woman's voice that purred "Your toast is done"). I placed my hand on the forehead of this shaking soul as he pleaded with us, "Oh, I don't need your help, I'm just browsing!" How could we possibly blame him for the bald lie? We had positioned the Sunbeam beautifully on a red velvet cloth.

As Jonah reached for the product we prayed hard. The choir hummed and the deacons moved forward to lay hands on the craven consumer as the devil pulled the young man's begging fingers toward the toaster. Jonah was pretty far gone. "Oh ... toast and butter ... toast and butter ... it's more than a smell ... Oh, my God! Black currant jam on the butter, oh, oh!" The cry was hideous.

But wait! Jonah's hand hesitated, and then pulling out of that force field, it flew back and wavered there in the air. Jonah stared, in shock, at his released fingers. Then he ran around the church as if proving to a Pentecostal TV audience that now he could walk. Held aloft by the preacher, his hand was shaking with new freedom, unburdened. The Stop Shopping Gospel Choir was swaying with the power of a receiptless God-Goddess that surpasseth all valuation. The object looked cheated, cuckolded. Finally the Sunbeam deluxe toaster was just fucking junk.

Not-buying is a brave thing to do. At first it may induce vertigo, identity weirdness, and a desire for an unwanted pregnancy, but most often a new believer will have an abnormal kitsch-acquisition fit. The first response to the break in buying may be a huge sucking sound in your hands - you want to buy something, anything. You are headed for a relapse, a spree. My pastoral advice is to steer clear of Ralph Lauren, Kenneth Cole, or any other fashion designer who is trying to anticipate the not-buying revolution by copping a look of weatheredness, offhandedness, or lack of manufacture. Their sales departments think all day about your escape, admiring it and blocking it. They study you via surveillance feeds as they sit in their easy chairs, thoughtfully rubbing their chins.

When you lift your hand from the product and back away from it, a bright, unclaimed space opens up. Consumers think it is a vacuum. It is really only the unknown - full of suppressed ocean life, glitterati from Bosch, DNA twists, and childhood quotes that if remembered would burn down the Disney Store. Many Americans consider this withdrawing gesture a dark thing. Officially, it is absurd, an antigesture, like an American who didn't go west, who didn't go into space, who had sex without a car.

In the Church of Stop Shopping we believe that buying is not nearly as interesting as not-buying. When you back away from the purchase, the product may look up at you with wanton eyes, but it will slump quickly back onto the shelf and sit there trying to get a life. The product needs you more than you need it - remember that.

Now, if you try this - if you lift your hand from the product, pull that hand back into the aisle, back away from the product, and carefully move toward the door - you may feel turbulence deep in your muscles' memory. You may feel the old grab, the lift, the swipe of plastic, and finally the bagging for the road. The ex-consumer can easily lose his or her footing, buffeted by all those ghost gestures.

Like crack cocaine or membership in the National Rifle Association, shopping is an annihilating addiction that must be slowed down to be stopped. Or flooded with new and different light. But people, please - do something! Think of something quick. The research phase is over. How many times do we have to hear that seven percent of the world's population is taking a third of the world's resources? How many neighborhoods need to be malled? When will our foreign policy be violent enough to turn our heads? Recently a local Starbucks rang with shouts of "We are from the Church of the Necessary Interruption!" We try many strategies. Enacting a purchase in a formal church ritual on Sunday or acting out a comic version of being born again might help those parishioners when they are cornered in Temptation Mall. Sweatshops are truly shocking, and I've seen the sheer force of the information stop a shopper. We make dramas, we sing and shout, and chain ourselves to Mickey Mouse. We are desperate to access the bright and unclaimed space that the corporations must desperately hide.

In another time, long, long ago, maybe you could have gone ahead and had a life without shopping. But now life without shopping is something that takes years of practice, since shopping is so virulent and ubiquitous that mothers are bathing their wombs with sounds of Mozart so that their fetuses will score higher on their SATs. Now everything from the most intimate disease to daydreaming is a pretext for the avant-fascism of convenience, comfort, and closure.

We might call that unclaimed space "ordinary life". And how do we design that back in? How much of real life hasn't made it into our fully mediated consumption? Can we ever go home again? We have made thousands of purchases - thousands of times the doors have closed behind us as we walked farther into that big, big sale.

The bumper sticker says Birth, Shopping, Death. Well, birth and death are a part of ordinary life. And ordinary life is itself amazing; the intriguing mystery that precedes birth and follows death does not stop when we are alive. Perhaps the great con began when churches made us pay our own arrival and departure. Life itself has as much unknown in it as death; it is just as inexplicable. That's the thrill of the ride. We say, Put the ODD Back in God!

We shop because we fear life. We shop because we want to banish from life something we identify with death, the unknown. It waits for us in that bright, unclaimed space. Of course, we are trained to think of what we can't know as a bad thing. Actually, it is the source of the brightness; it is why this space has no owner.

I'm claiming that the rejection of living-by-products opens up a sensual and peopled life, and it also has in it an acceptance of the unknown, which is always waiting with the glorious indifference of the fires that float above us in the night sky. Is it a contradiction that accepting this unknown is what makes it possible for us to live together? Well, there is nothing more thoroughly mysterious than love, thank God. Those who organize defenses against the Unknown (such as religious fundamentalists and consumer fundamentalists) foment numbness, hatred, and war. Unfortunately, they have perfected their imitation of ordinary living, and that comes to us as the comforting ghost gesture of shopping.

Ordinary life will feel counterintuitive, to put it mildly. But what will happen to the American consumer when the consuming stops is about as fascinating a question as we can ask.

_____

Excerpted from What Should I Do if Reverend Billy is in My Store? by Bill Talen (The New Press, 2005). Reprinted with the author's permission.

Bill Talen is an actor and activist who, as the Reverend Billy, leads the Church of Stop Shopping, an anti-consumerist communion devoted to putting the "Odd into God". He lives and preaches in New York City, but has been feted and arrested in several countries. For further information, visit revbilly.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 SoMAreview, LLC. All Rights Reserved

http://www.somareview.com/revbilly.cfm

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Anti-Empire Report

Some things you need to know before the world ends

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org (March 05 2007)


Flash! This just in! The Cold War was not a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It was a struggle between the United States and the Third World. What there was, was people all over the Third World fighting for economic and political changes against US-supported repressive regimes, or setting up their own progressive governments. These acts of self-determination didn't coincide with the needs of the American power elite, and so the United States moved to crush those governments and movements even though the Soviet Union was playing virtually no role at all in these scenarios. (It is remarkable the number of people who make fun of conspiracy theories but who accepted without question the existence of an International Communist Conspiracy.)

Washington officials of course couldn't say that they were intervening to block economic or political change, so they called it "fighting communism", fighting a communist conspiracy, fighting for freedom and democracy.

I'm reminded of all this because of a recent article in the Washington Post about El Salvador. It concerned two men who had been on opposite sides in the civil war of 1980-1992. One was Jose' Salgado, who had been a government soldier, and is now the mayor of San Miguel, El Salvador's second-largest city.

Salgado enthusiastically embraced the scorched-earth tactics of his army bosses, the Post reports, even massacres of children, the elderly, the sick - entire villages. It was all in the name of beating back communism, Salgado says he remembers being told. But he's now haunted by doubts about what he saw, what he did, and even why he fought. A US-backed war that was defined at the time as a battle against communism is now seen by former government soldiers and former guerrillas as less a conflict about ideology and more a battle over poverty and basic human rights.

"We soldiers were tricked", says Salgado. "They told us the threat was communism. But I look back and realize those weren't communists out there that we were fighting - we were just poor country people killing poor country people."

Salgado says he once thought that the guerrillas dreamed of communism, but now that those same men are his colleagues in business and politics, he is learning that they wanted what he wanted: prosperity, a chance to move up in the world, freedom from repression.

All of which makes what they see around them today even more heartbreaking and frustrating. For all their sacrifices, El Salvador is still among the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere - more than forty percent of Salvadorans live on less than $2 a day, according to the United Nations. The country is still racked by violence, still scarred by corruption. For some the question remains: Was it all worth it?

"We gave our blood, we killed our friends and, in the end, things are still bad", says Salgado. "Look at all this poverty, and look how the wealth is concentrated in just a few hands".

The guerrillas Salgado once fought live with the same doubts. Former guerrilla Benito Argueta laments that the future didn't turn out as he'd hoped. Even though some factions of the coalition of guerrilla armies that fought in the civil war were Marxist, he said, ideology had nothing to do with his decision to take up arms and leave the farm where his father earned only a few colones for backbreaking work. Nor did ideology play a role in motivating his friends in the People's Revolutionary Army. He remembers fighting "for a piece of land, for the chance that my children might someday get to go to the university". {1}

The Salvadoran government could never have waged the war as destructively and for as long as it did without a massive influx of military aid and training from Washington - estimated value: six billion dollars; 75,000 Salvadorans dead; about twenty Americans killed or wounded in combat; dissidents today still have to fear right-wing death squads; scarcely any significant social change in El Salvador; the poor remain as ever; a small class of the wealthy still own the country. But never mind. "Communism" was defeated, and El Salvador remains a loyal member of the empire, sending troops to Iraq. {2}

This is not merely of historical interest. A civil war still rages in Colombia. Government soldiers and large numbers of right-wing paramilitary forces, with indispensable and endless military support from the United States, battle "communism", year after year, decade after decade. The casualties long ago exceeded El Salvador. The irony is monumental, for of those labeled "communist", a handful of the older ones may have fancied themselves as heirs to Che Guevara ten or twenty or thirty years ago, but for a long time now the primary motivation of these "left-wing" paramilitary forces has been profits from drugs and kidnapings, obtaining revenge for their comrades' deaths, and staying alive and avoiding capture. Someday the survivors on both sides may well be expressing sentiments and regrets similar to the Salvadorans above, wondering what the hell it was all really about, or at least wondering what the United States's obsessive interest in their country was. (For those who may have forgotten, it should be noted that the Soviet Union has not existed since 1991.)

And someday, as well, survivors on all sides of Washington's "War on Terrorism", may wonder who the real terrorists were.


The Germans have to learn to kill

In the September 5 2005 edition of this report I wrote about the decades-long effort by the United States to wean Japan away from its post-WW2 pacifist constitution and foreign policy and set it back on the righteous path to again being a military power, acting in coordination with US foreign policy needs.

For some years, the United States has of course had the same goal in mind for its other major WW2 foe. But recent circumstances indicate that Washington may be losing patience with the rate of Germany's submission to the empire's embrace. Germany declined to send troops to Iraq and sent only non-combat forces to Afghanistan, not quite good enough for the Pentagon war lovers and their NATO allies. Germany's leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, recently reported the following:

At a meeting in Washington, Bush administration officials, speaking in the context of Afghanistan, berated Karsten Voigt, German government representative for German-American relations: "You concentrate on rebuilding and peacekeeping, but the unpleasant things you leave to us" ... "The Germans have to learn to kill".

A German officer at NATO headquarters was told by a British officer: "Every weekend we send home two metal coffins, while you Germans distribute crayons and woollen blankets".

A NATO colleague from Canada remarked that it was about time that "the Germans left their sleeping quarters and learned how to kill the Taliban".

Bruce George, the head of the British Defence Committee, said "some drink tea and beer and others risk their lives".

And in Quebec, a Canadian official told a German official: "We have the dead, you drink beer". {3}

Yet, in many other contexts since the end of the war the Germans have been unable to disassociate themselves from the image of Nazi murderers and monsters.

Will there come the day when the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents will be mocked by "the Free World" for living in peace?


Should it be legal under international law to criticize the state of Israel?

"On Faith", an Internet feature of the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, poses questions each week to a panel of more than fifty persons from the world of religion. A recent question was "Can you be critical of Israel and not be anti-Semitic?"

Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University replied: "Much depends on the motives of the critic. The unworthy critics today are easy to find ... their shrill voices are neither moderated by love nor tinged with sadness. Their desire is to see the Jewish state destroyed. The worthy critics, by contrast, are more scarce ... their words mingle praise along with reproof. They speak directly, sadly, and always in pain." {4}

So there you have it. A question so ridiculous on its face that it should not even be raised by two media giants or anyone else with any intellectual pretensions, but is being raised because of the unrelenting pressure of the Israeli lobby in the United States and throughout the world. It then receives an appropriately ridiculous answer.

Can anyone express reservations about a papal decree and not be anti-Catholic? Can anyone be critical of the pilgrimages to Mecca, which often end in tragedy, and not be anti-Islam? Can anyone be critical of the African negligence on the AIDS crisis and not be racist?

For anyone in the world to criticize the US war in Iraq do they have to love the United States? To be taken seriously - to be judged a "worthy critic" - must they in the same breath offer some kind of praise for the US? Are we to judge that those who don't do so desire to see the American state destroyed? Can those in Palestine and Lebanon, upon whose heads and homes Israeli bombs fall, be worthy critics of Israeli policies? Are they not speaking "directly, sadly, and always in pain"?


Fortieth anniversary of the March on the Pentagon, coming up March 17; an excerpt from William Blum's memoir.

October 21 1967, the March on the Pentagon, surely one of the most extraordinary and imposing acts of protest and civil disobedience in history - the government hunkered down in its trenches in the face of an audacious assault upon its seat of power by its own citizens; a demonstration much bigger than the Bonus Marchers of 1932 (those depression-stricken World War One veterans demanding payment on their government bonus certificates NOW, not in some pie-in-the-sky future - the people peaceably assembled to petition the government for a redress of grievances, violently and humiliatingly squashed by federal troops under the command of a general named MacArthur, and his aide named Eisenhower, and their officer named Patton.)

After a stirring concert at the Reflecting Pool by Phil Ochs surrounded by 150,000 of his closest friends, most of the protestors marched over the Memorial Bridge to the war factory. Never to be forgotten: the roof of the Pentagon when the colossus first came into view and we marched closer and closer - soldiers standing guard, spaced across the roof from one side to the other, weapons at the ready, motionless, looking down upon us from on high with all the majesty of stone warriors or gods atop a classical Greek temple. For the first time that day I wondered - not without excitement - what I was letting myself in for.

This was wholly unlike my first protest at the Pentagon. This was not a group of Quaker pacifists sworn to non-violence, who could bring out the least macho side of even professional military men, and who would be received cordially in the Pentagon cafeteria. Today, we were as welcome and as safe as narcs at a biker rally. Our numbers included many the boys at the Pentagon must have been itching to get their hands on, like those in the Committee to Aid the National Liberation Front, with their Vietcong flags, and SDS, and other "anti-imperialist" groups, who became involved in some of the earliest confrontations that day.

In sharp contrast to the likes of these were the illuminati like Norman Mailer, Marcus Raskin, Noam Chomsky, Robert Lowell, Dwight McDonald - men in dark suits, white shirts and ties as if to ward off evil spirits with the cross of respectability.

In the vast parking lot to which we were confined, open hostility was kept in check at first, but it was clear that the peace was only an inch deep. Repeated draft-card burnings took place - a veritable performance, with flaming cards held high and flaunted square in the irises of the soldiers, whose faces were masked in studied indifference. Although this augured conflict of unpredictable dimensions, I found it exhilarating to see all those young people acting so principled and fearless. I was sorry that I was too old to have a card to burn.

Scattered pockets of mild confrontation broke out, soon unfolding into more widespread and serious clashes. At one spot a Vietnam teach-in for the troops was broken up by MPs with clubs. Later, 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers, veterans of Vietnam, entered the scene, bayonets fixed, face to face at last with these people they had been hearing about so much, the privileged little sons of bitches whose incessant crying about international law and morality and god-knows-what-else gave aid and comfort to the enemy, the cowardly little snotnosed draft-dodgers who wallowed in sex and dope while the GIs wallowed in mud and death (and dope as well).

The paratroopers proceeded to kick ass - after 'Nam this was a church picnic - and many bruised and battered demonstrators were carried away to waiting prison busses, helping to swell the day's total arrestees to near 700. The protestors, whose only defense was to lock arms, appealed to the soldiers to back off, to join them, to just act human, shouting through a bull horn: "The soldiers are not our enemy, the decision makers are". Though this was a sincere declaration, its failure to sway their attackers gave way to angry, impotent curses of "bastards" and "motherfuckers".

I had no big argument with the idea that the soldiers' bosses were the real enemy, but I had real difficulty with the expressions of "love" for the GIs that some silly hippie types allowed to pass their lips. The soldiers, after all, had made decisions, just as others of their generation had opted for draft evasion or Canada. These soldiers, in particular, were fresh from the killing fields. The idea of "individual responsibility" is not just a conservative buzzword.

Several eyewitnesses told the Washington Free Press that in other areas of the "battlefield" they saw as many as three soldiers drop their weapons and helmets and join the crowd, and that at least one of them was seized and dragged into the Pentagon by MPs soon afterward. Later attempts to obtain information about these soldiers from the Pentagon were met with denials. {5}


There's no evidence like no evidence

"AIDS patients suffering from debilitating nerve pain got as much or more relief by smoking marijuana as they would typically get from prescription drugs - and with fewer side effects - according to a study conducted under rigorously controlled conditions with government-grown pot". {6}

So, yet another study illustrating the absurdity of marijuana use being illegal in the United States. It remains to be seen whether the anti-marijuana forces will even bother to respond with one of their fatuous arguments. My favorite one is that "marijuana use leads to heroin". How do they know? Well, 95%, or 97%, of all heroin users first used marijuana. That's how they know. Of course, 100% of all heroin users first used milk. Therefore, drinking milk leads to heroin?


The sins of omission are more insidious than the sins of commission

Diane Rehm has a large and loyal listenership on National Public Radio, and I think she does a pretty good job with her very wide-ranging interviews, but the woman has one deep-seated flaw: She doesn't understand ideology very well - right from left, conservative from liberal, liberal from radical leftist, and so on. Time and time again she gathers a group to discuss some very controversial issue, and there is not amongst their number a single person of genuine leftist credentials, or even close to it; and from a number of remarks I've heard her make, my guess is that this is not because she has a conservative bias, but rather that she has an inadequate comprehension of what distinguishes left from right; although whoever helps her choosing guests may well be conscious of what they're doing.

The program of February 27, with someone sitting in for Rehm, is a case in point. The topic was Iran - all the controversial issues surrounding that country were on the table. The discussants were: 1) someone from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the oldest, most traditional private institution in support of US imperialism; 2) someone from the American Enterprise Institute, which makes the CFR look positively progressive; 3) someone from the Brookings Institution, which is about on a par with CFR ideologically. The Brookings representative was Kenneth Pollack, former CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, who will always be remembered (or at least should be) for his 2002 book: The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (Random House, 2002). Can we look forward to his next book, "The Case for Global Warming"?

In a society which pays so much lip service to dissent, free speech, and Town Hall "balanced" discussions, the lineup of Diane Rehm's guests is depressingly typical in the mainstream world. Whether it's the 9-11 Commission, the Iraq Study Group, the Congressional JFK assassination committee, or any of dozens of other congressional investigating committees over the years, the questioning, challenging, progressive point of view is almost always one that cannot be entertained in polite society.


Is capitalism past its sell-by date?

The prisoner at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, standing on a box, a pointed black hood over his face, his arms outstretched, electrical wires dangling from his fingers, leading to other parts of his cloaked body ... a symbol, an iconic image of the US war against the people of Iraq.

Now we have, if a photo were available, what could be an iconic image of the US war against the people of America, or at least against their health care - a paraplegic man, no wheelchair or walker, somehow propelling himself along a street in Los Angeles, a broken colostomy bag dangling from his piteous body, clothed in a soiled hospital gown, dragging a bag of his belongings in his clenched teeth ... This human being had been taken by Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center to a homeless mission, which refused to accept him; the man then hurled himself from the hospital van to the street. Witnesses said that the van driver ignored their cries for help and instead applied makeup and perfume before speeding off. {7}

This is one of several cases in the recent past of "homeless dumping" in Los Angeles. It's all very understandable, from a bookkeeping point of view. The homeless missions have only so many beds, the hospitals have a budget and the debits and the credits have to balance. It's what happens when a free market in a free society guarantees access to Coca Cola but not to health care.


Doonesbury

Has anyone noticed how Doonesbury has gone downhill during most of the past year? Not only is the strip usually not very funny, it's very often not even political; lots of TV-sitcom-type humor. Who needs that? There are plenty of other comic strips like that to choose from. What happened to Garry Trudeau?


Notes

{1} Washington Post (January 29 2007), page 1

{2} For further details of the civil war period see William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 54

{3} Der Spiegel (November 20 2006), page 24

{4} Washington Post (February 24 2007), page B9

{5} West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, http://members.aol.com/bblum6/mem.htm

{6} Washington Post (February 13 2007), page 14

{7} Los Angeles Times (February 15 2007)


William Blum is the author of:-

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
(Common Courage Press, 1995)

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002)

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
(Common Courage Press, 2004)


Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6@aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.

Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite.

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate
it if the website were mentioned.

http://killinghope.org/aer43.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Pathologies of Hope

by Barbara Rhrenreich

Harper's Magazine Notebook (February 2007)


I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer: Think positively! Don't lose hope! Wear your pink ribbon with pride! A couple of years later, I was alarmed to discover that the facility where I received my follow-up care was called the Hope Center. Hope? What about a cure? At antiwar and labor rallies over the years, I have dutifully joined Jesse Jackson in chanting "Keep hope alive!" - all the while crossing my fingers and thinking, "Fuck hope. Keep us alive."

There. It's out. Let pestilence rain down on me, for a whole chorus of voices rise up to insist that hope, optimism, and a "positive attitude" are the keys to health and longevity. The more academically respectable among them - the new PhD-level "positive psychologists" - like to cite a study of nuns in which the ones professing a generally positive outlook in their twenties went rather tardily to their maker while the glummer ones dropped off like flies a decade earlier. The average author of motivational materials - books, CDs, and audiotapes - needs no studies to buttress the warning that negative thoughts "can be harmful to your health and might even shorten your life span".

Not only is health at stake; so is your credibility as a citizen, employee, or social entity of any kind. "Ninety-nine out of every 100 people report that they want to be around more positive people", claims the self-help book How Full Is Your Bucket? Many champions of positivity urge one to ostracise negative people - complainers and "victims" - because they are "committed to lose".

It's everywhere, this Cult of Positivity, at least in America, the birthplace of Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and est, where 30,000 beaming "life coaches" ply their trade and a pessimist is no more likely to be elected president than an atheist. George W Bush provides a sterling role model. Asked on his most recent birthday about the potential nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea, as well as the US-instigated civil war in Iraq, he replied, "I'm optimistic that all problems will be resolved".

Google offers more than a million entries on "positive thinking" covering almost any kind of challenge you might encounter. Dieting? Robert Ferguson, the "Master Weight-Loss Coach", tells us, "With a positive attitude you can do, have and be everything you want in life!" Bereaved? You can put the fun back in funeral by replacing it with a "celebration" of the deceased's life. Need money? Attract it to your wallet with positive mental affirmations, such as:

I love having money ... l am open to receive money. I give generously to myself and others. I am generous. I feel great about all the money I spend. Note: Be SPECIFIC about amounts of money [you require].


Cancer? See it positively, as a "growth opportunity", and hopefully not just for the tumor. A representative of the American Cancer Society rebuffed a researcher in the mid-Nineties by saying that the organization didn't "want to be associated with a book on death. We want to emphasize the positive aspects of cancer only." Laid off? Forget the economy and concentrate on reconfiguring your attitude, as explained in the 2004 bestseller We Got Fired! ... And It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us.

One measure of the cult's success is the growth of the "self-improvement" industry, most of which promotes techniques for upgrading your attitude and visualizing success through affirmations that open you to the abundance of the world - like this one, for example, from a current financial self help book:

Place your hand on your heart and say ... "I admire rich people!" "I bless rich people". "I love rich people". "And I'm going to be one of those rich people too!"

In 2000, the self-improvement industry-including books, CDs, seminars, and coaches - took in $3.35 billion. In 2005, it grossed $5.62 billion, with the coaching market alone growing by almost 500 percent.

Until recently, the marketing of optimism was left largely to familiar snake-oil purveyors like motivational speakers, prosperity-oriented preachers, and self-anointed coaches. Then, in 2000, the new academic discipline of positive psychology emerged, complete with annual conferences, a Journal of Happiness Studies, and a World Database of Happiness. There are now more than a hundred courses on positive psychology available on college campuses, and in the spring of 2006, one of them was the most popular course at Harvard. Its professor, Dr Tal D Ben-Shahar, takes an indulgent stance toward his disreputable confederates. "For many years", he says, "the people who were writing about happiness were the self-help gurus. It had a bad rap ... What I'm trying to do in my class is to regain respectability for the concept of self-help."

Much of the behavioral advice offered by the gurus, both credentialed and otherwise, is innocuous. "Smile", advises one success-oriented, positive thinking website, "greet coworkers". Surely the world would be a better, happier place if we all held doors for one another and stopped to coax smiles from babies - if only through the well-known social psychological mechanism of "mood contagion". Nor can I quibble with the common assignment in positive-psych courses to write "gratitude letters" or keep a "gratitude journal". As the mother of two Ivy League graduates, I'm for having all students write weekly odes to their tuition-payers.

The problem, for anyone with a lingering loyalty to secular rationalism, is that the prescriptions don't stop at behavior. Like our culture's ambient Protestantism, the Cult of Positivity demands not only acts but faith. It's not enough to manifest positivity through a visibly positive attitude; you must establish it as one of the very structures of your mind, whether or not it is justified by the actual circumstances. Some gurus attempt to dodge the potential conflict with reality by attributing to positive thoughts the power to control the outer world through a "Law of Attraction", as yet unknown to physicists, whereby thoughts somehow produce their material counterparts in the outer world. The 2005 book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, for example, explains that the universe "is akin to a big mail order department ... You 'order' what you get by sending energetic messages out to the universe based on your predominant beliefs".

The academic side of the cult, which rests its claims to respectability on science, is of course barred from endorsing wacko mind-over-matter notions. Instead, we learn there that irrationality, at least in the form of "positive illusions", works like a vitamin, even at the admitted "cost perhaps of less realism", Scientists should presumably avoid such magical thinking, but it is recommended to everyone else: Go ahead, pump yourself up, imagine that all the obstacles you face are projections of some lingering negativity, whatever gets you through the day.

Why should an intelligent species need to rely on illusions? According to positive psychology's founder, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Selig man, it is our negative, pessimistic, thoughts that are maladaptive and happily, as it turns out, vestigial:

Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modern world.


In this view, which was restated uncritically in a February 2006 New Yorker review of two books on happiness, our Paleolithic ancestors were well served by the suspicion that a saber toothed cat crouched behind every bush. Today we would do better to visualize pots of gold.

There are exceptions, the positive psychologists concede, even in the modern world, and at first glance they seem a little exotic: airplane pilots, for example, need to anticipate worst outcomes rather than happy landings. Recently, Seligman further limited the purview of positive psychology to nations that "are wealthy and not in civil turmoil and not at war", perhaps not realizing that he had thus excluded the majority of the world's people. But even leaving the poor and war-ravaged aside: if a pilot needs a healthy dose of negative thinking, what about the driver of a car? Should I assume, positively, that no one is going to cut in front of me or, more negatively, be prepared to brake?

Child-raising is another quotidian activity that eludes the positive psychologists. Religion and marriage are both recommended as positivity boosters, and they do seem to increase self-reported happiness, but children, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, can be "an extreme source of negative affect". Kids are, in other words, bummers, and it's easy to see why. You might want to be "positive" by advertising a trip to the pediatrician as an opportunity to play with the cool toys in the waiting room rather than an occasion for a painful shot, but no parent dare risk assuming that the sudden quiet from the toddlers', room means they are studying with Baby Einstein. Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks: that's how we reproduce our genomes.

If health and well-being in general are at stake, the positive psychologists would argue, why not indulge in some positive illusions even at the cost of "realism"? There's no question but that extreme, locked-in negativity in the form of depression is a risk factor for physical illness, but the evidence for the health-enhancing effects of positivity is surprisingly muddled. A frequently cited 1988 article arguing that positive illusions, such as unwarrantedly high self-estimations, promote mental health has been disputed. Nor are positive-thinking people necessarily happier than pessimists or realists, since anyone who self-reports positivity is equally likely to self-report happiness. As for "success": in workplaces that enjoin a positive attitude, one would do well to conform, but the halls of fame are lined with the busts of major depressives, including Max Weber, William James, John Donne, and Samuel Johnson.

It takes a positive spin to see a consistently positive effect of positivity on physical health. A 2002 New York Times article headlined "Power of Positive Thinking Extends, It Seems, to Aging" cited two studies linking optimism to longevity - and four studies tracing longevity to such other traits as "conscientiousness", calmness, pessimism, and even cantankerousness. A 2002 study not cited in the Times article found mildly depressed women living longer than nondepressed or more severely depressed women, and even two positive psychologists reported that people displaying negative affect "complain about their health but show no hard evidence of poorer health or increased mortality". As for those oft-cited nuns: Nuns are popular with researchers because of their controlled, homogeneous lifestyle. But that lifestyle is not for everyone, and Freud might think of reasons why those who were not initially enthusiastic about their vocation would go on to live lives of quiet and self-destructive desperation.

In fact, there is some evidence that the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved. Not only are you failing to get better but you're failing to feel good about not getting better. Similarly for the long-term unemployed, who, as I found while researching my book Bait and Switch, are informed by career coaches and self help books that their principal battle is against their own negative, resentful, loser-like feelings. This is victim blaming at its crudest, and may help account for the passivity of Americans in the face of repeated economic insult.

But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering. Far from being a "culture of complaint" that upholds "victims", ours has become "less and less tolerant of people having a bad day or a bad year", according to Barbara Held, professor of psychology at Bowdoin College and a leading critic of positive psychology. If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: "no whining", as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the cult acquires a viral-like reproductive energy, creating an empathy deficit that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.

I got through my bout of cancer in a state of constant rage, directed chiefly against the kitschy positivity of American breast-cancer culture. I remain, although not absolutely, certifiably, cancer-free down to the last cell, at least hope-free. Do not mistake this condition for hopelessness, in the beaten or passive sense, or confuse it with unhappiness. The trick, as my teen hero Camus wrote, is to draw strength from the "refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation". To be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one's moves accordingly.
_____

Barbara Ehrenreich is a Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine. Her new book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, is due out in July.

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Housing Fetish

by Jim Kunstler

www.kunstler.com (January 29 2007)


Martha Stewart was not an accident of history. She came along in the late 20th century as a kind of spirit guide to a society whose bad choices and misinvestments had led to the wholesale destruction of any place in America that people called home. And by this I mean the towns, neighborhoods, and city districts of our land, not just the individual dwellings.

By the 1980s, America had been converted, with monstrous efficiency, into what I have called a geography of nowhere, a panorama of identical highway strips, malls, big box warehouses, fried food out-parcels, and free parking wastelands - all serving the endless new subdivision pods of single family houses. The ultimate result was a landscape full of places no longer worth caring about.

The program was carried out ruthlessly by big corporations and their hand-maidens, the road-builders, the house-builders, and the brotherhood of traffic engineers, but it was fully supported by the public at large and their elected local officials on the planning and zoning boards. It was both an "emergent" economic ecology - a systemic response to decades of cheap oil and favorable geopolitics - and a consciously mapped-out attempt to create a kind of Utopia, in this case a suburban Utopia of Happy Motoring. Whatever it was, nothing like it had ever been seen before.

It had many consequences but one of the worst was the impoverishment of public space. From the social point-of-view, it turned out that housing pods and highway strips lined with strip malls were a poor substitute for main street towns or walkable neighborhoods. Under the insane dictates of single-use zoning, each individual was trapped in a car for hours each day, often in vexing traffic with other isolated individuals, and also often in the company of little children with a low tolerance to being trapped and vexed. Older children lacking drivers' licenses lost access to other social realms beyond the subdivision of houses. The adventurous ones assembled in the bosky berms between the WalMarts and the KMarts to smoke a variety of drugs, worship Satan, and torture kitty cats. The rest were relegated to the room at home with the one-eyed-monster, the television.

The case was not much better for the adults. By the 1980s, both parents had to be out of the house generating income to pay the mortgage and especially to pay for the multiple cars needed to service the family headquarters. Mom went to work not because Betty Friedan said that actuarial science was more fun than managing a house, but because wages were stagnant and Dad could no longer make the family's ends meet.

Out of this sad and desperate circumstance, Martha Stewart arose. The promise of Stewartism was that if the public realm was now inaccessible or meaningless, then one should make the most of the private realm. This was accepted as self-evident by enough people to make Martha extremely wealthy. Luckily for Martha, her job was at home. She didn't have to drive thirty-eight miles to a cubicle in the billing office of Ramjack Medical and spend eight hours each day minutely examining spreadsheets on a computer monitor.

As her wealth and success increased, Martha's resources for doing things in and around the house enabled her to spin a fantasy of uber-homemaking that America found irresistible - despite the fact that everyone else spent so much time away from the house that it was nearly impossible for them to emulate the goddess of hearth and home. Instead, they devoured her many publications and TV shows, finding consolation in all the beautifully portrayed scenes of Martha enacting the fantasy for them.

History is full of ironies and paradoxes, and one of them is that this avatar of home-making was relentlessly hunted down by federal prosecutors for allegedly scamming $40,000 on an insider stock sale, while true major league corporate CEO grifters walked off legally into their golden sunsets with hundreds of millions in back-dated stock options and other booty winkled out of feckless boards of directors.

It is also an ironic coincidence that at the exact time Martha Stewart went off to jail, the American home fantasy went totally off the rails. The systematic shut-down of America's manufacturing sector led policy-makers to insidiously try to replace it with a hyped-up housing industry. They kicked off the program by dropping the prime interest rate as close to zero as possible, making money extremely cheap to borrow. Everybody need a home, the logic went, including those who ordinarily wouldn't have qualified for regular mortgages that required substantial down payments, proof of employment, and other formalities. So the answer was to engineer a financing modality that would allow anyone to buy a house - and thereby ramp up the "homebuilding" industry into super-hyper-turbo-overdrive, which would incidentally generate even more potential house-buyers among the many framers, trimmers, plumbers, electricians, painters, real estate agents, and sellers of Corian countertops, who made good wages or commissions on delivering the "product". Meanwhile, the new housing pods in evermore remote locations, where there were no towns, could be accessorized with all the requisite service infrastructure - new highways, strip malls, Pizza Huts, WalMarts, Best Buys, and video rental joints, all of which had to be built by somebody, making for additional contracts, incomes, and potential house-buyers.

Meanwhile the financial wizards "innovated" methods for dispersing the risk associated with iffy loans (made to people with poor prospects for repayment) by bundling the mortgages into odd-lots and repackaging them as tradable securities, which could be used to "leverage" other finance "plays" yet more exotically abstracted from the actual making-and-selling real things of value. At the same time, the wizards converted the mortgage insurance business into a casino of swappable risk, materializing more fees and profits for themselves out of thin air.

This extremely complex racket worked well for a brief period of time, namely the period when the price of houses steadily increased, year after year, promoting the expectation that rising house "equity" was a permanent condition of life, and that the dependable annual increase in value could be "put to work" in the form of borrowing more money against it. The supposed increase in value protected those trafficking in swappable risk, since increased value banished the risk of loss, and the notion of moral hazard disappeared into the dumpster of history.

The whole racket floundered when several things changed or went awry. One was the sheer saturation of markets. Sooner or later, everybody who might possibly buy a house, got a house. The racket had had the perverse effect of stealing demand from the future by making house-buyers of those who were not really ready to buy - for example very young adults with no savings or people with bad credit records. And not every immigrant from Bangladesh, El Salvador, or the Central African Republic could be positioned as a house buyer - even under the now nearly nonexistent lending standards.

The next thing that went wrong was affordability. If absolutely everybody's house rose ten percent in value every year for years and years - including every "pre-owned" raised ranch shitbox - then sooner or later every house in America would cost at least half a million dollars. And with wages stagnant among the ninety percent who worked outside the financial services industry, sooner or later no house would be affordable to that ninety percent majority under even the most supernaturally lax lending provisions.

The final problem would come when central bankers had to raise interest rates so that customers for debt would accept the risk of investing in a national economy that was increasingly seen to be based on the engineering of modalities to get something for nothing.

This is the point we're at now. The whole system was greatly underwritten by the final peaking of available energy, chiefly oil, which made it possible in the first place to sell so much real estate in the farthest-flung outlands of the American landscape, including not only desert and swamp, but also prime farmland. The housing bubble began to collapse at exactly the moment that the world reached its all-time oil production peak: the summer of 2005.

Now the house market is both saturated and wildly mis-valued. Most of the new houses were built in places that will be logistically unfavorable as motoring becomes less affordable. Many of them are too large to heat as home heating becomes less affordable. The houses are overpriced. Those who must sell must drop their prices. Many such sellers will have to sell for less than the obligations still owed on their houses. The speculators have necessarily fallen by the wayside, because speculation is not possible in a falling market. Those who expected to sell old houses in older places for a half a million dollars or more to buy new houses in new places will have to stay put. As prices fall, the few potential buyers still left will step back in anticipation of further price drops. This "death spiral" will be self-reinforcing and take years to play out. As it occurs, many of the creatively-engineered contracts will be welshed on. Lenders will choke on "non-performing" mortgages. Mortgage-backed securities will lose their credibility and turn into junk or worse (worse-than-junk being certificates with no value whatsoever, not even pennies on the dollar). Bets, plays, leverages, positions, and hedges based on the idea that all these loans would continue performing will be wiped out.

The final result will be a dashed American Dream - of a safe life in a happy home. Poor Martha Stewart will be seen as the goddess who failed. Well, she already has, really, having gone to prison and afterward retreated into her omnimedia fortress of corporate refuge (basically joining the enemy). As the middle class chokes and gets crushed under the weight of its unpayable debts and falling standards of living, Martha may be lucky to avoid getting eaten, along with a long list of other celebrity porkchops that an angry and grievance-filled public will turn on.

Finally, the idea that people could live happily ever after in "homes" devoid of any larger community context, or reality-based economic context, will fail. Perhaps we will even stop calling houses "homes" - as we have been conditioned to do by the realtors hoping to manipulate all our subconscious desires for safety, familiarity, and order in this world of chaos and sorrow.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Man Who Farms Water

An inspirational farmer proving just how much is possible for farmers in Africa, even in times of extreme drought

by Brad Lancaster

The Ecologist (February 2007)


During an extended trip through southern Africa in the summer of 1995, I had the privilege of meeting a true ecological visionary. His name is Mr Zephaniah Phiri Maseko, but to the Permaculture Trust of Botswana (who directed me to him), as well as to hundreds of people throughout the region, he is known more generally as 'the man who farms water'.

As a longtime student of sustainability and rainwater harvesting, I've found an abundance of simple, inspiring, and highly effective strategies practised in areas having far fewer available resources than the United States.

On this trip I'd been through the arid and temperate regions of South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, with the goal of observing at first hand, proven strategies for sustainable living that I might be able to bring home and adapt to the similar climates of the southwest USA.

Gazing out of the window of a colourful old bus roaring through the countryside of southern Zimbabwe,, I was struck by both the beauty of the land and its similarities to my home: rolling hills of yellow grass on red earth, broken up by small thickets of twisting, umbrella-like trees. Almost nine hours later, we crested a pass of low-lying semi-desert vegetation; below us spread a vast, dry prairie veldt capped with barren outcroppings of granite. Trees were sparse. A brilliant expanse of blue sky stretched overhead, reminiscent of the sky above the open grasslands of southeastern Arizona. The bus crept slowly downhill and stopped in Zvishavane, a small rural town in a province of the same name.

The local director of CARE International escorted me to a row of single-storey houses. One of these was the simple office of the Zvishavane Water Resources Project, and there on the porch sat the water farmer himself, reading the Bible. As my ride came to a stop he sprang up, beaming. Here at last was Mr Zephaniah Phiri Maseko. When he learned how far I had travelled to meet him, he burst into wonderful laughter. He explained that lately, visitors from all over the globe seemed to be dropping in about once a week. Then he jumped in his jeep and we drove off together over worn, eroded dirt roads toward his farm. An endless stream of humour, poetic analogies and stories poured out of him.

The best story of all was his own.


The Garden of Eden, Mark II

In 1964, Phiri was fired from his job on the railway for being politically active against the white-minority-led Rhodesian government. The government told him that he would never work again. With a family of eight to support, Phiri turned to the only two things he had - an overgrazed and eroding 7.4-acre (three-hectare) family landholding, and the Bible.

He put the Scriptures to use as a kind of gardening manual. Reading Genesis, Phiri was struck by the realisation that everything Adam and Eve needed was provided in the Garden of Eden. 'So', he thought, 'I must create my own Garden of Eden'. Gifted also with a firm grasp of geography, however, he realised that Adam and Eve had had the benefit of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in their region, while he didn't have even an ephemeral creek. 'So', he thought, 'I must also create my own rivers'.

The family farm is located on the north-northeast-facing slope of a hill providing good winter sun to the site (important in the southern hemisphere). The top of the hill is a large exposed granite dome from which stormwater runoff once freely and erosively flowed. The average annual rainfall in the region is just over 22 inches (570mm). However, as Phiri points out, this average is based on extremes. Many years are drought years, when the land is lucky to receive 12 inches (304mm) of rain.

When Phiri began fanning, it was very difficult to grow crops successfully, let alone make a profit. There were frequent droughts and he had no money for deep wells, pumps, fuel and other equipment needed for groundwater irrigation.

Along with everyone else in the area, Phiri was dependent on the rains for water. Storms always brought him outside to observe how water flowed across his land. He noticed that moisture lingered longer in small depressions and in the upslope of rocks and plants than it did in areas where sheet flow went unchecked. He was struck by a realisation: he could mimic and enhance areas of his land where this was occurring.

Thus began Phiri's self-education and work in rainwater harvesting, or 'water farming'. Thirty years later, this humble, hard-working African farmer has managed to create a sustainable system that now provides all the water needs of his land and farm - which has thrived as a result - and his household, from rainfall alone.


Check dams - and 'immigration centre'

'You start catchment upstream, before the old deep gullies form downstream', said Phiri. Beginning at the top of the watershed, he built unmortared stone walls at random intervals on contour (along lines of equal elevation). These 'check dam walls' slow or 'check' the flow of storm runoff and disperse the water as it moves through winding paths between the stones. Runoff is then more easily managed because it never gets a chance to build up to more destructive volumes and velocities. Controlled runoff from the granite dome is then directed to unlined reservoirs just below.

The larger of the two reservoirs is what Phiri calls (with a characteristic flair for metaphor) his 'immigration centre'. 'It is here that I welcome the water to my farm and then direct it to where it will live in the soil', he told me. The water is directed into the soil as quickly as possible. The reservoirs are located at the highest point in the landscape where soil begins to cover the granite bedrock.

Above the reservoirs, the slope is steep, with very little soil. At and below the reservoir, the slope is gentle and soil has accumulated. 'The soil is like a tin', Phiri explains. 'The tin should hold all water. Gullies and erosion are like holes in the tin that allow water and organic matter to escape. These must be plugged.'

Phiri's 'immigration centre' is also a water gauge. He now knows from his long experience that if it fills three times in a season, enough rain will have infiltrated the soil of his entire farm to support the bulk of his vegetation for two years.

The reservoirs occasionally fill with sand carried in the runoff water. This is used for mixing concrete, or for reinforcing the mass of the reservoir wall. Gravity brings this resource to Phiri free of charge.

Overflow from the smaller reservoir is directed, via a short pipe, to an aboveground ferro-cement (steel-reinforced concrete) cistern that feeds the family's courtyard garden in dry spells. The family has another cistern, shaded and cooled by a lush, food-producing passion vine. This cistern collects water from the roof of the house for potable use inside.

Aside from these two cisterns, all the water-harvesting structures on the farm enable water to infiltrate directly into the soil. Nothing is wasted. Even all the grey water (used wash water) from an outdoor washbasin is drained to a covered, unmortared, stone-lined, underground cistern where the water is percolated into the soil and made available to the roots of surrounding plants.

Across the farm's entire watershed, from top to bottom, numerous water harvesting structures act as nets that collect the flow of surface runoff and quickly infiltrate the water into the soil before it can evaporate. These include check dams, vegetation planted on contour, terraces, berm 'n' basins (dug out basins and earthen or vegetated berms laid out on contour), and infiltration basins (basins without berms). All these handmade structures catch and put to use water that was once lost to a government built drainage system.

Many years before, the government of Zimbabwe had built large drainage swales throughout the region. Unlike water harvesting swales or berm 'n' basins, these ditches were not placed across the slopes on contour (to retain water), but instead were built so they would drain water off the land. Vast amounts of unhindered monsoon runoff were caught by the drainage swale, carried away to a central drainage, and shot out to the distant floodplain. The erosion problem was addressed, but drought intensified because the area was being robbed of its sole source of water.


From conception to fruition

Phiri turned things around by digging a series of large 'fruition pits' (basins about twelve feet long, by three to six feet wide, by four to six feet deep) in the bottoms of all the government drainage swales on his land. Now, when it rains, the pits fill with water and the overflow successively fills one pit after another across his property. Long after the rain stops, water remains in the fruition pits, percolating into the soil.

The fruit of Phiri's fruition pits takes the form of thatch grasses, fruit trees and timber trees, which are planted in and around the pits. This vegetation provides building materials, cash crops, food, erosion control, shade, and windbreaks. All are watered strictly by rain and the rising groundwater table underground.


Growing steadily stronger

Phiri explained that he dug fruition pits to 'plant' the water so it could germinate elsewhere. 'I have taught the trees my system', he told me. 'They understand my language. I put them here and tell them, "Look, the water is there. Now, go and get it".' A basin or berm for holding water may be constructed around or beside the trees, but Phiri always places such earthworks at some distance from them, so their roots are encouraged to reach out and grow strong as they seek water.

A truly diverse mix of open-pollinated crops - such as basketry reeds, squash, corn, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, peas, garlic, onion, beans, passion fruit, mango, guava, and paw paws; along with such indigenous crops and trees as matobve, muchakata, munyii, and mutamba - are planted between the swales and contour berms. This diversity gives his family food security; if some crops fail due to drought, disease or pests, others will survive.

Rather than using hybrid and genetically modified (GMO) seed, Phiri uses open-pollinated varieties to create superior seed stock as he collects, selects and plants seed grown in his own garden. By propagating seed from plants that have prospered off the sporadic rainfall and unique growing conditions of his site, each season his seed becomes better suited to his land and climate. This is another form of water conservation - Phiri is helping his seeds to adapt to living off less water, instead of adapting his farm management to import more water.

Living fertiliser factories paper the farm, in the form of nitrogen-fixing plants. One example, the edible, leguminous pigeon pea, is also used for animal fodder and mulch. Phiri has found that soils amended with local organic matter and nitrogen-fixing plants infiltrate and hold water much better than those amended with synthetic fertilisers. As he says, 'You apply fertilizer one year but not the next, and the plants die. Apply manure once and plant nitrogen-fixing plants, and the plants continue to do well year after year. Synthetically- fertilised soil is bitter.'

The abundant food and fruit Phiri produces is anything but bitter. He's been generous with his abundance, giving away a diverse array of trees to anyone who wants them. Unfortunately, as Phiri points out, the majority of the trees he gives away die when people don't implement rainwater-harvesting techniques before planting. 'The land must harvest water to give to the trees, so before you plant trees you must plant water'.

The soil is Phiri's catchment tank, and it is vast. In times of drought, his neighbours' wells go dry, even those that are deeper than his. Yet, Phiri says, 'My wells always have water'. This is due not only to the particular hydrologic/geologic conditions of his site, but also because he is putting more water into the soil than he takes out.

Except for one well, which is lined and has a hand pump for household water use, all are open and lined with unmortared stone. 'These wells', explains Phiri, 'are those of an unselfish man. The water comes and goes as it pleases, for you see, in my land it is everywhere.' During severe drought, Phiri uses a donkey-driven pump to draw from these wells to water annual crops in nearby fields.

A lush wetland lies below the wells at the lowest point of Phiri's property. Here, three rich aquaculture reservoirs are surrounded by a vibrant soil-stabilising grove of bananas, sugar cane, reeds and grasses. The fish are harvested for food and their manure enriches the water used to irridate the vegetation. The taller vegetation creates a windbreak around the ponds, reducing water loss to evaporation. The dense, lower-growing grasses filter incoming runoff water.


Rhyming with nature

For years, Phiri was an object of scorn in Zvishavane, standing in opposition to international aid and government programmes that pushed groundwater extraction and export crops.

Phiri's response - aside from proving his critics wrong with the success of his farm - was to create the Zvishavane Water Resources Project, a non-governmental organisation. The organisation is having a dramatic effect. He influenced CARE International in his region to shift much of its work from giving away imported food to helping people implement his methods, and growing their own food.

When I asked Phiri about the three decades it took him to get his land and his vision to the place it is today, he answered, 'It's a slow process, but that's life. Slowly implement these projects, and as you begin to rhyme with nature, soon other lives will start to rhyme with yours.'

We walked back up toward the house - and stopped midway. Phiri's eyes were sparkling as he pointed across the fence. His neighbour was in the government's diversion swale, digging fruition pits on the adjoining property. 'Look' cried my guide, 'now he is starting to rhyme!'

As an educator in the field of sustainable living, Phiri is an ongoing inspiration. His work and his perspective enabled me to understand what we can accomplish if we choose to live as stewards of the land by truly walking the talk. Phiri shows how water scarcity can be turned to water abundance - by planting the rain both in the soil and in the minds of the people.

_____

Brad Lancaster is the author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, available from
www.HarvestingRainwater.com

_____

If you would like to support the work of this grassroots project, write to Mr Zephaniah Phiri Maseko, ZWRP, Post Office Box 118, Zvishavane, Zimbabwe.


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Just a Lot of Hot Air

An audit of the government's planned carbon cuts shows they will achieve only half of what it claims.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (March 05 2007)


"If", said Mr Blair at the launch of the Clinton Climate Initiative last year, "we do not motivate ourselves to take the decisions commensurate with the gravity of the threat that we face, we will betray in the most irresponsible way the generations to come. That is not something I want on my conscience as a political leader." {1}

Well it looks like he's going to have to live with it. Tony Blair has had ten years in which to tackle Britain's contribution to global climate change, and he has blown it. His bold intitiatives and stirring speeches look like little more than greenwash. For the first time, we have the figures to prove it.

With Channel 4's series Dispatches, I commissioned a team of environmental scientists at University College, London to conduct a peer-reviewed audit of the government's planned greenhouse gas reductions {2}. The scientists, led by Professor Mark Maslin, estimated the real impact of its carbon-cutting policies. Nothing quite like this has ever been done before. The results are staggering.

The government has two formal targets for reducing Britain's climate changing gases. The first is the one set by the Kyoto Protocol, which commits the UK to a 12.5% reduction by 2012. The second is its long-term goal, of a sixty per cent cut in carbon dioxide by 2050. This target will be made legally binding later this year.

Last year the government's Energy Review found that to show "real progress" towards the 2050 target, by 2020 the UK's greenhouse gas emissions would need to be reduced to between 143 and 149 million tonnes per year {3}. This means a cut of 29 to 31% on 1990 levels. We asked Professor Maslin's team to assess the policies which are supposed to deliver it.

For an audit, the 2020 aim is more useful than the 2050 target. If we are to have a realistic chance of hitting it, the necessary policies must already be in place or in development. While the Blair government would be only partly responsible if we fail to make sixth per cent by 2050, it will carry almost all the blame if we don't reach its milestone in 2020.

Our audit reveals that the government's assessment of its own policies is wildly optimistic. Instead of a 29 to 31% cut by 2020, it is currently on course to deliver a reduction of between twelve per cent and seventee per cent {4}. At this rate the UK won't meet its 2020 milestone until 2050. This result suggests that the government's claim to be "leading the world on tackling climate change" {5} is simply another product of the Downing Street spin machine. Its carbon-cutting policies are a sham.

How has this happened? You don't have to look very far to find out. In almost every sector, government programmes have been characterised by voluntarism, vacillation and surrender to industrial lobby groups.

Take transport, for example. The government expects that national transport emissions (not counting international flights) will rise by 3.8 million tonnes between 1990 and 2020 {6}. Professor Maslin's team discovered that the real increase will be between seven and thirteen million tonnes {7}.

Faced with a vocal and powerful motoring lobby, Blair's government has sought to cut emissions in three ways, all of which are failing. The first is a voluntary agreement, struck in Brussels with the major motor manufacturers. In 1998, the car makers promised they would bring the average emissions from new cars down from 188 grams per kilometre to 140 in ten years. The deadline falls due next year, and they will miss their target by half: the real figure is likely to be 164 grams per kilometre {8}. They have no incentive to succeed and every incentive to fail, especially in the UK, where we love gas guzzlers.

The second mechanism is the tax we pay to put a car on the road - vehicle excise duty (VED). In 2001, the government replaced the flat rate for VED with a graduated tax. The owners of the most fuel-hungry cars would have to pay more than the owners of efficient models. Seven bands were introduced, starting with A (for cars which produce less than 100 grams per kilometre) and rising to G (more than 225 grams).

A survey carried out by the Department for Transport found that to encourage most drivers to switch to a less polluting model, you would need a difference between the bands of at least GBP 150 {9}. The government's Sustainable Development Commission went further: if the tax were to be really effective, the difference between the bands should be GBP 300 and the top whack should be GBP 1800 {10}. But the government's top rate is only GBP 215, and the difference between the bands only GBP 35. When you are shelling out GBP 65,000 for a Range Rover, that's really going to make a difference, isn't it?

If you want to know just how seriously the government takes this issue, take a look at the fiasco surrounding Band A. By 2012, Ten per cent of all the new cars sold in this country (250,000 vehicles) are meant to be in Band A {11}, which is exempt from VED. So how much progress has been made? If you check the tables on the Vehicle Certification Agency's website, you will find that there is just one car in this category. Astonishingly, it's the Seat Leon {12}.

The Leon is a petrol-snorting, road-eating monster, producing 267 grams per kilometre. It ought to be in Band G. But someone in the agency seems to have moved its noise level, in decibels, into the column for its carbon emissions, in grams. Officially, if you own a Seat Leon, you should not be paying tax.

So where are the real Band A cars? The Department for Transport told me that there should in fact be one car in the band - the Smart Fortwo diesel {13}. There's only one problem: it is not currently on sale in the UK.

The third policy is to encourage us to switch to biofuels - diesel or alcohol made from plants. By 2010, the government wants five per cent of all our transport fuels to be made this way {14}. By 2020, the EU wants to raise this to twenty per cent {15}.

There are two massive problems, which the government consistently refuses to address. The first is that beyond a certain point the production of fuel begins to compete directly with the production of food. A study conducted last year by Sarasin, the Swiss bank, placed "the present limit for the environmentally and socially responsible use of biofuels at roughly five per cent of current petrol and diesel consumption in the EU and US". {16} Already, when only a tiny fraction of our transport fuel comes from plants, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that the demand for biofuels has helped to cause a "surge in the prices of cereals" to "levels not seen for a decade". {17} All over the world, the poor are feeling the effect.

The second problem is that the new market has stimulated a massive expansion of destructive plantations, especially of oil palm. Palm oil planting is the major cause of tropical deforestation in both Malaysia and Indonesia. As the forests are cut down, the carbon in both the trees and the peat they grow on turns into carbon dioxide. A study by the Dutch scientific consultancy Delft Hydraulics found that the production of every tonne of palm oil causes 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions {18}. This makes oil palm ten times worse than petroleum. Already nine new palm oil refineries are being built, in Malaysia, Singapore and Rotterdam, specifically to meet the growing demand from the European biofuel market {19}.

The government urges us not to worry - a "second generation" of biofuels will eventually become available, made from straw, wood and waste. But there is no guarantee that these will outcompete their cheap but destructive rivals, or that they will be ready before the last rainforests in south east Asia have been felled.

In every sector the audit found similar oversights, elisions, and deceptions. In housing, for example, the government has loudly proclaimed its intention to use better building regulations to make new houses more energy efficient - by 2016, it says, every new home in the country will be "zero carbon" {20}. But since the energy efficiency regulations were first introduced in 1985 there has not been a single prosecution for non-compliance {21}. Building inspectors treat the energy rules as a joke - in one recent survey they dismiss them as "trivial" and "not life threatening" {22}. A study by the Building Research Establishment of new houses passed by the inspectors found that 43% of them did not meet satisfactory energy standards {23}.

In the power sector, the auditors uncovered what looks like a conjuring trick. The government claims that Phase 2 of the European Emissions Trading Scheme (which allows power companies to buy and sell permits to pollute) will cut carbon emissions by eight million tonnes against 1990 levels {24}. Professor Maslin's team found that the cut appears to be not a reduction in absolute emissions, but a reduction in future gases which might have been released if the scheme did not exist {25}. Somehow this figure seems to have been muddled up with savings made against real emissions of carbon in 1990.

But the biggest greenwash of all involves flying. Under the Kyoto protocol, the pollution from international flights does not count towards a country's emissions. The government has taken this as a licence to ignore flying even when setting its own targets. The emissions simply don't appear on the balance sheet. Otherwise it couldn't justify its instruction to the UK's airports to double their capacity between now and 2030 {26}.

Because they were assessing the government's own programme, the auditors didn't produce figures for aviation. But even the government proposes that carbon emissions from planes will rise by 10.5 million tonnes between 1990 and 2020 {27}. Had it been incorporated into the audit, this figure would have reduced the cuts for the whole economy by 2020 to between eight and thirteen per cent.

But the government's figure is almost certainly a wild under-estimate. It counts only half the emissions from planes flying to and from our airports, on the grounds that only half the passengers belong to this country. In reality, 67% are UK citizens {28}. It also ignores the other greenhouse gases - especially high-level water vapour - that flying produces. If international flights were counted in the national total, they could wipe out all the cuts in the UK's emissions between 1990 and 2020 {29}.

What makes these failures most shocking is that Blair's government took office in 1997 with a massive head start. In 1990, the UK's carbon dioxide emissions were 161.5 million tonnes. By 1997 they had come down to 149.6 million tonnes {30}. This had come about through energy efficiency, power stations switching from coal to gas, the maturing of the nuclear power programme and a few small tweaks to some obscure industrial processes, like capturing methane from landfill sites and nitrous oxide from explosives factories {31}.

When John Major left office, the UK was one of the few nations on course to meet its Kyoto commitments, with plenty of emissions to spare. That advantage has already been squandered. Today the UK is turning out slightly more carbon dixoide than it was in 1997 (though other greenhouse gases have declined) {32} and we will just scrape in beneath the Kyoto bar, while falling way beneath the trajectory for meeting our long-term target.

And even if the official aim - of a sixty per cent carbon cut by 2050 - were met, it would, I believe, be too little, too late. Climate scientists warn us that if global temperatures rise by two degrees or more above their pre-industrial levels, the warming is likely to trigger runaway feedback. We are already beginning to see some signs of this. In parts of the West Siberian peat bog, the permafrost has begun to melt, releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The more methane escapes, the more the planet warms, so the more methane escapes. The West Siberian bog alone is believed to contain seventy billion tonnes of the gas whose liberation would equate to 73 years of current manmade carbon dioxice emissions {33}.

If runaway feedback sets in on a large enough scale, the biosphere takes over from human beings as the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions. At that point the problem is snatched from our hands - there is nothing more we can do. So it is critical that we make big enough carbon cuts to stop this from happening. But everywhere - in Westminster, in Brussels, even in the Stern report - politicians and officials seem to be abandoning the two degree target, which would mean an eighty to ninety per cent cut in emissions {34}. It is perceived as just too difficult. The government is failing even to hit the wrong target.

Instead of real action to deal with the greatest menace of the 21st Century, the government has sold us a set of fake policies, designed to make us feel better about ourselves, without political pain. Next time Tony Blair gives a heart-rending speech about his legacy to future generations, don't believe a word of it.

_____

George Monbiot is presenting Dispatches: "Greenwash" on Channel 4 at 8 pm tonight.


References:

1. Tony Blair, 1st August 2006. Remarks at the launch of the Clinton Climate Initiative. http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page9961.asp

2. Mark Maslin et al, 5th March 2007. UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions: are we on target? UCL Environment Institute. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/environment-institute/pdfs/UCLEI-report.pdf

3. Department of Trade and Industry, July 2006. The Energy Challenge: Energy Review Report 2006, paras 8.6-8.7. http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file31890.pdf

4. The cuts are against a 1990 baseline of 208.2MtCe (from DEFRA's Climate Change The UK Programme 2006). The government projected in the Energy Review in July 2006, that on trends prior to the new policies announced in the review would put the UK on track for 168.5MtCe in 2020. The new policies, it suggests, would lead to additional savings of 19.5 - 25.3 MtCe, giving a total saving on 1990 levels of 60.2MtCe and a projected total output in 2020 of 148 MtC. (Even this, the government concedes, is insufficient. The Review said that "in order to demonstrate our leadership in tackling climate change and make real progress towards our 2050 carbon reduction goal", MtC emissions [note C, not Ce] must come down to 110-120 by 2020 [from 151.5MtC today]. This, it said, required further cuts of 25-35MtC, rather than the proposed 19.5-25.3MtCe [in the case of these proposed cuts, MtC and MtCe can be regarded as equivalent]. UCL's audit found that total cuts on 1990 levels by 2020 will amount to between 19 and 30MtCe in the four sectors examined [domestic, business, energy and national transport]. It assumes for the purpose of the study that the government's proposed cut of 7.4MtCe in the remaining sectors [agriculture, forestry, land management and public] will be delivered.

5. Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for the Environment, 29th September 2005. We are leading the world on tackling climate change. Speech to the Labour Party conference, Brighton.
http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php?id=news2005&ux_news%5Bid%5D=ac05mb&cHash=cc194954f6

6. Department of Trade and Industry, July 2006. The Energy Challenge: Energy Review Report 2006. http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file31890.pdf

7. Mark Maslin et al, ibid.

8. House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, 7th August 2006. Reducing Carbon Emissions from Transport. Volume I, para 44. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmenvaud/981/981-i.pdf

9. Department for Transport, 30th June 2003. Assessing the Impact of Graduated Vehicle Excise Duty: Main Findings. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/research/consumerbehaviour/assessingtheimpactofgraduate3817?page=310. House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, ibid, para 18.

11. ibid, para 20.

12. Vehicle Certification Agency, viewed 29th February and 5th March 2007. http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/search/vedSearchResults.asp

13. DfT press office, pers comm.

14. HM Treasury, November 2006. Pre-Budget Report 2006, para 7.61.

15. The European Union, 8th May 2003. Directive 2003/30/EC: On the Promotion of the Use of Biofuels or Other Renewable Fuels for Transport. Official Journal L 123 , 17/05/2003 P. 0042 - 0046.

16. Bank Sarasin, July 2006. Sustainability Report: Biofuels - transporting us to a fossil-free future?, page 14.

17. Food and Agriculture Organisation, December 2006. Food Outlook 2. http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/j8126e/j8126e01a.htm

18. Wetlands International, 8th December 2006. Bio-fuel less sustainable than realised http://www.wetlands.org/news.aspx?ID=804eddfb-4492-4749-85a9-5db67c2f1bb8

19. Tamimi Omar, 1st December 2005. Felda to set up largest biodiesel plant. The Edge Daily. http://www.theedgedaily.com/cms/content.jsp?id=com.tms.cms.article.Article_e5d7c0d9-cb73c03a-df4bfc00-d453633e;

See e.g. Zaidi Isham Ismail, 7th November 2005. IOI to go it alone on first biodiesel plant. http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BT/Monday/Frontpage/20051107000223/Article/

No author, 25th November 2005. GHope nine-month profit hits RM841mil. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/25/business/12693859&sec=business;

No author, 26th November 2005. GHope to invest RM40mil for biodiesel plant in Netherlands. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/26/business/12704187&sec=business;

No author, 23rd November 2005. Malaysia IOI Eyes Green Energy Expansion in Europe. http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33622/story.htm; Loh Kim Chin, 26th

October 2005. Singapore to host two biodiesel plants, investments total over S$80m. Channel NewsAsia.

20. Ruth Kelly MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. 13th December 2006 Shaping a low carbon future - our environmental vision. Speech at the ‘Towards Zero Carbon Development' event. http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1505202.

21. Andrew Warren, March 2006. Time to Put a Stop to the Disdain for Regulations. Energy in Buildings and Industry. http://www.ukace.org/pubs/articles/eibi2006-03.pdf

22. AEA Technology, May 2006. Compliance with Part L1 of the 2002 Building Regulations. The Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes. http://www.est.org.uk/uploads/documents/partnership/Compliance%20with%20Part%20L1%20of%20the%202002%20Building%20Regulations%2030506.pdf

23. P. Grigg, 10th November 2004. Assessment of energy efficiency impact of Building Regulations compliance. Building Research Establishment. Report for the Energy Savings Trust and Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes. http://www.est.org.uk/uploads/documents/partnership/Houses_airtightness_report_Oct_04.pdf24. Department of Trade and Industry, ibid. Table 8.1, page 150.

25. Mark Maslin et al, ibid.

26. Department for Transport, December 2003. The Future of Air Transport. White paper. Para 12.8.

27. Sally Cairns and Carey Newson, September 2006. Predict and Decide: aviation, climate change and UK policy. Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. p16. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/predictanddecide.pdf

28. ibid, p8.

29. See the figures and sources here: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/12/19/preparing-for-take-off/

30. DEFRA, 23rd January 2006. 2004 UK climate change sustainable development indicator and greenhouse gas emissions final figures. http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/2006/060123b.htm

31. DEFRA, March 2006. Climate Change: the UK Programme. P25. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/pdf/ukccp06-all.pdf

32. 151.5MtC. 33. Fred Pearce, 11th August 2005. Climate warning as Siberia melts. New Scientist. Methane has a warming effect 23 times as great as carbon. Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are currently around 22 billion tonnes a year (this is 3.667 x the weight of the carbon they contain).

34. I explain this in George Monbiot, 2006. Heat: how to stop the planet burning. Penguin, London.


Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/05/just-a-lot-of-hot-air/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Global warming: An inconvenient truth or hot air?

Everyone agrees global warming is a terrible fact of life. Right? Wrong. A film to be screened this week ridicules the Al Gore orthodoxy.

by Geoffrey Lean on the green war

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

Independent.co.uk (March 04 2007)


After two decades, the long scientific and political debate over whether human activities are warming up the Earth is finally over. Or is it? The world scientific community says so. Even the most recalcitrant governments, including the Bush administration, reluctantly agree. But the British media is characteristically unwilling to let an old row simply fade away.

On Thursday, Channel 4 will screen what it calls a "polemical and thought-provoking documentary" - The Great Global Warming Swindle - by one of the environmentalists' favourite hate figures, film-maker Martin Durkin.

It follows hot on the heels of a decision by David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, to send a copy of Al Gore's box-office hit, An Inconvenient Truth - which this month won two Oscars - to every secondary school throughout the country.

And the debate continues in the printed media with the Daily Mail and the Telegraph printing regular articles by sceptics and even The Independent, which - with this newspaper - presses for action to control climate change, giving space to the columnist Dominic Lawson, who rejects much of the green lobby's case. Yet, while contrarians remain common in broadcasting studios and newspaper offices, they are becoming increasingly hard to find in laboratories or governments.

Last month, the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which brings together almost all the world's leading scientists in the field and all its governments - published the first instalment of its latest massive "assessment report", concluding that it was ninety per cent certain that human activities are heating up the planet. The conclusion was all the more authoritative as the IPCC is a cautious body that acts by consensus; all governments, including the United States, have to agree its conclusions.

Some scientists still disagree - that is the nature of science - but their numbers are diminishing, and few are leaders in their fields. A recent survey of 928 published scientific papers found not one that dissented over the reality of global warming. Even President Bush admitted - through gritted teeth - in January's State of the Union speech that the climate change presented "a major challenge".

Yet more recently, his main ally against the Kyoto Protocol, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard, has been forced into a U-turn by a massive Australian drought and an approaching election, announcing a ban on energy-wasting incandescent light bulbs.

And Mr Bush's best hope of a replacement - the Canadian premier, Steven Harper - has been forced by public opinion into a similar conversion.

But if environmentalists thought they could finally give up arguing, and focus entirely on promoting action, they can think again. For the clash between the Oscar-winning film and the Channel 4 production is likely to spark new public debate. Both are produced by controversial figures. Al Gore last week came under attack for hypocrisy, after it was revealed that he spends GBP 15,000 a year heating his home, twenty times more than the average American house. And, as The Independent on Sunday has repeatedly pointed out, he failed comprehensively to practise what he preaches when in Government.

Martin Durkin, for his part, achieved notoriety when his previous series on the environment for the channel, called Against Nature, was roundly condemned by the Independent Television Commission for misleading contributors on the purpose of the programmes, and for editing four interviewees in a way that "distorted or mispresented their known views".

Channel 4 was forced to issue a humiliating apology. But it seems to have forgiven Mr Durkin and sees no need to make special checks on the accuracy of the programme. For his part, the film-maker accepts the charge of misleading contributors, but describes the verdict of distortion as "complete tosh".

His programme uncovers no startling new information, any more than does Mr Gore's film. The documentary repeats many of the arguments put in Britain by, among others what appears to be be something of a family cottage industry.

Standing with Dominic Lawson on the sceptic's barricades are his father (or to give him proper deference, Lord Lawson of Blaby) and his brother-in-law Christopher Monckton, Lord Monckton of Brenchley. Surprisingly, there is much common ground between sceptics and the environmentalists. Lord Lawson, for example, says that there is "little doubt that the 20th century ended warmer than it began".

He adds, similarly, that "there is no doubt that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increased greatly" during it.

He even agrees that it is "highly likely that carbon dioxide emissions" have played a significant part" in heating up the Earth.

He could hardly do otherwise. The measurements of what has happened are clear, and the basic science has been established, unchallenged for 180 years. Instead, the debate is about precisely what contribution to warming the pollution has made, whether it will continue and what to do about it.

The row concentrates on often arcane points of science, frequently delving far back into history. Three of them, raised in this week's documentary, are described above; in each the sceptics have a point, but fail to give the whole picture and so draw the wrong conclusions. Other arguments have been discredited.

Similarly, they emphasise that temperatures in Britain, Greenland and parts of Europe were warmer in the Middle Ages than they are now. That may or may not be true - since no accurate measurements were taken it is hard to be certain.

But, if so, it was only a regional effect: measurements of ice from the poles on which the sceptics place great reliance for other arguments (see table) show it did not happen worldwide. They also claim that tackling global warming would hurt the world's poorest by denying them fossil fuels. But renewable sources of energy should also be the poor's salvation.

They are abundant in the Third World and don't need costly distribution networks to get them to village. And even if the sceptics are right, and the bulk of the world's scientists wrong, there is still a compelling reason for cutting carbon dioxide emissions. For, as often reported in this newspaper, rising levels of the gas - in an entirely separate process - are killing the world's oceans by turning them acid.


Temperature

Durkin Says: Studies of gases in bubbles of air in polar ice sheets reveal that in prehistoric hot periods temperatures began rising before carbon dioxide levels. So increasing concentrations of the gas are the result, not the cause of global warming.

Gore Says: "It's a complicated relationship, but the most important part of it is this: when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the temperature increases". He shows two graphs of rising temperature and carbon dioxide levels over the past 600,000 years and says they "fit together".

We Say: Temperature and carbon dioxide are bound together. When one goes up, the other will follow. In prehistory temperatures often started rising 800 years before levels of the gas, and Gore evades this point. But it is irrelevant to what is happening now, because for the first time ever enormous amounts of extra carbon dioxide are being released.


The Arctic

Durkin Says: Recent reports of how the amount of ice in the Arctic is shrinking have been exaggerated. The Arctic has always contracted and expanded over history.

Gore Says: The Arctic is a "canary in the coal mine". Since the 1970s, the extent and thickness of its ice cap has "diminished precipitously". If we continue as we are, it will disappear during summers, profoundly changing the climate.

We Say: The amount of the ice ebbs and flows with natural warmings and coolings of the climate, and part of this shrinking is probably due to that. But this is being increased by global warming caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases, and these continue to go up. The Arctic is likely to be free of ice by 2050, for the first time in millions of years.


The sun

Durkin Says: The sun is the main cause of global warming. The sun's activity increases from time to time, with increased solar flares, cutting down on cloud formation and raising temperatures on Earth. This activity correlates well with warmer periods over the past several hundred years.

Gore Says: The culprit is humanity's emissions of "huge quantities" of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which trap more of the infrared radiation of the sun that would otherwise escape out into space.

We Say: Variations in solar activity may have been responsible for past warm periods, though it's hard to be entirely sure because we have been taking good measurements of it only since 1978. But recent solar increases are too small to have produced the present warming, and have been much less important than greenhouse gases since about 1850.

_____

Also in this section

* Miliband: 'Time for a green industrial revolution'
* The Big Green Fuel Lie
* The Big Question: What is La Nin~a, and will it cause serious climate disruption?
* Scientists from 63 countries to investigate polar melting
* Melting ice gives birth to a strange new world

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2326210.ece


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Big Green Fuel Lie

George Bush says that ethanol will save the world. But there is evidence that biofuels may bring new problems for the planet

by Daniel Howden in Sao Paolo

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

Independent.co.uk (March 05 2007)


The ethanol boom is coming. The twin threats of climate change and energy security are creating an unprecedented thirst for alternative energy with ethanol leading the way.

That process is set to reach a landmark on Thursday when the US President, George Bush, arrives in Brazil to kick-start the creation of an international market for ethanol that could one day rival oil as a global commodity. The expected creation of an "Opec for ethanol" replicating the cartel of major oil producers has spurred frenzied investment in biofuels across the Americas.

But a growing number of economists, scientists and environmentalists are calling for a "time out" and warning that the headlong rush into massive ethanol production is creating more problems than it is solving.

To its advocates, ethanol, which can be made from corn, barley, wheat, sugar cane or beet is a green panacea - a clean-burning, renewable energy source that will see us switch from dwindling oil wells to boundless fields of crops to satisfy our energy needs.

Dr Plinio Mario Nastari, one of Brazil's leading economists and an expert in biofuels, sees a bright future for an energy sector in which his country is the acknowledged world leader: "We are on the brink of a new era, ethanol is changing a lot of things but in a positive sense".

In its first major acknowledgment of the dangers of climate change, the White House this year committed itself to substituting twenty per cent of the petroleum it uses for ethanol by 2017.

In Brazil, that switch is more advanced than anywhere in the world and it has already substituted forty per cent of its gasoline usage.

Ethanol is nothing new in Brazil. It has been used as fuel since 1925. But the real boom came after the oil crisis of 1973 spurred the military dictatorship to lessen the country's reliance on foreign imports of fossil fuels. The generals poured public subsidies and incentives into the sugar industry to produce ethanol.

Today, the congested streets of Sao Paolo are packed with flex-fuel cars that run off a growing menu of bio and fossil fuel mixtures, and all filling stations offer "alcohol" and "gas" at the pump, with the latter at roughly twice the price by volume.

But there is a darker side to this green revolution, which argues for a cautious assessment of how big a role ethanol can play in filling the developed world's fuel tank. The prospect of a sudden surge in demand for ethanol is causing serious concerns even in Brazil.

The ethanol industry has been linked with air and water pollution on an epic scale, along with deforestation in both the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests, as well as the wholesale destruction of Brazil's unique savannah land.

Fabio Feldman, a leading Brazilian environmentalist and former member of Congress who helped to pass the law mandating a 23 per cent mix of ethanol to be added to all petroleum supplies in the country, believes that Brazil's trailblazing switch has had serious side effects.

"Some of the cane plantations are the size of European states, these vast monocultures have replaced important eco-systems", he said. "If you see the size of the plantations in the state of Sao Paolo they are oceans of sugar cane. In order to harvest you must burn the plantations which creates a serious air pollution problem in the city."

Despite its leading role in biofuels, Brazil remains the fourth largest producer of carbon emissions in the world due to deforestation. Dr Nastarti rejects any linkage between deforestation and ethanol and argues that cane production accounts for little more than ten per cent of Brazil's farmland.

However, Dr Nastari is calling for new legislation in Brazil to ensure that mushrooming sugar plantations do not directly or indirectly contribute to the destruction of vital forest preserves.

Sceptics, however, point out that existing legislation is unenforceable and agri-business from banned GM cotton to soy beans has been able to ignore legislation.

"In large areas of Brazil there is a total absence of the state and no respect for environmental legislation", said Mr Feldman.

"Ethanol can be a good alternative in the fight against global warming but at the same time we must make sure we are not creating a worse problem than the one we are trying to solve".

The conditions for a true nightmare scenario are being created not in Brazil, despite its environment concerns, but in the US's own domestic ethanol industry.

While Brazil's tropical climate allows it to source alcohol from its sugar crop, the US has turned to its industrialised corn belt for the raw material to substitute oil. The American economist Lester R Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, is leading the warning voices: "The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its two billion poorest people who are simply trying to stay alive is emerging as an epic issue".

Speaking in Sao Paolo, where the ethanol boom is expected to take off with a US-Brazil trade deal this Thursday, Fabio Feldman, said: "We must stop and take a breath and consider the consequences".


Biofuel costs

When Rudolph Diesel unveiled his new engine at the 1900 World's Fair, he made a point of demonstrating that it could be run on peanut oil. "Such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time", he said.

And so it has come to pass that US President George Bush has decreed that America must wean itself off oil with the help of biofuels made from corn, sugar cane and other suitable crops.

At its simplest, the argument for biofuels is this: By growing crops to produce organic compounds that can be burnt in an engine, you are not adding to the overall levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The amount of carbon dioxide that the fuel produces when burnt should balance the amount absorbed during the growth of the plants.

However, many biofuel crops, such as corn, are grown with the help of fossil fuels in the form of fertilisers, pesticides and the petrol for farm equipment.

One estimate is that corn needs thirty per cent more energy than the finished fuel it produces.

Another problem is the land required to produce it. One estimate is that the grain needed to fill the petrol tank of a 4X4 with ethanol is sufficient to feed a person for a year.


Also in this section

* Miliband: 'Time for a green industrial revolution'
* Global warming: An inconvenient truth or hot air?
* The Big Question: What is La Nin~a, and will it cause serious climate disruption?
* Scientists from 63 countries to investigate polar melting
* Melting ice gives birth to a strange new world

(c) 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2328821.ece


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The turbo-Thatcherites can't see the limits of privatisation

by Simon Jenkins

The Guardian (February 28 2007)


The Cumbria train crash and the plan to contract out probation both reflect a failure to grasp the value of democratic oversight


Those seeking a root cause of the Cumbria train crash should study today's third reading of the management of offenders bill 2007. It seeks to privatise the probation service. Both are infected by the same policies instituted by the Treasury under Gordon Brown and his predecessors.

Privatisation was the great liberator of the political economy in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a central construct of the transformation of Britain from lame duck to Euro-tiger. It was also a snare and a delusion. The inability to distinguish good privatisation from bad explains why a decade of public sector reform by Tony Blair's Labour party has failed to win public confidence.

In my youth I was a rail enthusiast and member of the board of British Rail. I was sure of the need to privatise the railway, to free managerial blockages and liberate its entrepreneurial spirit. But one thing was vital, to retain the vertical management crucial to operational discipline. If the railway were to be divided, it should be as in the old days, into integrated regional companies, with managers controlling assets, risks and balance sheets as one.

Between 1991 and 1993 this argument was lost. John Major, Norman Lamont and the transport secretary, John MacGregor, conceded the Treasury view that the route to greater rail efficiency led, via the City of London, to vertical fragmentation and internal subcontracting. The daily discipline needed to run a railway could be replicated by private incentives backed by contract law. The result was the Railways Act 1993.

The act was a blunder, a fiasco, a nonsense, intellectually grotesque, one of the worst passed by any postwar parliament. It was the classic work of stupid and arrogant men thinking that because they sat in London chatting to highly paid bankers and consultants they must know better than horny-handed sons of toil. A great European industry, at the time the most cost-effective rail network in Europe, was brought to its knees within five years. Whitehall did for the railway what it had done for the car industry. It kicked it in the crotch.

When Blair came to office in 1997 he cynically appointed John Prescott to sort things out, a man he must have known was not up to the task. It took New Labour six years to renationalise the infrastructure company, Railtrack, as Network Rail, ending one managerial weakness revealed by the Hatfield and Potters Bar crashes, the subcontracting of line maintenance. As shown in a recent Films of Record documentary, Potters Bar was the nadir of Treasury policy, with seven private contracts governing one stretch of track. Nobody took responsibility, least of all the head contractor, Jarvis.

Maintaining the permanent way requires total discipline. A century ago crossing keepers were licensed by magistrates as constables. Such discipline depends on stability, hierarchical loyalty and continuity of experience. Tamping ballast, checking points and tapping rails are arts as much as skills. Nothing is 100% safe, but how safe is a matter of personal judgment, not a legal contract. Early evidence from Cumbria suggests that the "subcontract" syndrome revealed at Potters Bar has not yet been cured. Old track gangs would have known every inch of the rail, every point and every bolt. I imagine the present gangs have been broken up many times over the past ten years, meandering from one contractor to another.

These contracts were supposed to bring down the price to the Treasury of rail travel in Britain. They have tripled it. On that score alone they have failed. Modern Railway magazine has estimated that it costs three times as much to lay and maintain a mile of high-speed track after privatisation as before. Certainly the railway is safer than ever, probably safer than normal risk assessment might require, but this too is a result of contractual "hypersafety" that has sent costs, fares and subsidies soaring. British trains are now the most expensive form of public transport.

My enthusiasm for privatisation remains undimmed, even within the public sector. It has transformed my rubbish collection and street cleaning. The private running of Westminster and Wandsworth councils has won Audit Commission approval. From government catering to council housing, from property management to some (very few) public finance projects, privatisation has broken logjams and delivered the goods. No problem.

But neither Labour nor the Tories seem to have any grasp on what is and is not suitable for accountability to a contract rather than democratic oversight. Because Treasury officials crave jobs in banks, they cannot believe that other officials might be moved by a desire for public service. They imagine that, unless chained to a target, a consultant and a contract, all public servants are off "on a sickie" or down at the pub. The subcontracting of hospital cleaning to de facto gangmasters who make their money by employing the cheapest labour on the block, takes out of house the central discipline of any hospital, its hygiene. It has sent Britain rocketing to the top of the European league of hospital-borne infections.

A similar result has come from Brown's (or his aide, Shriti Vadera's) bone-headed separation of night-time maintenance on the London tube from daytime operation. This means that tube companies actually make more money by delaying work - and millions of commuters - and then paying the contract fines. As for the idea that a probation officer might want to help his charges from a sense of public duty, this seems wholly alien to Brown and his aides pushing today's bill. They are true turbo-Thatcherites.

Experience shows that core public services are not necessarily more efficient under performance-linked private contracts. As with hospital private financiers, or Nord Anglia's flirtation with Hackney's schools or the shady "academy" operators, costs soar and continuous leadership, experience and community involvement long associated with public institutions cannot be legally enforced. Capita may run a smooth congestion charge, but do we want it running the Metropolitan police? We have lost sight of the difference between accountability to a contract and to democracy. I am sure someone will be pilloried for the Cumbria crash, and rightly so. But blame is shared with others who are never called to account, who walk into the sunset covered in fees, pensions and ermine.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/comment/0,,2022958,00.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Iraq: The Genocide Option

by Edward Herman

ZNet Commentary (January 24 2007)


It was claimed early in 2005 that the United States was considering resort to what has been called the "Salvadoran Option" in Iraq, in which, as had been done in El Salvador in the 1980s, US Special Forces would train paramilitary squads to hunt down and assassinate rebel leaders and their supporters. {1} A year earlier, it was reported that a sizable fund had been appropriated for the creation of an exile-based paramilitary unit for Iraq, and that the money would more broadly "support US efforts to create a lethal, and revengeful Iraqi security force". It was expected that this would lead to "a wave of extrajudicial killings" of armed rebels, but also of "nationalists, other opponents of the US occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists". {2}

The rise of the death rate in Iraq, and the evidence of large-scale assassinations and slaughters frequently carried out by uniformed men, suggests that the Salvadoran option was put in place and that it has done its work well even if failing to bring victory to the Shiite leaders and militias and their sponsors.

However, along with the Salvadoran option the US military had also stepped up its own activities in one of a series of "surges", among them the assault on Fallujah in November 2004, and using the Fallujah model, with the application of massive firepower in Sunni-dominated areas, much of it from the air, moving from town to town, in an effort to kill Sunni resistance fighters and render their home bases unusable. Because of the lavish use of firepower and limited concern with Iraqi civilian casualties, this process is very costly to civilians in the area of attack. Civilians also suffer from the fact that the invading troops not only don't speak their language, but become extra hostile as they suffer casualties from a resistance that lives among the local population. This results in greater ruthlessness and increasing numbers of cases of literal direct mass murder as in Haditha. {3}

This is reminiscent of US policy during the Vietnam war, where torture and multiple Haditha-type massacres, enormous firepower, napalm, B-52 bombing raids, and chemical warfare applied to jungles and peasant farms, ravaged the country, leaving much of it a wasteland, killing several million civilians, and leaving a heritage of traumatized, injured and chemically damaged people as well.

It is important to understand that the most violent warfare, including My Lai and its many many look-alikes, as well as the use of napalm and dioxin-based herbicides, was applied in the southern part of the country, which the United States was allegedly "protecting" from an invasion from the north. The methods of warfare themselves demonstrated that the alleged protection and "saving" was a lie, but it should be recognized that the reason these horrors could be applied more lavishly in the south rather than the north is that the south was controlled by the US occupation and its puppet government, so that, unlike North Vietnam, the terrible violence wrought against the southern peasantry could be relatively hidden and kept from public and international scrutiny.

The US attack on Vietnam may be termed the "Genocide Option", as the killing and destruction went far beyond anything that took place in El Salvador, and threatened the survival of the southern population. Southern Vietnam had its US-organized death squads, with Operation Phoenix famously accounting for possibly 40,000 assassinations of NLF cadres and unknown other victims of this murder program.

El Salvador also had impressive death squads, but couldn't match the scope and intensity of the violence wrought by the United States on the distant peasant society, which brought into play all weapons in the US high-tech arsenal short of the nuclear - many being tested against live experimental victims - used in enormous volume, without moral restraint (and with minimal protest from the "international community").

By 1967 the level of violence had reached a point where Vietnam scholar Bernard Fall warned that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity" is threatened with extinction ... [as] "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size". {4} In the south, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some 25 million acres of farmland and twelve million acres of forests. One and a half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and 800,000 orphans. The chemical defoliation operations were vast and their effects could take many generations to reverse, and they resulted in a further generation of malformed children (500,000 in one 1997 estimate). {5}

This was a truly genocidal attack, both in volume and threat to viability and with its demand that the resistance surrender as the condition for termination of the assault. (In a marvel of transference, the oft-expressed US position was that the refusal to surrender demonstrated a low Vietnamese valuation of Vietnamese life! In a further marvel of Western impudence, the Krstic decision by the NATO-organized Yugoslavia tribunal found that "genocide" had been committed by a NATO target group [Bosnian Serbs] because killings - which explicitly spared women and children - might have ended the viability of a single small town in Bosnia.)

Another feature of the Vietnam War of relevance today is that all through its murderous course it was argued in the United States that it must go on in order to avoid a post-occupation "bloodbath"! The huge ongoing and genocidal bloodbath was needed to prevent a hypothetical one that never did materialize. {6}

The genocide option threatens Iraq, where the United States is engaged in direct military action against another virtually defenceless population - in contrast with El Salvador where proxies did the dirty work. Military technology has advanced further, and the complete amorality of the Deciders and their willingness to kill without limit to achieve their goals or save face is clear. It is important for the Deciders that not too many US service personnel be killed, as this has a definite negative effect on the national willingness to move forward to "victory" (or at least temporarily fending off acknowledging defeat). If US casualties can be reduced by more intensive firepower, at the expense of greater Iraqi civilian casualties, that has been and will continue to be the route taken. Furthermore, US pacification violence applied to Sunni-dominated towns is implemented out of sight of the mainstream media (although not completely hidden given the bravery of some non-imbedded Western journalists and Al Jazeera).

The Bush "surge" is a desperation maneuver, and in a context of ever-stronger political objections to more US personnel in Iraq and sensitivity to US casualties, there is good reason to believe that the Bush answer will be even more intensive firepower in Baghdad and other cities and villages in which the insurgents mingle easily with the civilian population. Bush even warns US citizens of more blood and gore "even if our new strategy works exactly as planned". Furthermore, partly via the use of the Salvadoran Option and partly by US manipulation of sectarian conflict, {7} the invasion-occupation has produced a deadly civil war in which the Sunnis and Shiites engage in large-scale communal ethnic cleansing and killing, adding to the toll.

There can be little doubt that the rate of civilian killing in Iraq is about to rise from something like the recent Lancet estimate of 655,000 to a larger figure. If "genocide" was committed in Bosnia, where recent establishment analysts concluded - embarrassingly, given the earlier institutionalized total of 250,000 - that approximately 100,000 people died on all sides, including military personnel, {8} surely we have a case of genocide in Iraq just during the period 2003 to 2006. And Bush is about to give us more, with the Democrats and UN looking on but doing nothing to restrain the killing machine.

Wouldn't it be nice if democracy worked and a popular antiwar vote had some effect? And if the global double standard now in force was not so gross and the perpetrators responsible for this genocidal outburst could be brought before a real tribunal in the interest of real global justice before their next surge?


Endnotes:

1. Michael Hirsh and John Barry, "'The Salvadoran Option'", Newsweek (January 14 2005).

2. Quoted in Craig Murrary, "Civil War in Iraq: The Salvadoran Option and US/UK Policy", http://www.uruknet.org.uk/?s1=1&p=27587&s2=20.

3. Tom Engelhardt, "Collateral Damage: the 'Incident' at Haditha" http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_060806O.shtml;
Chris Floyd, "Lesson Plan" http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/06/02/120.html;
Linda Heard, "Media and Tal Afar": http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/63044;
Ghalil Hassan, "Iraq: A Criminal Process", Global Research (November 27 2005).

4. Bernard Fall, Last Reflections on a War (Doubleday, 1967).

5. Peter Waldman, "Body Counts: In Vietnam, the Agony of Birth Defects Calls an Old War to Mind", Wall Street Journal (December 12 1970).

6. Gareth Porter, "The Bloodbath We Created", http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1214-32.htm

7. Ibid.

8. See Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results", European Journal of Population, Vol 21, No 2-3 (June 2005), pages 187-215, www.yugofile.co.uk/onlynow/EJP_all.zip .
Also see the ongoing work of Mirsad Tokaca et al at the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center, which produces month-by-month updates of the latest estimates for deaths attributable to the war on the webpage "The Status of Database by the Centers", http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus/Overview_of_jobs_according_to_%20centers.htm
Fear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frightens the Sunni. The patience of the Shia is wearing very thin. But their leaders want them to consolidate their strength within the government after their election victory in January.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-01/24herman.cfm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Independence from the Corporate Global Economy

The old story says we have to depend on big corporations. The new story tells us we can earn a livelihood, gain freedom, and build community through cooperation.

by Ethan Miller

YES! Magazine (Winter 2007 Issue) Go Local!


Call it "globalization", or the "free market", or "capitalism". Whatever its name, people across the United States and throughout the world are experiencing the devastating effects of an economy that places profit above all else.

None of this, of course, is news. Many of us have come to believe that the crucial economic decisions affecting our lives are made not by us, but by far-away "experts" and mysterious "market forces". A friend asked me recently, "Since when did the American people decide to send their manufacturing sector south to exploit people in El Salvador or the Dominican Republic?" We didn't, and nobody ever asked.

But what's the alternative? We're taught that there are only two possible economic choices: capitalism - a system in which rich people and corporations have the power, make the decisions, and control our lives; or communism - a system where state bureaucrats have the power, make the decisions, and control our lives. What a choice!

When it comes to real economic alternatives, our imaginations are stuck. Clearly, we need something different, but what would it look like? How do we start to imagine and create other ways of meeting our economic needs?


A Story of Dependency

We can begin by changing the stories we tell about the overwhelming power and inevitability of our economic system. These stories have hidden from us our own power, potential, and value as creative human beings.

The dominant story defines the heroes of our market system as the rational, self-interested firms and individuals who seek to satisfy their endless need for growth and accumulation in a world of scarce resources.

In this story, we the people are just worker-bees and consumers, making and spending money, hoping for the opportunity to accumulate more, and perpetually dependent on the jobs and necessities that the corporate system allocates to the worthy. Citizenship is reduced to the active pursuit of financial wealth. Feeling powerless to make real change, we come to see the economy as like the weather - beyond our control and understood by only the elite "experts". We hope for sunny days and carry umbrellas.

This story renders all activities other than business transactions invisible - segregated into the sphere of family life, social life, and leisure. A community of active, creative, and skilled people without money or capital (or the desire to have it) is considered unproductive or backward.

This is why many economic developers talk endlessly about "bringing in new businesses" or "attracting investors" to improve the local or regional economy. Real value, for them, comes from the outside, not the inside; from those who invest capital, not those who invest time and hard work; from the power of money to make more of itself, not from the power of life and community to self-organize and to thrive. This dominant story is about how our lives and our communities are never good enough, never complete or worthwhile without the money and jobs of the capitalist market economy.


A Story of Hope

Suppose we try a different story: instead of defining the economy as a market system, let's define it as the diverse array of activities by which humans generate livelihoods in relation to each other and to the Earth. Extending far beyond the workings of the capitalist market, economic activity includes all of the ways we sustain and support ourselves, our families, and our communities. Peeling away the dominant economic story of competition and accumulation, we see that other economies are alive below the surface, nourishing us like roots. These are not the economies of the stock-brokers and the economists. They are the economies of mutual care and cooperation - community economies, local economies.

Many are familiar to us, though rarely acknowledged. They include:

Household Economies - meeting our needs with our own skills and work: raising children, offering advice or comfort, teaching life skills, cooking, cleaning, building, balancing the checkbook, fixing the car, growing food and medicine, raising animals. Much of this work has been rendered invisible or devalued as "women's work".

Gift Economies - built on shared circles of generosity: volunteer fire companies, food banks, giving rides to hitch-hikers, donating to community organizations, sharing food.

Barter Economies - trading services with friends or neighbors, swapping one useful thing for another: returning a favor, exchanging plants or seeds, time-based local currencies.

Gathering Economies - living on the abundance of Earth's gift economy: hunting, fishing, and foraging. Also re-directing the wastestream - salvaging from demolition sites, gleaning from already-harvested farm fields, dumpster-diving.

Cooperative Economies - based on common ownership and/or control of resources: worker -owned and -run businesses, collective housing, intentional communities, health care cooperatives, community land trusts.

Community Market Economies - networks of exchange built from small businesses and cooperatives that are accountable to their communities through social ties, innovative ownership models, and mutual support. Such economies are not created to make large profits, but to provide healthy, modest livelihoods to their participants, and services to the larger community.


Recognizing these diverse forms of livelihood we can see not only that economic possibilities exist beyond the market and the state, but that these possibilities are viable and powerful. Indeed, the dominant economy would fall apart without such basic forms of cooperation and solidarity. It is not the capitalist market that germinates seeds, calls nourishing water from the sky, or transforms decay into delicious fruit. It is not the capitalist market that nourishes our souls on a daily basis with friendship and love or cares for us when we are too young or too old to care for ourselves. Nor is it this market that keeps us alive in times of crisis when the factories close, when our houses burn down, or when the paycheck is just not enough. It is the economies of community and care - what many activists in Latin America and Europe call the "solidarity economy" - that hold the very fabric of our society together. It is these relationships that make us human and that meet our most basic needs for love, care, and mutual support.

So what's the alternative to the market system? Its seeds already exist. Though capitalist markets are constantly working to undermine, exploit, and co-opt elements of the solidarity economy, its power and potential as a space of creation and hope persists.

We already inhabit different kinds of economic relationships. We have our own forms of wealth and value that are not defined by money. Economies already exist that place human and ecological relationships at the center, rather than competition and profit-making. We do not need to start from scratch.

When faced with the question of alternatives, then, we can answer not with another Grand Economic Scheme, but with a vision for creative, diverse, and democratic economic organizing. We can build on existing cooperative economic practices, cultivating imagination and possibility.

Linking together emerging alternatives in networks of mutual support and exchange, we can take them to the next level and generate new economic dynamics of solidarity and cooperation on local, regional, and global scales.

A strategy begins to emerge: identify existing alternatives; bring them together to build shared identities and connections; and with new-found collective strength, generate powerful possibilities for social and economic change.

Sounds simple, right? Perhaps, but it is the complex, deliberate, and beautiful work of community organizing that will transform vision into reality.

Efforts to identify spaces of democratic economic possibility are already under way. Groups such as the Seattle Local Economies Mapping Project - www.seattlemap.org - are building inventories of alternative economic initiatives, from cooperatives and local currencies to volunteer fire companies and community food banks. Inspired by what is sometimes called "asset-based community development", other groups are cataloging forms of wealth left out of the economic equation, such as subsistence skills, traditional arts and crafts, local stories and lore, and natural landscapes. A coalition of organizations in the US and Canada called the Data Commons Project is building a directory of North American cooperative economic projects - see http://dcp.usworker.coop .


New Eyes, New Connections

With local economic inventories in hand, we can begin to generate conversations among solidarity initiatives and institutions. In Brazil, where the solidarity economy movement is well-established, 23 statewide forums, connected by the national Brazilian Solidarity Economy Forum, generate dialog and collaboration among solidarity-based economic projects.

Similar gatherings could be highly effective in North America. The United States Social Forum, to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, in July 2007, offers an exciting opportunity for solidarity economy practitioners and organizers to meet on a large scale.

Such gatherings can link previously isolated efforts, integrating their work into a new and emergent economic web of solidarity. These connections are about more than mutual recognition; they are about building relationships of exchange and support - connecting producers and consumers, marketers and distributors, investors and organizers. In the process, we redefine these roles and institutions.

Connections can also extend to the larger web of organizations and social movements struggling for justice, ecology, and democracy. Campaigns against big-box stores are enhanced by efforts to create community-based economic alternatives. Counter-recruitment work is more effective when youth are involved in cooperative economic projects that offer viable alternatives to the military, and the creation of community land trusts and housing cooperatives strengthens anti-gentrification struggles.

In all of these cases and more, the support is reciprocal: the dreams, aspirations, and energies of grassroots social movements ensure the integrity and health of community-based economic institutions.

The practices of seeing, convening, and connecting all build toward the practice of creation. From imagination and possibility can grow new initiatives, new institutions, new forms of exchange, new economies of solidarity. Together, we can reclaim our homes and communities as spaces of safety, care, healing, and mutal aid.

Seeking economic alternatives? The seeds have been planted. They're ready for the rain.

_____

Ethan Miller - ethanmiller@riseup.net - is a writer, musician, subsistence farmer, and organizer. A member of the GEO Collective - www.geo.coop - and of the musical collective Riotfolk - www.riotfolk.org - he lives and works at JED, a land-based mutual-aid cooperative in Greene, Maine.

http://yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1545


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Ending Industrialism

by Jan Lundberg

Culture Change Letter #150 (January 22 2007)


Will peak oil save the climate, or shall we first embrace a new culture?

We will have to be much more imaginative as a people if we are to take meaningful action to deal with global warming. It is a simple truth that economic activity that transforms the Earth into consumer products is the main problem.

Yet, hardly anyone is proposing that such activity and products have to be mostly stopped. There is actually some thought along these lines, and there always has been, but it is frowned upon by those with industrial axes to grind or who have bought into "progress" and "growth". So it is hard to publicize the idea of ending industrialism. The few authors on this topic are not household names, unless we infer that some famous old writers would have come out against industrialism if they had seen a little more progress and growth. Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau are examples of men who appreciated small farming and would have decried the concentration of employment in urban factories and the complete triumph of the corporation.

Today, it is claimed that the US is "post-industrial" or is "a service economy". But in the global economy there has mainly been a geographic change in the exploitation of workers and resources, compared to the heyday of smokestack-industry heavy employment on US soil. US cities are still more like work-camps than communities of enlightened citizens involved in politics.

Rather than say "Get rid of all industry" or "Get rid of technology", one can visualize local crafts-people soon making due with scrap materials and some renewable resources. The individual's possessions will not be so voluminous and overbearing when the change comes. There will no longer be a great number of things used daily, because new stuff won't be available and cheaply shipped to everyone the way it once was. So, re-using finally becomes the rule of the day.

Politics has increasingly meant proposing only (1) what will be acceptable to those with vested interests or (2) what people can be swayed to tolerate regardless of justice or scientific logic. Therefore, as the climate crisis enters a catastrophic level never before seen by humanity, politics as we know it must be rejected or bypassed. This might be expressed simply as "Think for yourself and save yourself", although selfishness is not the message as it would not solve the collective dilemma.

People cannot stop the global-warming culprit of industrialism, rather, it will stop itself. Another way to state this is to say that the economy will collapse and end most greenhouse gas emissions. This is not to say everything will be just fine as soon as manufacturing and oil-powered transport stop. There will be severe repercussions to "lifelines" of energy, food and materials being cut or terminated.

Being unable to plan for meaningful cuts in emissions during the time recognized today as most effective (perhaps as late as 1980 onward), modern society faces not just climate catastrophe but the imminent breakdown of systems that rely on fast-dwindling petroleum. The peak in world oil extraction may not be certain for a few more years, according to several peak-oil analyses.

But if enough people know what to expect, and are motivated to try to save the atmosphere and climate today, an attempt at simplifying lifestyle and cutting consumption will do two helpful things: soften the blow of petrocollapse and help usher in the "new" economics of local self-sufficiency and community cooperation.

Opposing this reasonable approach are those who wish to only get rich or richer, and those who believe religiously in the notion of linear progress and growth that have culminated in impressive technology. The accomplishments of industrialism and Western Civilization have blinded people to the overall negative trend we are all beginning to glimpse and feel. While people can sing the praises of the internet, they unconsciously use similar technology for convenience that harms themselves and the rest of the world. A prime example is throw-away plastic waste such as separate baggies for veggies that grow their own protective skins.

The technofix-environmentalist shares the same mind set and ethics of the incurable politician who always takes the easy way out and panders to common standards of status-quo behavior. A whole raft of information and insight on the non-feasibility of whole substitutes for petroleum is available, but is ignored by corporate interests and others allied with them perhaps unconsciously. To want to save the climate and yet maintain an economy similar to the destructive, wasteful economy that is killing us (and feeding us), is to want to have one's cake and eat it too.

It is hard for most modern humans, educated or not, to get their minds around the idea of the industrial world as they know it coming to an end. Even more far fetched for them is the idea of hastening its end - even though this would give the climate as we have known it a fighting chance. Resistance to change may be our greatest obstacle, while resistance to annihilation is fertile, not futile.

And when faced with an unworkable situation and glimpsing a better future free of greed and war, people try to embrace it. Sometimes all they can do is believe in a song such as "I Am The Walrus" ... No, I mean "Imagine" by John Lennon, from 1971.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

The song was and remains extremely popular. (Lest any feminists be offended by the quaintness of the last line, it is worth recalling that Lennon was soon to put out "Woman is the Nigger of the World".)

How can people live without the benefits of industry? But, equally vexing and dispiriting: How can people exercise their freedom when they gave it away for the regular paycheck - to remain within four oppressive walls away from home and nature for forty or more hours a week? Trying to answer these questions, and to grapple with the challenges of giving up privilege or the aspirations of wealth and power, can result in little more than frustration, denial or mental depression. So, it must be with open-minded inquiry and seeking answers from sources often suppressed, that stamped-out molded citizens might discover "new" ways of living that will rock this present world.

It would be pointless to talk about ending industrialism if we were not also discussing a liveable future. The climate must not end. Or we end too. So our future has to be sustainable and worthy of honoring all life.

At the same time, trying to honor the maximum number of human lives when such a number is unsustainable is not compassionate. Just as unpopular as ending industrialsim, with those running society, is the idea that the growing human population must shrink significantly. We are all subject to laws of biology, so if we don't manage our population size, nature will do it for us.

Under the current regime of industrialism, getting sick is - but should not be - a normal part of life. Primitive and many Third World people lack industrial medicine and much of the stress of modern life, and are normally free of runny noses and dental problems. Apart from the industrialized person's processed diet and near constant stress, there is widespread petrochemical-induced poisoning from a vast multitude of profitable products, even medicines, that represent another major negative feature of western civilization. The worst may be radiation of various deadly kinds, under the categories of war and "peaceful".

These are clear mistakes in managing our environment, and are indicative of our huge population's weakness and susceptibility to die-off from disease and genetic failure - even if Mother Nature's climate were to be kind, and petrocollapse not on the horizon.

Nevertheless, there are countless people who are positive and optimistic, regardless of the weirdness this society represents and generates. Do-it-yourself mutual aid, as happened with post-Katrina New Orleans, or Miami's Liberty City neighborhood for the former homeless, is perhaps becoming more common, and will come back bigtime.

Another even bigger return-phenomenon will be primitive living and living as a tribe; the two seem to go together. These concepts have been demonized, even though they are 99.9% of our history - before global problems emerged with civilized agriculture and its offspring industrialism. As part of the swing of the pendulum, spirituality identified with the Earth will return strongly, as people revere life in part by deploring the past era's trashing of the living world.

Industrialism is accelerated entropy. Instead of the moderate amount of waste generated in the Iron Age, the Industrial Age that began with coal enabled mass production of ultimately disposable items. The forests of Western Europe were first disposed of as population rose and industrialization began, but it was not until coal was surpassed by petroleum that industrialism could grow like a metastasizing cancer.

Thus we see that as the dominant culture adapted to extreme industrialization and the ostentatious wealth it permitted, the same culture - that allowed for the warped values to dominate in the first place - reluctantly spawns within it the seeds of revolution such as a counterculture. It will arise out of the dying mainstream culture of materialism and separation from both nature and one another.

Prior to certain effects of peak oil that may manifest officially as the final energy crisis, it may be that another mechanism or Earth-shaking event brings the industrial culture to its end. Regardless, out of the rubble and ashes will come a new culture that some have already been embracing for decades in their respect for the land, air, water and our fellow species.

I've recently revisited the Ten Steps of The Pledge for Climate Protection our office distributed since 2000. These steps could usher in serious economic changes in short order. But they would need to be adopted almost universally until the present system buckles and falls. However, the present system will not, I predict, be made to fall by people-power's surge for a better world, although one can hear this now and again. Rather, larger forces than social movements are in charge: a collapsing economy and "Nature bats last".

Yet it is definitely worthy to start embracing now a new culture. There are many of us who wish to do more today. The Pledge may be difficult-sounding for some of us. One way of making the Pledge seem reasonable could be to add to it, perhaps thus getting people to think more deeply about the first easier steps.

Here is first the Pledge for Climate Protection, which Eban Goodstein says "Looks very good". Goodstein is Professor of Economics at Lewis & Clark College, and Project Director of Focus the Nation. (This section will be followed by an additional ten steps, to be offered for consideration by the Global Warming Crisis Council.)

"I pledge to begin taking as many of the following steps as I can to stave off the worst effects of global warming, and spread the word. In so doing I will cut fossil fuel use. I will do some or all of the following:

1. Cut down on driving my vehicle, or carpool. I will walk or bike, and not buy a car if I do not have one (best of all). I will support and use mass transit. I may work closer to my home.

2. Cut down on working just for money: I can thereby barter more, and cut down on commuting.

3. Depave my driveway, or help others' depave their driveways, or depave parking lots, and grow food in depaved land.

4. Unplug or retire my television, and perhaps go off the electricity grid. I will reduce energy for heating, and share appliances such as my oven with neighbors, and not buy or use power tools or jet skis, et cetera.

5. Publicly oppose new road construction and road widening in my community, to start undoing sprawl, prevent growth in traffic, and halt the spread of forest roads allowing clearcuts.

6. Take vacations without jet air travel, and avoid career activity dependent on jet travel.

7. Plant trees, collect rainwater, and avoid overusing municipal water as it is energy-consumptive (and thus may emit carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas that fossil fuels release).

8. Buy local products, buy as little plastic as possible, carry a travel mug. Minimize consumption. Support alternative plant materials to cut down on petrochemicals and trees for paper. Avoid eating animal products especially shipped-in beef.

9. Not bring more children into the world, or limit my offspring to one, and possibly adopt. I recognize the threat of overpopulation.

10. Inform my community and the greater national and global community on the need to take action such as the above for climate stability."


Pledge for Climate Protection (and Even a Little Human Liberation) II:

- Take brief, cold showers. If you "can't", because it's too miserable, and that's the only option, then you prefer being dirty. Cold running water is a luxury, and because of the fossil-fuel-powered pumps, it's a source of greenhouse gas emissions.

- Go to bed when darkness falls, or shortly afterwards, and get up when it's light, to save on energy for lighting and heating.

- Live without refrigeration. Okay, some people are unusually dependent on refrigeration at this time.

- Dumpster dive some time, or be observant enough on the streets or anywhere to pick up for yourself some useful abandoned item.

- Go for a wilderness or parkland camp-out for an extended period. Augment your outdoor skills. Note useful materials from nature and use them when needed, such as in making pipe out of bamboo.

- Tell a motorist in his or her gas-guzzling car that you hope he or she will be able to save the climate and cut oil dependence soon, by car-pooling, biking, et cetera. Actually, rather than be confrontational and risk road-rage and run-of-the-mill insanity, it's safer to either hum "Have a global warming day ..." or just cough conspicuously while giving the car a dirty look.

- When buying a product in a jar or a bottle, if the cap has a clear plastic sealant in it, ask the cashier or manager if they know about bysphenol-A (endocrine disrupter).

- Rethink eating: (A) Eat wild herbs you pick in the neighborhoods or vacant lots, such as dandelion, yarrow, plantain, red clover, and fennel. (B) Go on a fast from time to time, in order to detoxify and regain appreciation for the food that comes your way.

- Give a homeless person some food, including those asking for money, with some helpful words such as locations of shelters, camp-sites, or Food Not Bombs, and encourage the person to eat wholesome foods.

- Raise your voice to uphold what is right in the common interest and what you oppose, in the name of the common good - including for all species.


If coordinated, as in a Gandhian movement against a colonial oppressor, efforts to stop the climate-killing plague of industrialism could be focused with powerful effect: if enough car buyers only bought used cars instead of new cars, the economy would dissolve into many local economies; the money would be kept in the community instead of going to distant corporations. This kind of effort, or some other people-power attempt to derail a runaway train heading off a cliff, may never happen or become necessary if petroleum supplies tighten enough to choke economic growth and spark a new, post-petroleum and truly post-industrial era.

* * * * *

San Francisco, California
January 20, 2007

Culture Change mailing address: Post Office Box 4347, Arcata , California 95518 USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax).

Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=94&Itemid=2#cont

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Coming Meltdown

by Bill McKibben

The New York Review of Books (January 12 2006)

Review

Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains
by Mark Bowen (Henry Holt, 463 pages, $30.00)

Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots
by Alanna Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 239 pages, $25.00)


The year 2005 has been the hottest year on record for the planet, hotter than 1998, 2002, 2004, and 2003. More importantly, perhaps, this has been the autumn when the planet has shown more clearly than before just what that extra heat means. Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:

- Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was twenty percent less of it than normal this summer, and as Dr Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, "the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover". That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun's heat, amplifying the melting process.

- In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly frozen methane - which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" - is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.

- British researchers, examining almost six thousand soil borings across the UK, found another feedback effect. Warmer temperatures (growing seasons now last eleven days longer at that latitude) meant that microbial activity had increased dramatically in the soil. This, in turn, meant that much of the carbon long stored in the soil was now being released into the atmosphere. The quantities were large enough to negate all the work that Britain had done to switch away from coal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. "All the consequences of global warming will occur more rapidly", said Guy Kirk, chief scientist on the study. "That's the scary thing. The amount of time we have got to do something about it is smaller than we thought."

Such findings - and there are more like them in virtually every issue of Science and Nature - came against the backdrop of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the now record-breaking Atlantic storm season that has brought us back around the alphabet and as far as Hurricane Epsilon. Because hurricanes draw their power from the warm water in the upper layers of the sea's surface, this bout of storminess served as a kind of exclamation point to a mid-August paper by the MIT researcher Kerry Emmanuel demonstrating that such storms have become more powerful and long-lasting, and would likely continue to increase in destructiveness in the future.

But the hurricanes also demonstrated another fact about global warming, this one having nothing to do with chemistry or physics but instead with politics, journalism, and the rituals of science. Climate change somehow seems unable to emerge on the world stage for what it really is: the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we haven't even begun to deal with. The coverage of Katrina's aftermath, for instance, was scathing in depicting the Bush administration's incompetence and cronyism; but the President - and his predecessors - were spared criticism for their far bigger sin of omission, the failure to do anything at all to stanch the flood of carbon that America, above all other nations, pours into the atmosphere and that is the prime cause of the great heating now underway. Though Bush has been egregious in his ignorance about climate change, the failure to do anything about it has been bipartisan; Bill Clinton and Al Gore were grandly rhetorical about the issue, but nonetheless presided over a thirteen percent increase in America's carbon emissions.

That lack of preparation and precaution dwarfs even the failure to prepare for the September 11 attacks, and its effects will be with us far longer. It's not, of course, that America could in two decades have prevented global warming. But we could have begun taking the steps to keep it from spinning entirely out of control, steps that grow ever more difficult to take with each passing season. The books under review, though neither deals directly with the politics of global warming, help us understand some of the reasons why we've so far done so little.

The best of the two - indeed, one of the best books yet published on climate change - is Mark Bowen's Thin Ice, which describes the science of global warming through the experience of the Ohio State University scientist Lonnie Thompson, the preeminent explorer of tropical and semitropical glaciers today, and the principal decoder of the secrets trapped in their ice. A minor defect is that the book was clearly designed to sell to readers of Jon Krakauer's classic Everest account, Into Thin Air - the title and the cover are bizarrely similar. And because of that decision, too much space is devoted to Thompson's adventures in the "death zone" above 18,000 feet on various Andean and Himalayan peaks, and too many tales are told about the Sherpas who make the expeditions possible and the hot-air balloons designed to float ice cores back to the base of the mountain before they could melt. These stories make the book needlessly long and distractingly repetitive, and detract a little from its emphasis on glaciers and what is happening to them.

But only a little. Bowen is one of the few people who could have written this book. Himself an expert climber who has written for popular magazines like Climbing, he also has a PhD in physics from MIT. He has been able to climb mountains along with Thompson to examine the glaciers and explain both the scientific and political consequences of their melting.

For many years, scientists trying to reconstruct past climate history have studied glaciers. Since each year's snowfall lies in a distinct layer, a core sample from such an ice field can be read much like a tree ring to distinguish long-term trends in weather. Moreover, small bubbles of air trapped in the ice can be sampled to provide a record of atmospheric conditions from any time in the past. One can tell from them how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere and what the weather was like - a Siberian core extracted in the 1980s demonstrated a perfect correlation between fluctuations in temperature and carbon dioxide levels and helped to embolden a few researchers to make the first global warming forecasts with real confidence.

For many years, researchers concentrated on taking core samples from alpine and polar ice - they were relatively easy to get to, and no one thought that high mountain ice in the equatorial zones would yield much interesting information because the tropics were seen as unvarying from year to year and hence climatologically dull. But beginning in the 1970s Thompson and his team began perfecting the techniques of drilling long, thin cores from the high and wild glaciers of Peru, Ecuador, Nepal, and Tibet, and then examining them in their laboratory in Columbus. They also began to translate the information latent in the cores.

The aim of their research was to figure out what had driven changes in the earth's climate in the past - how and why ice ages emerged and retreated, why there have been smaller but abrupt swings back and forth in climate even du