The demand for oil is categorized as “demand inelastic,” considering there are no ready substitutes available for oil, the implications being consumers have few opportunities to switch to other fuels for the myriad activities which oil enables. Strict supply conditions and a growing demand for oil give rise to an economic environment in which, as a rule of thumb, each 10% increase in the price of oil restricts U.S. GDP growth by up to 0.1 percentage points. Proceeding the Joint Economic Committee in April 2002, Alan Greenspan observed, “all economic downturns in the United States since 1973… have been preceded by sharp increases in the price of oil.”

U.S. oil consumption habits are quite extraordinary: for, due to a monumental privilege made possible by the U.S. dollars current status as reserve currency, the U.S. accounts for more than 25% of global daily demand, despite composing only 4% of the human population. Transportation accounts for 67% of U.S. oil consumption, and 97% of transportation in the U.S. is fueled by oil, with virtually no substitutes. An overwhelming amount of this movement of goods and services is on behalf of the major industries, featuring at center the military-industrial complex.

Over the past three years, gasoline prices in the U.S. and western world have fluctuated dramatically. In the summer of 2008, for instance, they rose to over $4/gallon but subsequently settled; decades of price inflation aside. Many analysts cite the reality of Peak Oil as the main reason for the inflationary and wild oil prices, however others argue that the price of crude oil today is not determined by the relation of supply to demand, but, rather, the control of oil through speculation by four major Anglo-American companies and their associates. This highly deferential pyramid in regards to the number of sellers in the oil market, in and of itself, results in higher prices. More sellers, on the other hand, would lead to more supply, leading to a more competitive environment with lower prices and higher quantity. Many maintain that Peak Oil not an ecological phenomenom, but, rather a political one, such as the prolific researcher and author William Engdahl.

At least 60% of the $128 per barrel price of crude oil in the summer of 2008 was, indeed, the outcome of unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds. While some of the spike has to do with summer’s status as driving season, other factors, such as the paper markets, play a significant role. U.S. rules as stated in Commodity Futures Trading Commission enable speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the NyMex, having only to pay 6% of the value of the contract. So, a futures trader in the Summer 2008 was required to pay approximately 8$ for every barrel, borrowing the other $120. This 16 to 1 hyper-leveraging of oil futures abated the high prices and ameliorated bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters by expenses suffered by the population.²

The selling of oil futures and derivatives contracts have major implications for where oil prices sit at any given time, for the number of buyers and expected prices shifts demand. Further, the process of fixing these prices is so open-ended, only few insiders, such as major oil trading banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, know who is buying the oil futures and derivatives contracts; that is, “paper oil.”

This perceived anticipation for the future affects our present demand, and when a multitude of investors bet on a bullish oil market, the price will increase. Similarly, cash for clunkers, for instance, increased consumer demand due to the tax write-off and deflated price of the cars featured in the program, shifting demand from the future to the present. In the future, profits of the auto industry and price of automobiles should fall due to depressed demand exacerbated, in part, by this program.

The appearance of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures over the past 15-20 years has made possible the present speculative bubble in oil prices. The advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts has landed control of oil prices not with OPEC, but with Wall Street.

In June of 2006. a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report entitled “The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices,” observed “…substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.” The ability for certain firms to influence prices by way of speculation is one symptom of a decades long process of deregulation in the marketplace and the following explosion in derivatives trading.

The report noted, also, that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulation of financial futures, had been mandated by Congress to ensure the laws of supply and demand were reflected in the prices on the futures market. The U.S. Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future deliver… causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue an unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” The CEA, moreover, instructs the CFTC to implement trading limits, “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator, had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery … causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.”

Therefore, the world’s keystone commodity market, oil, is unregulated and highly manipulated. The global economy runs, so to speak, on oil. The U.S. dollar, since 1971 under Nixon, has been a purely fiat currency, as are the majority of global currencies and all speculative instruments; in other words, it’s intrinsic value has been, since 1971, based solely on arbitrary pronouncement and maintained through responsible fiscal policies and management. No longer backed by gold or silver, paper and digital dollars were effectively backed by the world’s oil, especially when one considers that, in order to buy crude oil, virtually each nation had to first purchase US dollars. This dynamic is what Valery Giscard d’Estaing termed an “exorbitant privilege,” in reference to the benefit the U.S. enjoyed in the U.S. dollar being the international reserve currency: one outcome being, that the U.S. would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it purchased imports in its own currency.

The aforementioned US Senate Report further acknowledged:

Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes.”

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

The impact on market oversight has been substantial. NYMEX traders, for example, are required to keep records of all trades and report large trades to the CFTC. These Large Trader Reports, together with daily trading data providing price and volume information, are the CFTC’s primary tools to gauge the extent of speculation in the markets and to detect, prevent, and prosecute price manipulation. CFTC Chairman Reuben Jeffrey recently stated: “The Commission’s Large Trader information system is one of the cornerstones of our surveillance program and enables detection of concentrated and coordinated positions that might be used by one or more traders to attempt manipulation.”

In contrast to trades conducted on the NYMEX, traders on unregulated OTC electronic exchanges are not required to keep records or file Large Trader Reports with the CFTC, and these trades are exempt from routine CFTC oversight. In contrast to trades conducted on regulated futures exchanges, there is no limit on the number of contracts a speculator may hold on an unregulated OTC electronic exchange, no monitoring of trading by the exchange itself, and no reporting of the amount of outstanding contracts (“open interest”) at the end of each day.

David Kelly of J.P Morgan Funds, the Chief market strategist for one of the world´s leading oil industry banks, recently told the Washington Post: “One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong.” The story is floated around, and generally accepted for that matter, that China´s oil imports are exploding, meaning grave implications for the supply-demand equilibrium, and subsequently reason for the spike in prices. David Kelly´s enunciation, in contraposition, negates that hypothesis.³

OPEC, furthermore, left its 2008 global oil demand forecast unchanged, citing slowing economic growth in the industrialized world and slight growth in the emerging markets. OPEC predicted oil demand in 2008 to be, for the most part, unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India, and Latin America will rise, offset by lower demand in the EU and North America.

Big oil conglomerations profit enormously from high oil prices. Advocates of Peak Oil argue that, in the near future, Absolute Peak Oil was the coming end to cheap oil. One premise of Peak Oil holds fossil fuel to be the leftovers of fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, and so therefore characterized by finite supply. Alternatively, a theory of oil formation, arrived at in the Soviet Union of the 1950’s, criticizes the assumptions of western biologists to be unproveable, citing the fact that western geologists have warned an end to oil for more than century, thereafter discovering more supplies.

For the USSR, in the Cold War of the 1950’s, a domestic supply of oil was a geopolitical necessity, and a considerable boost to security. In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev and a team of other scientists concluded: “Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.” They termed this new theory “a-biotic,” or, in other words, non-biological.⁴

Implications of such a theory being that earth’s oil supply is limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon materials present deep in the earth at the time of earth’s formation, as well as the technology available to drill uber-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. The scientists argued that oil comes from deep in the earth, and from conditions of high temperatures and very high pressure. Porfir’yev: “Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth.”

The theory of Peak Oil originated in a 1956 paper by Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist employed by Shell Oil. Oil from wells is extracted, he argued, in a bell curve nature, and once a “peak” was reached, what he termed “Hubbert’s Curve,” decline ensued. By 1970, he argued, oil production in the United States would peak and the oil crises of the seventies are oft cited as evidence of the legitimacy of his theory. Free trade agreements world wide have taught us, on the other hand, that it is more likely the flooding of the US market with tariff free and dirt cheap Middle East imports by Shell, Mobil, Texaco, and the other Saudi Aramco made it impossible for California and many Texas producers to compete.

Exacerbating theories that political posturing promotes the illusion of limited oil supplies, the suppression of alternative modes of transportation is well-documented; from electro-magnetism to water powered cars. Why does the combustible engine reign supreme in an age of moon exploration, globalization and other seemingly sky-high technologies?

How do few companies get to the point of wielding so much influence?

By the 1870’s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the United States, as well as various foreign countries. The King of Holland, in 1890, supported the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company for the purpose of refining and selling kerosene from Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. In the same year, a British company founded to ship oil, the Shell Transport Trading Company, “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and “the two companies merged to become Royal Dutch Shell.”⁵

In 2008, it was widely reported that the U.S. government secretly led dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts. Andrew Kramer, for the New York Times, uncovered the story that the world’s oil giants, “Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP… along with Chevron and a number of smaller companies” were present at “talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.”

According to the Times, “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies…”

There is much evidence that the Bush administration, foreign firms and Iraq’s Oil Ministry had conspired during the most important periods of the Iraq War. There are deep financial ties between the military occupation in Iraq and the aforementioned oil giants; for instance, the oil giants Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron often make appearances on the Pentagon’s payroll. In 2007, these five firms earned more than $4.1 billion from the Pentagon, with Royal Dutch Shell at the forefront with $2.1 billion.

The government of Iraq and Royal Dutch Shell eventually signed a $4 billion deal to “to establish a joint venture with [Iraq's] South Gas Company in the Basra district of of southern Iraq to process and market natural gas.” The Times reported that Shell “established an office in Baghdad.” A “Green Zone” was guaranteed, and Shell was handed a $338 million contract for aviation fuel by the Pentagon. Therefore, the U.S. government was heavily involved in dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry, and the U.S. military regularly pays Shell billions of dollars each year.⁶

These subsidies should drive the price of oil down, as, from the businesses´ perspective, subsidies lower costs and make firms willing to offer more at a given price.

In an October 6 Business Week article, Robert Fisk elaborates upon the coming demise of the dollar. The phenomenon will see Gulf Arabs, along with China, Russia, Japan and France end dollar dealings for oil. The break from the post World War II Bretton Woods world order will be an in-between period as the aforementioned nations shift to a bread basket of currencies; among which will be the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a fledgling, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.⁷

It is possible that such plans partially explain the dramatic rise in the price of gold over the last few weeks. Certainly, they portend the end of the Dollar System as we have known it since the end of the Second World War. Further, these questions center on the strategic importance of Middle Eastern oil to both the rising giant of China and the waning United States. The deadline for the currency transition is 2018. Adding to the drama, Iran recently announced that its foreign currency reserves would from now on be held in euros as opposed to dollars. Many analysts recall what transpired after the last Middle East oil producer decided to sell its oil in euros than dollars. After the decision by Saddam Hussein, the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq.

Others hold that the timeline for revaluation is much shorter. The decline in consumer spending, which makes up 70% of the U.S. economy, and unemployment rates, which, though their rise has slowed continue on an upward trajectory, are indicators of this. A revaluation of the US dollar, if even only by one-third, would seriously compromise the U.S.’s ability to import commodities, such as oil.

In September, U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs stated that oil price could potentially peak at $85 a barrel by the end of 2009, and average approximately $90 in 2010. Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, recently raised their prediction $10, but it still lands at $65 a barrel. This is after they predicted in 2008 $150 oil by 2010.⁸

1. Securing America’s Future Energy. Fundamentals of the Global Oil Market.
2. F W Engdahl. ‘Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation‘. Global Research, 2 May 2008.
3. F W Engdahl. More On the Real Reason Behind High Oil Prices, Global Research, 21 May 2008.
4. F W Engdahl. War and Peak Oil. Global Research, 26 September 2007.
5. Andrew Gavin Marshall. Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order. Global Research, 28 July 2009.
6. Nick Turse. Pentagon Hands Iraq Oil Deal to Shell. Global Research, 4 October 2008.
7. Robert Fisk. Oil Not Priced in Dollars by 2018? The Independent, 6 October, 2009.
8. Deutsche Bank raises 2010 oil price forecast. Boiler Juice, 6 October 2009.

Chomsky is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia. The Kentucky segment was sponsored by Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC), where participants witnessed the impact of Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on local communities. In Colombia the delegation met with human rights activists, trade unionists, members of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, and others affected by coal production in Colombia.

Hans Bennett: Having just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation’s trip to Kentucky and Colombia, can you please tell us about your visit to Kentucky, and about the group ‘Kentuckians For The Commonwealth’ (KFTC)?

Aviva Chomsky: KFTC is a community organization working on social justice issues, one of them being local resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining that is destroying lands and communities in Appalachia. I’ve been working with them since last summer, when four people from that organization came with us on our delegation to the Colombian coal region. The connections they made between the two regions were amazing. In both, big companies run roughshod over some of the poorest and most marginalized people. People are losing their land, their water, their right to clean air, and their homes to the coal mines. The Kentuckians felt a real link with the Colombian communities, that they were part of the same struggle. Last fall, we worked with KFTC to organize a tour for two Colombian coal union leaders. They spent a week in Kentucky, seeing for themselves the results of mountaintop removal, and speaking to different audiences there. The Colombians were also incredibly moved by the destruction of land and lives in Kentucky. They couldn’t believe that this was happening in the First World. We decided we’d really like to organize a delegation that would visit both regions — and that’s what we did this summer. We spent three days in the Kentucky coal region, and then went to Colombia. We also had five people from Appalachia, all involved in different aspects of the movement against mountaintop removal, with us on the Colombian part of the delegation.

HB: What did members of the group share with the delegation?

AC: One thing that really struck me was the ways that people in both the Colombian and the Kentuckian coal regions talked about the land. I’m from the city, and have lived a pretty cosmopolitan life. For people in eastern Kentucky, like those in northern Colombia, the land is tied to the essence of their identity. People have generations-long ties to the land, they farm the land, they feel personally connected to the mountains, to the rivers, to the farms. Also, in both regions, people are aware that they are seen as expendable, not only by the coal companies, but by the centers of power. Both regions suffer from a lack of state services, and have been really politically marginalized. But also in both regions, there is a really powerful sense of collective identity that I think has contributed to the strength of the social struggles there.

In one interview a few years ago, a Colombian indigenous leader explained to us that for his people, the earth was “la madre tierra,” mother earth. “It hurts us to see the earth damaged,” he said, pointing to the gaping hole of the mine. People in eastern Kentucky talked the same way about their mountains.

HB: What has been the impact of the coal mining industry, Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on the local communities?

AC: The impact has been devastating. I’ve never been anywhere else in the United States where you can’t drink the water! But the tap water smells so sulfurous that I was even wondering if it was safe to shower in. People in the region complain of the same kinds of illnesses and reactions that we’ve seen in Colombia — respiratory ailments, rashes and skin diseases, eye diseases — reactions to coal particles in the air and in the water. Rivers that used to run crystal clear have turned into toxic sludge. People’s homes are being surrounded by the various impacts. A mountainous region is being flattened. A way of life and a people are being forced into extinction.

After visiting Kentucky, the Colombian union leaders told us they were shocked by how “irrational” the mining was there. I didn’t really understand what they meant until I saw it myself. In Colombia, there are huge seven-foot seams of coal. The mines there are giant operations that have opened up many-mile long areas. In Kentucky, whole mountains are being felled for little seams that are only a few inches wide! And believe it or not, there seem to be more serious reclamation efforts going on in Colombia than in Kentucky.

HB: After visiting Kentucky, the delegation flew to Colombia, which your flyer explains is “the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere, and also the country with the highest levels of official and paramilitary violence, including forced displacement, killings of journalists, trade unionists, and human rights activists.” The flyer asserts that, “foreign corporations are some of the major beneficiaries of this situation.” How do the corporations benefit from this? How does US financial and diplomatic support for the Colombian government influence the situation?

AC: Colombia is the poster child for neoliberalism in Latin America. Since the 1970s the United States — and the international financial institutions that it plays a leading role in, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have been pushing a development model on Latin America that calls, essentially, for governments to act in the interests of multinational capital. Governments are supposed to invite in foreign investment, and provide it with low taxes, low wages, and low regulation. They are supposed to cut back on social spending, and offer state enterprises up to the private sector. And, they’re supposed to quash any popular protest against these policies, using force if necessary. These policies have gone by names such as structural adjustment, the Washington Consensus, the Chicago Boys prescriptions (referring to the role of Milton Friedman and other economists from the University of Chicago), or neoliberalism. The United States has played a key role in the implementation of these policies — from working for the overthrow of elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and their implementation there, to Plan Colombia today, by which the United States provides military and economic aid that goes directly to implementing this economic model and crushing protest.

Union leaders have been some of the most visible victims. In the U.S.-owned Drummond mine in northern Colombia, three union leaders were assassinated in 2001. The company is currently facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly paying a paramilitary force to carry out the murders. Another U.S. company, Chiquita Brands, admitted to making payments for years to the paramilitaries. They claimed that they made the payments to protect their workers, but banana workers — and especially union activists—were the main victims among the hundreds murdered by paramilitaries during the 1990s and early 2000s.

HB: Before we talk about the delegation’s visit to Colombia this month, I’d like to first refer back to our 2007 interview in Z Magazine titled “Colombia Solidarity Work,” and ask you to please give an update about what has been going on since then, during this two year period since then.

AC: When we visited the Cerrejón mine in the summer and late fall of 2006, the company had taken the stance that it would not recognize or negotiate with the displaced Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco. It also insisted that community issues and union issues be kept completely separate. The union had included a demand about the rights of the communities in its 2006 bargaining proposal, and the company absolutely refused to include this in the contract — although they did agree to a side letter inviting the union to participate in the company’s social programs.

In the summer of 2007, Cerrejón announced that it was forming a Social Review Panel to evaluate its relations with the communities and provide recommendations. The Panel concluded that the displacement of Tabaco was a festering wound, and that the company simply had to rectify this if it wanted to develop any kind of working relationship with the local communities. The company agreed, finally, to engage in collective negotiations with former Tabaco residents, aimed at a resettlement of the community. This was a struggle that had been going on for ten years! In December of 2008, the company signed an agreement with the community defining the terms of the relocation and for compensation for the people who had been displaced. This was a huge victory.

Still, in some ways we were struck with how much has not changed. Although the agreement was signed with Tabaco, the relocation process has not yet begun—so people are still displaced. In the other communities we work with, the company has been engaging in collective negotiations for relocation — but they are still desperately poor, landless, and living in the shadows of the world’s largest open-pit coal mine.

In the Cesar Department, where the U.S.-owned Drummond mine operates, things are even worse. Union leaders there live in daily fear for their safety and lives. We had hoped to return to one community that we visited last summer, Mechoacán — but it had been wiped off the map. We met with the communities of Boquerón, El Hatillo, and Plan Bonito, that are slowly being strangled by the mine. Drummond, unlike Cerrejón, still refuses to recognize any right to collective relocation for these communities, and is simply trying to starve people out in hopes that they will leave.

HB: Okay, now let’s talk about your recent visit to Colombia. Who did you meet with and what did they talk about? What were the key issues addressed?

AC: The main issues we’ve been working on, with our partners in Colombia, are labor rights and community rights, in the areas where the multinational coal mines operate. The coal region in Colombia is in the north, close to the Caribbean coast, in the Cesar and La Guajira Departments. The people who have lived there for decades, in some cases centuries, are mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous peasants who have survived by farming, hunting, fishing, and day labor on ranches owned by large landholders in the area.

Multinational mining came to La Guajira in the 1980s, to Cesar in the 1990s. These mines are almost unbelievably gigantic operations — Cerrejón claims to be the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and Drummond is currently undergoing expansion that it says will make it overtake even Cerrejón’s size. Each one employs thousands of workers, some directly, and some through subcontractors.

The main people we spent time with there were the unions at the two mines—including the Injured Workers Association at the Drummond mine — and the communities that have been displaced, or are in the process of displacement. Everyone we met with there seemed to share the belief that getting their stories out to the U.S. public was essential to protecting their lives and their livelihoods. Drummond is a U.S. company, and much of the coal produced by both mines is imported by U.S. power plants. People in Colombia are also acutely aware at the huge influence that the United States has on their country’s policies. Mostly, they want us to tell their stories here in the United States, so that people here will pressure Drummond, the companies that buy the coal, and the U.S. government, to make sure that workers and communities in the coal region have the same rights that we here enjoy — the right to personal safety, the right to clean water, to education, to safe working conditions, to form unions, to be able to provide for their children, to not live in fear of their government or of the companies that operate in their midst.

HB: How does the union organizing in Colombia compare to the organizing in Kentucky, and the US in general?

AC: We were shocked to learn that there are no unionized mines left in eastern Kentucky. Not even in Harlan County. Yet despite a high level of disillusionment with the United Mineworkers among many of the people we met with in Kentucky — because of its weak or non-existent critique of surface mining, and because of the capitulations it has made to industry that people believe are responsible for its demise in the region — people there have an incredibly high level of union consciousness. Nearly everybody we met talked to us about how their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, had fought and in some cases shed blood, to bring in the union.

Unions in Colombia — especially those in the coal mines — are extremely militant, and have a strong current of leftist analysis and environmental consciousness that are pretty uncommon among unions in the U.S. today. The union leaders we met with talk about foreign mining companies raping the land and the people, looting their country’s natural resources, lining the pockets of shareholders with coal produced with the blood and the land of Colombians.

In both the U.S. and Colombia, union density has been falling. In Colombia, the main cause has been violence against unions; in the U.S., deindustrialization has played a big role. The AFL-CIO has a checkered history in Colombia, as it does in the rest of Latin America. Historically, the federation has been closely linked to U.S. foreign policy goals through the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD. I think the AFL-CIO is trying to overcome this past, and the suspicion it has generated in Latin America. Yet it is also struggling with internal conflicts, and now the accelerating economic crisis, and I think it has not made as much progress as it could in the area of trying to develop real international solidarity.

HB: How does the coal mining trade fit into the current global energy crisis and fossil fuels’ effects on the environment, including global warming?

AC: We had an interesting conversation about this during one of our meetings in Colombia. One of our delegates works with the Move America Beyond Coal campaign, and she asked Jairo Quiroz, the president of the Sintracarbón union that represents workers in the Cerrejón coal mine, more or less the same question: don’t we just have to stop mining and burning coal altogether, given its environmental impact? Jairo’s response really challenged all of us, I think. “There is no clean source of energy,” he said. “You in the United States are the ones who use most of the world’s energy resources. What do you propose to use, if we stop mining coal? Petroleum and natural gas are no better for the environment than coal is, and both contribute to global climate change. Nuclear energy also requires mining, and creates waste products even more dangerous than coal’s. Solar energy and wind energy are only viable where those resources are sufficiently available, and they also require production, transmission and storage techniques and equipment that depend on mining (for turbines, batteries, solar panels, etc.) and the use of toxins. So-called biofuels are the worst of all, because they expand the agro-industrial model which has profound environmental effects — from deforestation to desertification to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers — and it also disrupts the whole food chain by channeling agricultural land to the production of fuel instead of food.” Basically, his point was that rather than pointing the finger at coal, we needed to think about the underlying causes of environmental destruction — like our overuse of energy. “As long as you want to keep using that much energy,” he said, “we’re going to keep mining coal.”

There’s always a challenge, in a campaign for social and political change, to choose a target that’s narrow enough that you can effectively organize around it, but making sure that you don’t get distracted from the larger goals by the narrow target. In Salem, we have a coal-fired power plant. Some people argue, from an environmental perspective, that we should shut down the plant. But what are the larger implications of that argument? Unless we are planning to stop using electricity altogether, it just means that we’ll be getting it from another plant somewhere else. It can turn into a kind of NIMBYism [i.e., “not in my back yard”] — we don’t want to have to see the impact of our standard of living, we want to displace it onto somebody else. That’s how our system works—and that’s how we’re encouraged to think. We need to think more profoundly about the causes of global warming and environmental destruction if we really want to address them.

This may seem only peripherally related, but one of the communities we visited, in the Cesar Department, was located right next to the trash dump for the city of La Loma. Trash is blowing around, and it smells awful. Also, many of the communities we work with have no running water — thus no real latrines. These issues made me think about the multiplications of our privileges in the First World. We don’t have to see where our energy comes from, and we don’t have to see where our waste goes — we just live in this bubble of plenty and our waste is invisibly whisked away — all of which encourage us to continue abusing and wasting the earth’s resources!

HB: How has the recent election of several leftist and ‘left of center’ Presidents throughout Latin America (most recently in El Salvador) changed US power and influence? How do you think the US is reacting to this? What role with Colombia play in US strategy given that it is one of the last remaining right-wing governments?

AC: The United States is clearly counting on Colombia to play a major role in maintaining and promoting what they call “U.S. interests” — which generally means the interests of U.S. corporations — in Latin America. Ecuador’s new government recently announced that it is not renewing the U.S. lease on its military base in Manta, Ecuador. So among other things, it looks like Colombia will be the site of the new base that will replace Manta.

There are really two things that a leftist government in Latin American needs to accomplish — neither one of them simple. One is to redistribute their countries’ resources internally, to address the region’s devastating social and economic inequalities. The other is to reformulate Latin America’s relationship with the rest of the world, to break out of the pattern established after 1492, in which Latin America provides cheap labor, and cheap resources, for the benefit of Europe and later the United States. These are monumental problems, and the United States government has shown itself pretty committed to keeping the status quo, even if doing so requires violence, murder, invasions, or coups.

Many of the people I spoke with on this trip seemed to feel a lot of hope that we’re entering a new era, in which the United States will choose — or be forced — to accept major structural changes in Latin America. Despite Obama’s diplomatic language, he’s already shown that he’s quite ready to use military methods to further what the U.S. defines as its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But other factors — the swing to the left in Latin America, the work towards alternative regional economic integration, the economic crisis, and the growing global awareness of the environmental crisis and the planet’s limited resources — could contribute to some real changes.

HB: How can readers best help support the current work of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, Witness for Peace, and those in Colombia who you recently visited?

AC: We’re hoping to bring one or two community leaders from the Colombian coal region to the U.S. on speaking tours this fall. We are also planning another delegation for next summer. And, we do occasional “urgent action” requests in support of the work our Colombian partners are doing. You can join the Witness for Peace or NSCSC e-lists to get updated information about all of these activities, or write to us directly at nscolombia@comcast.net if you want to get more involved in the planning.

* This interview was first published at UpsideDownWorld.org on June 15, 2009.

This long-standing gulf between government rhetoric and action was preoccupying scientists attending the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in the Danish capital during March, and many of these specialists have since engaged in activism of a kind not seen since the period of nuclear proliferation during the 1950s and 1960s. Acknowledging the failure of governments to date, experts at the meeting urged world leaders to resist the influence of vested interests and act decisively to avert a series of devastating ecological and social consequences.

Whilst Nicholas Stern, one of the UK’s leading climate change scientists and author of the Stern report, berated the British government’s failure to pursue strong and effective policies, other outspoken and prominent scientists took to the street in protest. Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), joined more than 1,000 campaigners in Coventry (UK) as part of a Climate Change Day of Action in March. Demonstrators similarly voiced concerns over government inaction at the Put People First and Climate Camp protests during the G20 Summit in London. Dr. Hansen, like many in the climate change movement, believes that our politicians are failing the planet, and that direct action through protests is now crucial in order to combat heavy lobbying from the business sector that has prevented the necessary legislative interventions.

What these scientists-cum-activists now faced is the same barrier to progress that campaigners have expressed for decades: a stubborn adherence to economic growth and corporate welfare by policymakers. So entrenched is the attachment to continually expanding the economy that Gordon Brown, acting as ‘chancellor’ of the G20 Summit, made the resumption of global economic growth a key target for the meeting. Ministers hope that the trillion dollar stimulus that was agreed upon will go a long way to re-establishing economic ‘normality’. More recently, the same ministers pledged billions to the world’s lender of last resort — the IMF, to provide additional debt-based credit to stimulate growth around the world. The underlying rationale behind these policies is that governments must preserve economic growth at all costs, and the best way to safeguard growth is by protecting those businesses that generate the most income.

Profiting from Climate Change

The danger of continuing such a ‘growth at all costs’ approach is amplified when only financially profitable solutions to the climate crisis are pursued by governments. In most industrialized countries the largest and most influential businesses are oil corporations and car manufacturers that wield significant lobbying power over governments, and a responsibility to their shareholders before any commitment to reduce CO2 emissions. Given both the overriding commitment by corporations to profit and a dependency by the population on the consumption of oil, there is little incentive for these industries to encourage people to consume less fossil fuel. As one example, car manufactures have traditionally prioritized speed and aesthetics over efficiency, and some of the most fuel efficient cars available today are less economical in fuel use than those available over two decades ago — particularly in the US. Whilst this approach has contributed to gross domestic product (GDP) and generated huge incomes for the car industry, the average ‘miles per gallon’ usage in US cars is currently less than it was in the 1908 model T Ford.

A spiraling level of economic and financial competition between nations is also stifling effective agreement and action on emission reductions, whilst continuing to aggravate the often-tense relationship between countries in the Global North and South. Given the competitive nature of the global economy, most governments resist enacting tough legislation to curb emissions in the fear of losing their competitive financial edge. They prefer instead to use less effective market-based mechanisms that will facilitate a continued prioritization of economic growth.

Green taxes on driving cars or flying in airplanes discriminate against the poor and are only half measures compared to stricter legislation, such as outright bans on cars in cities or domestic flights. Despite being a key mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, setting an agreed ‘cap’ on emission levels and then allowing some companies to ‘trade’ their allowances to other firms for profit doesn’t reduce emissions as effectively as simply legislating for larger reductions. Whilst strict legislation would force corporations to innovate greener technology, ‘Cap and Trade’ results in incremental and insufficient adjustments to emissions with a view to creating new markets and expanding profits. Carbon offsets are an increasingly popular way of reducing emissions, and present yet another business opportunity that contributes to GDP. Palliative measures such as planting trees or purchasing offsets sold by ‘greener industries’, while at the same time pursuing business as usual, does little to mitigate the unsustainable and damaging activities that emit greenhouse gases in the first place.

An understanding of how business opportunity has trumped effective policy can be drawn from a host of other market friendly solutions to global warming. Bio-fuel expansion accelerates climate change through increased deforestation, the destruction of ecosystems, peat drainage, and an increasing use of nitrate fertilizers. Policies that encourage ‘clean coal’ production or carbon capture and storage (CCS) help governments to justify the continued building of coal plants, thereby appealing to the fossil fuel lobby and obfuscating the deeper issues. And the nuclear lobby is using climate change to revive their flagging industry despite serious concerns over hazardous wastes, a lengthy development process, and clear evidence of its marginal capacity to reduce emissions.

Ultimately, none of these options addresses our over-reliance on fossil fuels, the problems with continued industrial expansion, or the need for more sustainable modes living and working. Instead of limiting advertising, restricting the overuse of pollutants or legislating for deeper cuts in emissions in key polluting industries, governments and corporations have adopted a strategy that leaves the average citizen feeling responsible for solving the climate crisis themselves.

The tendency of governments to trust business models and not strong legislation is skillfully masked by shifting guilt and responsibility onto ‘consumers’, and much of the public debate still remains focused around recycling, changing light bulbs and re-using carrier bags. By reducing their carbon footprints and making choices that are more responsible in of lifestyle and consumption habits, people in the developed world may try to live more sustainable lives. Whilst engagement by the public is crucial and personal adjustments are necessary, consumer measures are limited in their effectiveness and generally only possible in the richest countries.

Moreover, the ideal of ‘consumer choice’ in goods and services is predicated on the continued consumption of natural resources, the pollution from which is one of the main drivers of climate change. By any assessment, it would take decades for consumer preferences to re-orient the current model of production and consumption that remains driven by the need to increase profit levels and share prices endlessly.

A more suitable strategy would be for governments to enact legislation targeting the source of emissions, for example by regulating the exploitation of natural resources by industrial producers, including the full environmental costs of production into the price of goods, and discouraging the all-pervading consumer culture that is increasingly the focus of life, even in the developing world. These and similar measures would shift the responsibility away from the end ‘consumer’ who is presently encouraged to continue over-consuming, albeit more conscientiously.

Revisiting the Limits of Growth

Endless economic growth is clearly unsustainable as GDP can only increase through the continued production and consumption of the world’s resources. This paradigm, despite its application to almost all aspects of international and domestic policies, is inherently flawed since we only have finite resources and a limited capacity to absorb emissions. As the oft-quoted UK Interdependence report by the New Economics Foundation estimated, if all countries consumed as much as the US per capita, we would require over five planets worth of resources to survive.

The relentless process of economic expansion largely relies on inputs from nature, and consequently ravages the environment whilst releasing huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. A recent report by the Sustainable Development Commission in the UK summarized the conflict between growth and the environment, stating; “In the last quarter of a century the global economy has doubled, while an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems have been degraded. Global carbon emissions have risen by 40% since 1990 (the Kyoto Protocol ‘base year’). Significant scarcity in key resources — such as oil — may be less than a decade away.”

Writing previously in the New Scientist, Tim Jackson, the report’s main author, equated emissions rates to consumption rates and calculated that, if we factor in moderate economic growth, the necessary cuts in emissions will require an 11-fold reduction in the current European average consumption rate. Yet any coherent plan, requisite technology or financing to achieve this universal decarbonization of the world’s economy is still far from being realized.

There are wider social issues that accompany an entirely growth-based approach to economic development. For example, numerous studies have demonstrated that economic growth is not an adequate measure of wellbeing or happiness. As a society, despite a phenomenal increase in material wealth, we are no happier now than we were in the 1970s. If fairly distributed, the proceeds from growth can be important, particularly in the developing world where it can significantly enhance well-being by helping to secure basic human needs. But once these needs have been met, as is largely the case in rich countries, increases in wealth cease to contribute significantly to well-being.

Even as a means of poverty reduction, economic growth is extremely inefficient and uneven in its benefits. The proceeds of growth are not distributed fairly enough to justify an adherence to the ‘trickle down’ theory, and there is no coherent global welfare system to compensate the increasing numbers of ‘losers’ in the global market system. Not only has inequality in wealthier countries increased in recent decades, but levels of inequality between countries also continue to rise. The minimal quantities of aid redistributed by donor countries to compensate those who cannot afford to pay market prices for their essential goods and services is also fast dwindling, as donor countries have fewer resources to spare in the wake of the worsening global financial crisis.

The poor in the developing world also suffer disproportionately from the ‘externalities of growth.’ As demand for more goods continues to rise, and resources are extracted and then consumed as products — often many thousands of miles away — various hazardous by-products are created along the way. These include toxic chemicals used by the extractive industries, chemical fertilizers used by agri-business, and carbon emissions from machinery and transport.

Not only can poorer countries simply not afford to address many of the environmental consequences of this process, they will often be the first to be threatened by the consequences of climate change as it affects agricultural production. Up to 85 percent of the population in some of the poorest countries depend directly on crops, livestock, fisheries or forests for their daily income or sustenance, and estimates suggest that crop yields could reduce by a third in many poorer countries by 2050 as a direct result of global warming. Sub-Saharan Africa, the smallest contributor to CO2 emissions, will be the hardest hit.

There is a growing acknowledgment amongst scientists and campaigners that the only way out of the quagmire of growth is an immediate shift in policy to favor public and environmental interests over those of big business and the profit imperative. But it is also necessary to achieve a wider appreciation of how the pursuit of economic growth accelerates global warming and mitigates prevention — a basic fact that should play a key role in climate change campaigns. Without greater public awareness of the political and ideological obstructions to action, governments are likely to continue reinventing the same competitive, growth-centric policies that are the root cause of the climate crises.

Only public engagement can finally urge governments to act more decisively on climate change, although this involvement must go beyond individual efforts to recycle waste, buy responsibly or reduce carbon footprints. The media has already well documented the role of non-violent protests in reshaping public opinion and policy, and the recent heavy-handed approach by the UK government to squash the G20 protests signals a growing concern amongst policymakers of how informed citizens can quickly damage their political reputation. It is time to step up efforts to educate, engage and mobilize world opinion on the real causes and solutions to climate change, enabling the global public to take the lead in forcing governments to act.

Nigeria’s environmental degradation is a by-product of the moral and political rot that flows from neocolonialism. It is the physical manifestation of the total surrender of national sovereignty to foreigners — like Shell oil — by those native classes that rule the land for the benefit of foreigners. To put one’s country’s resources at the disposal of foreigners is the ultimate corruption — which leads to every other conceivable crime.

It is a false dichotomy to separate the corruption of Nigeria’s governments — military or civilian — from the predatory presence of Big Oil. The two are locked in the deepest embrace. The foreign corporations pay the regime to maintain peace — and the regime reciprocates by imposing on the people a “peace of the dead.” There are other sources of corruption in the developing world, other contradictions between people and their governments, but the dominance of economic resources by foreigners exacerbates every other division in society. The competition to get into the foreigners’ money flow becomes the Great Game of national political life. The bigger the money flow, the greater the imperative to keep the people in check. The police and army serve as paid thugs for the foreigners’ protection. The national debasement is total. Nigeria’s most important city, Lagos, is also one of the most expensive in the world — yet 70 percent of Nigerians subsist on a dollar or less a day. There is no greater corruption imaginable.

In court, Shell oil will seek to present itself as an innocent party — even a victim of African brutality and corruption. Shell is more properly compared to a businessman who hires a hit man to kill a union organizer. The businessman and the hit man are both guilty of capital murder. The greater onus is on the businessman, whose money made the crime possible.

In the Niger Delta, Ogoni rebels have cut Nigeria’s oil production in half, putting the squeeze on US-based Chevron Oil (where, incidentally, Condoleezza Rice used to work). According to Amnesty International, hundreds of civilians have been killed in the fighting. The Nigerian government has declared the entire delta a military zone. No doubt, great crimes are being committed at the behest of Big Oil. Before he was put to death, Ken Saro-Wiwa predicted it would come to this.

* This article was a Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The impetus for this interview (Sobre poder atómico, cambio climático, energías limpias y formas de organanización ciudadanas) was the publication of a Spanish translation of Garcia’s CounterPunch article “To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?”

Salvador López Arnal: Let us start with a few basic notions. When we talk about nuclear fusion, what do we really mean?

Manuel García, Jr.: Nuclear fusion is the application of energy to a pair of atomic nuclei so as to force them into each other despite the electric and nuclear forces of repulsion that normally keep nuclei separate and distinct, so that some of the combined nuclear mass is transformed into energy by Einstein’s formula E = m c-squared, and is emitted as nuclear radiation; and the remaining combined mass is reformed into an new single nucleus of a different chemical element.

SLA: This new source of energy is sometimes associated with a defeat of climatic change. Why? Do you think this is a fantasy of self-interest by governments, military powers and large corporations?

MG,Jr.: The consensus of modern science is that the carbon dioxide (CO2) gas emitted by the many, many sources of combustion of hydrocarbons (petroleum and many forms of natural and processed organic matter) inherent in human activity has made the Earth’s atmosphere warmer and more insulating (it traps more infrared radiation, which is heat) than it was before the industrial exploitation of petroleum. So, human activity in combination with natural cycles of climate are producing an effect that is called global warming (”Climate and Carbon, Consensus and Contention“).

By comparing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere today with conditions and climates of the distant past, so far as science can detect them; and by running computer simulations of Earth’s climate into the far future, scientists can arrive at a wide variety of possibilities of what our climate might evolve to during this century. Many of these predictions are unpleasant, some generally, and others for particular regions and portions of humanity. For example, some island nations may disappear because of the rise of the ocean level due to the melting of the ice caps.

The difficulty faced by modern society is that the great work-saving technologies, comforts and advances much of the developed world enjoys are possible because of abundant energy, which we generate by the combustion of coal (for electricity and industrial process heat) and petroleum (for transportation technology and military mobility), and this combustion is the source of the CO2 that might trigger a major change in Earth’s climate to much less hospitable conditions. Do we forsake today’s comforts and conveniences for decades, even longer, solely based on fears arising out of computer simulations, and which may not come to pass? Or, do we proceed emitting enormous quantities of waste heat (CO2 and entropy) to continue our capitalist mode of industrialized resource exploitation, and wealth accumulation for a select few, even if it triggers a catastrophic shift in climate and a drastic reduction of food production?

How to respond to the uncertainties and challenges of global warming, by finding the right balance between our old technologies of energy production, new ones that emit less CO2 but may need development and investment before achieving their full potential, and imposing stricter measures of energy conservation and accepting greater inconveniences (like the reuse and recycling of current items) is a subject of major contention today. Nobody wants to give up their particular way of making a profit just because it may contribute to global warming, and also many would like to find profitable business ventures that exploit the concerns over global warming. So what begins as a discussion of geophysics and its impact on society degenerates into many arguments about making money, and politics: who is going to “win” and who is going to “lose?”

Clearly, if we can find new ways of generating abundant energy without also emitting CO2, then the comforts of the First World can be continued, and the necessary improvements for the Third World can be made without causing a change of the world’s climate. So, many suggest that their favorite technology or hoped-for future profit-making scheme will provide energy without CO2 emission. Some of these claims have more merit than others, and many groups that make such claims are seeking government subsidies (research money or tax breaks).

The nuclear power industry is advertising itself as a “green” technology, one that does not emit CO2. This is blatantly false as all the mining, fuel processing, transportation, construction and waste disposal activities associated with nuclear power create CO2 emissions. Wind and solar energy are the most efficient as regards energy produced per mass of CO2 emitted. The deficiencies of wind and solar in terms of their convenience are that they are energy sources of low concentration (they may require a large area for collection) and low power (low to moderate temperature or limited electrical power from any single generator). Conservation is the most cost-effective “green” technology today, it simply means reducing the waste associated with whatever energy generation methods are already in use.

SLA: So, at this point fusion is promoted as the solution?

MG,Jr.: One dream that grew out of nuclear physics is the vision of devising fusion reactors to power society. We are familiar with the enormous output of energy from nuclear fission (the splitting apart of a nucleus) whether slowly in nuclear reactors or suddenly as in explosions of nuclear bombs. But, there is a much larger yield of energy from nuclear fusion; and an essentially unlimited supply of fusion fuel. The fusion of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, powers our Sun (the Sun’s own gravity from its huge mass squeezing the nuclei together at its core). Here on Earth, deuterium and tritium occur naturally in trace quantities in the oceans; and they are readily made from ordinary water irradiated with neutrons in nuclear reactors. The fusion dream is to use deuterium and tritium to make power reactors of much greater yield than nuclear fission reactors, and which do not use radioactive metals for fuel, nor generate the same quantities of radioactive waste.

The leading idea in the quest for technological fusion energy has been the magnetic compression of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) plasma (a highly electrified gaseous form of matter) in devices called tokamaks (magnetic fusion energy has nearly 60 years of research). A more recent idea (over 35 years) is laser-fusion (called inertial confinement fusion). The NIF facility I discussed in my recent article is a laser-fusion facility (”¿Bombas nucleares o luz solar?“).

Fusion works marvelously in stars because they are so massive. Their huge gravity forces nuclei into fusion at the star’s core, and the huge bulk of the star is of sufficient depth and density to easily capture and contain the nuclear energy released by fusion reactions. Fusion is a process of energy generation that is mismatched to the much smaller scale of our Earth. The Sun extends 109 times further from its center than the Earth, and it is 333,000 times more massive. Science has yet to devise an artificial star, a steady fusion reactor; but it has devised impulsive ones, which are nuclear (hydrogen) bombs. My article described how NIF (National Ignition Facility) and facilities like it assist in the design of nuclear weapons.

SLA: What are your criticisms of nuclear energy, generally?

MG,Jr.: My criticism of nuclear power in all the forms described, for the purpose of providing a steady supply of electricity to a nation, is twofold:

1, the technology is not well matched to the end-use, there are many complexities, dangers, and inefficiencies between the fuel source and the electrical output, the entire cycle from fuel production to waste management is excessively costly (per kWh of electricity produced) fiscally, environmentally and politically;

2, the nature of the technology makes for highly centralized generator sites (which must also be high security zones, and are very expensive), requiring an extensive distribution network (which will have transmission losses).

Highly centralized power generation serves the needs of highly centralized economics: exclusive capital accumulation at extensive social cost. Distributed power generation serves the needs of a distributed population: communal technical networks provide local control and personal economic independence.

Solar and wind technologies can generate electricity locally and practically over much of the Earth’s surface, whether land or sea. There are far fewer conversions of energy forms from the sources to the electrical output, so there are fewer types of inefficiencies; and there are never the types of hazards associated with radioactive materials and nuclear technology. Because the energy generation processes are natural to the Earth’s environment (solar-electric, solar-thermal, wind-torque-electrical, hydro-torque-electrical), the entire process cycle: from source to generation to recycling of used equipment and material, is much simpler and cheaper (by fiscal measures that are socially complete in that they account for environmental and political liabilities). Solar, wind and hydro technologies are “natural’ to the Earth, and well-matched to the end-use of residential electricity, and many industrial applications.

The dispersed nature of “the source” of solar energy (wind and hydro too, but they are more localized) means that generators and users are closer to each other (even coincident), so distribution networks will be smaller and more efficient. This means proximate local networks can have overlap, providing redundancy and thus a greater degree of overall reliability over regional and national scales. It also means the local “owners” of the generators are much more likely to be among the users of the electrical output, so the entire economics of the system becomes as distributed and decentralized as the energy source. Micro-networked solar energy is intrinsically communal. An energy system that offers a family the possibility of gaining its energy independence by harvesting the sunlight that falls, and catching the wind that whisks through the space they occupy to live, would be a wonderful thing.

However, if you are part of a group — we could call them capitalists, or industrialists, or pirates, it’s all the same — who wish to control a large source of energy, which they meter out to many individuals at a distance for a profit, then you would prefer a highly centralized energy generation technology. This is why I wrote that nuclear power is prized by the mentality that sees the taxi meter and the cash register as the purpose of organizing society. The hazards, complexities and inefficiencies that make it necessary to isolate and make large nuclear power generation sites, also fits them to the needs of monopoly control, and leaves the nation vulnerable to societal blackmail through the energy dependency of its people.

SLA: In a recent article published in CounterPunch — “To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?” — you mention that Hugh Gusterson wrote, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that the recently inaugurated National Ignition Facility (NIF), near San Francisco, was in its entirety a program of nuclear weapons development. Do you agree with that opinion? How does NIF support nuclear weapons development?

MG,Jr.: My article covered that point. NIF is funded to provide data on fusion phenomena that are created on a microscopic scale, with extremely intense pulses of laser light bombarding micro-balloons filled with deuterium and tritium. NIF will also be used to provide data on the properties of uranium and plutonium when they experience extreme pressure; microscopic samples will be compressed by laser bombardment, and fission reactions initiated. This data from experiments is then used to refine and correct computer codes that simulate the intricate physics. These codes can then be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs. NIF is intended to fill the gap left by the cessation of full-scale nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. There has never been any secret about any of this, but Thomas Friedman did not mention it in his paen to NIF as a prototype fusion energy system, published recently in the New York Times. That was Gusterson’s point.

SLA: As you say, NIF belongs to the mentality that “sees the taxi meter and the cash register… as the purpose of social organization.” But, you add, “this flow of energy in unlikely to be as safe, reliable, freely available, poverty alleviating and socially uplifting as could very easily be the case today.” What sense does it make then to choose a road of so limited value? What is hidden behind that decision?

MG,Jr.: This is because public resources are being invested for the benefit of a profiteering capitalist elite, and all risks and liabilities are being socialized. Don’t ever think that socialism is disliked in the United States. On the contrary, it is highly prized by the apex class of our economic pyramid as the best way of eliminating its wastes, expenses and responsibilities. Centralized energy technology is preferred by monopolists, and their sole focus is exclusive capital accumulation. Decentralized power generation puts more control into the hands of local communities and individuals. This method of powering the nation is clearly of superior social value (and an essential necessity in the rural Third World, with solar electricity generators of the simplest type), but it is not championed by the US government for the same reason national health care is not championed by the US government: it has been bought off by corporate money. The key political point here is that the US government does not work primarily in the interests of the public, it is an agent of corporate interests, protecting them FROM popular democratic action. By far the most devastating deficit in the U.S. today is the democratic deficit; the fiscal ones are trifles in comparison, they only entail money.

SLA: You also mention that nuclear weapons only have a functional value if their design is proved by tests and that this requirement was the reason for the many nuclear tests carried out by many countries since 1945. How many tests have been carried out to date by all nuclear nations, including Pakistan and Israel? Where are they carried out?

MG,Jr.: Since 1945 over 2000 nuclear tests have been carried out, about half were conducted by the U.S. (1054); Russia did 715, France 210, the U.K. 45, China 45, India 6 and Pakistan 6 (this total is 2081). Not all tests have been acknowledged or verified, so there are some uncertainties as to the exact number. South Africa, under the apartheid regime, and Israel may have conducted a joint test in the South Atlantic, but South Africa claims never to have tested and has since dismantled its stockpile; Israel says nothing and is not known to have conducted a nuclear test. Tests have been carried out in many places. Most US tests were in the Pacific southeast of Hawaii, and at the Nevada Test Site. Both Russia and China conducted their tests at remote sites within their territories. France conducted tests in the South Pacific, and the U.K. conducted nearly half its tests in Australia or territory controlled by it, and the rest at the Nevada Test Site. India and Pakistan used remote and desert locations for their underground tests. The test by North Korea in 2006 was of such low yield that many believe it was really a failure.

SLA: What are the difficulties and risks of working with large quantities of materials with high levels of radioactivity?

MG,Jr.: The risks are of (1) radiation exposure to people, causing illness or disability or death; (2) the possibility of grouping too much radioactive material together and initiating a chain reaction (a critical mass that proceeds to “melt down”); (3) theft of nuclear material, and its malicious misuse; (4) accidental release into the environment, introducing a pollutant with heavy metal toxicity as well as radioactivity; (5) producing a large amount of radioactive waste: the machines, materials and containers used to shield workers from radioactivity, which must be stored and kept secure for a long time; (6) incurring large and continuing expenses to pay for all the activities required by the possession of a nuclear materials industry and its legacy.

SLA: Is there any link between the use of nuclear energy and the possession of nuclear weapons?

MG,Jr.: Yes. The material for bombs is usually produced in reactors built for that purpose, but it can also be harvested from the fuel rods of civilian power reactors. All uranium nuclear reactors produce a build-up of plutonium. This is why the U.S., Russia and the major atomic powers wish to control the fuel cycle of reactors in client states that have “peaceful’ atomic power, like South Korea. The fuel cycle is the production of fuel rods for civilian reactors, and their eventual removal and “reprocessing” to remove the plutonium build-up, and recycle the remaining uranium-235, or package the rod for “disposal.” The situation of Iran’s nuclear program illustrates the intrinsic connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (”Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: What do you think of the pressures by the US and Israel to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear energy?

MG,Jr.: Both Israel and the U.S. want to prevent the rise of any competitive regional power in the Middle East and Central Asia. This is because the U.S. seeks to control the sources and economics of petroleum, and Israel seeks to undercut the source of economic sustenance to the resistance movements in the territories it invades and occupies (and its vision is large in this regard). I have elaborated on these themes elsewhere (”Iran’s Uranium“).

SLA: Please give us five reasons against the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

MG,Jr.: Nuclear power is:

(1) inefficient: it is likely that more energy will have been used to build, maintain and secure nuclear power sites, and to manage the waste legacy of the nuclear power industry than it will ever supply as electricity;

(2) insecure: nuclear reactors require massive amounts of cooling water, those located along rivers have had to be shut down in times of drought (in recent years in Europe) creating shortages of supply; because nuclear power is so centralized, any reactor site that is incapacitated for any reason will cause a deficit in its network, and this will require purchasing fossil-fuel energy on short notice, or doing without;

(3) slow: it takes so long to build a nuclear power station that this technology cannot really be mounted, nor easily disassembled as the case might be, to respond to changes in the volume and geographical distribution of energy demand;

(4) dangerous: it uses the most physically hazardous substances we know of, though I suppose they do kill germs, and this extreme hazard creates monumental problems of risk management and security; also, the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation is all too real;

(5) expensive: the features noted each add to the expense of the technology, and this cost is considerable in each of the fiscal, political and environmental dimensions; expense is always a relative measure, and my view is that if solar (and related generation and storage) and micro-networks were given the same quantity of government subsidy, and not even for as many decades as nuclear power has enjoyed, we would have a much better system of national electrical power by every criterion imaginable, except that of monopoly control of a societal dependency.

SLA: You mentioned that NIF is presented as the positive answer, in the U.S., to the question many nuclear weapons states are now asking: “can we keep a nuclear weapons arsenal at reduced cost and also bypass the ‘danger’ and ‘political’ disincentives of having them, by eliminating most of the weapons testing infrastructure and workforce, and instead relying on the virtual reality of computer simulations.” Why do you think that those simulations will never be able to replace tests of real life-sized weapons?

MG,Jr.: By definition a simulation is incomplete, it relies on projections and approximations to some of the details that make up a real item and a real phenomenon. The details of the dynamics of ultra-rapid (billions of a second) compression and nuclear fusion of millimeter-scale capsules will have unavoidable differences to the much slower (microseconds) implosion of full-scale nuclear devices. The characteristic length scale of the phenomenon plays a role in determining how the dynamics of the imploding fluid mass will evolve.

Let me give an analogy. The distance over which molecules of air interact by collision (at sea level) is about 60 billionths of a meter, call it lambda. The air friction resisting the motion of an object through the atmosphere is the accumulated effect of molecular collisions: air pushed away by the object in turn collides into surrounding air molecules, and some of these rebound back into the object. The net effect is “drag” caused by the viscosity of air. The effect of this viscosity is most pronounced against the surface of the object, but soon fades away with distance from it (say within thousands of lambdas). In the case of a typical airplane wing, the fluid disturbed by viscous interaction with the wing surface is confined to a relatively thin layer called a boundary layer (which might build up to a few percent of the wing thickness). For many calculations of aeronautical engineering, a slight increase to the thickness of the wing is used to account for the boundary layer of fluid that tends to move with, or ’stick,’ to the wing, and then the overall lift of the wing is calculated as if this modified shape were moving through a frictionless atmosphere. This method is quite good when the length scale that characterizes the size of the wing is large in comparison to the thickness of the boundary layer. This is easily the case with large wings at high speed, as with our airplanes. However, this method fails when trying to understand the workings of the wings of small insects. Gnats that may be of millimeter scale will be swimming in a viscous soup of an atmosphere, since their wings and bodies are easily within the length over which air viscosity acts.

Because not every force and physical interaction changes its characteristic length scale as the length scale of the object in question is changed, there are inevitable differences in the dynamics of fluid motion, between situations of different size. Another example is the dynamics of planetary atmospheres, like our weather, which is highly influenced by gravity because of the size and mass of the Earth. Yet, gravity has essentially no influence on the dynamics of gnat flight; gnats are nearly suspended in weightlessness, paddling through a three dimensional syrup of atmosphere.

So, micro experiments in fusion will certainly help to refine codes simulating intricate physics, which can be used to help design full-scale nuclear bombs, but neither these experiments nor the codes will ever fully account for all the details of the full-scale dynamics. Of course, all that is needed, for the purposes of engineering warheads, is that they be good enough, and that is ultimately determined by the complexity of the warhead designs and the accumulated experience of the weapons designers.

SLA:You mentioned that, in any case, the crucial point is that nuclear weapons are unnecessary for a reasonable national defense. How do you justify that statement? Because of the monstrous effects of their actual use?

MG,Jr.: Let me point you to an article (”Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence“). My basic points: (1) the globalization of world economies makes any nuclear war a permanent loss of wealth to the investor population of world capitalism, so nuclear weapons have lost their strategic value, and (2) the improvements in shooting and bombing accuracy given by the integration of computer, electronics and GPS space technologies makes it unnecessary for advanced military powers to use the massively powerful blasts from nuclear explosions in order to achieve tactical objectives in their colonial wars or wars for dominance against rivals.

SLA: You ask yourself: “Is the investment in NIF as an ICF (Inertial Confinement Fusion) system prototype a wise public policy, regardless of NIF’s role for nuclear weapons?” You answer by saying that “it depends on the type of society you want to power and when you expect to start doing so.” Why? How do you justify that relation?

MG,Jr.: I can only repeat what I said in the article (”To Power A Nation: Nuclear Bombs Or Sunshine?“). Highly concentrated power generation systems serve the needs of narrowly focused capital accumulation at great social expense. Fusion energy systems fit that type, but they will take a very long time and a lot of money to develop.

SLA: You also mention that you prefer to organize society “in a socialist or classless manner, or at least more egalitarian and certainly not corporate-controlled,” and that you would prefer a decentralized national energy supply system, where “the generation, control of, storage and use of energy were all local.” What type of systems would these be? What sources of energy are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: A solar collector unit, perhaps the size of a large refrigerator, that can generate enough heat to power a small Stirling engine that then cranks a generator, and produces as much electricity as a typical wall outlet (115 VAC, 15 A) during four hours a day, and which could be built locally with generic components, could transform the lives of people in Third World villages and rural areas. Imagine having the energy to pump water, refrigerate essential food stores, recharge batteries that provide lighting for nighttime study, run power tools, provide electric heat for cooking, boil and purify water. Such simple and small systems of “gridless green energy” could have a major impact on the conditions of most of humanity, including the people at the bottom of the economic ladders in our First World nations. Fancier versions of such systems (e.g., using the batteries of electric vehicles as storage units of household electricity generated by a solar-photovoltaic system), and micro-networks of generation and storage as mentioned several times, could maintain the level of comfort we have grown accustomed to in the First World, and do so with much less danger and in a much more egalitarian and economically liberating way. There are no physical laws barring such a vision, only the small-mindedness of our greed as institutionalized in our politics.

SLA: You state that we already have all the technical means to implement such a system, a national network of micro-networks or local networks. “Solar energy focused as heat onto pipes carrying oil along the focal axes of parabolic trough collectors, and the oil transferring its heat through a heat exchanger to water, generating steam, which in turn drives a turbine that turns an electric generator, can produce electricity from sunlight with from 1% to 5% efficiency, steadily during the day.” Are you thinking basically of the U.S.? Would it really be posible in other tecnologically less developed societies? Wouldn’t it be necessary to have technological or even geographical conditions that are within reach of very few states?

MG,Jr.: Clearly, the more elaborate and technically refined the nature of solar, wind or hydro systems and the networks connecting generators with storage units and users, the less likely they will be first used in the Third World. But, the general type of thinking behind such systems can be used to build simple examples that are within the reach of less developed societies.

Face it, there isn’t a corner of this globe that is so remote that it hasn’t been reached by the gun trade. Well, why not the solar energy movement? We can assume that there is enough of a population of artisans anywhere, with sufficient hand tools and knowledge that they could fabricate the simplest of solar collectors, ovens and windmills, Stirling motors and even electric generators if they have access to basic materials, and clearly drawn plans or sample units. Anywhere such a local system of energy-from-the-sun is built will become a focal point of new construction of newer and better systems, and these will spread to other sites and other groups of people. Yes, I admit this is a step up from giving a completely helpless and ignorant person in the wilderness a shovel and a cow; but it is not that big of a larger step. And, like the shovel and cow, giving such a person both the knowledge and the essential materials to produce a system that provides a greater quantity of clean energy right at his location is an investment in humanity that can only grow to everyone’s benefit. Read the reports on the energy needs of the Third World written by the United Nations Development Programme (my article on the subject can be read here).

As to geography, most of the Third World is in equatorial latitudes, sunshine may be one of the few things they have in abundance.

SLA: Wind-power, you say, “is the most abundant source of non-fossil non-nuclear energy today.” Do you see any inconvenience in the widespread use of this type of energy?

MG,Jr.: Large wind power arrays are best isolated to sites with little nearby population and frequent winds. An obvious location is away from the shore, for example instead of oil derricks at sea. Small wind-energy modules are already being built, which can be mounted on rooftops and add to the household electrical supply. “Inconveniences” are really just problems of design and engineering, and ultimately a source of satisfaction to the innovators of the technology, who overcome them.

A national system of electrical energy supply will be the integration of solar, wind and hydro generators of micro or residential scale, which are coupled with storage units and use sites by a micro-network, and the micro-networks are then coupled by the types of regional networks we are accustomed to now, which also connect to industrial-scale generator sites (e.g., “solar farms,” “wind farms,” large hydroelectric facilities), in order to create a quilt of overlapping local networks which in total is then a robust, reliable and multiply redundant system of national electrical energy supply.

SLA: From your point of view, the hurdles for change are only political. Is it so? What political hurdles are you thinking about?

MG,Jr.: The hurdles are: (1) public awareness of what is truly physically possible — this is the target of my writing, (2) the fear of change and loss of continuity of service (continuity of mindless comfort, as long as one can afford to pay for it), (3) the opposition of powerful capitalist “energy industry” interests, who do not want any change in their profitable modus operandi, and (4) the democratic deficit of the U.S. government (and others), which is held hostage by corporate money and is unresponsive to the public will.

SLA: Please let me ask two final questions. Why do you think Einstein supported the research on atomic energy during the Manhattan Project?

MG,Jr.: He was influenced by people he knew and trusted (Leo Szilard, like Einstein, a Jew), and were afraid the world might indeed succumb to the domination of Hitler and the Nazis. One has to remember how formidable the Third Reich was at its peak in 1939. Europe had essentially capitulated to it: France would fall in 1940, England would be isolated and on the defensive, and Stalinist Russia was formally in compliance with its non-aggression treaty with the Third Reich. The very idea of democracy and free society seem threatened. The thought of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Militarist Japan (in China since 1937) dominating and having their types of mass oppression spread over the globe was inducement enough for Einstein to urge the one major power left, the United States, to invest in the physics that could turn the tide of the world war: the atom bomb. Great fears give rise to great weapons.

SLA: Could you imagine a world without nuclear weapons? What realistic steps could be undertaken to bring us nearer to that ideal?

MG,Jr.: Yes, I can imagine a world free of nuclear weapons. The more people become self-confident in their own lives, and free themselves from their personal fears, the less likely they will be fooled by fear-inducing propaganda, which is the main tool of social control. People who have liberated their minds in this way are best able to become aware of the realities of their national societies, and to become advocates for the egalitarian betterment of their societies. Part of this betterment will include alterations to personal lifestyle, undertaken freely so as to remove oneself (as well as one can) from the support of imperialism and anti-environmental and exploitative capitalism. One then is able to drop prejudices and broaden one’s sympathy to include all who suffer in the world. At this point, your actions in the cause of creating a just and authentically peaceful world are a matter of taking advantage of whatever opportunities the accidents of birth and the vagaries of fate make available to you. Others will be influenced by your example, and in this way the effectiveness of the cause spreads.

A political movement to bring a nation to implement nuclear disarmament, and to then urge other nations to do likewise, must be populated by individuals who have gone some way along the process I described, above. The generosity of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, they being replaced by compassion and respect as the basis of international relations, can only arise from a political movement that reflects these ideals as the general sense of the personal values of its people. A people obsessed with their own gain and their entertainment, and living in fantasy worlds of parallel isolation enveloping them from their laptop screens, is a mass of atomized disengagement, a sea in which the managers of the corporatocracy wash away their cares and sink their wreckage.

I could recommend the philosophy of Epicurus, or Zen. Most basically, I would ask anyone to realize that we are living in a world that would be paradise if we cooperatively chose to make it so. Learn what you fear, and overcome it; then be grateful for life and express it. The rest will come naturally.

Soldiers and coal miners have a shared camaraderie as both are enforcers of the will of the oil and coal corporations for the purpose of increasing bottom-line profits at any cost. This is depicted on a billboard in Beckley, W. Va., showing soldiers and coal miners arm in arm. The major difference being that coal miners do not have to kick down the doors of Appalachians to get the coal, as the coal companies already own most all of it.

In Iraq, private contractors (working for Halliburton and Blackwater, for example) are killed and not counted as U.S. casualties. In Appalachia, independent contractors killed are also not tallied as coal company deaths.

Innocent Iraqi women and children killed are termed “collateral damage,” and innocent deaths in Appalachia are treated no differently. What are the differences between a 4-year-old child in Iraq killed with a bullet, and a 4-year-old child in Appalachia killed by a rock blasted off the mountain, or by a flood resulting from a breached sludge/slurry pond, or in an accident when the family car collides with a coal construction vehicle.

There will be long-term civilian suffering in Iraq by virtue of the more than 400 tons of debris from depleted uranium shells that we spread over the cradle of civilization in Iraq. This has already resulted in severe and repeated birth defects in Iraq, and among our own troops, who come home and infect their husbands and wives.

The irony here is that over 80,000 MOP chemical protection suits designed to protect our troops from exposure were defective — they were made in Rainelle, W. Va., with no consequences for the now-bankrupt company.

Likewise, long-term ill effects are occurring in Appalachia due to the use of tetryl, a banned Second World War-era substance used to detonate the ANFO explosives that daily to blow up the mountains. This also results in the spread of arsenic, selenium and other toxic substances released when the mountain is blown up, and the rock exposed and pushed into the valleys.

In both arenas, we are getting rid of our toxic wastes without regard to the fact that Iraqis and Appalachians and coal miners are becoming sick and being killed. Outside colonizing forces (the oil and coal companies) are providing inadequate protection to the soldiers and coal miners who follow their orders. When oil and coal companies care so little for their own workers, how much concern can they have for Iraqi and Appalachian residents?

The culture and history of Iraq and Appalachia are of no consequence as far as the occupiers are concerned. Our tanks run over archaeological sites in the cradle of civilization, and the dragline excavator in Appalachia obliterates historic sites, cemeteries and artifacts in the oldest mountain range in the world.

Appalachians are displaced and become refugees in major cities and neighboring states, never to see their home again. And should Appalachians go back home to their mountains, they discover that even the mountain is gone — currently, a one-quarter-mile-wide road could be constructed from New York to San Francisco with mountaintop removal sites. Meanwhile, the millions of Iraqi refugees also can’t go home, or come home to find those homes destroyed.

Yellow-dog journalism influenced by both corporations and their political allies tries to convince the public that the people and culture of Iraq and Appalachia aren’t worthy of respect, admiration or protection. “Ragheads” and “hillbillies” don’t deserve rights when it comes to the extraction of oil and coal.

To justify going after the oil in Iraq, the occupiers are trying to convince the world that it is part of a “war against terrorism.” To justify going after the coal in Appalachia, the occupiers are trying to convince the world that “clean coal” is one of the best offenses against terrorism.

The consequences of both wars against terrorism have left the people of both theaters without water, homes, food, family infrastructure, culture, health and peace and justice. On the bright side, the occupiers’ bottom line has soared.

There are permanent U.S. bases along the proposed Caspian Sea pipeline, and Iraq can boast about having the largest American embassy in the world. But we all know that Iraq harbored no terrorist responsible for 9/11, and we all know “clean coal” is an oxymoron (not a single home in this country has electric from “clean coal”).

Toxic waste sites dot the landscape in Iraq (not even counting DU), while toxic sludge and slurry ponds sit in Appalachia, with one harboring billions of gallons of toxic sludge sitting above the Marsh Fork Elementary School When these impoundments are breached, residents are killed, aquatic life is destroyed, and the future of the oldest mountain range in the world is threatened.

And it just so happens to be that the first strike our U.S. Air Force made after its inception was against the coal miners at the battle of Blair Mountain, where Mother Jones was engaged in union organizing.

Our soldiers are subject to “stop loss” orders, which forces them to stay deployed in iraq even when their deployment is up. This is similar to the coal miner having to give up the 40-hour workweek that thousands have died for.

There are many other subtle parallels, such as the fact that West Virginia sends a higher percentage of our sons and daughters to the Middle East than any other state. And since Appalachians are losing their homes and being displaced by the occupiers, the military becomes an attractive alternative.

When I see a popular sign in Appalachia that states “Clean coal: Fighting terrorism for America’s future,” I am convinced of the shared goals of the energy corporations who support and buy our political system to help carry out the goal of increasing bottom lines at any cost.

Living in Appalachia with the coal companies at my door makes all this more visible and real to me. We need to empathize with Iraqi citizens and Appalachian residents and put ourselves in their shoes for a while to more fully understand the devastating consequences of these corporate occupations. Then, and only then, will we think twice about buying an automobile that does not get at least 35 miles per gallon, or buying that electric hand cream warmer, or leaving a light on.

Then, and only then, will we see that perhaps we have strayed so far away from a representative social democracy that to get it back would require all of us to assume our responsibilities as “We the People” — and not become victims ourselves of the “increasing bottom line at any cost.”

Needless to say, the 1400 or so Palestinians who had suffered the fate rhetorically sanitized under the rubric, ‘collateral damage,’ were not the victims of the Israelis, according to the logic of Dershowitz; rather, they were victims of Hamas.

After all, Hamas members failed to extricate themselves from the densely populated territory, wherein Hamas provided social services, in order to line up in some type of military formation, so that they would become the unmistakable target for the Israelis. Therefore, the mounting civilian casualties were the fault of Hamas, because the organization neglected to cooperate with its adversaries.

Never mind the fact that it was the Israelis who dropped the bombs – destroying all sorts of Palestinian institutions, such as the university, various government edifices, including the Ministry of Culture; and numerous domestic dwellings that happened to be located next to the residencies of Hamas officials, whom the Israelis have been assassinating through the use of missiles.

When questioned about the year-long embargo, which has been waged by the Israelis, preventing humanitarian aid from entering the besieged territory, Dershowitz indicated that Israel was not to blame. In order to understand the logic behind the claim leveled by Dershowitz, one must ignore every ostensible aspect to this situation, because one’s plain perceptions and commonsensical reasoning are obfuscated and circumvented by the polemic that Dershowitz has constructed.

I would compare Dershowitz’s argument to something stereotypically spouted by the abusive male in a dysfunctional heterosexual relationship. Similarly to the wife-beater who screams at the object of his physical abuse, “Why do you make me hurt you?” the illegal embargo is not the fault of the party that implements and maintains it; it is the fault of the victim, the Palestinian population.

According to the law professor, Dershowitz, the people of the Gaza Strip should overthrow their democratically elected leaders – who are members of the political section of Hamas – in order for the Israelis to accomplish their military-politico objectives, so that the Israelis can cease with their ongoing strangulation of the Palestinian population.

Finally, we come to the crescendo of Dershowitz’s apologia for the Israelis. The Professor from Harvard generalized the war being waged by the Israelis against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as embodying a struggle that all democratic nations face. Therefore, in order to ascertain the essence of the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, one must ignore the historical specificities that led to the current state of affairs.

Push aside and ignore the fact that the Israelis are colonists who have displaced millions of Palestinians from their traditional homeland. Forget about the hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese captives who are illegally held in extrajudicial limbo by the Israelis. Neglect to consider that the Israelis had suffered zero casualties, resulting from the missile attacks launched from Gaza, prior to the Israeli incursions, which have led to over 500 Palestinian deaths, including women and children.

According to Dershowitz, all of these facts are epiphenomena, and matter not at all when arriving at an understanding of the present situation. Dershowitz argues that this ongoing conflict is reducible to the following: A democracy defending itself against terrorism.

In response to Dershowitz, we can say, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Many economists assure us the current recession will begin to subside by 2010, but the paradigm from which they conceptualize reality is incomplete, ignoring costs externalized by markets, such as the encroaching effects of habitat destruction. The fledgling and contagious social unrest at hand must be quickly organized, attitudinized and mobilized, for existing environmental, geopolitical and financial upheavals threaten the survival of many. Firstly, the outlook for food yields in 2009 is dismal: Many analysts have warned of a 20 to 40 percent drop in agricultural production, depending on the harshness and duration of the current global drought. Two years ago, however, Science published predictions of “permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” of the United States, and forecast levels of aridity akin to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s that would envelope swaths of land from Kansas to California. The Hadley Center in the UK reported in November 2006,

“Extreme drought is likely to increase from under 3% of the globe today to 30% by 2100 —areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.”

This, of course, is a recipe for widespread desertification. The NOAA foresees drought of considerable duress—“ largely irreversible for 1,000 years”—and identifies the following key regions as facing, insofar as our contemporary purviews are considered, permanent Dust Bowls: (Romm )

• U.S. Southwest
• Southeast Asia
• Eastern South America
• Southern Europe
• Southern Africa
• Northern Africa
• Western Australia

Countries yielding two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are on the precipice of serious climatatic discontinuities reminiscent of the Global Climate Optimum of the 900 to 1300 variety. Food prices will soar, and, in poor countries where food is scarce, millions will starve. One thing we have to fall back on is our natural humanity, —not just our braininess and know how, but also the fact that the collective wet dream that constitutes our social reality skews how many of us can actually live now and in the future. Simply put, by ditching the wet dream and downsizing, we significantly better our plight. There are plenty of atavistics (those who are like, so last dark ages) among us, like Dianne Feinstein, who said that it is Californians “god-given right to water their lawns and gardens.” Southern Californian Scott Thill offers, in an article published by AlterNet, a new definition of the front lawn: “Gorgeously tended middle fingers to reality, which, like death and taxes always, has a way of winning in the end.”

The California drought is anticipated to be the worst in modern times. Already thousands of acres of crops are fallow, with no sign of slowing. Furthermore, the Northern Sierra snowpack for this past winter turned out to be 51% lighter than usual. According to the Los Angeles Times, the state is nearly out of water, leaving it with prayers of rain and a dwindling Northern California supply. Los Angeles has already begun allocation of water, which, as Scott Thill points out, means water to the rich (north) and away from the poor (south). He then portends evacuations and realignments, “by 2100, you will not recognize it.” East of southern California, 18 percent of Texas is burdened by severe drought.

In some countries historical relief efforts have been undertaken. The Chinese government has allocated 86.7 billion yuan (roughly $12.69 billion) to affected regions, and, moreover, lent a helping hand to its western colleagues during the financial crisis, but also to nature itself. Officials in Beijing blasted silver iodide into clouds over northern China to create precipitation as a means of alleviating the most severe drought experienced by the region in half a century. King your fingers crossed (or maybe not, there’’s no telling with these things!), as China produces 18% of the world’s grain each year.

Australia has been in the midst of an unremitting dry spell since 2004, as 41% of the country’s agriculture suffers the worst drought in the 117 years of record-keeping. Rivers have stopped flowing, lakes are being eradicated by toxicity, and farmers have left their land.

Shall we proceed? Argentina’’s worst drought in half a century has turned that country’s verdant landscapes to dust. The country has declared emergency. Soy plants are scorched by the sun and Argentina’’s food production is set to go down a minimum of 50 percent or greater. 2008’’s wheat yield was 16.3 million metric tons, whereas 2009′’s is projected to be merely 8.7 metric tons.

Africa faces food shortages due to lack of rainfall. Half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plant. The Middle East and Central Asia, to boot, are suffering from contemporary nadir droughts and food grain production is at the lowest levels in decades. A major shortage of planting seed for the 2010 crop is expected.

Stocks of foodstuff are dangerously low worldwide. Agricultural commodities must rise in price so as to obviate even larger food shortages and famine. Wheat, corn, soybeans, etc. must become expensive enough so that every available acre is harvested with the best possible fertilizers. With food prices steady, production will continue to fall and millions would starve.

A spike in food price is likely to spark competitive currency appreciation in 2009. Foreign exchange reserves exist for this. Central banks the globe over would lower domestic food prices by either directly selling off their reserves to appreciate their currency or buying grain from the market. Appreciating a currency is the fastest way to control food inflation. The more valuable a currency the more monopolistic a nation over global resources —so, for example, an overvalued dollar enables the US to consume 25% of the world’s oil, despite only having 4% of the world’s population. Were China to sell off its US reserves, its population of over one billion would then suck up the world’s food supply. Prices soar around the world.

This process, however, would most likely not end up in the impoverishment of nation states per se, though almost certainly the disintegration of the modern middle class, already long past its youthful heyday. The American Dream has been repeatedly resuscitated over the last thirty years through portfolio insurance, Long-Term Capital Management, the internet, the housing market, and now the looters have taken to the streets—oh, excuse me; I mean to their theoretical electronic world—and pillaged the landscape.

Social unrest and soaring food prices go hand in hand, from sea to shining sea. Countries, so as to avoid revolutionary reform from the bottom up, would have no choice but to appreciate their currencies in order to cheapen food imports. China holds the best deck, and so then would sell off more of its reserves. The world’s reserve currency, the dollar, floats into precarious waters. As a fiat currency, the US dollar is, by its very nature, worthless. Trillions of US holdings could be liquidated in favor of food.

“”We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger.” (President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 24 Feb 2009)

In Washington, talk of bailouts and relief are framed in the realm of economics and economics only, with no considerable deliberation of our species ecological outlook. The budget proposal is sold as a demand oriented New Deal-esque expansionary program, with health, education, renewable energy, investment infrastructure and transportation at its forefront. The hope is to stimulate employment, boost social programs and to revive the real economy. Michel Chossudovsky reports in a recent article published by Global Research, that —– surprise, surprise— — the “stimulus package” is the most substantial diverging of public spending ever, and serves the interests of Wall Street, in particular, the finance, oil and defense cartel. This in and of itself should cause social unrest, and certainly makes more likely the potential evaporation of the middle class.

The 2010 fiscal year, which begins on October 1st, will represent an increase in spending of 32%. The nucleus of the proposal inflates defense and the Middle East War funds, the Wall Street bank “bailouts that never end,” so-called by the New York Times, and interest on a debt that exceeds ten-fold the world’’s GDP. The bailout— financed, in part, by the recipients themselves, the creditors, which, as understood by the Treasury and the banks in the first place, meant the FED enjoyed sweeping authority over how the money was to be spent from the onset of this collapse—continues under the new proposed budget. Unlike Keynesian style deficits, this piling on of debt through the proposed budget would not stimulate investment and consumer demand; there will be no expansion of production and employment, for the giveaway of tax dollars to the financial oligarchs is no more than a monumental concentration of wealth and centralization of world banking power.

Washington places defense spending at $739.5 billion, though some estimates assert aggregate defense and military related spending at more than $1 trillion. The total of both bailouts—, Obama’s $750 billion piled on top of Bush’s $700 billion dollar bailout, —is 1.45 trillion dollars paid for by the Treasury. Virtually all federal government revenues would be expended to finance the bank handouts: 1.45 trillion, the war; $739 billion, and interest payments on public debt; $164 billion. And then the well is dry. There are no funds available for the social programs encapsulated in the stimulus package. Therefore, programs for healthcare and education will most likely be sold to private enterprise to fund the bankrupt state. Education is not the only state asset that is at risk of being privatized: Public infrastructure, urban services, highways, national parks, etc. are all at risk. The worsening fiscal collapse coalesces in the privatization of the state, tilling the land for a much more lucrative market in governance and social control.

Many economists hypothesize that the Obama administration is employing Zimbabwe School of Economics policies, where by hyperinflation is produced through the incessant printing of money, resulting in that currency’s fall to zero. Currently, we are seeing the simultaneous devaluation of the currency and the purchase of the world’’s commodities by corporations, government assets included; a process that will presumably leave the rest of us with toilet paper.

So, that leaves us with a raped resource base and a new system of globalized neo-feudalism. In 1800, —around the time of the Industrial Revolution—, there were 969,000,000 humans on earth. That leaves more than five billion redundant individuals whose lives were made possible by fossil fuels and abundance of water. A ubiquitous and enduring reorientation of human cognition is the key to survival: in short, reprioritization. This problem is of the utmost importance. A change of consciousness would result in a change in mass behavior. This starts at the obvious level: short-showers, low-flow everything, no lawns, total conservation and the reorientation of the economy based on renewable resources and sustenance. We must then work on disbelieving in our governments and the moribund banking system.

An all-pervasive insurgency, attacking multi-laterally the global industrial grid oligarchy, with broad but explicit aims— among which a new harmony with the natural world is foremost— must, before all else, work towards dismantling tyrannical corporations. Computers and electricity are the lifeblood of civilizations. Coordinated attacks against the electric grid, financial markets, and destroyers of the environment could be wildly successful, but could only be so as part of a talented and colossal movement with army-like discipline. Specialization comes in handy. The average American city has food for about half a month, which means economies will need know-how to localize and quick.

Another option would be to create companies of our own to challenge the global giants. Max Keiser, host of the Oracle on the BBC, has championed the idea of creating huge syndicates of boycotters against companies such as Coca-Cola and Exxon/Mobil. The money saved would be diverted to the world’s top activism organizations. The biggest take-home lesson when it comes to boycotts is this: the consumer wields enormous power. You’’ve been told it before and it’’s true. Boycotts of certain market elements such as the Fed Cartel (Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America), in which we move our money, refinance with another bank, sell our stock or quit our jobs, is a major step in the right direction.

Your television lies. Propagandistic news networks like CNN, NBC, ABC, Fox, etc are the only companies from whom Americans get their daily dose of news. The panoply of diverse news websites on the internet forms the most active resistance community around; further privatization and censoring of the internet must be actively challenged. The corporate attitudinized mass media dangles carrots in front of the consumer’s face from the confines of a hallucinatory feedback loop. Awash in an onslaught of terroristic American-style boulevard journalism, dimension is hard to find. The axioms with which the corporate-owned media frame reality are so far off base that it can be taxing for many of us to find the right ripostes while discussing our world with Nationalists. A good example is the recent slandering of Michel Phelps, caught toking with a relatively impressive piece of glass. The pro-marijuana movement has failed utterly, —though they are indeed going up against a billion dollar smear campaign— to gain traction with this simple notion: That had Michel Phelps not indulged in marijuana, his record breaking Olympic performance would have been inconceivable. There are many doctors who have championed the medical benefits of marijuana, some going so far as to suggest THC promotes brain cell growth.

Don’t join the military, for the US government and mercenaries view soldiers as cannon fodder or expendable assets; one in four soldiers in the US is homeless.

Wine-making vats are an excellent habitat for a multitude of micro-organisms. By fermenting the juice of crushed fruit, the organisms explode at first before depleting the once abundant nutrients needed for survival. They eventually die from the accrual of alcohol and carbon dioxide they themselves produced. We choke just the same on our industrial discharge, especially in agglomerations such as Southern California and BosWash on the eastern seaboard. By making our communities self-sustainable with clean energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, and magnetic— forever replacing the obsolete 80-year long enterprise known as the combustible engine—, we make ourselves and our families less dependent on the broken state-enterprise apparatus. Not to mention less toxic.

It’s important to remember, there’’s always the future. We must keep our humanity; —it’s much too late in the ballgame to be weighed down by our razor-thin ideologies, be they Marxism, Capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Nudism, Obamaism, Indie Rockism, Hyphy, Fuck the’ policeism, or what have you. Understanding, compassion, and altruism are the chords deep within our souls, and once struck it is clear that they are the essence of humanity.

Allow me to introduce you to a peculiar form of denial called anosognosia, the condition in which a person suffering from a disability due to brain injury appears unaware or denies the existence of the malady. This ailment applies to radical changes in one’s life, affecting the newly blind or paralyzed. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, suffered from anosognosia after a stroke on October 2, 1919. After the bloodletting of “the war to end all wars” subsided, Wilson’’s first priority was the establishment of the League of Nations, which he believed would help ensure world peace. With the help of those by his side, Wilson ignored the seriousness of his stroke, and continued to look forward to more campaigning in favor of the League, and even the possibility of a third term. Wilson was no more than wool gathering with such hopes in light of his incapacity.

The industrialized world’s superego is suffering from a terminal form of anosognosia: We have all gone insane. That we find solace in proclamations from economists that the current financial crisis will subside in a year’’s time, while momentarily watching the corporate nanny state’s complete submission to corporate rule, is further evidence of our aloofness. Our capacity for widespread social reform is great if only we exercise our power. Malcom X expressed his belief that one day there would be a clash between the rich and poor of the world, and, in all likelihood—, details of how it may or may not play out aside—, we are headed towards such a clash. So, before we starve between a stream and a berry bush, now is the time for us to reconsider our goals and desires. Next week is the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq. I suggest we all consider penciling it into our day planners.

Unfortunately, two others – “clean coal” — were included.

An increasingly desperate reactor industry just tried to sneak a $50 billion loan guarantee package into the stimulus bill. But for the third time since 2007, it got beat by a powerful national grassroots movement and key Congressional leaders.

Nuke pushers now want reactors painted “green” in a renewable standard Congress may soon set.

Hordes of radioactive lobbyists will swarm around that and new energy and global warming legislation. Every obscure sentence in those bills will be targeted for hidden handouts. Unfortunately, some money may already have slipped through from previous Bush-Cheney maneuvering.

EDF, the French national utility, wants to force its nukes into the American market. With Wall Street unwilling, Areva — the EDF front company — would use French tax money here as in Finland, where a new reactor project is already years behind schedule and billions over budget.

In Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Maryland, Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the industry wants to tax ratepayers for reactor construction in advance. In Florida and Georgia, rates are already soaring. A Missouri utility is trying to overturn a 1976 public referendum banning such scams.

Obama’s position has been largely opaque. Close to pro-nuke Illinois utilities in his early days, he has never renounced the technology. But he’s firmly opposed Nevada’s Yucca Mountain high-level repository, whose failure — after fifty years — leaves the industry with no solution to its waste problem.

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has made pro-nuke rumblings. But the critical component — massive federal funding — has not materialized. So we green energy advocates held our collective breath when Obama promised to “invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.”

In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Obama included nuke power. Now the reference is gone. Let’s hope that signals an end to all taxpayer funding for this catastrophic failed technology.

Unfortunately, Obama did mention “clean coal,” which — like “safe nukes” — does not exist. On March 2, there will be non-violent civil disobedience against a coal burner in the nation’s capital. This welcome action follows in the tradition of mass occupations at the Seabrook (NH) and other reactor construction sites since 1976.

Back then, grassroots organizations like the Clamshell Alliance developed a Solartopian vision of a world totally free of fossil fuels and atomic power. The plan was born in part at a “Toward Tomorrow” energy fair in Amherst, Massachusetts that featured wind power pioneer William Heronemus and efficiency guru Amory Lovins.

A green-powered Earth means ending both fossil and nuke power, to run totally on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, non-food-based biofuels and other true renewables, with increased efficiency and restored mass transit.

Like stashing nuke waste in an earthquake zone surrounded by dormant volcanoes, as at Yucca Mountain, carbon sequestration for coal is unworkable, unacceptable — and unnecessary.

The upcoming march against that coal burner will be ushered along by three decades of anti-nuke activism. Let’s hope it prompts Obama to omit that clean coal oxymoron from his next speech — and from all proposed government funding.

Energy and global warming were at the top of the agenda when President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper met in Ottawa on Thursday. The two leaders emerged from their meeting saying they agreed to establish a “clean-energy dialogue” to cut greenhouses gas emissions and fight climate change. The use of such ambiguous language allows both Barack Obama and Stephen Harper to side step any concrete obligations to deal with the issue of tar sands and global warming. However, whatever ‘clean-energy dialogue’ the leaders do have, will continually be tested by internal U.S. politics concerning climate change and new environmental regulations. Developments surrounding tar sands and climate change in the United States including; low carbon fuel standards, a cap and trade system (climate change legislation), and targets for greenhouse gas reductions all pose serious threats to the importation of dirty tar sands oil from Canada, and the ‘clean energy dialogue’ that both leaders promised to on Thursday.

As Greenpeace Canada pointed out,

In January 2007 California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger established a Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) by Executive Order. This unprecedented greenhouse gas (GHG) standard for transportation fuels requires fuel providers to ensure that fuel sold in California reduces GHG emissions measured on a “full fuel cycle” basis (i.e. upstream feedstock extraction, fuel refining, and transport to market). This will clearly discourage the use of tar sands oil. Schwarzenegger has also called for the U.S. to implement a national Low Carbon Fuel Standard. (http://www.energy.ca.gov) [In addition,] in June 2008, 1,000 mayors at the U.S. Conference of Mayors supported a “High Carbon Fuels” resolution which called on mayors across the U.S. “to track and reduce the lifecycle carbon dioxide emissions from their municipal vehicles by preventing or discontinuing the purchase of higher-carbon unconventional or synthetic fuels. (http://www.mass.gov)

These strong environmental regulations continue to move from the state level to the federal level, and will face fierce domestic and foreign opposition from an array of special interest groups ranging from the Canadian government, to global warming deniers, to major oil companies that have huge investments in the tar sands. The tar sands remains the most capital intensive project on the planet, and continues to expand production even in the midst of a global recession and falling oil prices — thanks to the United States unrelenting demand for oil.

Since 1999, Canada has been the largest supplier of oil to the United States, providing 2.4 million barrels per day, with approximately 75% coming from the tar sands (1.8 million barrels per day). The tar sands hold an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil (bitumen), the second largest deposit of oil reserves in the world (the size of Florida), trailing only Saudi Arabia. The problem embroiling the tar sands, President Obama, and the Canadian government lies within the production of tar sands oil and its effects on global warming.

The extraction and production of oil from the tar sands is incredibly energy intensive; generating three to five times as much greenhouse gas pollution as conventional oil production, and it has single handedly made Canada’s Kyoto protocol targets for greenhouse gas emissions impossible to attain. Whole ecosystems, including the Boreal Forest and the Athabasca River Delta are threatened by tar sands oil production through practices such as clear cutting and water depletion. For instance, it takes 3-5 barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. In addition, the extraction and upgrading of this synthetic crude oil also releases dangerous toxins into the air and water, greatly affecting air quality, and jeopardizing the health of indigenous communities downstream and downwind from tar sands operations.

The major effects of oil imported into the U.S. from the tar sands, on the climate and environment in general, continues to create a major fault line between what the Obama administration says it wants to achieve in regards to stopping global warming, and what is actually possible. Mitigating climate change in both Canada and the United States will be impossible unless U.S. fossil fuel consumption levels fall.

Moreover, the argument that an increased reliance on oil derived from the tar sands is self-evident under the guise of national security, is a shallow argument at best. Considering that the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a Pentagon-funded think tank, issued a report last year calling climate change a “serious national security threat,” and that Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Lawrence Farrel recently stated in the Washington Times that climate change “is not just a foreign policy issue …it is a national security issue” should raise eyebrows among those who advocate continued development and importation of oil from the tar sands.

If the Obama administration decides to increasingly rely on oil from the tar sands to fulfill our energy needs; they’ll be sidestepping his commitment to wean America off its addition to oil, to address global warming, and to work towards achieving world stability while protecting America’s national security. The road we must take in order to achieve all three of those goals will take courage, dedication, and sacrifice from all Americans combined with unprecedented leadership from Washington.

Unfortunately, it’s not just President Obama and his energy secretary Dr. Steven Chu who want to see nuclear power in the country’s energy mix. Many other countries are seeing a nuclear resurgence as well: Germany’s Angela Merkel and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi wanted more nuclear power in their energy mix as they tackle global warming, and U.K.’s Business Secretary John Hutton said in July 2008 that “Nuclear power is an essential part of our future energy mix” and Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to be “more ambitious” with nuclear power. Hutton is quoted by the BBC as saying that nuclear power is a “safe and affordable” way of securing the U.K.’s future energy supplies while combating climate change. Today all members of G8 are more pro-nuclear than ever before.

As an insider and consultant to the nuclear industry, retired Yale professor Charles Perrow warns in his book, The Next Catastrophe (2007): “Nuclear power plants concentrate more lethal potential than anything else in our society. These vulnerabilities of nuclear power require a vigorous regulatory effort, especially since there is no meaningful liability penalty for a catastrophic accident.” Unfortunately, what we see in the energy industry–just like what we see today in the financial industry and Wall Street–has been vigorous deregulation (which essentially allows the energy industry to self-regulate) and a woeful lack of governmental oversight and failure of enforcement. Perrow wrote that in 2001 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reduced federal oversight of security and “allowed the power companies to design their own security exercises, despite reviews that found, in 2000, ‘alarms and video camera surveillance cameras that don’t work, guards who can’t operate their weapons, and guns that don’t shoot….’” If the existing nuclear utilities cannot even do a decent job on securing their power plants, how can the public have faith in their ability to upgrade their facilities in the face of extreme climate disruptions or well-trained foreign terrorists?

Climate scientists working for United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have forecasted more catastrophic weather events in the near future: more floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and droughts. Mainstream media worldwide have already reported on the significantly increased unpredictable, extreme weather events with global warming. Hence, global climate change threatens to turn normal natural disasters into nuclear disasters when the two intersect, if a natural disaster happens to strike an existing nuclear power plant, a nuclear waste-storage site, or even nuclear wastes in transit.

Global Warming and Extreme Weather Events Significantly Amplify Existing Risks of Nuclear Power Plants: Floods, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Wildfires, and Droughts

Nuclear-power facilities will be affected by global climate disruptions and their associated intense storms and flooding, according to U.S. intelligence agencies’ joint assessment, which was released in June 2008. In remarks prepared for a joint congressional hearing, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, said, “Two dozen nuclear facilities and numerous refineries along U.S. coastlines are at risk and may be severely impacted by storms.” He also said that other U.S. infrastructure is ill-prepared for climate change.

Nuclear-power advocates tend to underestimate or altogether dismiss the risks of catastrophic weather events associated with global warming. The reality is that climate change is being forecasted by scientists (including those on the IPCC) to bring more frequent and more severe floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts. These extreme weather events are likely to wreak havoc for not just the nuclear power plants, but also for the nuclear waste storage and waste and fuel transportation.

Nuclear Power Plants Vulnerable to Frequent and More Severe Floods, Rising Sea Level, Higher Storm Surges and Waves, and Coastal Erosion

Climate scientists at U.K.’s University of Bristol who published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have forecasted that with global warming, there will be more extreme floods, droughts, forest fires for the next 200 years. Many nuclear power plants are built in flood-prone zones and in coastal areas. With more frequent and severe floods in the new era of global climate change, nuclear power plants will be more vulnerable to both floods and rising sea level.

According to NIRS, in mid-July 1993, the Cooper nuclear power station, situated on a 100-year flood plain, had to shut down its reactors when the fast-rising flood waters of the Missouri River near Brownsville, Nebraska, collapsed the surrounding dikes and levees. Later, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that the below-grade rooms in the reactor and turbine buildings had suffered extensive leakages due to rising flood waters. In fact, the nuclear power plant was not flood-proof: the electrical cables and equipment in the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling pump room had ground-out circuitry due to flood waters, and the floor-drain system had backed up, causing the standing water from the radioactive area to contaminate the clean area. Most importantly, the power-plant employees had no measures to divert water away from critical components.

Most of Britain’s existing nuclear power plants are located on the coastal area (see this map in a BBC news report). According to the IPCC, sea level has been rising at a rate of 1.7 to 1.8 mm/year over the past century, with an increased rate of approximately 3.1 mm/year in the previous decade. IPCC noted that in the past 100 to 150 years, sea-level rise has contributed significantly to coastal erosion, whereby 75 percent of eastern United States shoreline has been affected and 67 percent of eastern coastline of U.K. has retreated landward of the low-water mark. U.K. is proposing to build four new nuclear power plants on its coasts: if the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet melts completely, there would be an expected 5 to 6 meters (16.4 to 19.7 feet) rise in sea level, totally inundating these nuclear power plants! Greenpeace did an excellent analysis of the impacts of climate change on the site selection of U.K.’s proposed nuclear plants.

During the December 2004 Sumatra earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami, a fast-breeder nuclear reactor at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu state was flooded by a ferocious tidal wave which surged toward the coast. The operating unit of Madras Atomic Power Station was forced to shut down after its pumping station (its cooling system) was flooded by salt water, according to Economic Times (India); the secretive Atomic Energy Regulatory Board refused to disclose whether there were radiation leaks afterwards and then there were reports of supposed safety. Fortunately, the nuclear reactor itself was not damaged structurally, but the nuclear power plant’s residential complex nearby was overwhelmed by the tidal waves and several technical personnel (including nuclear scientists) died during the flood, clear evidence of poor planning to protect the nuclear power facility and staff from floods and other natural disasters.

In addition to rising sea level with global warming, IPCC scientists predicted there will be increased intensity of storms, enhanced wave heights, and worsening coastal erosion. It is difficult to imagine how governments can cope with the mounting existing problems of nuclear power plants (e.g., accidents in its operations, waste transport and storage) in an era with serious climate disruptions; now they are planning to build new plants in the path of higher sea levels and more ferocious storms—are they asking for trouble? Evidently, the existing nuclear power plants are ill-prepared for the effects of global warming. How can energy planners and policymakers be seriously thinking about constructing more nuclear power plants—especially those built in precarious locations?

Nuclear Plants Susceptible to Violent Tornadoes and Severe Thunderstorms

NASA scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies are forecasting that as Earth’s climate warms, there will be more violent and severe storms and tornadoes. There will also be more “severe thunderstorms” with significant wind shear which will cause damaging winds on the ground. Meteorologists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say tornado season of 2008 is one of the deadliest in a decade and could have set the record for the most tornadoes. And flooding in the midwestern United States has been at 100-year levels in spring of 2008. Already in 2004, NOAA Storm Prediction Center in Norman Oklahoma recorded 1,717 tornadoes, the highest ever since record-keeping began in 1950, and nearly 300 more than the previous year.

More violent tornadoes and storms can cause significant damages to our existing nuclear power plants. But we have been lucky that no tornado thus far has caused major damage to nuclear power plants in the United States.

On April 7, 2002, the tornado that leveled the city of La Plata, Maryland, narrowly missed the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant (see photographs) located on the shores of Chesapeake Bay in Lusby, Maryland, according to a report by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. This tornado, categorized as a F4 tornado with its 260-miles-per-hour winds, could have produced winds and tornado missiles which could have seriously damaged steel-reinforced concrete structures and support systems for on-site irradiated fuel-storage ponds, off-site power supply, emergency onsite power supplies, cooling pumps, and make-up water supply.

In June 2008, a tornado hit Kansas State University campus (approximately 120 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri), flattening other buildings and causing extensive damage to the building housing the campus’s nuclear reactor. Fortunately there was no damage to the reactor which had been shut down properly earlier in the day.

On June 24, 1998, the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station located on the southwestern shore of Lake Erie in Oak Harbor, Ohio, suffered a “directly hit” by an F2 tornado. Luckily, there were no radioactive leaks, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that the plant’s switchyard was damaged and that access to external power was disabled. Also damaged by the tornado were the turbine building’s roof, the administrative building’s roof, and extensive flood damage to the latter building’s second floor.

According to a 2005 hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the “robust design and construction” of U.S. nuclear power plants have “enabled them to withstand” severe natural phenomena. In this self-congratulatory statement, the committee entirely missed the fact that in the new era of global climate change and extreme weather, the frequency of “natural phenomena” and their severity will be significantly magnified.

Nuclear Plants Vulnerable to More Frequent and Severe Wildfires

Wildfires have been in the news lately, especially in California, where the fire season has been significantly lengthened and Governor Schwarzenegger even blamed global warming for elongating the fire season. Scientists forecast that with global warming, there will be more intense droughts, less precipitation, hotter weather, earlier snowmelt, and more tree diseases (such as the pine beetle currently ravaging Colorado’s pine trees), all of which make the wildfires more intense and less manageable.

In October 2007, wildfires destroyed nearly 1,000 homes (and property damage surpassing $1 billion) in San Diego County, California. The wildfires raged at Camp Pendleton on October 24, 2007, within seven miles of the San Onofre nuclear power plant operated by the Southern California Edison in Oceanside, a plant with two reactors generating 2,250 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 1.4 million homes. Luckily, the nuclear reactors were not online at the time. But even when nuclear reactors are not online, they still require hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to cool the reactors and need electricity to run the cooling water pumps; they might compete for this water with firefighters who also need this water to put out the surrounding wildfires.

In January 2007, a wildfire burned within two miles of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California; the 332-acre blaze was attributed to rats chewing on electrical wire inside a mobile home. Luckily, this wildfire did not reach the nuclear power plant before being extinguished.

So far, we have been lucky. In the face of the decade-long drought in the U.S. Southwest and several recent catastrophic wildfires, nuclear power plants have escaped ravage by these fires.

Droughts, Chronic Water Shortages, and the Coming Water Scarcity Are Achilles Heel of Nuclear Power Plants: No Water, No Nuclear Power. Period.

Nuclear power plants are a voracious consumer of water. Nuclear power requires even more water than gas-fired generators, at 3,100 liters per megawatt hour of electricity, just to keep the nuclear reactors from overheating. (Coal and natural gas use 2,800 liters and 2,300 liters per megawatt hours, respectively.) According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2006 “Report to the Congress on the Interdependency of Energy and Water,” the most water-intensive form of electricity generation is nuclear power, especially the plants with the open-loop cooling (once-through) design.

IPCC scientists and other climate scientists worldwide have published grim reports of freshwater availability throughout the world. With coming water shortages, it is difficult to see how the United States and the rest of the world can operate more nuclear power plants. The U.S. banking giant JP Morgan Chase has issued an interesting report, “Watching Water: A guide to evaluating corporate risks in a thirsty world,” which contains a short section on energy requirements of water. Even a multinational bank has recognized that nuclear and thermoelectric power generation (in addition to mining, semiconductor manufacturing, and food and beverage industries) “are particularly exposed to water-related risks….”

In the well-publicized drought and the heat waves when temperatures soaring above 100° F in summer 2003 led to thousands of deaths across Europe, Electricité de France (EDF) had to shut down a quarter of its 58 nuclear power plants in France while the average electricity price skyrocketed by some 1,300%. EDF lost €300 million because it had to import electricity. Italy imported 2,650 megawatts from France each day, but since France was experiencing electricity shortfall itself, Italy was forced to cut power in many cities, trapping people in elevators and turning off traffic lights.

Three years later, during Europe’s 2006 heat wave, French, German, and Spanish utilities were forced to shut down several nuclear power plants and reduce power at others for as much as a week due to low water levels.

In the summer of 2007, dubbed as having “the hottest weather in more than 50 years,” the Tennessee Valley Authority had to shut down one of three reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in northern Alabama due to heat waves and drought and to avoid heating the Tennessee River to dangerous levels. The irony to the story is that while nuclear power has been called reliable, during this peak of energy demand, it could not deliver due to drought and water shortages.

An Associated Press report found that 24 of the 104 nuclear reactors in the United States are located in areas experiencing severe drought: In November 2007, the Harris reactor near Raleigh, North Carolina, operated by Progress Energy Inc., had to be shut down because water level in Harris Lake was too low: at only three and a half feet above the water limit set in the plant’s license. Duke Energy Corp.’s McGuire nuclear power plant, which draws water from Lake Norman near Charlotte, North Carolina, was so low in 2007 that it was barely a foot above the minimum required for a backup system.

An excellent article on energy-water interdependence published by Scientific American also begins with a conflict between Florida and Alabama over water to save Florida’s endangered species and to operate nuclear power plant:

In June the state of Florida made an unusual announcement: it would sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the corps’s plan to reduce water flow from reservoirs in Georgia into the Apalachicola River, which runs through Florida from the Georgia-Alabama border. Florida was concerned that the restricted flow would threaten certain endangered species. Alabama also objected, worried about another species: nuclear power plants, which use enormous quantities of water, usually drawn from rivers and lakes, to cool their big reactors. The reduced flow raised the specter that the Farley Nuclear Plant near Dothan, Ala., would need to shut down.

With global warming, the world will see more chronic droughts and water scarcity, according to IPCC and many other climate scientists. With nuclear power’s voracious demand for water, how can building more nuclear power plants possibly be a solution to climate change? Is nuclear power an energy solution in time of more severe droughts?

Water-Scarce and Disaster-Prone China and India Plan to Build More New Nuclear Power Plants

According to the nuclear industry association, World Nuclear Association, there are some 439 nuclear power reactors operating in 31 countries, with a combined capacity of more than 370 GWe; in 2007 these provided 2608 billion kWh, about 16% of the world’s electricity. The two countries which are furiously building new nuclear power plants are China and India, with ambitious plans to build many more:

• China currently has 11 operating reactors but it has ambitious plans to at least quadruple its nuclear-power capacity by 2020, according to World Nuclear Association. (Taiwan is building two new advanced boiling water reactors, or BWRs.)
• India is now building six reactors (expected to be completed by 2010), according to World Nuclear Association. Ten more nuclear power plants are being planned. (Pakistan is now building two new nuclear reactors, with China’s help.)

It is a grave mistake for national energy planners in China and India to be building so many new nuclear power plants. In recent years, both countries have been severely affected by extreme weather associated with global climate change (catastrophic droughts, floods, tornadoes, cyclones, and typhoons), domestic and foreign terrorist attacks, and earthquakes. Any one of these natural disasters or deliberate attacks striking either nuclear reactors or nuclear-waste transport and storage sites could spell potential cataclysmic nuclear disaster for China and India, both being large and densely populated countries. Both countries also have poor records of cleaning up their own sites of past industrial chemical accidents: for example, India has left untouched the Bhopal site after the Union Carbide/Dow pesticide plant’s toxic gas leak (releasing 42 tons of methyl isocyanate) on December 3, 1984, which initially killed an estimated 8,000 people within the first two weeks and claiming 8,000 more lives afterwards. With this kind of environmental record, how can people trust their government with building more nuclear power plants?

Let’s start with a very brief glimpse of China’s water problems associated with climate changed-induced extreme weather events in the past two years (remember, this is a much abbreviated list of extreme weather events):

• Begun on May 26, 2008, the 20-day torrential rains, floods, and landslides in the 15 provinces of eastern and southern China left more than 200 dead or missing and forced 1.3 million people to evacuate. The damages were estimated at $2.2 billion.
• In the first three months of 2008, China suffered a devastating drought in Liaoning Province, which left nearly 700,000 people without drinking water; approximately 66 reservoirs dried up, and 1,700 new wells were drilled in a desperate search for drinking water, according to Reuters and Xinhua. Also affected were 19.4 million hectares (48 million acres) of land and 3.3 million hectares (8.15 million acres) of cropland. Water is a serious problem in China: annually about 30 million rural and 20 million urban Chinese face drinking-water shortages.
• In mid-2008, Shanxi Province was also hit with drought: 560,000 people had no drinking water, according to Xinhua news agency.
• In mid-2007 in Liaoning, the worst drought in 30 years left more than 8 million people without water; nearly 90 reservoirs dried up and 25,000 wells could no longer supply enough water, and 1.4 million hectares of crops were damaged, according to Xinhua news agency. In Inner Mongolia Province, 870,000 people and 1.5 million livestock had no water (and many livestock died of hunger and thirst).
• In August 2008, Sichuan Province suffered the worst drought in 50 years, with no rain for more than 70 days: more than 10 million people had no drinking water, and economic losses totaled at least 9.9 billion yuan. Two-thirds of lakes and rivers dried up, and more than 200 reservoirs were extremely low; the Chongqing section of the Yangtze River was lowest in 100 years.

As for India, it has its long list of natural disasters in recent years, of which we briefly list only three, as follows:

• In August 2008, more than 200 people died (with thousands more missing) and more than half a million people were stranded by the floods in northern India (especially Bihar); an estimated 2.1 million people in the 394 square-mile area were affected by the flood, according to the Bihar government as reported in the New York Times.
• In 2000, during India’s worst drought in 100 years, 50 million people in four states were severely affected. In 2002, it faced another severe drought (the fifth worst drought in its history), which affected 300 million people across 1.8 million square kilometers and almost one-third of its cropland (62 million hectares, which reduced its crop yield by 12 percent), according to the World Bank (report in PDF).
• In 1999, a Supercyclone with wind gusts up to 190 miles per hour and waves up to 15 feet crashed into the eastern state of Orissa; it left more than 9,500 people dead, 2.5 million homeless, and property damage estimated at $3.5 billion (in 1999 U.S. dollar).

If any one of these extreme weather events had struck a nuclear power plant, nuclear waste in transit, or a nuclear-waste storage facility, then the consequences would have been unimaginable. In addition to climate-related natural disasters, China and India also have their share of separatists, extremist factions, domestic disgruntled groups, and foreign terrorists. They have mounted more violent attacks in recent years. Building more nuclear power plants will concentrate more lethal vulnerabilities into fewer and smaller areas, making it easier for each attack to be transformed into a calamitous nuclear disaster.

Avoiding the Next Catastrophe: Don’t Turn Natural Disasters into Nuclear Disasters

Water will become scarcer and more expensive as global climate disruptions exacerbate existing water problems of groundwater and surface water pollution and intensify chronic water shortages worldwide. During the Christmas week of 2008, we witnessed the largest toxic coal ash spill in the U.S. history: more than 1 billion gallons of wet toxic coal ash were spilled across 300 acres and into tributaries of the Tennessee River; tests of river water revealed heavy metals (e.g., arsenic, lead, chromium, and mercury) at 2 to 300 times higher than drinking-water standards. The offender, the Tennessee Valley Authority, disclosed to the New York Times that in just one year, a coal-fired power plant’s byproducts include 45,000 pounds of arsenic, 49,000 pounds of lead, 1.4 million pounds of barium, 91,000 pounds of chromium, and 140,000 pounds of manganese. It has been established by decades of medical research that these heavy metals can cause cancer, liver damage, and neurological complications, among other health problems. It is time for our society to engage in discussions of which is more valuable to us: water or electricity. Do we value clean drinking water more, or do we value low-cost electricity more? Do we value aquatic endangered species and pristine watersheds more, or do we value low-cost electricity more?

Nuclear power plants in the United States have two sources of “cataclysmic danger,” according to Perrow. The first one is that the stored nuclear waste products, planned for eventual transport and storage for Yucca Flats in Nevada, “which threatened to contaminate vital water supplies.” The second one is simply terrifying: “More fearsome in immediate terms is the release of radiation from one of our 104 operating plants because of natural disasters, industrial accidents, or terrorist attacks.”

Facing these two calamitous dangers, Perrow also attributes two sources of failures: deregulation in the energy sector in the age of privatization and the downsizing of government; the new one is the consolidation of energy industry, further “magnifying the vulnerability of the bottom line.” These two issues simply make nuclear power extremely vulnerable.

The price of electricity generated by nuclear power appears artificially low on paper because the actual costs are underestimated, mispriced, or shifted to society (or individual victims), and so the private utilities and corporate owners of nuclear power plants do not have to pay for the actual cost of producing nuclear energy. If we figure in the true costs of nuclear power (accounting for all the risks, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties), it has the highest of all forms of power; no other types of power has such a staggering scale of risks and frightening vulnerabilities associated with it. (According to NIRS, annual costs per 1,000 kilograms of avoided CO2 emissions are $68.9 for wind power and $132.5 for nuclear power.) The true cost of nuclear power is the one that the society will keep on paying for decades, long after the decommissioning of the nuclear power plants.

Now, let’s multiply the existing vulnerabilities of nuclear power with that of climate disruptions and extreme weather. And we haven’t even begun yet to discuss the nuclear power plants’ risks as highly attractive targets to both domestic and foreign terrorists! The sensible solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not with more nuclear power, but with small, deconcentrated (as opposed to corporate monopolies), and decentralized power systems that can adapt to local conditions.

“We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what’s in the bank,” said Jackson, president of The Land Institute. “If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won’t much matter.”

Jackson doesn’t minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a “50-year farm bill,” which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op/ed earlier this month.

Central to such a bill would be soil. A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination, said Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as an environmental studies professor at California State University-Sacramento.

Jackson believes that a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it. While Jackson and his fellow researchers at The Land Institute continue their work on Natural Systems Agriculture, he also ponders how to turn the possibilities into policy. He spoke with me from his office in Salina, Kansas.

Robert Jensen: This is a short-term culture, and federal policies typically are aimed at short-term results. Why call for a farm bill that looks so far ahead, especially in tough economic times?

Wes Jackson: For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.

We need to reverse that destructive process, which means recognizing the need for fundamental changes in the way agriculture is practiced. That requires thinking beyond the next quarterly earnings report of the agribusiness corporations and beyond this fiscal year of the feds. We need farm bills — laid out in five-year segments, with a view to the next 50 years — that can be mileposts for moving agriculture from an extractive to a renewable economy.

RJ: What are some of the key aspects of a long-term solution?

WJ: Support for soil conversation and protecting water resources have to be central. There needs to be funding for research on a different model for agriculture. And we have to avoid wasting any more resources on biofuels made from annual crops, especially corn, which is certain to exacerbate soil erosion, chemical contamination, and a larger dead zone in the gulf.

RJ: But it is true that most people, including those in the new administration, are focused on short-term problems in the financial and industrial economy. Is there any chance people — especially people in an overwhelmingly urban nation — will pay attention right now?

WJ: Remember, if our agriculture is not sustainable then our food supply is not sustainable, and food is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs. Either we pay attention or we pay a huge price, not so far down the road. When we face the fact that civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland, it’s clear that we don’t really have a choice. Beyond that, changing the way agriculture is practiced would incorporate partial solutions to major problems that people do care about: climate change, over-consumption of energy, water problems. Yes, a 50-year bill is sensible right now.

RJ: What would such a 50-year plan look like? What are the key features?

WJ: We start by acknowledging the necessity of moving from an extractive, unsustainable economy to one that is renewable and sustainable, and the first place to look is to the production of the most basic commodity — food. Once we face that necessity, we move to examining the possibilities for achieving this, recognizing that we have to act now while we still have slack, some room to move. Here’s a sobering thought: If we don’t achieve this sustainability first in agriculture, it’s highly unlikely we will in any other sector of the economy and society. That’s what makes this so imperative.

RJ: OK, start with the necessity. How is agriculture, as it is practiced today, an extractive enterprise that is unsustainable?

WJ: All organisms are carbon-based and in a constant search for energy-rich carbon. About 10,000 years ago humans moved from gathering/hunting to agriculture, tapping into the first major pool of energy-rich carbon — the soil. It was agriculture that allowed us effectively to mine, as well as waste, the soil’s carbon and other soil-bound nutrients. Humans went on to exploit the carbon of the forests, coal, oil, and natural gas. But through all that, we’ve continued to practice agriculture that led to soil erosion beyond natural replacement levels. That’s the basic problem of agriculture.

Added to the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has given us pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. We have less soil, and it is more degraded. We’ve masked that for years through the use of petrochemicals — pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. But that “solution” is no solution, and is in fact part of the problem. There are no technological substitutes for healthy soil and no miraculous technological fixes for the problem of agriculture. We need to move past the industrial model and adopt an ecological model.

RJ: This concern about chemicals has led to increased support for organic agriculture. Is that the solution?

WJ: Organic agriculture is a start but by itself is insufficient. Eliminating the chemicals is only half the problem — we still have to deal with soil erosion. Remember that we humans had organic agriculture until very recently, when we got industrial agriculture, and we still lost soil all along the way, for the last 10,000 years. There is good reason to believe we started the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about then (with the carbon compound of the soil being oxidized). It has only become a crisis in our time due to the scale increase of people and material and energy throughput.

RJ: OK, so organic alone isn’t the answer. Isn’t that where no-till or minimum-till farming comes in?

WJ: Those methods help deal with erosion, but as practiced today they require unacceptable levels of chemical inputs and end up eliminating biodiversity. Once again, it doesn’t offer a way out of the extractive economy and the problem of contamination.

RJ: So, where does that leave us?

WJ: Let’s go back to basics: The core of this idea is the marriage of agriculture and ecology. As Wendell says, we need to take nature as the measure. We need to look to nature for models of how to manage ecosystems in a sustainable fashion. At The Land Institute, we think that leads to perennial polycultures. Instead of annual crops grown in monocultures on an industrial model, we are looking at perennials in mixtures, which we think can solve a number of problems regarding erosion and contamination.

RJ: Before I ask about the details, a basic question: Is that feasible, given the 6.5 billion people on the planet? Can such strategies focused on perennials produce enough food?

WJ: First, let’s recognize that without fossil fuels, the industrial-agriculture strategies we have now could not feed even the current population, and population growth makes these changes more important than ever. As populations grow, there’s increasing pressure to put more and more marginal land into production, which increases the rate of degradation. A new model is essential.

At The Land we’ve been working on perenializing the major crops and domesticating a few promising wild species. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can not only better protect the soil but also help reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use, and toxic pollution. Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient.

RJ: Let’s assume that Natural Systems Agriculture and similar projects hold the promise you suggest. Those practices will have to be implemented in the real world, which is structured by the larger extractive economy in capitalism, at a time of crisis — some would say, even, a time of collapse. What has to happen to make that possible?

WJ: You’re right that it’s not just about plants and science, it’s also about people and society. We think that protecting the soil is not only an ecological imperative but an opportunity for positive economic and cultural change as well. The proposals we’re discussing would increase employment opportunities in agriculture — sustainable farming will require more “eyes per acre,” and replacing fossil-fuel energy with human energy and ecological knowledge makes good economic sense. With the reduced need for the hoe or plow, and land management relying more on fire and grazing, we draw on the naturalist instinct in nearly all of us, rather than presenting farm work as nothing but the “sweat of the brow” amid “thistles and thorns.” This will be necessary to counter the longstanding denigration of the countryside and rural communities, which has been a feature of our so-called cosmopolitan culture.

We’re seeing that on a small scale now with more young farmers staying on the land, with creative new endeavors in community-supported agriculture. People recognize that life is more than working in a small cubicle and consuming in a big-box store. People are hungry for good food, and they’re also hungry for a good life. People are ready to explore what it would mean to come home, not to a romanticized vision of the past but to a sustainable future.

RJ: How would a farm bill that you and Wendell might write differ from what we see today?

WJ: The farm bills we’ve had largely address exports, commodity problems, subsidies and food programs. They all involve here-and-now concerns. A 50-year farm bill represents a vision that stresses the need to protect soil from erosion, cut the wastefulness of water, cut fossil-fuel dependence, eliminate toxins in soil and water, manage carefully the nitrogen of the soil, reduce dead zones, restore an agrarian way of life, and preserve farmland from development. The best way to accomplish most of these goals is to gradually increase the number of acres with perennial vegetation, first of all through rotations and an increase in the number of grass-fed dairies sprinkled about the countryside and secondly, through progress toward perennializing the major crops. A good bill could help farmers accomplish those things.

RJ: It’s also likely that many people reading this will dismiss you as idealistic, as unrealistic. How would you answer that?

WJ: These are the same people who believe it’s realistic to continue practices they know to be unsustainable. The basic choice is simple: Do we want to work at coming up with a system that can produce healthful food and healthy communities, one that is economically and ecologically viable? Or do we want to continue to contaminate our soil and water, as we watch that soil continue to be eroded by that water? That contamination and erosion are both material reality and metaphor for our cultural and economic condition.

Look, I’m a scientist from the countryside, which means I have spent my life dealing with reality in research and on the farm. These are necessary and possible goals. Without the necessity it may be considered grandiose. Without the possibility it could be regarded as grandiose. The test for grandiosity, in my view, fails. As a nation, we are blessed with some of the world’s best soils. Increasingly city people want healthier and safer food. And we’re at a political moment when everybody and his dog is talking about the need for change. So, let’s get to it.

The interview I conducted with its chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, broadcast on The Guardian’s website yesterday, contains what appears to be an interesting admission. I asked him whether Shell had now stopped producing ads extolling its investments in renewable energy. Mr van der Veer does not express himself clearly at this point, but he seems to admit that his company’s previous advertising was not honest. “If we are very big in oil and gas and we are so far relatively small in alternative energies, if you then every day only make adverts about your alternative energies and not about 90% of your other activities I don’t think that — then I say transparency, honesty to the market, that’s nonsense.” So, I asked, Shell did not intend to return to that kind of advertising? “Probably not,” he told me. “I’m very much keep your feet on the ground, tell them who you are and explain why you are who you are.”

But since the interview was filmed, Shell’s messianic tendencies appear to have resurfaced. In December the company ran a series of ads in The Guardian suggesting again that it had come to save the world. “Tackling climate change and providing fuel for a growing population seems like an impossible problem, but at Shell we try to think creatively,” one of these advertisements boasts³. It features a diagram of a human brain, divided into sections labeled “fuel from algae,” “fuel from straw,” “fuel from woodchips,” “hydrogen fuels,” “windfarm,” “gas to liquids” and “coal gasification.” This suggests progress of a kind, in that the company is acknowledging that it sometimes dabbles in fossil fuels, but its core business — oil — and its massive investments in tar sands are missing from the corporate mind. Could Shell be having a senior moment?

The confusion deepens when you watch its latest publicity film. It’s called “Clearing the Air,” and it does just the opposite. It is supposed to tell an inspirational tale of discovery, but the script and the acting are so gobsmackingly bad that it inspires you only to rip your clothes off and run screaming down the street. The lasting impression it leaves is that Shell’s staff is chaotic and incompetent. Perhaps the clean-cut corporate clones featured in the ads of 2006 put people off.

Mr. van der Veer is neither an incompetent nor an automaton. He is charming, friendly and smart. But he refused to answer some of the questions I had prepared.

Reading Shell’s reports and publicity material, I kept stumbling on an absence. In 2000, the company boasted that it would be investing $1 billion dollars in renewable energy between 2001 and 2005. But since then it appears to have produced no figures for its renewables budget. The company now claims that “we’re investing significantly in wind energy”, but it doesn’t say what significantly means. Of the ten wind farms listed on its website, only one appears to be in the planning or development stage: the others are already in operation. Where is the evidence of new money? When Shell pulled out of Britain’s biggest windfarm, the London Array, last year, did this represent the end of its major investments?

I asked Mr. van der Veer a simple question — fifteen times. (Only a few of these attempts feature in the edited film). “What is the value of your annual investments in renewable energy?” He waffled, changed the subject, admitted that he knew the figure, then flatly refused to reveal it. Nor could he give me a convincing explanation of why he wouldn’t tell me, claiming only that, “those figures are misused and people say it is too small” and it “is not the right message to give to the people.” It strikes me that there is only one likely reason for these evasions: that Shell’s spending on renewables has fallen sharply from the figure it announced in 2000. It’s a fair guess that the current investment would look microscopic by comparison to its spending on the Canadian tar sands, and would make a mockery of its new round of advertising. I challenge Shell — for the 16th time — to prove me wrong.

Nor would Mr. van der Veer give me a straight answer to another straight question: “is there any investment you would not make on ethical grounds?” I asked this six times. He was unable to furnish me with an example. It’s not hard to see why. As well as exploiting the tar sands, which means destroying forest and wetlands, polluting great quantities of water and producing more CO2 than conventional petroleum, Shell is still flaring gas in Nigeria, at great cost to both local people and the global climate. It has been fiercely criticized for its secret negotiations with the Iraqi government, which led last year to the first major access for a western company to Iraq’s gas reserves⁴. It is prospecting for oil in some of the Arctic’s most sensitive habitats. All this makes my question difficult to answer. Aside from the greenwash, it is not easy to spot the practical difference between this civilized, progressive company and the Neanderthals at Exxon.

Like all oil companies, Shell simply follows the opportunities. Shut out of the richest fields by state companies, struggling to extract the dregs from its declining reserves, it has been turning to ever more difficult oil, some of which lies beneath rare and fragile ecosystems. When the price of oil was high, it announced massive investments in the tar sands. Now that the price has dropped again, it has canceled further spending⁵. It has even less of an incentive to invest in renewables. Shell does what the market demands.

I don’t blame Shell or van der Veer for this: they are discharging their duty to their shareholders. I do blame them for creating the impression that the company has a different agenda, and I blame governments for allowing them to drift into whatever fields they find profitable, regardless of the consequences for people or the environment.

On this issue Jeroen van der Veer and I agree. Oil companies, he says, should not seek to determine a country’s energy mix: that is for the government to decide. Saving the biosphere, in other words, cannot be left to goodwill and greenwash: the humanity of pleasant men like van der Veer will always be swept aside by the imperative to maximize returns. Good people in these circumstances do terrible things. Companies like Shell will pour big money into alternative energy only when more lucrative or immediate opportunities are blocked. Where is the government that is brave enough to block them?

1. The three examples I have in my files are: Shell, 30th May 2006. “The world wants more energy, the planet wants less pollution.” Page 10, Financial Times; Shell, 29th April 2006. “One energy company is going further to make hydrogen a reality.” New Scientist; Shell, 22nd May 2006. “How can we produce more energy but lower carbon emissions?” Page 23, New Statesman.
2. ASA, 7th November 2007. Adjudication: Shell Europe Oil Products Ltd; ASA, 13th August 2008. Adjudication: Shell International Ltd.
3. Shell, 20th December 2008. “In the New Energy Future, if it doesn’t exist we’ll need to invent it.” Page 21, The Guardian.
4. eg Terry Macalister, 24th September 2008. “Shell’s $4bn Iraq breakthrough could boost Britain’s natural gas supplies.” The Guardian.
5. Kristen Hays, 13th December 2008. “Petroleum companies delay expansion, new projects.” Houston Chronicle.

Barack Obama has been almost universally supportive of President Bush’s plans to throw free money from tax payers to extremely wealthy investors whose recklessness brought about this, the greatest world economic crisis in 70 years. Right now we are looking at EIGHT AND A HALF TRILLION DOLLARS being handed out, at a time when all kinds of necessary spending on human needs and a sustainable economy are being rejected due to “lack of funds.”

Even more damning is the likelihood that financial regulation will not be reintroduced to prevent similar crises from repeating in the near future, and that many of the people who (almost purposely) engineered this disaster are now coming back to power in the new Obama administration. (Lawrence Summers and Robert Reich in particular.)

Obama supports a multibillion dollar giveaway to US automakers, whose commitment to producing fuel inefficient vehicles (and fighting of legislation to improve fuel efficiency standards) has brought them to bankruptcy. It does not appear that Obama will require much change in the kind of vehicles the “Big 3″ produce as part of the bailout.

A Fake “Green Economy”

One of the few inspirations for hope in our current economic problems was the chance that they would cause the institution of the kinds of radical economic changes that humanity needs to survive coming resource shortages.

Obama has taken this theme, stripped it of legitimate accountability, expert opinion, and hard numbers, and turned it into his first major address to the nation. Now we hear that “rebuilding roads” (the opposite of a green solution) and “replacing wasteful lightbulbs in schools” (as opposed to just banning wasteful lightbulbs and other kinds of wasteful production, like hummers, as was done during WWII) is the best he can offer a world on the brink.

Earlier, his campaign had mentioned the cost of the bailout as the reason why they would not be able to follow through on their promises to greatly increase alternative energy production in the US.

Finally, Obama has consistently embraced ethanol as both a solution to resouce problems and a magic cure for rural America. In fact, grain ethanol is, to quote the UN, “a crime against humanity,” responsible for most of the doubling of grain prices that we saw this year, leading to great increases in hunger. As the Worldwatch Institute points out, the grain needed to make enough ethanol to fuel an SUV up just once could feed a person for one year.

In fact, as currently produced it takes more energy to produce ethanol than can be derived from it–it only exists dude to massive government subsidies, the same subsidies that cause non-subsidized farmers in the developing world to go bankrupt when “free trade” agreement banning their tariffs are enforced, as Obama plans to continue doing.

Taxes

It seems that Obama flat out lied about taking away the giant Bush tax cuts for the megarrich, and also hopes to withdrawal his proposal to tax oil companies on the insane profits they’ve recently enjoyed at the expense of everyone else. He may still follow through on plans to cut taxes for the “middle class” (at a time when the US faces it’s greatest deficits and need for public investment ever), but keep in mind that when leading Democrats talk about the middle class, they mean people who make $250,000-$100,000 per year.

Obama opposes critical fuel taxes (supported by every leading environmental scientist and environmental body) that would support the development of alternative energy.

There is now emerging historical consensus that targeted public spending–and NOT tax cuts for wealthy corporations and individuals–is the best way to help the real economy recover and grow.

Healthcare

Obama opposes universal healthcare (aka “single payer”) , which is supported by most Americans and is successfully used by most developed nations to provide healthcare to all their citizens at a fraction of the cost of what Americans spend per person each year.

Selling Out

Obama’s congressional allies have claimed that he and they won’t be able to keep their promises to pass a major economic stimulus package due to “resistance from Republicans in congress.” The Democratic Party already controls the majority of both houses, and with just one moderate Republican could break any filibuster in the Senate. Therefore this claim is a lie.

Good public spending benefits the economy far more than tax cuts. Note that infrastructure spending that leads to renewable power and energy efficiency has an even greater return on dollar invested.

If you ask, it always produces the same response: “global oil resources are adequate for the foreseeable future.”¹ It knows this, it says, because of the assessments made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook reports. In the 2007 report, the IEA does appear to support the government’s view. “World oil resources,” it states, “are judged to be sufficient to meet the projected growth in demand to 2030″²; though it says nothing about what happens at that point, or whether they will continue to be sufficient after 2030. But this, as far as Whitehall is concerned, is the end of the matter. Like most of the rich world’s governments, the United Kingdom treats the IEA’s projections as gospel. Earlier this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the UK’s Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government has made for global supplies of oil peaking by 2020. The answer was as follows: “the Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020.”³

So the IEA had better bloody well be right. In the report on peak oil commissioned by the US Department of Energy, the oil analyst Robert L.Hirsch concluded that, “without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs” of world oil supplies peaking “will be unprecedented.”⁴ He went on to explain what “timely mitigation” meant. Even a worldwide emergency response “10 years before world oil peaking”, he wrote, would leave “a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.”⁵ To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin “a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking.”⁶ If Hirsch is right and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we’re in deep doodah.

So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as “doomsayers”. “The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern,” he wrote. “Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.”⁷ In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields of 3.7% a year.⁸ This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7%, which means a much greater gap to fill.⁹

More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers. “Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”¹⁰ These bland words reveal a major shift. Never before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world’s conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).

But that is as specific as the report gets. Does it or doesn’t it mean that we have time to prepare? What does “towards the end of the projection period” mean? The agency has never produced a more precise forecast — until now. For the first time, in the interview I conducted with its chief economist Fatih Birol, it has given us a date. And it should scare the pants off anyone who understands the implications.

Fatih Birol, the lead author of the new energy outlook, is a small, shrewd, unflustered man with thick grey hair and Alistair Darling eyebrows. He explained to me that the agency’s new projections were based on a major study it had undertaken into decline rates in the world’s 800 largest oil fields. So what were its previous figures based on? “It was mainly an assumption, a global assumption about the world’s oil fields. This year, we looked at it country by country, field by field and we looked at it also onshore and offshore. It was very very detailed. Last year it was an assumption, and this year it’s a finding of our study.” I told him that it seemed extraordinary to me that the IEA hadn’t done this work before, but had based its assessment on educated guesswork. “In fact nobody had done this research,” he told me. “This is the first publicly available data.”¹¹

So was it not irresponsible to publish a decline rate of 3.7% in 2007, when there was no proper research supporting it? “No, our previous decline assumptions have always mentioned that these are assumptions to the best of our knowledge – and we also said that the declines [could be] higher than what we have assumed.”

Then I asked him a question for which I didn’t expect a straight answer: could he give me a precise date by which he expects conventional oil supplies to stop growing?

“In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]“, he replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view.”

Around 2020. That casts the issue in quite a different light. Mr Birol’s date, if correct, gives us about 11 years to prepare. If the Hirsch report is right, we have already missed the boat. Birol says we need a “global energy revolution” to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as the Canadian tar sands. But nothing on this scale has yet happened, and Hirsch suggests that even if it began today, the necessary investments and infrastructure changes could not be made in time. Fatih Birol told me “I think time is not on our side here.”

When I pressed him on the shift in the agency’s position, he argued that the IEA has been saying something like this all along. “We said in the past that one day we will run out of oil. We never said that we will have hundreds of years of oil … but what we have said is that this year, compared to past years, we have seen that the decline rates are significantly higher than what we have seen before. But our line that we are on an unsustainable energy path has not changed”.

This of course is face-saving nonsense. There is a vast difference between a decline rate of 3.7% and a rate of 6.7%. There is an even bigger difference between suggesting that the world is following an unsustainable energy path – a statement almost everyone can subscribe to – and revealing that conventional oil supplies are likely to plateau around 2020. If this is what the IEA meant in the past, it wasn’t expressing itself very clearly.

So what do we do? We could take to the hills, or we could hope and pray that Hirsch is wrong about the 20-year lead time, and begin a global crash programme today of fuel efficiency and electrification. In either case, the British government had better start drawing up some contingency plans.

1. Eg DECC Press Office, 28th October 2008. Statement e-mailed to Duncan Clark at the Guardian newspaper (UK).
2. International Energy Agency, 2007. World Energy Outlook 2007, page 43. IEA, Paris.
3. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request, Ref 08/0091.
4. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy, page 4.
5. ibid, page 59.
6. ibid, page 65.
7. International Energy Agency, 2005. Resources to Reserves: Oil and Gas Technologies for the Energy Markets of the Future, page 3. IEA, Paris.
8. International Energy Agency, 2007, ibid, page 84.
9. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook 2008, page 43. IEA, Paris.
10. ibid, p103.
11. This interview is broadcast on the Guardian’s (UK) website, December 15, 2008.

Al Gore has made an impact.

Too bad the Gore effect is like a bad hangover: all headache, no buzz. The purported solution to the imminent warming crisis, nuclear technology, is just as hazardous as our current methods of energy procurement. Al Gore, who wrote of the potential green virtues of nuclear power in his book Earth in the Balance, earned his stripes as a congressman protecting the interests of two of the nuclear industry’s most problematic enterprises, the TVA and the Oak Ridge Labs. And, of course, Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation’s outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company’s Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana.

The Clinton years indeed saw an all-out expansion of nuclear power around the globe. First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China, announced during Jiang Zemin’s 1997 visit Washington, even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the so-called “full scope safeguards” spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act.

The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who cited repeated exports by China of “dual use” technologies to Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. The CIA also weighed in against the deal, pointing out in a report to the president that “China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction” worldwide. In a press conference on the deal, Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be “a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coal-fired plants” and will be “a great opportunity for American vendors” — that is, Westinghouse.

A day later, Clinton signed an agreement to begin selling nuclear technology to Brazil and Argentina for the first time since 1978, when Jimmy Carter canceled a previous deal after repeated violations of safety guidelines and nonproliferation agreements.

In a letter to congress, Clinton vouched for the South American countries, saying they had made “a definitive break with earlier ambivalent nuclear policies.” Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg justified the nuclear pact with Brazil and Argentina as “a partnership in developing clean and reliable energy supplies for the future.” Steinberg noted that both countries had opposed binding limits on greenhouse emissions and that new nuclear plants would be one way “to take advantage of the fact that today we have technologies available for energy use which were not available at the time that the United States and other developed countries were going through their periods of development.”

The atom lobby during the 1990s had a stranglehold on the Clinton administration and now they seem to have the same suffocating grip around the neck of the brightest star in the Democratic field today: Barack Obama.

In 2006, Obama took up the cause of Illinois residents who were angry with Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant operator, for not having disclosed a leak at one of their nuclear plants in the state. Obama responded by quickly introducing a bill that would require nuclear facilities to immediately notify state and federal agencies of all leaks, large or small.

At first it seemed Obama was intent on making a change in the reporting protocol, even demonizing Exelon’s inaction in the press. But Obama could only go so far, as Exelon executives, including Chairman John W. Rowe who serves as a key lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Lobby, have long been campaign backers, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars dating back to Obama’s days in the Illinois State Legislature.

Despite his initial push to advance the legislation, Obama’s office eventually rewrote the bill, producing a version that was palatable to Exelon and the rest of the nuclear industry. “Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Illinois, where the nuclear leaks had polluted local ground water. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”

Inevitably the bill died a slow death in the Senate. And like an experienced political operative, Obama came out of the battle as a martyr for both sides of the cause. His constituents back in Illinois thought he fought a good fight while industry insiders knew the Obama machine was worth investing in.

Obama’s campaign wallet, while rich with millions from small online donations, is also bulging from $227,000 in contributions given by employees of Exelon. Two of Obama’s largest campaign fundraisers include Frank M. Clark and John W. Rogers Jr., both top Exelon officials. Even Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, has done consulting work for the company.

During a Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing in 2005, Obama, who serves on the committee, asserted that since Congress was debating the negative impact of C02 emissions “on the global ecosystem, it is reasonable — and realistic — for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration.” Shortly thereafter, Nuclear Notes, the industry’s top trade publication, praised the senator. “Back during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor of ‘common sense solutions.’ And when it comes to nuclear energy, it seems like the senator is keeping an open mind.”

Sadly for the credibility of the atom lobby, some of their more eye-grabbing numbers don’t check out. For example, as noted in a report by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuke industry claims that the world’s 447 nuclear plants reduce C02 emissions by 30 percent. But existing nuclear plants save only about 5 percent of total C02 emissions, hardly a bargain given the costs and risks associated with nuclear power. As you go up the nuclear fuel chain, you have carbon dioxide emissions at every single step — from uranium mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor construction to the transportation of the radioactive waste.

Moreover, the nuclear lobby likes to compare its record to coal-fired plants, rather than renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal. Even when compared to coal, atomic power fails the test if investments are made to increase the efficient use of the existing energy supply. One recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that “even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for C02-abatement. Thus, to the extent that investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency, the pursuit of a nuclear response to global warming would effectively exacerbate the problem.”

Clearly Senator Obama recognizes the inherent dangers of nuclear technology and knows of the disastrous failures that plagued Chernobyl, Mayak and Three Mile Island. Yet, despite his attempts to alert the public of future toxic nuclear leaks, Obama still considers nuclear power a viable alternative to coal-fired plants. The atom lobby must certainly be pleased.

The anger at the US seems to be surfacing everywhere at once. It was particularly noticeable at the recent opening of the UN General Assembly. Typically, this is a tedious event full of empty political blabbering and pretentious ceremonies. But not this time. With the world sliding towards a US-created recession; foreign leaders have started lashing out at the United States more vehemently. The speeches have been blunt and acrimonious; no one is “pulling their punches” any more. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez summed up the mood of the meetings like this:

“I think that, sooner rather than later, this empire will fall — to the benefit of the whole world, enabling a balance in the world to be created: polycentric and multi-polar. That will guarantee peace in the world. To the creation of this multi-polar world we are making our small contribution.”

What Chavez objects to is Bush’s “unipolar” model of global governance whereby all the world’s crucial decisions–on everything from global warming to nuclear proliferation–are made by Washington. No one likes being told what to do, just as no one likes the US constantly meddling in their affairs. That’s why none of the UN attendees seemed particularly bothered by the fact that the US financial markets are in freefall. It’s called schadenfreude, taking pleasure in someone elses misfortune, and it was on full display at the United Nations last week.

Many of the dignitaries seem to believe that America’s sudden economic downturn presents an opportunity for change. And that’s what everyone wants; real change. No one wants another 8 years like the last. That’s why the central theme in Chavez’s speech was repeated over and over again by other leaders. They reject the present system and want a bigger role in shaping the future.

That doesn’t mean that the world hates America. It just means that everyone wants a breather from the torture, the abductions, the bombing of civilians, and now, the financial contagion that has spread throughout the global system. The US’s lack of regulation and monetary policies have driven up inflation, triggered food riots, and sent oil prices skyrocketing. Enough is enough. The United States is like the dinner guest who doesn’t know when it’s time to go home. Perhaps, a touch of recession will help to rebalance Washington’s approach and make its leaders more responsive to the needs of the rest of the world.

Journalist John Gray summed it up like this in his article in The Observer, “A Shattering Moment in America’s fall from Power”:

The control of events is no longer in American hands… Having created the conditions that produced history’s biggest bubble, America’s political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

The US is about to join the family of nations and learn how to get along with its neighbors whether it wants to or not. There’s simply no other choice; the dollar is falling, the deficits are soaring, and the financial markets are in a shambles. America will either learn to cooperate or become isolated in a world that is rapidly integrating. It’s “get along or go it alone”; a message that Washington needs to learn quickly so it can adapt to the new power-paradigm.

Yes; plenty of money will still flow into covert operations and CIA-sponsored dirty tricks just to keep alive the hope that Superpowerdom will be restored. That is to be expected. The well-heeled rogues in the British royal family still dream of rebuilding the Empire, too. But realists know that it’s just a harmless fantasy. Nothing will come of it. Empire’s have a short shelf-life and they’re impossible to stitch-back together. They usually end on a corpse strewn battlefield or in a towering financial bonfire which leaves nothing behind but a pile of ashes and shards of broken glass. We can only hope that the yawning economic chasm ahead of us all, will involve less hardship than we anticipate. But when a nation sows dragon’s teeth, it shouldn’t expect a harvest of sweet plums.

Journalist Steve Watson reports on Infowars:

A Council on Foreign Relations member and former policy planner under prominent Bilderberger Henry Kissinger has penned a piece in the Financial Times of London calling for a “new global monetary authority” that would have the power to monitor all national financial authorities and all large global financial companies.

Even if the US’s massive financial rescue operation succeeds, it should be followed by something even more far-reaching – the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless.” writes Jeffrey Garten also a former managing director of Lehman Brothers.

The dream of “one world” government does not die easily, but it is dead all the same. The center of the present global financial system is the Federal Reserve. Its offspring includes the Council on Foreign Relations, the IMF, The World Bank, the G-7 banking cartel and thousands of predatory NGOs which have expanded the grip of the Washington banking cabal and the dollarized system across the planet. But neoliberalism is collapsing and what we are seeing now is the erratic spasms of a terminal heart patient entering the final stages of cardiac arrest. There is no drug or medical procedure that will restore the victim to good health.

No one is looking to the US or its “supply side” hirelings to chart a course for their country’s economic future. Those day’s are over. The US will have to pull itself from the rubble and start over without the massive infusions of low interest capital from China, Japan and the Gulf States. The money spigots have been turned off. It’s thin gruel and hard times ahead. That’s the price one pays for swindling the world with worthless mortgage-backed snake oil and other “illiquid” garbage.

Russian President Vladimir Putin summed up recent events in the financial markets like this:

Everything that is happening in the economic and financial sphere has started in the United States. This is a real crisis that all of us are facing, and what is really sad is that we see an inability to take appropriate decisions. This is no longer irresponsibility on the part of some individuals, but irresponsibility of the whole system, which as you know had pretensions to (global) leadership.

Back at the United Nations, Germany’s Finance Minister Peer Steinbuck echoed similar sentiments when he said:

The United States is solely to be blamed for the financial crisis. They are the cause for the crisis and it is not Europe and it is not the Federal Republic of Germany. The Anglo-Saxon drive for double-digit profits and massive bonuses for bankers and company executives that were responsible for the financial crisis.

He added,”The long term consequences of the crisis are not clear. but one thing seems likely to me; the USA will lose its superpower status in the global financial system. The world financial system is becoming multipolar.”

Steinbuck was merely reiterating the feelings of Chancellor Angela Merkel who used more diplomatic language in her critique:

The current crisis shows us you can do some things on the national level, but the overwhelming majority must be agreed to on the international level. We must push for clearer regulations so that a crisis like the current one cannot be repeated.

Merkel knows that Europe was blindsided by America’s deregulated system which allows fraudsters and scam-artists to rule the roost. Even now–in the middle of the biggest financial scandal in history–not one CEO or CFO from a major investment bank has been indicted or dragged off to prison. US markets are a lawless “free for all” where no one is held accountable no matter how large the crime or how many people are hurt. But there’s a price to be paid for fleecing investors, and the US will pay that price. Already, the purchase of US Treasurys has slowed to a crawl. In the coming months, America’s life-support system will be disconnected altogether and the oxygen tent removed. Kissinger’s protege is not worried about that; but working class American’s should be. There’s a train wreck just ahead and many people will suffer needlessly.

This is how Spiegel Online puts it:

The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics. The industrialized countries are sliding into recession, the era of turbo-capitalism is coming to an end and US military might is ebbing…. This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success.

A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans…. Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.¹

Both presidential candidates have vowed to continue the unilateralist Bush Doctrine. Obama is just as eager as McCain to violate sovereign borders, invade countries that pose no imminent national security threat to the US, and carry out the many flagrant violations of international law as long as they serve the interests of western mandarins. But it’s not up to the politicians anymore. Change is coming; the unipolar moment has passed. As the financial crisis deepens, America’s ability to wage war will steadily erode as capital and resources dry up. Its only a matter of time before the war machine sputters to a halt and the troops return home. When the killing stops, a truly new world order will begin.

1. Spiegel Online, “America loses its Dominant Economic Role.”

If I recall correctly, the very same US Congress that is considering bailing out the big financial corporations that got the economy into its current mess because of their greed and the government’s willingness to forgo any regulation of their doings (and the doings of their sister companies in the energy sector) made it almost impossible for individual working people in the US to declare bankruptcy. Yet, they are enabling these giants of the Wall Street economy to get out of their financial catastrophes by making us foot the bill. Furthermore, they have the nerve to tell us it is for the good of the country. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can honestly recall the last time the White House, Congress or Wall Street did anything for the good of the country that I know.

Sure, they started a war against Afghanistan under the pretense that they were going to chase down and capture the guys who organized those planes flying into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That’s gone real well. I mean, look at Afghanistan now. The Pentagon is sending more troops and the White House and Congress are giving the okay. Dozens of civilians are dying in US air strikes as the occupiers fight a growing guerrilla army. They also started a war in Iraq that has done nothing but brought greater misery to that country and its people. It has also caused over 30,000 US casualties, with over 4000 of those casualties being dead men and women whose families are still not sure what they died for. Oh yeh, the price of fuel at the pump has increased by almost four dollars in some places across this land and the number of jobs has decreased steadily. That is, of course, unless you look at the military. Those job openings continue to grow.

But somebody must have benefited from this, right? And we all know who they are. The energy industry has raked in historically huge profits, all the while claiming that they deserve them while insisting that they get further tax breaks. Tax breaks which Congress willingly grants. The war industry has also made a bundle. Some companies, like General Dynamics, have doubled their net earnings just in the past four years. Others, like Haliburton, have used their insider connections to capture dozens, if not hundreds, of no-bid contracts that involve several documented cases of outright fraud and corruption. Yet, they continue to obtain the contracts and avoid prosecution. Then, there are those so-called security contractors, whose employees murder Iraqi citizens, media workers, and even Iraqi employees of the US-installed regime in Baghdad and face no penalties. Meanwhile, the contractor corporations themselves reap huge profits while also selling their services to agencies stateside that are involved with immigration and disaster management. So, uniformed thugs who answer to no one are now performing police duties here in the US. It’s like the Pinkertons of old in the employ of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and the government they ran back then.

Anyhow, back to that financial bailout and the arrogance assumed by those who are proposing it and those who will vote for it. Every time I hear about a CEO of some corporation that fails getting a multimillion dollar compensation package I can’t help but wonder: why is it that these guys get paid for doing their job so poorly that the company they manage fails? I know that in every job I have ever had that if I don’t do my job correctly than I get fired, plain and simple. If I’m lucky I might get a small unemployment check for a few months, but usually when a worker gets fired there is no compensation whatsoever. So, it pisses me off that these guys, from Lee Iacocca to the folks who ran Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the sewer not only get what the rich people call a parachute, but that they genuinely think they deserve one. I say push them out of th plane and let them try to fly. That’s what happens when people who work for a living lose their jobs.

The government isn’t any better, either. What could arguably be called the worst presidential administration in history will be leaving Washington next January. Yet, when those men and women hop on their chartered planes and head out of town, will they have to wonder where their next meal is coming from? Of course not. Almost every single one of them will fetch a nice retirement check for the rest of their lives. In addition, many of them will continue to receive the best health care in the world and hand us the bill. Others will go directly back into the business they were in before they joined the government. Naturally, those businesses will most certainly be better off than when these men and women left them to work in what I loosely term public service. After all, I’m not convinced that there is much servicing the public going on in DC any more. It’s more like servicing the wealthy and their bank accounts. As for Congress, these folks can spend two years in DC kissing corporate ass and hanging out in K Street offices and then go back to their other life with a lifetime pension and that same health care referred to previously. Bet the average reader can’t depend on a package like that.

It’s time Wall Street and Washington DC start practicing for itself what it preaches to the rest of us. No more bailouts and no more fat no-bid contracts. No more wars fought by other people’s kids for the war industry’s profits and the politicians’ egos. No more pay raises and no more free health care. No more taxpayer-funded travel and no more free gas. No more compensation packages unless they do a good job. Either that, or share the wealth and make health care universal, wars illegal, and fuel affordable.

It’s time we tell these folks: Bail your own selves out. Or, if you can’t, then start swimming. That’s what you expect us regular folks to do.

There is a sour irony in the NSG making such an exception for India. The NSG was formed largely in response to India exploding a nuclear device in 1974. Several NSG states felt that approving nuclear trade for India, a nuclear-armed country that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, would undermine global non-proliferation efforts and further legitimize nuclear weapons. These countries put up considerable opposition to the deal, but they were stifled by the United States which engaged in what Jayantha Dhanapala, former United Nations Under Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs, described as a campaign of “brutal and unconscionable pressure.”

Key to having the NSG approve the exception for India was diplomats agreeing to paper over key objections with vague language, particularly regarding the consequences if India conducts nuclear tests or takes advantage of greater access to nuclear materials and foreign technology to expand and refine its nuclear arsenal. To prevent further political difficulties at home for India’s government, the Bush Administration may attempt a similar strategy in Congress. It could seek a spare formulation that approves the U.S.-India agreement as negotiated, while remaining silent about provisions of prior U.S. law that place greater restrictions on technology transfer, and that would cut off trade in nuclear fuels and technology if India conducted a nuclear explosive test. Further, by ramming the deal through Congress in the waning days of its fall session, the Administration will leave little time for study or debate.

What the Administration will likely not mention is that the deal would actually allow India to expand its nuclear arsenal, permitting it to buy fuel for nuclear power reactors on the international market while using scarce domestic uranium in nuclear weapons production. It will further aggravate tensions with Pakistan, which has signaled that it would respond in kind to a more ambitious Indian nuclear weapons program. Thus, the deal could further fuel an arms race between nuclear-armed neighbors that have fought multiple wars. The last war between the two countries in 1999 featured at least thirteen indirect and direct nuclear threats.

Despite these dangers, advocates of the deal see an increase in India’s nuclear capabilities as positive. To quote Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment: “If the United States is serious about advancing its geopolitical objectives in Asia, it would almost by definition help New Delhi develop strategic capabilities such that India’s nuclear weaponry and associated delivery systems could deter against the growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely to possess by 2025.” Such thinking only serves to legitimize the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, and to encourage the United States to ignore its nuclear disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and India to continue its nuclear weapons build-up.

Originally announced in July 2005 by President George Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the nuclear deal is part of a broader set of agreements centering on increased U.S.-India military cooperation and high-tech trade. In the United States an array of corporate interests led by the nuclear industry and arms makers are supporting the deal. They see the possibilities not only for nuclear trade but for big ticket weapons sales, as well as selling other goods and services to India’s elite, only a fraction of the population but a huge new market nonetheless. This emerging economic order, which systemically generates huge disparities of wealth both within and among nations, is itself a source of conflict. The answer envisioned by the military elites is to throw ever more sophisticated levels of high tech violence at these conflicts. Foreign policy pundits and officials in both countries extol the benefits of increased military cooperation, with the more enthusiastic on the U.S. side envisioning India as a junior partner for the U.S. military agenda in Asia. In the aftermath of wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the prospect of U.S. military action in Asia is hardly remote.

Despite the future oriented rhetoric the deal has been wrapped in, what is most striking about it is its backward looking character. Nuclear power was the technology of the future in the 1950s. Half a century later, the promise of energy “too cheap to meter” remains an unfulfilled dream, the fundamental problems of catastrophic risk and long lasting highly radioactive waste still unsolved. With nuclear power construction having ground to a halt in wealthier countries, the industry has turned its sights to Asia, marketing nuclear technology as a climate friendly solution to the continent’s burgeoning energy demand.

However, nuclear power cannot play a significant role in solving the energy needs of the vast majority of India’s population, much less do so in a way that offers any net environmental gains. Nuclear plants today generate only three percent of India’s electricity and less than one percent of its total energy needs. Even under the most optimistic scenarios nuclear power will only be able to double or triple its share of total electricity generation by the middle of this century. Nuclear power, the most expensive form of centralized electricity generation, is an inefficient way to deliver energy to India’s vast unserved rural population. Investing the immense capital needed to construct nuclear plants, in ways that we describe below, offers far larger payoffs for reductions of carbon emissions.

The single most pressing “security” issue of the 21st century will be assuring the essentials of a healthy, dignified life for the billions of people who are left out of a global economy focused on delivering mass consumption items to urban middle classes, luxuries to wealthy elites, and weapons to enforce this inequitable status quo. In the rising global awareness of both global warming and limits on oil supplies, there is an opportunity for a different path of both technology development and trade. This path would emphasize environmental sustainability and equity, rather than profits and maximizing consumption. It would therefore focus on decentralized energy strategies and technologies, and rapidly increasing access to electricity and more efficient energy services for currently unserved populations. This approach to energy development has other positive consequences, e.g. improving public health by reducing open fuel burning for cooking and heat, slowing deforestation where wood is used for fuel, and creating large numbers of jobs broadly distributed geographically and in skill levels, from technology development through manufacturing to widely distributed work installing equipment for decentralized energy generation and use.

Expanding use of decentralized, renewable energy technologies in India also would promote further innovation and bring down prices, encouraging their spread in the U.S. as well. Several virtuous, mutually reinforcing cycles can be created in this way: improving energy access, providing employment, and generally broadening the economic potential of areas left out of the current mode of corporate globalization, reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and oil consumption in the United States, and reducing as a consequence the need for access to foreign oil and gas that is a significant factor driving an aggressive U.S. foreign policy world-wide. This kind of approach, furthermore, can more easily be achieved incrementally, with constantly improving decentralized energy technologies being deployed a household, a village, a city at a time, without the kind of massive, one shot capital costs that commit entire regions to a narrow set of technologies and generating facilities for decades at a time.

This is what the 21st century could look like. In contrast, the U.S. India nuclear deal would build another set of institutional ties binding us to the power structures, both technical and political, of the last century, strengthening those who profit from centralized control of energy resources, a society that generates and tolerates great disparities in wealth, and a global weapons trade that further concentrates wealth while raising the risk of catastrophic wars from the local to the global. Nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and this nuclear deal are all bad risks for ordinary people everywhere, risks that humanity can no longer afford. It is time to chart a different future.

Dams fragment, divert and subjugate the world’s rivers. In one long lifespan, beginning with the inauguration of Hoover Dam in 1936, the engineering marvel of the 20th century, civilization has altered the most important function that makes the earth work, water. Thus, transmuting humanity into something foreign to the earth it inhabits — a stranger to the very system which gave rise to our species.

The late Carl Sagan was among precious few visionary humans who shared the extraordinary ability to differentiate between deep thought and deep nonsense and recognized the persistence of a satisfying delusion to perpetuate the latter. He understood with clarity that Earth, albeit the universe, was not held by any laws of science or sciences god to harmonize with or support the human ambition of massively reengineering the Earth.

Dr. Sagan wrote, “We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an earth that otherwise sends us spinning off into space or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.” Without some sense, some outline of how the earth works and our relationship to it, one is deprived of knowing, let alone of asking, the really important questions that promote regenerative life and prevent massive-scale destruction and degeneration.

It is only in blindness that ignorance can find engineering arrogance and feed the certainty of human expediency — that millions of dams can exist worldwide strangling the lubricant of life itself. It is true that dams have created a seemingly unlimited oasis in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Produced unimaginable population centers in water-stressed locations, food production on marginal arid lands, cheap taxpayer subsidized water and artificial lakes aplenty for fishing, camping and boating. It seems a good thing, yet, what isn’t accounted for is the short-term duration and ecological costs. It has created this artificial bonanza by short-circuiting the natural system of limitations much as the one time wonder of fossil fuels has short-circuited and driven the industrial revolution. The debts of temporary prosperity are all due and payable in the 21st Century.

In the present state of affairs, water, energy, population, war, global economic expansionism, and failing ecological systems are sending shockwaves throughout the vulnerable global community while staggering the biosphere which keeps us among the living tentatively.

Earth Recycling

The world’s water budget is a fixed volume and has remained unchanged for roughly 2.2 billion years in its present state. About 1% of the world’s total water circulates as freshwater while oceans represent 97% of the world’s stores and the remaining 2% is tied up in glaciers and polar ice caps. This finite water pie divides ever more thinly as population, agriculture and the industrial economy expands.

The uninterrupted Earth is a dynamic solar and geothermal energy system which powers the hydrologic and rock cycles. It conducts and convects energy flows from the earth’s 10,000 degree iron core outward through the mantle and lithosphere (crust) generating plate collisions that move continents and trip earthquakes. Magma driven plate collisions uplift mountain ranges and setoff volcanoes recycling lava and gases on land and underwater replenishing both with life-producing minerals.

Solar energy evaporates surface water primarily from oceans to atmosphere to land as water or snow. Erosive rainfall or expanding ice in rock crevices tears down mountains as fast as they rise. The Earth’s lumpy land surface is a massive drainage system. From high to low, meandering and networked creeks and rivers drive the rock and mineral cycle. A river system operates on the principle of erosion and deposition. As a river gains water volume and speeds up it erodes and picks up rock and sediment. As it loses volume and slows down it drops some of its load. Large pulses of water flush sediments onto the rivers floodplain creating fertile soil before arriving at its delta entry to the sea.

Remaining sediments combine with the heavy basalt sea floor at the shoreline which is being subducted under the lighter continental plate from volcanic spreading forces at the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. This continuous underwater volcanic ridge runs like the seams of a baseball throughout the world’s oceans. Everything cycles like a big conveyor; from Mid-Oceanic Ridge pushing the sea floor towards continental plates where it subducts back into the mantle to raise a mountain or explode through a volcano over geologic time. Dams, known as nickpoints, interrupt and distort the natural transport machinery between land and sea.

River Interrupted

Dams quiet the waters and backfill canyons forming massive lakes that produce and release vast amounts of methane from rotting vegetation underwater. The energy-deprived river unloads its rock and sediment load filling the reservoir, predicting its eventual self-cancellation by virtue of sedimentation fill. The only question is how will it end and what will civilization do when it does? What engineering-dominate options remain to further alter, manipulate or control the world?

The National Inventory on Dams shows the United States has constructed 79,000 dams large enough to require state and federal monitoring. These higher risk categories are often located near enough to population centers to pose a direct safety risk to human life and property. Worldwide, there are 800,000 similarly sized dams that are regulated and present equal challenges. Inventoried or not, total dams in the US may exceed 2.5 million and perhaps tens of millions worldwide. They interrupt and fragment the rock cycle and flow of more than 60% of the world’s major rivers with one or more large dams.

The International Commission on Large Dams reveals 45,000 dams of the world are mega-whoppers with heights up to 1000’ and volume capacities exceeding many million acre feet (MAF) of water.

A recent study measured the volume capacities of 29,484 large reservoirs throughout the world. It determined their storage capacity was about 8.7 billion acre feet (BAF) of freshwater. That’s enough water to make a nine foot lake out of Alaska, Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada combined. This immense artificial above-ground storage is counter intuitive to nature’s freshwater storage system which stores only .016% of all the circulating freshwater in all natural lakes, rivers, streams, creeks and atmosphere combined – Preferring to store 80% – 90% of the world’s circulating freshwater underground free from evaporation and sedimentation.

Still more revealing is the loss of artificial reservoir stores through evaporation. Although evaporation rates vary from region to region, a 1998 U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) study of California’s reservoirs in all nine major hydrologic regions recorded 2,342,800 AF of evaporation, about .06% of California’s 40 MAF of reservoir storage. Using a back-of-the-envelope estimation applying .06% evaporation rate to the world’s 8.7 BAF of reservoir stored water yields 522 MAF of evaporation which is about 2.5 years of total California rainfall and 16 years of California water draws for agriculture. That’s water that doesn’t infiltrate as groundwater to feed wells or perennial streams, or grow food, or evapotranspire through wetlands, grasslands, woodlands, and forests, or provide water for wildlife (aquatic and terrestrial) and the billion humans on the planet who don’t have access to unpolluted water.

The World Commission on Dams estimates that 3.1 billion acre foot of freshwater is withdrawn (as opposed to total stores) from lakes, rivers, and aquifers annually. That equals the total discharge of 7 Mississippi Rivers, or 22 Columbia Rivers, or 221 Colorado Rivers. Here again it would cover with 3 foot of water the above mentioned seven states totaling 1 billion surface acres and is 93 times the amount of water drawn from all California reservoirs by agriculture annually — a lot of water. The 3.1 billion acre foot number is still more revealing when one considers that over and above storage and withdrawals, most nearly 65% of all rainfall evaporates before it can become part of either surface or groundwater stores.

Aside from warming atmospheric conditions, and considering only current global population additions (80 million per year), the equivalent of adding a new Germany annually, and factoring rising water consumption rates which triple with each population doubling, all of human enterprises will consume and significantly pollute 90% of all the available freshwater by 2025 leaving a scant 10% to support the earths dwindling water-dominant ecosystem.

Are we playing against ourselves?

When 1964 American Nobel Prizing-winning physicist Charles Townes down-played his break-out laser technology with reporters he demurred, “When I hear that kind of thing, it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’”

In the 1960’s, the age without limits, this telling remark reflects how little was known and understood about the natural world and the accumulative impacts of dams. Since the idea of the beaver wasn’t to dam major rivers but build small organic dams on its many tributaries. And then these temporary ecosystems evolved and produced abundant life. They reduced flooding and erosion, enhanced groundwater penetration, created the valley’s precious topsoil and fed a radiant food web including decomposing bacteria, amphibians, fisheries, insects, birds, herbivores and carnivores. Comparing a beaver to Hoover Dam is like comparing life to death. Aldo Leopold, the legendary and visionary U.S. Forest Service land manager of the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s said dams make the land sick and provide only a temporary prosperity followed by tremendous vulnerability. This ecological reality is incontrovertible — all dams have an end date.

California leads the list with dams near self-cancellation. Within the next generation, 85% of all U.S. dams will have degenerated to the point of exhausting their operational lifespan of fifty years requiring decommissioning or massive repairs and upgrades. Now consider that every sweet spot in every geologically sane canyon that might reasonably hold a dam already has an aging dam, what then?

Let’s pause for just a moment and ask some relevant questions. What will it cost to maintain, repair, upgrade, and build new dams to replace those that fail or are decommissioned, and restore dysfunctional watersheds impacted by dams?

Let me proffer a worldwide estimate to maintain the current population of 6.7 billion without any further additions. Factoring ecological restoration, maintenance, repair, decommissioning, and replacement cost of the world’s developed water infrastructure as it’s currently engineered would likely be a cost greater than all the energy expended on all engineering projects from the beginning of civilization and this cost would recur every fifty years or so. Now factor in a population adding 1 billion every thirteen years?

Is it even possible at this stage of civilization to convince people to care about a time on earth that many will not have to live in?

These statistics and trajectories have no caution value to a species front-row seated as the primary agent of geologic change on Earth. For example, in three long lifespans, Europeans have altered a continuous American wilderness into a networked, layered, and interwoven mass of asphalt-spreading, carbon-coughing, concrete-lining, pipeshed-connecting, aqueduct-flowing, levee-bunkering, grid-generating, wireless-transmitting, urban-sprawling, mall-cloning, river-damming, and resource-consuming experiment in human unconsciousness.

Dams provide that tempting illusion of prosperity whose short-term gains literally vandalize the future of civilization and natural terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. This reality remains an abstraction to a developed and developing world breast-fed on cheap energy, cheap water, and unconscious consumption of finite resources.

The tenant of the economic element states clearly that the natural state of soil, rainfall, creeks and streams, forests, valleys, wetlands, deserts, mountains, etc. have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. And only those aspects that can be justified as an economic benefit to mankind first (logging, mining, damming, intensive agricultural production, urban development, or recreation) are redeemable and can be supported in so far as they produce artificial wealth through income generation. Commodification of elements cycling and recycling from the basement of time, as its sole recognized value displays an arrogance not intended by nature or nature’s god.

If the current growing population of 6.7 billion is considered a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If the vulnerability of dense populations downstream of dams is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial – If agricultural production on arid lands that require large volumes of water that salinate the soil and demand large inputs of fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides that runoff and pollute groundwater is considered a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If the displacement of 80 million people from their homelands to accommodate dams is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — if the destruction of life-supporting ecosystems and fishery resources is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If the inequitable sharing of benefits and costs is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If debt burden, cost overruns, deferred maintenance costs and the impoverishment of people is a benefit to mankind, than dams are the most beneficial engineering endeavor of human history second only to nuclear weapons. God help us — common sense hasn’t.