The authors contributing to Fleeing Vesuvius represent an impressive range of expertise. Six are economists, four environmental scientists, three specialists in green commerce and marketing, two architects, two community organizers, one an environmental engineer, one a psychotherapist and one a former corporate attorney. Others have backgrounds in appropriate technology, ethics and local government. All are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.

The first two sections of Fleeing Vesuvius define the problem by outlining the scientific, technological and economic parameters of fossil fuel depletion. The last five focus on solutions, with examples from Europe and North America of pioneering programs local groups and communities are undertaking to wean themselves off fossil fuels.

The Link Between Fossil Fuels, Industrialization and Capitalism

Fleeing Vesuvius deliberately emphasizes fossil fuel depletion more than climate change, owing to the major role it played (according to the authors) in the 2008 economic collapse. The first and most important section of the book, “Energy Availability” addresses the economics of fossil fuel depletion. It lays out hard truths about the link between cheap fossil fuels, industrialization, capitalism and money. We are always taught that the industrial revolution of the late 18th century was the result of British technological innovation, the view promoted by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Unfortunately Smith totally overlooks the importance of cheap fossil fuel energy, at first from coal and later from oil and natural gas, in running the giant machines that replaced human labor.

In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years. He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible – an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it. By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further. Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

The other side of this argument is that industrialization and capitalism will eventually cease when fossil fuel becomes too prohibitively expensive to support it. In fact,

Douthwaite argues that the skyrocketing cost of oil ($148 a barrel) and food – not speculation in subprime mortgage derivates – were the root cause of the 2008 economic crisis.

The End of Industrial Agriculture

Part I of Fleeing Vesuvius also looks at the link between cheap fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. In addition to the fossil fuel energy required for farm machinery, food processing and transportation to market, oil and natural gas are essential in the production of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that are an essential feature of industrial scale agriculture. Doing without them means returning to an era where people produced food and other basic needs with manure, human labor and draft animals. Prior to the industrial revolution, these primitive methods fed a global population of two billion. Many economists question whether it’s possible to provide for our current global population of seven billion without relying on fossil fuels.

Energy Return on Investment (EROI)

In the essay entitled “Future Energy Availability,” environmental physicist Chris Vernon explains the link between Peak Oil and Energy Return on Investment (EROI). EROI is defined as the amount of energy that must be expended to extract or produce surplus energy for business or household use. Although there’s still a lot of oil, gas and coal in the ground, we have reached the point where the reserves that are easy and cheap to extract have been used up. More importantly, owing to the enormous amount of energy required to produce some forms of renewal energy, renewable sources will never have the ability of fossil fuels to produce abundant cheap energy. Although wind, especially off-shore wind, and tidal energy have great promise, energy from these sources will remain quite costly for the foreseeable future. This leads Vernon to draw the conclusion that humankind will have no choice but to downsize their energy intensive lifestyles.

Money and Energy Scarcity

The main focus of the second section of Fleeing Vesuvius, “Innovation in business, money and finance,” is the link between energy availability and money. In it, Richard Douthwaite looks at our current debt based monetary system, which started at the beginning of the industrial revolution. He explains how banks create money out of thin air every time they approve a new loan and why continuous economic growth is necessary in order to pay off the debt created in this way. When economic growth stalls, as it did in 2008, the debt becomes unpayable.

With the end of cheap energy, according to Douthwaite, global leaders must accept that the era of continuous economic growth has also ended. This means our current debt-based system of money creation must also be scrapped. In addition to calling for government to remove control of money creation from private banks, Douthwaite also supports the creation of regional and local currencies. This preserves the ability of low income groups to trade products and services when the national currency is in short supply due to recession and deflation.

The Transition to a Fossil Energy-Free Society

The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle. There are two somewhat technical essays on using biochar as a carbon sink and the importance of soil mineral content in localized food production. Other essays look at national and international strategies for reducing carbon emissions, including the innovative “Cap and Share” approach put forward by Fiesta (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) in 2008. This would require primary fossil-fuel suppliers (e.g. oil companies) to buy permits to introduce fossil fuels into the economy. As fossil fuel suppliers pass these costs on to consumers, they, in turn, begin to seek out renewable energy alternatives. At the same time, revenue from the permits is used to help low income customers pay their energy bills.

Part 5 “Changing the way we live” includes an excellent essay by community organizer Davie Phillip describing some of the accomplishments of the worldwide Transition movement, started by Rob Hopkins (in Ireland and the UK) in 2002.

Part 6 “Changing the Way We Think” addresses the apathy and inertia that prevents most of the developing world from taking serious measures to address the catastrophic economic, ecological and resource crises we presently face. In “Cultivating hope and managing despair,” psychotherapist John Sharry compares this widespread apathy and inertia to Kubler Ross’s stages of grief in bereavement or impending loss (denial, anger, depression, acceptance). The impending collapse of our current way of life is the worst loss any of us can imagine. It should be no surprise that the initial response to such news is denial. Sharry suggests that Kubler Ross has left out an essential step between depression and acceptance – namely, the hopeful and constructive activity which is often necessary before full acceptance can occur.

Fleeing Vesuvius finishes with an Epilogue in which different authors give suggestions for specific steps people can take on an individual, community, national and international level in preparing for the eventual collapse of our present energy intensive economic system.

The North American edition of Fleeing Vesuvius has a preface by Richard Heinberg, author of the End of Growth and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.This edition also contains an appendix, “Should the US try to avoid a financial meltdown?”, a dialogue between two of the economists who contributed essays (Richard Douthwaite and Tom Konrad).

This upside down, deluded thinking is leading us to risk the precipitation of a colossal disaster of some unimaginable sort. The continuous plunder of limited resources and conversion of biomass into human mass, including the continual increase of food production to feed a growing population, are precisely what is causing humanity to charge down a “primrose path’ toward an unfolding confrontation with a global, human-driven ecological wreckage.

Perhaps we need to invite one another to listen more, see farther on a clear day, and communicate better. Thanks to all in the Circle of Friends and the Royal Society’s People and the Planet Working Group for being now here just as you are. We are going to make a difference. Like all of you, I do not have answers, but not having answers cannot be used as a ‘justification’ by population professionals, demographers and economists on our watch for ceasing their explorations and denying extant scientific research. Scientists cannot consciously and deliberately deny evidence of what could somehow be real.

All these unwitting experts must be called out. If foolhardy experts and their greedmongering benefactors are ultimately victorious in their elective mutism and willful denial of science, what is to keep silence from killing the world we inhabit? If ‘the ninety-nine percent’ are denying the human overpopulation of Earth, then 0.99% of the remaining 1% are in denial of the science of human population dynamics, I suppose. These circumstances are intolerable and cannot stand.

As a growing number of scientists are making all of us aware, a way needs to be discovered and chosen that effectively communicates an adequate understanding of the profoundly dangerous situation in which the human community finds itself in our time. As Paul Ehrlich reported last year, “Everybody who understands the situation is scared witless.”

That as it may be, experts need to gather their wits about them because they still have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform. After all, we live by our wits not witlessness; moral courage not fear; and by adapting to the requirements of reality rather than putting our heads in the sand. Somehow the vision, the honesty, the judgment, the pluck, the will and the means will be summoned by human beings with feet of clay to acknowledge, address and overcome the human-induced global challenges that are already dimly visible on the far horizon. Otherwise the greed of self-proclaimed masters of the universe and the witlessness of their minions, who together rule the world on our watch, will certainly bring about its ruin as a fit place for human habitation.

In all the seriousness and gravity of what could be true, never in a lifetime did I expect to see a situation like the global predicament looming ominously before humanity. Although my eyes were open during the first 50 years of life, I did not for a split second catch sight, even through a glass darkly, of the awesome big picture: the global predicament that is given its shape in the gigantic presence of seven billion, soon to become 9 billion human beings ravaging a finite planet with size, composition and frangible environs of Earth. The sight of something so awesome left me initially thunderstruck and later on incessantly compelled to speak out as I have for years.

Perhaps speaking out about what is true to you as best it can be expressed and thereby raising awareness, is at least one distinctly human way to go forward.

It is absolutely confounding how liberals have repeatedly fallen for this president. He has thrived off of vague pronouncements and innuendo, only making concrete political promises on issues with overwhelming popular support, at which point he generally manufactures some semblance of fight before rolling over dead in quick order. How many years of this before the Michael Moores of the world get it? The problem is not that the president’s hands are tied by an overzealous Republican establishment; rather, he is confined to a contrived role in a rigged political act designed to mimic representative democracy. The script goes like this: he postures as the people’s president, while the opposition scolds him as being a liberal elitist. Then, they bicker about all things innocuous, while carrying on unabated with the core business of shredding the constitution, stifling dissent, and maintaining the Empire. Obama’s new vaguely populist rhetoric and seemingly forceful tone is all a bad rerun. The Washington Post declared this to be the emergence of “Obama 2.0,” , but they got it wrong. It’s all the same Hope and Change Pony Show.

With each year of Obama’s successful duping of the liberal establishment, the center-point of accepted political opinion gets driven further to the right. In this address, he bills his two greatest accomplishments as getting Bin Laden and saving GM: an extrajudicial murder and a bailout conditioned with wage and benefit reductions for future employees. He blithely touted his circumvention of international law and due process in the bin Laden killing. Meanwhile, he goes on to trumpet his saber rattling vis-à-vis Iran, and his illegal use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen, while speaking of an “ironclad – and I mean Ironclad” relationship to the contemptible regime in Israel. It is quite disconcerting to know that respected “liberal” commentators could characterize a speech as “populist” despite all of this dastardly retrograde rhetoric.

The praise did not stop with Michael Moore. David Corn from the once respectable Mother Jones had this to say: “Obama is pitching a patriotic, quasi-populist progressivism (while conceding the need for deficit reduction and government cost-efficiencies).:  Either he doesn’t quite get the concept of “quasi” or we can count him in the ranks of the duped. In his coverage on Twitter he said: “Progressives can get too bogged down in critique. Obama showed how to criticize while reaching higher.” While it is difficult to discern from a 140-letter tweet, the thrust of this statement seems to be that far-reaching critiques are not acceptable. His reasoning goes that ideologues are archaic and inherently divisive. Anyone who breaks with the theme of unity is a party pooper. In taking this line, the president and his supporters conflate reasoned dissent with the knee-jerk rejectionist posture of the outrageous Republican establishment. Those that demand “too much” of the president are viewed with equal contempt by the increasingly base liberal establishment.

What these candy-ass liberals fail to understand is that we cannot be united with a 1% whose recklessness and avidity knows no bounds. The super-rich have unequivocally demonstrated that their interests lie elsewhere. They have spent decades lobbying for deregulation and trade “liberalization” that has allowed them to displace millions of American jobs while reducing the quality of millions of others. Meanwhile, they preyed on working Americans with their sub-prime and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and then shook the whole house of cards by repackaging those lousy investments into fancy financial instruments, thus provoking a recession that is ongoing for most of the 99% of us. The Occupy Movement grew out of rage against these monsters, not out of any desire to move in with them. A responsive and thoughtful president would be railing against them, not tidily talking about a “togetherness” that the 1% has incessantly rejected.

Nonetheless, liberals will argue that the president adequately addressed inequality with his token references to economic fairness and his advocacy of a Buffet Tax. The latter proposal is quite clearly a ploy on his part, as he knows the Republican congress would never seriously consider it. He gets to posture as a liberal without ever having to actually enact a progressive measure, per the norm. If he really had any desire to equalize the tax code, he could have done it during his first two years, when he had a strong party majority in both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, if he had the determination, he could ram through such legislation in the current climate of populist upheaval, despite the current Congress of stooges and charlatans. However, it would be extremely naïve to expect the president to suddenly cease being the servile sort that he is.

One could reasonably argue that the proposal to establish a “Financial Crimes Unit” amounts to a progressive initiative that is praiseworthy. Indeed, one cannot imagine a Republican president bothering with such a measure. However, Obama is merely building on what has been a very minimal response to the financial crisis thus far. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill barely began to scratch the surface: its primary purpose so far being that it provides government with alternative avenues to taxpayer bailouts should banks face liquidity issues in the future. The more far-reaching and prescient reforms, such as resurrection of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the monolithic corporate banks, have not been serious policy considerations by this administration.

That makes two progressive-leaning proposals, delivered in the president’s typically vague form, all set for future abandonment. Meanwhile, you can add his support for fracking and “school choice” to the list of regressive positions in this State of the Union. On the former issue, he calls for an ambitious increase in the refinement of natural gas. Despite widespread documentation of the hazards  posed to drinking water and the preponderance of disease in and around gas fields, Obama decided to tell the nation:

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.

On “school choice,” a moniker for school privatization via charters or vouchers, he elicits inspiration from his home-state’s treasured political icon: “I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.” Here, he is merely repeating talking points directly from corporate lobbyists that have used school choice as cover for their efforts to attack public schools, break up teachers unions, and to maliciously profit from the newly burgeoning education “industry.” Obama does suggest willingness to “stop teaching to the test,” though this is probably more of his vacuous pandering to common progressive causes.  He might make a half-hearted effort at some aesthetic change, but will do nothing to stave off the ongoing looting of the public schools. With Arne Duncan, the old Chicago Charter School champion, still serving as Secretary of Education, it is tough to imagine any diversion from the current privatization thrust.

The only rational conclusion from this year’s speech is that this is, indeed, the same old Obama. This is the same unrepentant militarist that was elected in 2008, the same prosecutor of illegal wars in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen; the same authoritarian that signed the NDAA, thus codifying his immoral and unconstitutional detention powers; the same murderer of American civilians: the president who has dutifully played his role as supervisor of this descendant and morally decaying power. As this has yet to become a full-fledged dictatorship, the president must appeal to his subjects’ finer sensibilities on occasion. In this, he excels. Even after three years of the same old dog and pony show, he is still proving adept at duping the diffident liberal mainstream.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

Despite the subterfuge of freedom and democracy, the rights of corporations have consistently superseded the sovereign rights of the individual and those of the community. Labor history and a litany of environmental catastrophes bear this out. For instance, everywhere one looks government agencies “ostensibly created to protect the public welfare” are allowing hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale, even when it poisons municipal drinking water and causes incalculable harm to the environment.

Our diverse forests are commodified, measured in board feet to be clear-cut and off-shored at prodigious bargain rates, like a liquidation sale. World class biodiversity is yielding to desertification and monoculture. Money changes hands. The few are getting rich at the expense of the many. The world and the people who live in it are treated like products to be exploited. We are told that nothing is sacred, save for the dollar and markets.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that no human being, including corporate CEOs and members of Congress, can live without potable water or breathable air. We are literally sacrificing the Earth’s life support systems and mortgaging the future, while attempting to satiate the greed of a few grotesquely wealthy individuals. Through lifelong indoctrination, Americans are persuaded that self-interested greed is in their best interest.

The rich and powerful have decreed that corporate profits “the Holy Grail of American capitalism” are more precious than life itself. The remorseless people in power are without conscience. History confirms that sociopaths do not hesitate to take what they want from their unsuspecting victims by any and all means.

But surely, even among Friedmanites, it must be allowed that some things cannot be commodified or bought and sold. For instance, clean air and potable water are the birthright of every living organism. These are necessities that belong to the commons; they cannot ethically be privately owned. In contrast to this assertion, two edicts of modern capitalism are private ownership and the commodification of workers and nature.

Capitalism, and the market fundamentalism that is associated with it, has stripped bare the Earth’s biodiversity and substituted a world of commodities in its stead. What we see and think we know is not real. It is the product of marketing and perception managers — a hologram.

There is growing conflict between capitalism and the planet’s ecology, its essential life support systems. A fierce struggle between capital and democracy is in progress. The booted foot of capitalism is pressing upon the throat of democracy. We inhabit a dying world and are inheriting dying freedoms. Corporate greed and over-population is the culprit. Conflict is everywhere.

Virtually all of the social upheaval, inequality, and environmental problems of today in some way ensue from capitalism, including overpopulation and armed aggression. Capitalism requires continuous economic expansion and a burgeoning market for consumers. This is simply not possible on a finite planet.

These tensions are manifested no more clearly than throughout the coal belt and mountains of West Virginia, where I make my home. Here, mountains are cleared of forests before being blown to smithereens in order to cheaply extract coal to enrich Massey Energy Corporation. The process, known as mountaintop removal, has poisoned streams, altered their courses, and changed the contours of the land and its hydrology. It has devastated both human and biological communities while filling the coffers of the timber and coal industries.

Conventional underground mining has claimed the lives of thousands of coal miners trying to scratch out a modest living from the Earth. At times, it has led to armed conflict between miners and the Pinkertons hired by the mining companies in places like Matewan and Blair Mountain.

In West Virginia, King Coal and the gas and oil industry run the state’s legislature. The government is effectively owned by corporate lobbyists. As a result, it is futile to make legal and moral appeals to government for redress of our grievances. If we limit ourselves to the tools that our oppressors provide us, the entire region will become a sacrifice zone. Working people and the poor make the sacrifices; billionaires and industry carry off the profit. We are left to deal with the aftermath.

The illusion of democracy “including voting in the absence of meaningful choice” is a poor substitute for direct action and anarchy. Democracy cannot flourish in the sterile soil that capitalism leaves in its wake. Either we have democracy or we have capitalism, or we create something entirely different. Radically opposing ideas cannot be reconciled.

Modern humans inhabit a human-engineered world of absurdities and contradictions. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s assertions, corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Every sentient human being knows this. However, the law says otherwise. We must deny the corporate state that victory by refusing to capitulate.

The struggle for community rights, egalitarianism, and social, economic, and environmental justice must occur outside of the system that creates inequality and fosters wanton destruction of the commons. Countless species of plants and animals that provide essential ecological services are being eliminated to create space for strip malls, gated communities, gambling casinos and golf courses. As a result, ecological and economic catastrophe loom. We are facing global famine in an anthropocentric over-heated world.

Globally, wealthy multinational corporations are gorging themselves on the biological and mineral wealth of the commons. What could be more absurd or unethical?

The brainchild of Adam Smith, capitalism, which replaced feudalism during the French Revolution, is founded upon demonstrably false premises, many of which were unknown in Smith’s time. Nevertheless, classically trained economists assert that capitalism is a primal force of nature rather than the defective human construct that it is. Modern capitalism has produced pathological symptoms and endorsed an ethos that is antithetical to life and to liberty. It is killing the world and foreclosing evolutionary possibilities.

Indeed, ethical considerations aside, and speaking purely from a biological perspective, one may emphatically state that modern capitalism is an aggressive cancer that is devouring its host. But most of us are in denial. People like me are asked not to utter the “C” word in public spaces. It might offend the well-intentioned believers. Whenever this occurs I am reminded of Thoreau, who uttered, “Any truth is better than make believe.” . One has an ethical obligation to state what one knows succinctly and clearly.

It is not in dispute that the ideology of constant expansion on a finite planet is contradicted by inviolable ecological dictums — among them, carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, and die-off. But classical economists act as if these laws do not apply, or they are mysteriously overridden by the irrational exuberance of capitalism.

In reality, every political economy is underlain by ecology and by living, evolving, biological systems. Ecology is the only economy that really matters.

By possessing even a modest degree of ecological literacy, one can make some revealing predictions with mathematical certainty. For example, the continuation of capitalism as the primary political economy can have one of two possible outcomes: the virtual destruction of the biosphere, meaning the death of the host organism, or the abolition of the capitalist system.

What would a post-capitalism world look like and how might it work?

Global capitalism, with its dependence on the availability of cheap fossil fuels and petrochemicals for food production, must give way to small-scale local economies and organic agriculture. Food must be locally grown and, as far as possible, other necessities locally produced. The age of cheap fossil fuels is ending. Industrialized man must bravely confront his addictions and embrace sobriety or he will self-destruct.

It is said that nature bats last. Humans do best when they emulate natural systems that have evolved over eons of time.

A moneyless economy based upon need must supplant the current profit-driven system of exploitation. Accordingly, goods and services may then be exchanged without the conduit of markets. These exchanges would be of equal value and thus inherently fair.

The classic business models will be replaced by worker-owned and worker-operated cooperatives. In this arrangement, workers – not a board of directors – make all of the business decisions. They share the risks and benefits and distribute the surpluses of production, while significantly reducing the work day and the work week. A portion of the surpluses of production is allocated to the betterment of the community and to the protection of the commons.

New economic models must be predicated upon ecological principles or they will fail. Existing alternatives to capitalism, such as Spain’s Mondragon Worker Cooperative, must be critically analyzed and evaluated as a model that could, with modifications, be implemented elsewhere.

There is no better teacher than evolution and natural selection. History confirms that the most revolutionary ideas are occasionally the oldest. For instance, anthropological studies indicate that early Homo sapiens evolved by implementing egalitarian principles into their tribal clans. People and the cultures they create must either evolve or perish.

The egalitarian societies of the future will look radically different from the capitalism of today. Political campaigns and elections will recede into history and quickly forgotten. Evolved societies do not need leaders or elected officials.

Every member of an egalitarian community is a leader. Power flows in a circular form rather than a linear, top-down hierarchy. It is derived directly from the people. There will be no social or economic stratification. No one shall have privileges or rights that are denied to others. Every member of the community must be equally empowered and equally valued. All people will have equal access to opportunity. Health care and higher education, like pure water and clean air, will be regarded as a right of birth and provided without cost.

Direct action will replace voting in political elections. Rather than consent to be governed, sovereign people can create the world they want to live in. In communities where people are empowered and where they have an equal stake, they will want to participate. Everyone brings something to the table. Everyone contributes and all of society benefits.

Communities will become as interconnected and interdependent as ecological systems. But each will remain autonomous within the larger matrix of nature. States and nations as we know them may eventually recede into history and disappear.

Rather than the callous competition and exploitation nurtured by capitalism, communities can be organized around the principle of cooperation and social need. As in healthy ecosystems, the welfare of the individual is dependent upon the well-being of the community — and vice versa. No one will be left behind. All of us shall rise together.

All living organisms share a common origin and a common destiny. Ecology and economy must merge into an integrated natural system suited to long-term survival in a world already ravaged by industrialized man. Ecological and social healing must be part of the process of building sustainable communities.

The transition from capitalism to cooperation will be neither smooth nor easy. There will be many false starts. At first, there will be fierce resistance to revolutionary change. People cling to the familiar and the comfortable, to what they know, even when the dominant paradigm and popular culture does them harm.

The first tentative steps of a journey are often the most difficult. There are no clear blueprints to follow. There will be trepidation and uncertainty. But we must commit to beginning. The alternative is oblivion. But if we embark on the voyage the survival of the species, and a new age of enlightenment will be possible.

The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit corporation that brings together some 2,500 “top” global business and political leaders every January in a remote Swiss mountain resort. Along with the G-7, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum has a strong pro-corporate agenda and is a regular target for anti-corporate globalization protests. The latter movement is a loosely knit network of anti-corporate groups that started in Asia and Europe in the 1990s, in response to the international treaty that created the World Trade Organization (WTO). Its American counterpart was born in Novemeber 1999, when 50,000 people marched in the streets of Seattle and thousands committed civil disobedience to derail the WTO Third Ministerial meeting. Currently the WTO and so-called “Free Trade” treaties, such as NAFTA, receive scant coverage in the mainstream media. Nevertheless labor and environmental activists remain deeply concerned about the power these international treaties give corporations to overturn democratically enacted labor and environmental protections.

Since 2001, grassroots activists from all over the world have been holding a World Social Forum in a developing country (usually Brazil) at the same time as the World Economic Forum. The philosophy behind the World Social Forum is that ordinary people have an even greater need for international conferences than corporate elites. It’s only by coming together and organizing that they can resist efforts by global elites to strip them of the limited democratic and economic rights they still enjoy.

Emphasis on Global Social Unrest

When the Guardian article that accompanied the report stated that Global Risks 2012 focuses mainly on economic turmoil and social unrest (as opposed to globalization and free trade), I was extremely keen to read it. Would it mention Occupy Wall Street? It sure does, right there on page 16 under “Case 1: Seeds of Dystopia”:

Two dominant issues of concern emerged from the Arab Spring, the ‘Occupy’ movements worldwide and recent similar incidents of civil discontent: the growing frustration among citizens with the political and economic establishment, and the rapid public mobilization enabled by greater technological connectivity.

The document is full of other surprises. Unlike the mainstream media, Global Risks 2012 is surprisingly sympathetic towards the Occupy movement. The authors are deeply concerned about “dystopia,” the opposite of utopia, which they define as “a place where life is full of hardship and devoid of hope.” They go on to talk about the danger of declining economic conditions in Western Europe, North America and Japan jeopardizing “social contracts” between states and their citizens. These they define as has historic understandings that workers will be guaranteed access to health care (by North America they must mean Canada – this has never been true in the US) and decent pensions in old age.

They express concern (implying that corporate CEOs should also be concerned) about the link between global recession and increasing rates of poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, suicide, divorce, domestic violence and the abandonment, neglect and abuse of children (page 18).

They talk about the large numbers of unemployed young people around the world being a “lost generation” (page 22). Even more surprisingly, they identify huge income disparity as being one of the most serious global risks. They caution that when “social mobility” (i.e. individual ability to advance socially and economically) is attainable, income disparity can spur people to work harder. When it’s clearly not, as in the current global recession, feelings of powerlessness, disconnectedness and disengagement can “take root.” (page 19).

They conclude the dystopia section with the following warning:

The social unrest that occurred in 2011, from the United States to the Middle East, demonstrated how governments everywhere need to address the causes of discontent before it becomes a violent, destabilizing force. (page 19)

Destructive Corporate Lobbying

Global Risks 2012 also talks about destructive corporate lobbying (my translation – they use more obscure, intellectually lofty language) in trying to enact environmental and health regulations: “By their very nature, the costs involved in implementing safeguards, such as quality standards and risk mitigation practices, may give some individuals, firms or organizations reasons to lobby to minimize them and look for ways around them.” (page 22)

They are equally critical of the “too big to fail” banks: “When losses can be passed on to others – as when banks are defined as “too big to fail” – excessive risk-taking is likely to occur.” (page 22).

They conclude with the argument (making the 2008 banking crisis a case in point) that dangerously lax regulations “in just one jurisdiction could trigger global catastrophe.” (page 22)

How Will CEOs Answer the Discussion Questions?

I have to admit my favorite part of Global Risks 2012 are the “Questions for Stakeholders,” inserted at the end at the end of each section to make sure the corporate elites and the politicians who accompany them to these meetings are paying attention. I would give anything to listen in to the answers JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, give to some of these:

• What steps can be taken to reduce income disparity? (they need to get Dimon to answer this one.)

• How can appropriate regulations be developed so that firms will undertake effective safeguards?

• How can business, government and civil society work together to improve resilience against unforeseen risks? (the report uses the word resilience, which they borrow from the sustainability movement, a lot).

• How can fostering entrepreneurship prevent the seeds of dystopia from taking root? (this wouldn’t be my approach, but at least they admit urgent action is needed)

How Global Risks 2012 Came to Be Written

The World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network (RRN) was launched in 2004 to provide public and private sector leaders with “an independent, impartial platform to map, measure, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks.” This is the RRN’s seventh annual report. It’s based on surveys completed by 469 international experts in industry, government, academia and civil society about 50 potential global risks across five categories: Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, Societal and Technological. Risks in each category are rated according to both the potential damage they could inflict and their likelihood of occurrence. In addition, a specific risk in each category is identified as “the center of gravity,” which feeds other risks, both within the specific category and across categories.

How 469 Experts Rated the 50 Risks

• Most likely to occur: chronic fiscal imbalances and severe income disparity.

• Economic “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: chronic fiscal imbalances (debt).

• Most likely to occur: rising greenhouse gas emissions

• Environmental “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: rising greenhouse gas emissions

• Most likely to occur: critical fragile states and pervasively entrenched corruption

• Geopolitical “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: global governance failure

• Most likely to occur: water supply crisis, followed by food shortage crisis

• Societal “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: unsustainable population growth (highly controversial, but a growing number of sustainability activists agree with this view)

• Most likely to occur: cyber attacks

• Technological “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: critical systems failure

Is There a Split in the Ruling Elite?

It’s clear from the spelling (using “our” instead of “or” and “re” instead of “er” at the end of words) that the authors of Global Risks 2012 are either British or Canadian. I find it extremely hard to imagine a report emphasizing carbon emissions and income inequality coming out of the US. I also think it’s it significant that three of the four companies listed as report “cosponsors” are insurance companies.¹ If Exxon had helped write this document, it would surely minimize the risk of increasing carbon emissions, if it mentioned them at all.

At times there are divisions in the ruling elite – between the banking/insurance and the energy/military sectors – over specific issues. Climate change seems to be one of them. Owing to deregulation, there is significant overlap between insurance companies, which derive most of their income from reinvesting premiums, and other financial institutions. AIG, for example, is supposedly an insurance company but had to be bailed out because they owned a substantial chunk of subprime mortgages.

It’s clearly in the interest of oil, natural gas and coal companies for consumers to continue to buy and burn up as much fossil fuel as possible. Insurance companies, on the other hand, serve their shareholders best by reducing carbon emissions. They already face growing claims losses due to a massive increase in weather-related catastrophes. In this context it makes sense for them to cosponsor a World Economic Forum risk assessment document emphasizing the need for international agreement about reducing carbon emissions. It also helps explain why Wall Street investment banker (and New York mayor) Michael Bloomberg has given a $50 million donation to the Sierra Club’s Anti-Coal Campaign.

1. Marsh and McLennan, Swiss Reinsurance Company, University of Pennsylvania Wharton Center for Risk Management, and Zurich Financial Services.

Of course, it would be nice to make $70,000+ a year like BC’s official, professional, organized, bureaucratic, charitable-status-guarding environmentalists. It sure would be fun to jet over to Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Durban and all over the world to chat about the climate disaster, become a go-to corporate-media darling, drive a Prius and hobknob with Paris Hilton. It might be pretty boring, hanging out in secret backrooms cutting deals with Gordon Campbell and ilk, but it would be worth it.

I’m starting to think that perhaps it would be nice to have a great big jiggling beer-and-beef fed belly, just like our Prime Minister and his media adviser, Ezra Levant, does. I think Ezra Levant is making a whole lot more money than I am, and just imagine all the fun he must be having, living there in Calgary. The only thing that’s holding Ezra Levant back from the really big bucks is that he can’t preface every single thing he says with “I was a co-founder of Greenpeace, but then I saw the light about corporate logging, the nuclear business, DDT and Big Oil.” Being able to say that at big corporate AGM events catapults a reformed tree-hugger into a world of glamour.

I’m just starting to see the light here about Enbridge. I mean, just look how well they are looking after former Prince George Mayor and Gordon Campbell shill, Colin Kinsley. And after a very long difficult search all across BC, Enbridge was finally able to find a single First Nation supporter, Mr Elmer Derrick. I believe that he got some $7 million for selling out the Gitxsan people to Enbridge.

And what about all those very comfortable regular Vancouver Sun Enbridge stumpers like Barbara Yaffe, Peter O’Neil and Gordon Hoekstra? All they have to do is write several columns a week extolling the virtues of Enbridge, the Tar Sands and gigantic Big Oil projects. And then, of course, there’s the ubiquitous Patrick Moore, who is right in there, cashing in. If Enbridge is so eager to hand out truckloads of cash to such uninspired lowlifes like these, why not me?

I’m starting to think about a whole new way of Green -– actually, Enbridge Pipelines really can guarantee the people of British Columbia that it will be impossible for them to ever have an accident with their pipelines. They can certainly safely transport a half million barrels of thick Alberta Tar Sands bitumen a day through a thousand kilometres of pipe, right through the Rocky Mountains and across more than 700 rivers all the way to the Pacific Coast so it can be shipped to China. It really isn’t a problem to coordinate hundreds of giga-tankers the size of the Empire State Building, loaded with 10 times the amount of oil spewed into Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdes wreck, weaving in and out of the rock-pile that is the BC Coast and Douglas Channel every year, dodging hundreds of LNG and Condensate tankers at the same time.

Even though Enbridge factotum Paul Stanway says on CBC Radio that Enbridge can’t keep on cleaning up their Kalamazoo River oil disaster “because we had to shut down because it is winter” we know that they can mitigate that winter issue in BC by continuing to exacerbate global heating. I’ll bet that Stanway is getting pretty rich saying what he says for a living. So obviously Enbridge and their spokesperson, Stephen Harper, are being completely honest when they say that there can never be an accident that will destroy Canada’s Pacific Coast. And our Prime Minister, Big Oil scion that he is, will happily retire with his legacy to Canada for which he will be eternally remembered, -”The Stephen Harper Pipeline.”

We all know that Canadians are too stupid and lazy to refine all that dirty-oil in Alberta, or invite all of the world’s energy-sucking manufacturing industry to come build their factories in Fort MacMurray. Canadians certainly are not interested in the thousands upon thousands of jobs that simple scenario would produce. Certainly that is outside Stephen Harper’s great vision for Canada. So I’m thinking the Prime Minister must be right. Canada’s economic future is absolutely dependent on shipping raw Tar Sands gunk to China so they can make all the stuff themselves. After all, in a world experiencing capitalist-caused bank-bailing economic catastrophe, somebody has to get rich. Those humungous ships all headed over to China wont be coming back empty. They’ll be coming back loaded up with stuff they made with our oil.

I wonder how much I’d be worth to Enbridge?? I could always preface my lectures with, “I used to be a raving tree-hugger, but…” That’s got to be worth more than a few bucks…

If Dr. King were alive today, there is a good chance the 83-year-old civil rights icon would be standing side-by-side with the African American Harry Holt family in Dickson County, Tennessee, located just 160 miles east of Memphis, whose 150-acre farmland and well were poisoned with the deadly trichloroethylene (TCE) chemical from the leaky Dickson County Landfill.  The landfill is located just 54 feet from the Holt family’s property line.

In 2003, the Holt family and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) sued the city and county of Dickson, the state of Tennessee, and the company that dumped the TCE. And in 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sheila Holt Orsted and her mother Beatrice Holt filed a lawsuit against Dickson City and County governments seeking cleanup of alleged water contamination.  And after more than eight years of litigation, on December 7, 2011, a settlement agreement was finally worked out with the Dickson City and County governments. The county spent more than $3 million and the city almost $1.9 million fighting the black family.  However, the family’s legal battle did not end in December since the state of Tennessee, a defendant in the Holts’ civil rights case, did not settle. The case is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

Here are five reasons why on this MLK Day we should demand eco-justice for the black landowners in Tennessee.

The treatment of the Holt family is a clear civil rights violation of equal protection under the law. The discriminatory and differential treatment of the Holts at the hands of the state of Tennessee is a violation of their civil rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Clearly, the U.S. is not yet in a post-racial era. Race still matters.

The right to clean water is a basic human right.  The poisoning of the Holt family’s well water and the failure of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to protect them from environmental harm are clear human rights violations. On July 28, 2010, the United Nations, through Resolution 64/292, recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights.

The Holts’ toxic nightmare on Eno Road is the “poster child” for environmental racism. The United Church of Christ 2007 Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty report describes the poisoning of the Holts’ well and the government response as the “poster child” for environmental racism.  The Dickson case conforms to the national trend in which African Americans and other people of color make up the majority (56%) of the residents living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities, nearly double the percentage in areas beyond two miles (30%).  They also make up more than two-thirds (69%) of the residents in neighborhoods with two or more clustered facilities. Nationally, African Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Toxic racism steals black health.  Harry Holt died of cancer in January 2007.  His daughter, Sheila Holt Orsted is recovering from breast cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, even though Caucasian women are slightly more likely to develop breast cancer than African-Americans, African-American women are more likely to die of the disease. The industrial solvent TCE is widely known to be harmful to humans. A 2011 EPA study found that TCE is even more dangerous to people’s health than previously thought—causing kidney and liver cancer, lymphoma and other health problems. This new EPA study lays the groundwork to re-evaluate the federal drinking-water standard for TCE:  5 parts per billion in water, and 1 microgram per cubic meter in air.

Toxic racism robs black wealth.  Poisoning of black land with toxic chemicals robs blacks of their wealth and widens the wealth gap between blacks and whites. Today, the typical white family has 20 times the wealth of the typical black family. That’s the largest gap in 25 years. This theft has robbed African American landowners of wealth that would normally be passed down to their offspring. This phenomenon is not unique to Tennessee. The world learned of this stolen legacy in the discriminatory treatment of black farmers at the hands of the USDA and their long wait for justice. And in December 2010, President Barack Obama signed a bill authorizing $1.25 billion dollars in appropriations for the Pigford II lawsuit after Congress approved the legislation in November 2010. According to the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, from emancipation to 1910, blacks amassed 15 million acres of land of which 218,000 black farmers are full or part owners.  A steady decline of black land ownership began after 1910 through theft, intimidation, discrimination, back taxes, and economic loss.

Finally, in the spirit of Dr. King, it is fitting that we lift up the Dickson, Tennessee case, a struggle that epitomizes the civil rights leader’s final campaign in Memphis involving garbage and human rights.

- the homelands of a number of the world’s nations;

- the productivity and reliability of global agriculture; and,

- likely more of the world’s biodiversity, and faster than in any other period in geological history.

Maybe there are physical forces making disaster inevitable, or maybe what is happening is within the control of human free will, but the window of opportunity for the latter is rapidly closing.  Hopefully it is not entirely shut yet.

Global warming may be lethal, but it is still only one of Earth’s  illnesses.  A debt-ridden, overpopulated, hungry and warring humanity is shredding the biosphere, home to billions of beautiful and innocent creatures like the family of mergansers you see, and at the same time facing “peak everything,” with fossil fuels at the top of the list, along with many of the minerals essential for agriculture and high technology.¹  Our erstwhile governments and most of the seven billion, or if you prefer, the 99%, are sitting in a stupor as if paralyzed.

Some, last spring’s Middle Eastern protesters and the Occupiers around the world in recent months, were awoken by a Middle Eastern fruit vendor who immolated himself. This appeal is made by one of the seven billion, from a tiny American town not far from the home of Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau, explaining why he went to jail rather than pay his head tax to support the Mexican-American War, wrote, “It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.”  That was also the message of the fruit vendor who sacrificed his life for us all.  There is very little evidence that the world’s governments are willing or capable of taking decisive action, so it is up to us, the 99%, or however many of us are willing, to “leaven the lump” and bring back the world from the precipice.

This article will argue that we the people, and more specifically those of us who call ourselves “green,” are losing the battle to stop global warming, and many other battles largely because we all, or at least too many of us, have been indoctrinated to forget:

- Mr. Thoreau’s other reminder, that ‘The government  is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will”;

- what “conservationists” understood before Earth Day 1970, that every environmental problem has its roots in “too many people using too much stuff”;

- what Thoreau and Gandhi and many others have taught us — that relinquishment of material wants is empowerment, not self-sacrifice; and,

- the foremost teaching of religion and spiritualism and ethics for at least four millennia — the Golden Rule.

We are all guilty.  So we need to resolve now to reinstate those principles in our personal lives and the life of society, not tomorrow but today.  It’s a tall order, but, in fact, we are coming so close to destroying civilization and the earth, that only a rethinking of fundamental values will save us.

What is more difficult to understand than that we have been losing the battles against environmental and human injustice is that the people  of the Baby Boom, now in power around the world, or at least in the United States, grew up in the shadow of a great man, John Kennedy, who said, “Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.”² We believed him then, and indeed it seems self-evident, doesn’t it? So we can believe him now. Yet most of us sit as if paralyzed.

On the global warming front in particular, the test case for survival of the Earth, all the talk and agreements and campaigns since the eighties have not even created a “blip” in the seemingly inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, never deviating in the slightest from a course followed for half a century.³

If the cacophony since the eighties has resulted in any progress, it is not apparent in the physical world, is it?  There are those who say that the talk alone is a sign of progress, and they may be right.  But not for Mama Nature.

Look what’s happened in the last few weeks.  This is what you already know if you’ve been paying attention.

1. International Energy Agency (IEA) scientists, the ones the world pays to know, announced that we have about five years (that’s until 2016, just around the corner) to put a stop to increased greenhouse-gas emissions before global warming gets completely out of control.  Their reasoning was economic.  When you build a power plant or tar sands oil pipeline or widget-manufacturing facility, you expect to pay for the investment out of the sale of electricity or tar sands oil or widgets.  So the construction locks everyone in to producing the widgets or oil or electricity, and if that causes CO2 emissions, the economics make it much harder to cut the emissions than before the construction happened.

Five years from now the expenditures will have been made that lock us into emissions that will cause more than 2 degrees C of warming.  The time to halt the emissions is now, not after many costly new  CO2-generating plants and pipelines have been built, which must somehow be paid for.  “The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, says. “If we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.” ⁴  Forever!

2. The IEA scientists also announced that global warming is happening much faster than expected; and unless practices and policies change very rapidly, global warming could easily be 3 degrees C by 2050, 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) by 2100.  The politicians had made an official finding at Copenhagen that anything more than a 2-degree warming, any time sooner than the end of the century, would have unacceptable environmental and economic impacts. Three times the warming by century’s end or 50% more in less than half the time?

We’re in trouble.  The unacceptable is becoming the inevitable.  It’s getting so warm in the arctic that (a) the ice is rapidly disappearing, which causes more sunlight to be absorbed and less reflected, which in turn means the earth heating up rapidly just because of that regardless of how how much more CO2 we put into the sky, and (b) methane is bubbling up  from under where the ice used to be and from formerly frozen peat – LOTS of methane, which is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful. than CO2 on a 100-year average basis, and even several times worse than that on an immediate short-term basis  The methane emissions will just keep coming faster, and like the missing ice, they’ll create their own global warming without regard to CO2.

3. There was also agreement at Copenhagen  for the protection of the more vulnerable countries that will be annihilated by rising seas, the 2-degree ceiling should be reconsidered no later than 2015 to be possibly lowered to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

4. As the politicians were about to fly into Durban on highly-polluting planes to talk about global warming, it was announced that 2010 had seen a 5.6% increase in world CO2 emissions, the largest gross increase in human history.  And that’s with the Kyoto protocols in effect as much as they have ever been.  The problem is, of course, that China and the US, the biggest emitters, don’t have to do anything at all under Kyoto, and Europe, which at least gives lip service to it, uses paper emissions trading said by some to be 90% fraudulent. ⁵

5. The politicians flew into Durban knowing that:

-  Kyoto is hardly working at all and in particular that under Kyoto we just saw the largest increase in CO2 emissions in history;

-  we’ve got five years to put into effect something that will halt further commitments to emissions increases;

- they had promised to reconvene in 2015 to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees to protect the more vulnerable nations; and,

- warming is now happening much more and much sooner than the maximum they had declared acceptable at Copenhagen.

6.  What was their Kyoto protocols response?

- they agreed to extend Kyoto, due to lapse next year;

- they agreed to try to come up with a new plan in 2020, already four years after the scientists say it will be too late, five years after they had promised to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees, and thirty years after Kyoto; and,

- they declared a victory and went home for the holidays.

7.  As soon as the folks in Durban announced the extension of Kyoto, Canada announced it was going to walk out of the treaty.  Bad medicine.  Why? Because Canadian tar sands oil is just as polluting as conventional oil when it is consumed, but more polluting in the refining process and the greater source of emissions for tar sands oil is where it’s gotten out of the ground rather than where it is ultimately used.  Tar sands oil will:

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is produced in Canada, where the emissions will be completely uncontrolled with Canada out of the treaty; and,

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is consumed – in the US if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, or elsewhere via a Pacific Coast pipeline if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built.

There are those who say that if the pipeline is built, the battle to halt global warming is lost forever, and they are likely right. ⁶  The same is true by the same logic, of course, if the pipeline is not built but the oil is sent elsewhere.

2010 was a bad year for CO2 emissions?  You ain’t seen nothin’.

8. In the meantime,  the government and industry have been busy working to bring Canadian tar sands oil into the US, for all the world as if we should never cease burning oil.  Back in Washington, thanks to 350.org and William Mckibben surrounding the White House with protesters, President Obama said he would postpone approval of the pipeline until there had been further environmental studies done.  Good!   Of course, if the pipeline is blocked, the oil will likely go out to the Pacific Coast by a much more environmentally damaging pipeline route, and will be used elsewhere.⁷  Oh well, at least the US won’t be blamed for the inevitable massive increases in emissions, even if Mama Nature can’t tell the difference. So 350.org declared a victory and the protesters went home for the holidays.

9. And then there is “fracked” shale gas, an immense new source of natural gas, which will become its own immense new source of greenhouse gas emissions.  Anyone who cares about global warming knows that the only thing to do with new fossil fuels is to leave them in the ground at least until there is a global warming treaty, and not make investments in their exploitation that will have to be repaid through their sale. “Fracking”, even if it could be done “cleanly”, is for economic reasons, one more pound of nails in the earth’s coffin.

10. Last but perhaps more appropriately first, the UN recently admitted for the first time that its projected world population of 9 billion by mid-century, already more than can be fed sustainably under any plausible scenario without corresponding increases in fossil fuel consumption, is going to keep spiraling upward to over 10 billion by the end of the century.  The farther we go in that direction, the more locked in we will be to impossibly destructive CO2 emissions, not to mention impossibly destructive losses of remaining forest lands.  As was pointed out years ago, the really “inconvenient truth” about global warming is that uncontrolled population growth means uncontrolled global warming.⁸

Of course, we should have known that our efforts at Durban would fail.  The politicians flew to Copenhagen, accomplished very little, declared victory and went home.  With both the United States and China refusing to commit to anything legally binding, the possibility of meeting the 2 degree ceiling is receding into fantasy-land.  Talks began before 1990, and now the earliest we could even hope for a treaty binding on the largest emitters is more than 30 years later. And the biosphere hangs in the balance.

To this writer what is more difficult to understand about the present state of affairs is this.  We greens will have been hard at work over thirty years trying to convince the governments to do the only thing that can be done about global warming: at this point to tell us to stop putting so much CO2 in the air.  What we have to show for it is thirty years of steadily increasing emissions with no end in sight.  If we fail to get the governments to order us to stop polluting, what stops us from doing it ourselves without orders?  However difficult that may be, what more realistic alternatives do we have, and why does there seem to be resistance to the idea?

The mainstream environmental groups are very vague about who will, in fact, have to stop polluting, and how much, but the truth is that to reach the goals we assert to be needed, we will have to decrease our driving radically, decrease our consumption of electricity radically, decrease our consumption of home heating fuels radically, etc. How much? Probably at least 80% because in the thirty years between Kyoto and our next meeting date, huge volumes of CO2 will have been added to the atmosphere, making additional heating for the next century inevitable.

You and I have to make those cuts or leave an almost unlivable earth to our descendants, yet we go on using whatever fossil fuels are available as if there were no concerns, making small efforts like purchase of hybrid vehicles, which fail to show up on the chart.  “Alternatives” (e.g., solar electricity, biofuels, “hybrids,” etc.) are there, but they appear at this point to be too little, too late.  And when environmentalists talk about decreasing emissions, there are always two fundamental approaches – conservation (e.g., drive less) or efficiency (e.g., fuel efficiency standards).  We hear proposals for the latter, (which have not been shown to be sufficient soon enough, not to mention that they are fleeting at best because they will be negated by population increases), but not proposals for the former.

Forty years ago, it was gospel that the root causes underlying almost all deterioration of the environment were “too many people using too much stuff.”  The fundamental solutions, then, were fewer people using less stuff. For close to four decades, however, the mainline environmental organizations have had a conspiracy of silence about the “too many people” part.  And when it comes to “stuff,” there is a lot of talk about “sustainable alternatives” (clean energy, hybrid vehicles, etc.) but very little talk about “less stuff” –- before Earth Day we called ourselves “conservationists,” but now the major environmental groups hardly talk about conservation at all.  It’s as if the former “conservationists” have acquired a conspiracy of silence about conservation itself as well as population.

From people who saw the root cause as “too many people using too much stuff,”  mainstream professional environmentalists have become folks who won’t say there are too many people and won’t say they use too much stuff.  Of course, the GDP is measured by how many people there are and how much “stuff” they create in monetary terms, so “too many people using too much stuff” is almost the same thing as too high a GDP. Admitting that in today’s world is trouble, so we seek “sustainable growth”.

As has been observed, “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.  In the global warming context the weakness of the “alternatives” approach (which is also the “sustainable growth” approach) is self-evident.  You build a car with greater fuel efficiency, and that just allows more driving or a larger population of drivers.  The amount of fuel used has to be addressed head-on, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in active programs among the mainline environmental groups.  No wonder we lose.  This blindness shows up directly when it comes to global warming — a refusal to talk about people actually using less of what generates greenhouse emissions.  We don’t want to talk about conservation, yet expect the government to impose it.  Huh?

The primary stumbling block to implementation of the Copenhagen goals was that both the United States and China refused to make any legally binding commitment at all.  When this writer reviewed Copenhagen from his personal point of view⁹, he pointed out that there was little on the horizon that would make the outcome different in future attempts to reach an accord, and said (I’ll repeat verbatim because the facts above only demonstrate that what was apparently true then is unquestionably true now, two years deeper into the hole. For the reader’s convenience, endnotes and inter-lineations are provided for further clarification.)

We are left with the two largest GHG emitters, the United States and China, unwilling to commit to binding goals for reduction. All the while, there’s little hope that the public can introduce any sort of meaningful change in this situation. At the same time, the rest, the signers of the Kyoto accords, increased their emissions when the protocols called for decreases. So much for governments.

All considered, we have lost twenty years [now 31, since the parties at Durban postponed further discussions until 2020] for bringing about meaningful climate change mitigation and we have little time left because every year that the atmospheric CO2 load increases, there is even a lesser chance that the dangerous processes can be reversed. Meanwhile, we clearly face governments in the hands of corporations and corporations blind to any need that could adversely affect the next quarterly report. Are these conditions going to change in the few years we have? It is unlikely. The concerned public has thus far proved incapable of accomplishing meaningful governmental and corporate programs to halt global warming, so how can we have confidence except in more of the same until time runs out?

Is it hopeless? Apparently so if we are going to depend on the governments and the corporations. Yet in taking that position, we are putting aside an “inconvenient truth” – inconvenient because we might rather put responsibility on irresistible forces out there in the universe than on ourselves.

The inconvenient truth is that there are few, if any, human CO2 emissions not the result of our own individual and collective consumer decisions. There are our direct uses of fossil fuels for transportation and home heating, there is the electricity we consume that is generated by burning fossil fuels or, more recently, biofuels and biomass. There is the energy consumed in production and transport of our food and consumer products. Why?  The catalogue is, in fact, the same catalogue that would have to be dealt with under a global treaty!

So, in fact, we the people, in the United States and all over the world, have no need to wait until we are forced by government programs to take the steps necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. We can do what we’ve been waiting for the governments and corporations to do, and because they are doing nothing, we no longer have any alternative except to make the changes ourselves.

Are we so childish that we can do nothing except whine that we haven’t been told what to do when the future of the earth, the future of humanity, depends upon action? Maybe the answer is yes. I don’t know what you will do, and I don’t know what I will do. Yet if we do not want to be responsible, individually and collectively for the horrors to come, then we must, individually and collectively, say no to any more greenhouse emissions than the scientists say are safe.

Henry Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi taught us that our needs are much less than our wants and that we can peacefully bring down governments and corporations by refusing to accept their measures of our needs.

Thoreau is widely viewed as the originator of civil disobedience as a moral and civic duty, especially in all societies aspiring to democracy. He believed that the Mexican-American war was immoral, yet he found himself requested to pay a head tax to finance the war.  So he said no, and went to jail. We shall never know how far he would have taken the experiment, because his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, over his objection, paid the tax and got him released.

In explaining why he viewed refusal to pay the tax as his duty, he said:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.¹⁰

Obviously we have not wiped our hands of global warming when we buy the fuels or the electricity or consumer goods and not only create  emissions but finance our opponents as Thoreau’s head tax financed the war.  We will not, by ourselves, have stopped global warming, but the example will be seen, and our willingness to make sacrifices for reductions in emissions will for the first time be unquestionable.

As Thoreau explained:

It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing.

Rather, if substantial numbers of people refuse to pay the profiteers  or to engage in throwing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will demonstrate their sincerity in a manner that cannot be accomplished by just asking the government to do something.  We shall, hopefully, “leaven the whole lump,” and, ideally, slow the growth of demand for products destroying the earth.  There will be less profit in building the power plants and pipelines about to lock us into failure, and we can sleep better in the knowledge that we “washed our hands off it”. Besides, nothing else that has been suggested will work.

The core teaching of “Civil Disobedience” is, as Martin Luther King saw it, “Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”  As consumers and users and financial contributors to the makers of the pollutants that are destroying the earth, its biodiversity, and its agricultural productivity for millions of years to come, we must demonstrate our opposition with noncooperation.  Why?    Because:

- it is a moral duty;

- it will “leaven the whole lump”; and,

- nothing else is working at all.

Another important part of Thoreau’s teachings is his examination of our ability and responsibility to reduce our material consumption to the core at which we can carry on our lives as principled members of the community without either imposing on others, depriving ourselves of freedom or violating our own moral beliefs.  That is Walden, which forces us to understand that consumerism locks us out from living our lives with integrity and freedom.  It’s a message essential for giving up the material “needs” for which we are destroying the earth.

Gandhi’s self-imposed poverty gives us the same message — that abandonment of material needs is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.  It’s a view, of course, that is anathema to the global corporations that control our lives through the culture of materialism. Without that understanding, it is unlikely that Americans can voluntarily relinquish their “rights” to a standard of living Russia’s President Putin and undoubtedly millions or billions of others have rightly called parasitism.  As long as Americans maintain that view, they are playing with the danger that the world will quickly and painfully take away the material “rights” they enjoy at everyone else’s expense –- “rights” that will soon be gone in any event as “peak everything” imposes itself on us. To fail to make a virtue of a necessity is the height of folly.

Remember Gandhi’s spinning wheel?  It was a simple declaration of independence from British capitalism, a statement that India could do without the capitalists. “Mahatma Gandhi Album: the Man and the Wheel,”  To the extent we liberate ourselves from the causes of global warming, so will we also liberate ourselves from the corporations of Wall Street which act in arrogant confidence that we are ever their dependents and ever in debt to them.  If we step away from the shiny things they produce, they will have no power over us, so it is time to do it in small ways and large.

 It is time to stop waiting for governments to act as we expected them to act at Kyoto long ago and at Copenhagen [more than two years ago and at Durban most recently].

At this point, exclusively focusing on government action is little more than avoidance of the inconvenient truth of our individual and collective responsibility. So we must get on with the show — convincing and helping ourselves, convincing and helping our neighbors, convincing and helping humanity to reduce CO2 emissions by all means within our power to reach the goals and timelines the scientists are telling us we must meet. We must do it with the good will and generosity so lacking in Copenhagen because our “leaders” showed us in Copenhagen [and Durban] that the needed changes assuredly will not happen otherwise.

There is a little catch. The fundamental rule of social behavior, raised to a pinnacle by “free-market” economics, has been for generations, in the words of 1952 U.S. Progressive Party Presidential nominee Vincent Hallinan, “Fuck you Jack, I got mine!” That is unnatural and unsustainable.

Every major religious text, back at least as far as the Egyptian Book of the Dead [four millenia ago], has taught us in substance, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

For specific wording of the rule in twenty of the world’s religions, see  ”Universality of the Golden Rule“. The rule explicitly dictates behavior towards all things living among the Jains, Native Americans, and Nigerian Yoruba, and this writer submits, implicitly does so among others. It is hard to see how a universally accepted rule of behavior can be, as asserted by our colleagues in the corporate world, genetically impossible, and it is, of course, a necessary rule for survival among the hunter-gatherer tribes from which we descend.

The corporate anti-Christ has tried to tell us otherwise for centuries.  That is hardly surprising, because it is increasingly coming to be understood that the structure of large corporations, indeed probably all large integrated organizations, regardless of stated mission, automatically draws to the top, psychopaths, people who, generally through factors of nature and nurture beyond their control, lack the ability to empathize.¹¹

Look where it has gotten us.

There are reasons why the free market rule has repeatedly brought down the US economy, destroyed the Copenhagen and Kyoto efforts and will make our efforts to stop global warming, with or without the aid of the governments, an impossibility. No other rule than that taught by universal religion will work to leave a world to future living beings in which they can actually survive and thrive.

We certainly have our work cut out for us, but we have no choice. And the governments and corporations are welcome to join us all if they see fit. If the offenders find themselves boycotted, they should not be surprised. So think about this message, start saying no to carbon, along with unnecessary consumption of goods and services. Instead, share the vision for a low carbon footprint with your neighbors, friends, other associates, congregations, nonprofit organizations, everyone. Then ever so nicely, ask them to get with the program post haste, because the responsibility is now with us.

We the seven billion are well-meaning folks on the whole, but with all due respect we are also all the right hand men and women of Wall Street.  Want to bankrupt the global corporations, one or all?  Just stop consuming what they sell, and stop producing future consumers.  It’s that simple, and within decades it will in any event be forced upon us by the limits to growth.  It’s all about “too many people using too much stuff,” so if we fail to do now what the limits to growth will force us to do tomorrow, future generations, if they survive, will pay dearly. We allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated by the corporate psychopaths into believing that we are like them, constitutionally unable to care for our fellow beings.  That’s not us, or wasn’t until they took over control of our minds and our religions.  Things might be different if we decided to “occupy” ourselves without abandoning the occupation of Wall Street, and having done so, to implement the Golden Rule, the central teaching of every major religion on earth, and the principle that conservation is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.

Think of these things, please, but with humor and good will, as you honor in your own way the religious and spiritual holidays.   And to be effective, the nonprofits need to change course too, and stop knocking their heads against walls that will remain unmoved until we all change our ways.

1. Vernon, 2007, “Peak Minerals,” Oil Drum Europe,  There appears to be considerable uncertainty as to the supplies of key minerals, which have not been studied in nearly the detail of oil, so this writer will not vouch for the current accuracy of Vernon’s work.
2. American University Speech, June 13, 1963.
3. Farley, The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming, Monthly Review
4. “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose forever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change,” Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent Guardian, Wednesday 9 November 2011 05.01 EST
5. “Carbon offsets have already run out of credit,“, and Carbon Trade Watch, which reports, “Carbon trading schemes are awash with paper “reductions” that do not correspond to actual reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in the real world, and this is a systematic problem.”
6. Why? because of tar sands oil’s “EROEI” (energy recovered over energy in.)  When the energy recovered in extracting a fuel from the ground is less than the energy needed to extract it (ie EROEI < 1) , getting it out is pretty much worthless, and when EROEI is only a little over 1 (as when you pull 4 barrels of oil out of the ground but burn the equivalent of  three of them to get them), you’ve already expended several times the net recovery to get there, which means the oil from tar sands has already caused more CO2 emissions before it even reaches the refinery than it or conventional oil causes after it’s burnt.  Really bad medicine.   Additionally, meeting recognized scientifically-established goals for reduction of CO2 emissions requires using less than the total reserves of “conventional” oil and gas.  Once development of “unconventional” sources (tar sands oil, shale oil, deep sea oil and “fracked” shale gas) are initiated in full scale, it will become virtually impossible to halt their use, since the investors will fight to retrieve their investments.
7. Pipeline and Tanker Transport Trouble: New report shows the impact to British Columbia’s communities, rivers and Pacific coastline from tar sands oil   December 12, 2011 RELEASE: Another Tar Sands Pipeline Postponed in Major Victory for First Nations and Ecological Internet, Tar Sands, Tankers & Pipelines.
8. Diane Francis, “The Real Inconvenient Truth“, and “Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?”, one of many discussions of the need to maintain growth of fossil fuels to maintain growth of food production.
9. Copenhagen Failed Us. What Do We Do Next?
10. Civil Disobedience – Part 1 of 3
11. Brian Basham Thursday, 29 December 2011″Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They Are Still Occupying Positions of Power.”  Basham cites some of the recent peer-reviewed academic literature on the subject

We had wanted the U.S. Department of the Interior to stop the government-approved slaughter of wild horses and burros in the southwest, but were disappointed that the cattle industry used its money and influence to shelter politicians from Americans who asked for compassion and understanding of  breeds that roamed freely long before the nation’s “Manifest Destiny.”

We wanted to see the federal government protect wolves, foxes, and coyotes, none of whom attack humans, have no food or commercial value, but are major players in environmental balance. But, we knew that the hunting industry would prevail since they see these canines only as competition.

We wanted to see the Pennsylvania legislature stand up for what is right and courageously end the cruelty of pigeon shoots. But, a pack of cowards left Pennsylvania as the only state where pigeon shoots, with their illegal gambling, are actively held.

For what seems to be decades, we have written against racism and bigotry. But many politicians still believe that gays deserve few, if any, rights; that all Muslims are enemy terrorists; and publicly lie that Voter ID is a way to protect the integrity of the electoral process, while knowing it would disenfranchise thousands of poor and minority citizens.

We will continue to write about the destruction of the environment and of ways people are trying to save it. Environmental concern is greater than a decade ago, but so is the ignorant prattling of those who believe global warming is a hoax, and mistakenly believe that the benefits of natural gas fracking, with well-paying jobs in a depressed economy, far outweigh the environmental, health, and safety problems they cause.Ee will continue to write against government corruption, bailouts, tax advantages for the rich and their corporations, governmental waste, and corporate greed. They will continue to exist because millionaire legislators will continue to protect those who contribute to political campaigns. Nevertheless, we will continue to speak out against politicians who have sacrificed the lower- and middle-classes in order to protect the one percent.

We will continue to write about the effects of laying off long-time employees and of outsourcing jobs to “maximize profits.” Until Americans realize that “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily mean “better,” we’ll continue to explain why exploitation knows no geographical boundaries.

The working class successfully launched major counter-attacks against seemingly-entrenched anti-labor politicians in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states. But these battles will be as long and as bitter as the politicians who deny the rights of workers. We will continue to speak out for worker rights, better working conditions, and benefits at least equal to their managers. We don’t expect anything to change in 2012, but we are still hopeful that a minority of business owners who already respect the worker will influence the rest.

There are still those who believe education is best served by programs manacled by teaching-to-the-test mentality, and are more than willing to sacrifice quality for numbers. We will continue to write about problems in the nation’s educational system, especially the failure to encourage intellectual curiosity and respect for the tenets of academic integrity.

Against great opposition, the President and Congress passed sweeping health care reform. But, certain members of Congress, all of whom have better health care than most Americans, have proclaimed they will dismantle the program they derisively call “Obamacare.”

During this new year, we will still be writing about the unemployed, the homeless, those without adequate health coverage—and against the political lunatics who continue to deny Americans the basics of human life, essentials that most civilized countries already give their citizens.

We had written forcefully against the previous president and vice-president when they strapped on their six-shooters and sent the nation into war in a country that posed no threat to us, while failing to adequately attack a country that housed the core of the al-Qaeda movement. We wrote about the Administration’s failure to provide adequate protection for the soldiers they sent into war or adequate and sustained mental and medical care when they returned home. The War in Iraq is now over, but the war in Afghanistan continues. The reminder of these wars will last as long as there are hospitals and cemeteries.

We had written dozens of stories against the Bush–Cheney Administration’s belief in the use of torture and why it thought it was necessary to shred parts of the Constitution. We had hoped that a new president, a professor of Constitutional law, would stop the attack upon our freedoms and rights. But the PATRIOT Act was extended, and new legislation was enacted that reduces the rights and freedoms of all citizens. At all levels of government, Constitutional violations still exist, and a new year won’t change our determination to bring to light these violations wherever and whenever they occur.

The hope we and this nation had for change we could believe in, and which we still hope will not die, has been minced by the reality of petty politics, with the “Party of No” and its raucous Teabagger mutation blocking social change for America’s improvement. We can hope that the man we elected will realize that compromise works only when the opposition isn’t entrenched in a never-ending priority not of improving the country, but of keeping him from a second term. Perhaps now, three years after his inauguration, President Obama will disregard the disloyal opposition and unleash the fire and truth we saw in the year before his election, and will speak out even more forcefully for the principles we believed when we, as a nation, gave him the largest vote total of any president in history.

We really want to be able to write columns about Americans who take care of each other, about leaders who concentrate upon fixing the social problems. But we know that’s only an ethereal ideal.  So, we’ll just have to hope that the waters of social justice wear down, however slowly, the jagged rocks of haughty resistance.

The urgency of these issues has caused an unprecedented reaction — a global uprising. It was called The Arab Spring when initiated in Tunisia last December and quickly spreading to Egypt and beyond. It’s called Occupy in the US, Europe, and much of Asia. There are protests and citizen repression in almost every nation-state on the planet at this time. And with good reason. Our governments have almost universally failed us in favor of colluding with corporations to form a kleptocracy. This arrangement not only funnels our money to the 1%, it destroys lives, communities and ecologies with impunity. It is this kleptocracy that we intend to dismantle. As this energy of Global R-evolution has bubbled up over the last several years, so has the idea of World 5.0.

I stumbled on the idea seven years ago, and have developed the idea in light of Life, the experience of being we have in this moment. Indeed, the central premise of World 5.0 is that ‘Life Is This Moment.’ The past is gone and tomorrow never comes. Our experience is always Here, unless we’re so caught up in our thoughts and feelings that we don’t recognize Life Here. Living in a bubble has that effect, and so was standard procedure in the World4 culture.

Prior to the failing Industrial Age we find ourselves in currently, we’ve had three previous ages: Neolithic, Agrarian and Medieval. We were hunter/gatherers for long centuries, maybe 150,000 years. 10,000 years ago we began farming with hemp and 1,000 years ago we learned to make machines. It was but 200 years ago that we developed engines, ushering in the Industrial Age. With World4 crumbling around us, the emerging global operating system is World 5.0.

Occupy begins to understand that we require not just a less corrupt world, but a new system entirely. We require a new level of integration, based on ethics and principles like peace and love. Indeed, we can say “we intend to replace the system of globalization built on the corruptive power of money with a system of ethics that supports Life based on the power of Love.” More simply, “we intend a world based on the power of Love instead of the power of money.”

This is not so hard to understand, unless you hold allegiance to the Kleptocracy, like corporate media outlets. Their difficulty is not understanding, it lies in trying to spin something so powerful, honest and peaceful that it is difficult to undermine.

There is much we can do already. World 5.0 encourages localism, spending our money with local purveyors of goods and services instead of global behemoths like Walmart and McDonalds. We can make efforts to grow and buy local food, and encourage organic food production instead of the polluting agribiz model. We can take steps to increase our personal and local energy sustainability, foregoing fossil fuel use as much as possible. We can engage in local civic actions to improve our communities and begin the process of reconstructing government.

The farther reaches of World 5.0 call for a World 5.0 Certification Process, whereas small businesses and organization are easily certified unless they act out of alignment with ethics and our principles. Corporations will typically find certification more challenging. This simple process takes us from a ‘buyer beware’ culture to one of trust in our spending decisions.

World 5.0 seeks to establish a ‘Constitution for the Earth,’ creating a document that enshrines protections for Earth’s ecologies and requires a system of ‘Natural Capital’ so that harvesters of the Earth’s resources, whether mineral, plant or animal, must pay for their extraction and for any negative effects on the system due to that extraction.

Indeed, with World 5.0 we seek to replace the extractive nature of the Industrial Age with the generative energy of Occupy and World5.

With the understanding that World 5.0 provides a ‘core idea’ to Occupy, we further our efforts at positive change  tremendously. First, we clarify by an order of magnitude what Occupy is about. Indeed, World 5.0 provides the context of us living as evolutionary creatures finding our shared identity for the first time in our history.

Second, we codify what Occupy already knows — that corporations are the central problem in our culture today, especially in using their vast wealth to undermine government’s inherent responsibility to meet the needs of their citizens. In the book, World 5.0: Healing Ourselves, Our Earth and Our Life Together, I explore the roots of the Limited Liability Corporation, and the long history of collusion with governmental entities, and how that process has lead to Disaster Capitalism and the general disaster we face today.

Third, we find areas of focus that can be personally implemented at once. These same areas of focus can be used to take on our largest challenges, like an end to war and corporate personhood

Fourth, we find a new awareness in living in this moment, awakened from the bubble of personal thoughts and feelings that cannot be shared. We connect with all we come into contact with, and honor and respect each other.

This allows us to get past long-standing hatreds, controversies and problems based on false ideas of reality and relationship. We are all here together, and the more quickly we understand this, the happier we find ourselves.

Fifth and finally, we create a path forward for the peaceful and agile transition from the Industrial World4 to our new home in World 5.0. We design and build systems that are life-affirming. We create infrastructure, buildings, homes and gardens where artistry is ingrained in the process. We nurture Life as best we are able, and in doing so nurture and restore the Earth. And we find each other as citizens, beloved sisters and brothers who understand our place, and are passionate about healing ourselves and our Earth. And so it is indeed Here we find ourselves. Our civilization is broken, and this global uprising creates an incredibly powerful force for change. Which begs the question, “What sort of change do we want?” Which begs the answer, “World 5.0.”

So said 64-year-old Chieko Shiina, a member of the group Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and a traditional farmer from Miyagi Prefecture, in reference to nuclear radiation, as I sat inside the tent on the floor across from her on Day 102 of the sit-in.  In years gone by she would have been 100 miles north on her farm tending her crops and doing such things as fermenting rice to make sake, harvesting leaves to make tea or manufacturing tatami mats.  However, her farm, in southern Miyagi Prefecture is just north of Fukushima and so, while Chieko’s farm is not in an evacuation area, it is too heavily contaminated with radiation for her to farm or sell her products: “I cannot let people eat these things.”

The tent encampment where we met is directly outside the Tokyo headquarters of METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) and began on September 11, the six month anniversary of the combined disasters of the March 11 genpatsu shinsai, a new term that combines a catastrophic quake with a nuclear disaster. Mothers from Fukushima traveled to Tokyo and launched the sit-in with the slogan “We Stood Up to Sit Down,” as they demanded that the Japanese government provide accurate information on the levels of radiation, better protection, and expansion of the evacuation zone for their children.

Over the last three months, the sit-in has become an organizing hub for the anti-nuclear people’s resistance in Japan as well as other protest movements against free trade agreements, the American military base in Okinawa, and the movement to stop any alteration of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution that prevents Japanese troops from being deployed offensively beyond the shores of Japan.  For these reasons, the camp has been regularly targeted for harassment by groups from the Japanese Right.

While large protests of delegations from Fukushima and around the country occur regularly, Chieko is there full-time, braving the elements and frigid temperatures of winter time Tokyo.  She intends to continue the encampment for 10 months and 10 days, the length of time that Japanese traditionally consider that a mother carryies a child as she believes that “the style of fighting should be derived from life” and “that is why it is 10 months and 10 days.”  Emblazoned across the top of one of the many hand-outs at the camp is her slogan: “Women are Pregnant with the Future.”

Another woman I met there, Hisako Tsuruta, told me why she had joined the sit-in: “I am 73 years old, but I can still move and I can still walk.  I need to act before I perish.  I have been building this society of destruction and pollution since the Second World War and I didn’t say anything before, so I am responsible.  Now I must make change.”

Echoing the language of the Occupy Movement, [a large banner at the encampment proclaims “We are the 99%”], Hisako was keen to make broader connections to environmental and social problems that could only be solved by the people acting in unison:

We are all the same, people cannot eat, don’t have jobs, there’s money for war but not people.  Within ourselves we have the power to solve these problems.  With people’s collaboration we can do anything; politicians should leave these problems to us to solve.  People are making the connections and so there is hope in the world.  Before, the image of Fukushima women was quiet, not emotional, now they start to stand up – and sat in.  Even if we lose, we must resist.

The theme of resistance was in the air at a meeting I attended between government representatives of NISA and METI and environmental organizations such as Green Action, Friends of the Earth (Japan) and the Citizens Nuclear Information Center, (CNIC).  Over 150 people, representing 125 organizations had endorsed two demands and were there to grill the government functionaries about cracked pipes between the reactors and the coolant system at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.

As a result of scheduled maintenance, safety concerns and popular protests, only 8 of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are currently operational and producing power.  Due to energy conservation efforts, there are nevertheless no blackouts.  This fact had not escaped the people in the room, who questioned what the need for any nuclear power was if, through a combination of energy conservation and a switch to clean, renewable energy, nuclear power in Japan, which previously supplied over 30% of electrical demand, could easily be made entirely redundant.  The room broke into strong applause when Ryoichi Hattori, Social Democrat member of the House of Representatives, came to the microphone to ask why this summer, rather than restarting any reactors, they couldn’t all be shut down and the Japanese people would see how they could live without any nuclear power.

Despite this, the government and NISA is pushing to restart some of the reactors early next year after completion of “stress tests” that they claim will show that the reactors are safe to operate, even in the event of another earthquake.  Environmental and other concerned citizen groups contend that the stress tests are based on a faulty and potentially fatal premise: that the earthquake itself did not cause pipes to crack and release steam and radiation, even before the tsunami hit.

Activists were there to present their two demands and provide evidence to back up their claim that pipes were indeed damaged by the earthquake, thereby invalidating the basis of the stress tests which are based on reactor earthquake-resistance analysis that rules out pipe damage from the earthquake.  If the stress tests on the reactors that the government wants to restart are without foundation and based on incorrect analysis, then none of the idled nuclear plants should be restarted.

The backdrop to the discussion and contributing to the tension in the air and the intensity of the meeting is the continuing disaster at Fukushima that has so negatively impacted the 80,000 evacuees and led to Chieko being forced from her farm, as well as those who are still trying to live nearby outside the official evacuation area but are scared of the radiation and unsure of whether it’s actually safe for themselves or their children.

Three reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi are now known to have suffered meltdowns of the highly radioactive fuel rods, with the strong possibility of some fuel melting through the inner containment vessel and pooling on the reactor floor.  Elevated radiation levels have shown up in food staples such as rice and milk in Fukushima prefecture, an area known for its agriculture and a significant farming region of Japan as radiation vented to the atmosphere when hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off two of the reactor buildings after the reactors lost electricity and therefore coolant.

Radioactive plutonium, the most toxic element known to humanity and one that does not exist on earth – it is only manufactured inside nuclear reactors as part of the fission of the uranium fuel – [EPA states: "Plutonium is considered a man-made element, although scientists have found trace amounts of naturally occurring plutonium produced under highly unusual geologic circumstances." -- Ed.] has been detected far from the plant itself, indicating beyond doubt that the inner and outer containment structures have been ruptured and the core of at least one reactor has been exposed.  The dumping of vast quantities of radioactively contaminated water into the oceans has also occurred as workers at the plant struggled to prevent further explosions by keeping the fuel rods cool and were forced to release the largest ever amounts of radiation into the sea when they ran out of storage space.  As the plants are still leaking, groundwater continues to become contaminated and because of the extremely high levels of radiation inside the plant and all of the wrecked equipment it’s still impossible to know the full extent of the damage to the cores and how badly melted they are.  Despite this, the new Japanese Prime Minister Noda declared on December 16 that the reactors were now stable and in “cold shutdown” and the nuclear crisis had “been resolved” which brought heavy editorial criticism from the Japan Times under the title “Nuclear Crisis Far From Resolved.”

Hence, the two demands at the meeting were that there should be no publishing of a report on the accident until all of the facts were collected, and secondly, that until the government knows the exact causes of the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants, they should not restart any of the inactive nuclear reactors around the country.

Local activist groups are also pushing for an enlarged evacuation zone and better compensation for those forced to relocate and who have lost their jobs along with their homes.  The four hour meeting grew increasingly fractious as it became apparent that the government bureaucrats were not in a position to relay any fresh information or answer any questions from the floor.

The meeting brought strong reminders of a similar meeting in New York in late spring that I attended between community members and the US’s equivalent of NISA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  At that meeting, 600 attendees grew increasingly enraged by the lack of real information or space for dialogue from NRC representatives until local activists took over the meeting and ran it in a democratic manner where people were allowed to present evidence against the 36 year old Indian Point nuclear power plant and finally have a say in how energy would, or would not, be produced in their community.

After one ministerial representative had repeatedly read aloud the exact same non-answer to people’s questioning, Ryoichi Hattori demanded that he be replaced by someone who could answer the people’s questions as they had the right to be informed.

A lower level bureaucrat was replaced, another quickly came in and eventually it was admitted that the government cannot confirm whether the pipes were cracked by the earthquake, nor can they rule out that the cracks were made worse by the tsunami.  Not at all to the reassurance of anyone there, the new bureaucrat said that this was partly because the government had not yet received all of the necessary information from the plant’s operator and owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the infamous TEPCO, and that they were not sure that they would get all of the information in the future.

In Japan, the term “nuclear energy village” refers to the tight connections between the government, the government’s regulatory body, NISA and nuclear corporations such as TEPCO which, to all intents and purposes, regulate themselves, a point highlighted by a New York Times investigative report detailing the “culture of complicity” and corruption by TEPCO at Fukushima-Daiichi that undermined safety at the plant.

As the Japanese government seeks to sweep the nuclear disaster under the rug, and maintain Japan’s dependence on nuclear energy, continuing to put the Japanese people, who live on a volcanically and geologically active island in tremendous danger, it is clear that only the combined pressure of valiant fighters like Chieko Shiina will force the government to rethink its pro-corporate energy policy and move Japan toward a renewable and safe energy future.  As she told me, “it’s human nature to fight.  And this fight is international.  The actions to change the system make you change.  Both are important and necessary.  This unequal power structure will lead to change, but we must fight”.

Tomorrow, I travel to Fukushima to spend Christmas in the radiation zone, speaking with those most directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

The Occupy Movement, fueled by the indignation of vast numbers of people who are increasingly disenfranchised and displaced by the modern marketplace economy, recognizes the primacy of place in social change that moves us toward a just and sustainable future. This aspect of the movement is articulated by the physical occupation of public spaces, and more recently of homes that have been foreclosed with their occupants evicted by a corrupt banking system.

The primacy of place in the movement reminds us that when people are denied access to the primary productivity of the land and the seas, they are relegated to a status of enforced dependency on an abstract marketplace primarily constructed to serve the interests of the rich and the powerful. The Movement’s emphasis on space also reminds us that we cannot live entirely within the realm of the abstract idea of the marketplace. We need real food, non-virtual water, wearable clothing, and shelter — all made available to us through the natural processes of the earth, captured and molded by human effort.

In what is perhaps a first step in (re)connecting with place in a world where the fantasy of an endlessly growing and satisfying marketplace is crumbling, the Occupy Movement articulates vital needs for human dignity: the need for efficacy — to be heard and to have one’s welfare and voice taken seriously within collective processes of decision making and action — and the need for dignified and adequate means to obtain physical sustenance to satisfy one’s basic needs. Both of these needs converge in the concept and construct of place.

Reviving place as a focal point of human life and community is essential to social justice and sustainability. When I invoke place in this context, I conceptualize it as a nexus of physical space (both the natural world and the built environment) and community life (that includes economic activity, interpersonal relationships between people and between people and environments, cultural identity and expression, and governance processes). We make our places, and our places make us. Place is a reciprocal relationship that continually emerges through the forces of nature and human activity.

In the techno-world of modern industrial societies, many of us have lost sight of place as an organizing principle in our lives. We find that virtual spaces may indeed satisfy many of our needs as environments for building social bonds and friendships and for purchasing just about anything we might need or want (as long as we have the money to do so, of course), but we still rely physically upon tangible places that provide the necessities of life, even if our needs are mediated and obscured by the modern phenomenon of the marketplace.

Whether we recognize it or not, we are intimately connected to places, though in the globalized world, the reciprocal bonds between people and place, once paramount to the processes of community prosperity and health, have largely been broken. We abuse the land and the sea, sometimes without even knowing it, but because we need nature, we cannot completely sever our ties to places.

Take, for example, our water. It comes to us through processes of the earth that occur in some particular place, even though most of us know little of the detail of how water appears in our taps. Food offers another example. Since we, as yet, only metaphorically eat words, our food must be raised, cultivated, hunted, or gathered from particular places with particular environmental characteristics, and most often it must be cared for and harvested by people living in those environments. Both food and water derive from particular social and ecological contexts. They are not abstractions, and their concreteness bonds us with natural and social processes that are hidden behind the facades of grocery store shelves and Internet shopping malls — the “places” where we make the purchases that support the way we live and provide the things we need to stay alive.

We live a paradox in which intimate physical relationships to nature and social processes of production are juxtaposed with ignorance and neglect of the places and people who sustain us. Our very lives are in the hands of people and ecologies that may be entirely foreign to us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. We may never see the face of one person who has picked the bananas we eat throughout our lives, but we are connected to the banana pickers and to the ecology of the banana fields from which the fruit comes. Through our bodily existence and our own internal ecologies, we are connected to others and nature. In many ways, we are others and nature, for without them we would cease to exist.

And as human-caused depletion and damage of the natural world continues, the threat has become ever present: we may indeed cease to exist without a radical (re)conceptualization of, and (re)connection to, place.

Many indigenous societies have conceptualized the fundamental relationship between humans and nature as reciprocal, believing that people must respect and care for nature if nature is to provide for people. We cannot allow the continued plunder of the land and the sea to take place in our name, masked behind images of clean and orderly grocery store shelves, spotless storefront windows, and online shopping centers. I’m also convinced that we won’t protect that which we don’t know, and consequently don’t value. It takes years of paying attention and continual, mutual interaction to know a place, both the human community that is part of the place and the natural world within which that community is embedded. Growing into a place is a long term process of relationship building, and to do it well, we will need to learn to stay in place. In a world where careerists are rewarded for their willingness to relocate, this is no small challenge.

But we will have to stay put if we are to learn what we need to know to live sustainably on the land. To recover the health of our damaged places, we will need to learn what can and can’t be done sustainably within particular environments, and we will have to end the process of robbing that which we need from other places because as we deplete distant places, we threaten the survival of other people and the health of the biosphere — we behave as tyrants, and we threaten both nature and our own existence. We will need to (re)learn the art of neighborliness and of working together in spite of our differences, and we will need to make decisions embedded in a context of our love for each other and for place — and rooted in a desire to sustain that which we love beyond our short lifetimes. It’s time to rejoin the community of life, to belong in mutually sustaining ways. We need to (re)construct places in ways that bring to an end this era of loneliness.

The process will not be easy, especially because so much social power has been concentrated for so long in so few hands. But at least people around the world are recognizing this reality and working to change it. People are seeing the concentration of power and wealth itself as perhaps the central driver for social injustice in the globalized world. This recognition is a huge step in the right direction. It’s also important to recognize that virtually all of the processes that contribute to (re)building healthy places also serve to devolve social power to local contexts.

The (re)conceptualization and (re)construction of place can be both challenging and exhilarating. It’s an endeavor that can take many forms that coalesce in a long term process of articulating who we are in place — community gardens; potluck dinners with neighbors; bioregional resource management; reading, study, and discussion circles; governance work in local politics or in community organizations; farmers markets; community art and theater projects, formal and informal education; developing and using local currencies; localized production, retail, and banking; localized renewable energy generation; and simply authentic listening among friends and neighbors – any activity that helps to build a sense of community and to increase the provision of basic needs from localized sources. Community building and (re)localization of our economies will help us build the resiliency that we will need to weather the converging crises of climate change, peak oil production, and economic instability.

The Occupy Movement may well be the introduction to a new story about who we are in place. The plot line for this story will be grounded in communities and bioregions, not in the marketplace. And it’s a story for which there is no final draft. Chapters will be written and rewritten over time, and if we can write them in ways that continually deepen our efficacy, improve the health of our environment, and strengthen reciprocal ties between ourselves and our places, we just might come to occupy a place called home.

•  This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

The “Bush tax cuts” are still called that, while Bush has been gone for years. The corporate trade agreements are rolling through at a pace Bush couldn’t have managed. While Social Security was protected by anti-Bush agitation, it now has its neck on a chopping block and the progressive position is that the taxes that pay for it should be cut — rather than expanded to apply equally to large incomes. President Obama has repeatedly blocked serious global efforts to address climate change. And you’re concerned about which Republican buffoon doesn’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran, or which other one thinks the United States has an embassy in Iran. Are you kidding me?

President Obama, the United States Congress, and the Federal Reserve are united in their generosity toward Wall Street and the war machine — both financial generosity and the equally generous provision of immunity from legal prosecution. In the Bush era we were locked in free-speech cages, and we raised hell about it. Now we’re locked in jails, beaten, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and otherwise brutally assaulted, and . . . wait! Look over there! Is that a presidential candidate who wants to publicly declare his desire to secretly murder Iranians? How outrageous!

For the love of everything decent, the current president is right now murdering Iranians, and it’s not very secret. What in the hell is the matter with you people?

Illegality is over, says Harold Koh (“the good John Yoo”). This is the same guy who claims massive slaughter by bombing of foreign nations is neither war nor an act of hostility as long as no significant number of U.S. citizens die immediately in the process.

How can illegality be over, when the crimes have not been prosecuted and have, in fact, been legalized? The current Department of Justice, at the direction of President Obama, has radically expanded claims of state secrets and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The current president has formalized, legalized, systematized, and normalized warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment (Bagram is booming!), prisoner abuse, assassination (including of members of the 5% of humanity we’re supposed to care about), war making in direct violation of the will of Congress (Cf. Libya), and the radically expanded use of drones to do much of this dirty work. And you want me to care that some house-broken elephant who’s been trained to parrot platitudes is in favor of child labor? Really?

It is not pleasant to face, but our children are done for if we proceed down either of the paths you are obsessing over the choice between. Behind curtain A is increased plutocratic militarization. Behind curtain B is the same damn thing. It’s an evil choice. Choose which of your children should be shot. This one. No, wait. This one. It is not a choice we have time to dignify with our attention. It is not something we should waste 10 months of inaction and misdirected resources on.

We must do what has finally, finally, finally been begun. We must occupy public space. We must move the entire culture. We must reshape this society. We must drag both political parties and everybody in them and the majority of the population which has long since grown sick up to the eye balls of both of them, we must drag everyone kicking and screaming to a better place, to a place where we do not choose between putting 65% or 62% of discretionary federal spending into war preparation without an enemy in sight. What kind of a range of options is that?

This government will halt the foreclosures only after we have halted the forclosures. This government will forgive student debt only after we have blocked its payment. This government will regulate Wall Street only after we have divested from it. And this government will stop dumping our hard-earned pay into wars we don’t want and cannot survive only when we have made that path (that running of the gauntlet of K Street’s opposition) easier for every type of misrepresentative than continuing on the current trajectory.

Self-government is not a spectator sport. Elections are not reality shows. There is much more at stake than a soap opera. The first step, and it is a more difficult step than sleeping in a tent in the ice cold rain, is to cease giving a damn what some individual who is stripping away your rights and the fruits of your labors really feels in his heart of hearts. Stop it. We do not have the time. Politicians who make speeches opposing everything they do must be pushed to match action to words, not treated as if words speak more loudly than actions. That attitude is what leads us to focus on what a gaggle of misfits with no power and less wisdom have to say about each other, just because they’re on the teevee screen.

Get serious. Get independent. Get principled. And stay nonviolent toward everything in the world except your television.

Bouldergrass had begun his health crusade more than a decade ago when he began reading more than the sports pages of his local newspaper, subscribed to his first magazine, and decided TV news could be informative if it didn’t mention anything about wars, famines, and poverty.

Based on what he read and saw in the media, Bouldergrass moved from smog-bound Los Angeles to a rural community in scenic green Vermont, gave up alcohol and a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and was immediately hospitalized for having too much oxygen in his body.

To burn off some of that oxygen, he joined America’s “beautiful people” on the jogging paths where the media helped him believe he was sweating out the bad karma. In less than a year, the karma left his body which was now coexisting with leg cramps, fallen arches, and several compressed disks. But at least he was as healthy as all the ads told him he could be.

To make sure he didn’t get skin cancer from being in the sun too long, he slathered four pounds of No. 35 sun block on his body every time he ran, and went to suntan parlors twice a week to get that “healthy glow” advertisers told him he needed. He stopped blocking when he learned that suntan parlors weren’t good for your health, and that the ingredients in the lotions could cause cancer. So, he wore a jogging suit that covered more skin than an Arab woman’s black chador with veil—and developed a severe case of heat exhaustion.

From ultrathin models and billions of dollars in weight-reducing advertising that told him “thin was in,” he began a series of crash diets. When he was down to 107 pounds, advertising told him he needed to “bulk up” to be a “real man.” So, he began lifting weights and playing racquetball three hours a day. Four groin pulls and seven back injuries later, he had just 6 percent body fat, and a revolving charge account with his local orthopedist.

Several years earlier, Bouldergrass had stopped eating veal as part of a protest of America’s inhumane treatment of animals destined for supermarkets. Now, in an “enlightened” age of health, he gave up all meat, not because of mankind’s cruelty to animals, but because the media revealed that vascular surgeons owned stock in meat packing companies. Besides, it was the “healthy” thing to do.

He gave up pasta when he saw a TV report about the microscopic creepy crawlers that infest most dough.

He gave up drinking soda and began drinking juice, until he read a report that said apple juice had higher than normal levels of arsenic.

He ate soup because it was healthy and so Mmm Mmm Good, until he learned that soup had more salt than Lot’s wife. When he found low-salt soup, he again had a cup a day—until last month when he gave it up because a Harvard study revealed that soup cans contained significant amounts of Bisphenol-A-, which can lead to cancer and heart disease.

For a couple of years, lured by a multi-million dollar ad campaign and innumerable articles in the supermarket tabloids, Bouldergrass ate only oat bran muffins for breakfast and a diet of beta carotenes for lunch, until he found himself spending more time in the bathroom than at work. He eliminated the muffins entirely after reading an article that told him eating oatmeal, bran, and hood ornaments from Buick Roadsters were bad for your health.

Bouldergrass gave up milk when he learned that acid rain fell on to pastures and was eaten by cows. When he learned that industrial conglomerates had dumped everything from drinking water to radioactive waste into streams and rivers, he stopped eating fish. For a while, based upon conflicting reports in the media, he juggled low-calorie, low-fat, and low-carbohydrate diets until his body systems dropped into the low end of inertia.

At the movies, he smuggled in packets of oleo to squeeze onto plain popcorn until he was bombarded by news stories that revealed oleo was as bad as butter and that most theatrical popcorn was worse than an all-day diet of sirloin.

When he learned that coffee and chocolate were unhealthy, he gave up an addiction to getting high from caffeine and sugar, and was now forced to work 12-hour days without any stimulants other than the fear of what his children were doing while he was at work.

Unfortunately, he soon had to give up decaffeinated coffee and sugarless candy with cyclamates since both caused laboratory mice to develop an incurable yen to listen to music from the Grand Funk Railroad.

He gave up pizza when the media reported that certain “health care investigators” claimed pizza was little more than junk food. But, he began eating several slices a day to improve his health when Congress, fattened by lobbyists campaigns, last month declared frozen pizza was a vegetable. He figured it made sense, since three decades earlier the Reagan administration had declared catsup to be a vegetable, and five years ago the Department of Agriculture decided butter-coated french fries were a vegetable.

Left with a diet of fruits and vegetables, he was lean and trim. Until he accidentally stumbled across a protest by an environmental group which complained that the use of pesticides on farm crops was a greater health hazard than the bugs the pesticides were supposed to kill. Even the city’s polluted water couldn’t clean off all the pesticides. That’s also when he stopped taking showers, and merely poured a gallon of distilled water over his head every morning.

For weeks, he survived on buckets of vitamins because the magazines told him that’s what he should do. Then, after reading an article that artificial vitamins shaped like the Flintstones caused dinosaur rot, he also gave them up.

The last time I saw Bouldergrass, he was in a hospital room claiming to see visions of monster genetic tomatoes squishing their way toward him. He was mumbling something about cholesterol and high density lipoproteins. Tubes were sticking out of every opening in his emaciated body, as well as a couple of openings that hadn’t been there when he first checked in.

In one last attempt to regain his health, Bouldergrass enlisted in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move army. But the only movement he was doing was when the nurses flipped him so he wouldn’t get bed sores.

Shortly before he died, he pulled me near him, asked that I write his obit, and in a throaty whisper begged, “Make sure you tell them that thanks to what I learned from the media, I died healthy.”

In line with a large variety of other scientific studies, the report found that average global temperature has been increasing since the industrial revolution took off, notching up a 1⁰C rise since the 1950s alone.  Scientists at Berkeley found no evidence that other factors were at play in distorting the data, as claimed by climate skeptics.  One of the authors of the study, physicist Richard Muller commented “My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly skeptical”.  Rather a forlorn hope, as Jon Stewart on Comedy Central reported, that news of the study received a mere 24 seconds of coverage across cable television news outlets.

Next consider that according to the US Dept of Energy, greenhouse gas emissions jumped by a record amount in 2010, exceeding the worst-case scenario of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimate made just four years ago.   Globally, a gargantuan 564 million tons of CO₂ were pumped into the atmosphere in 2010, 6% more than 2009, prompting John Reilly, the co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, to remark “The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing”.

Finally consider that in November, the IPCC released a report, compiled over a two year period by a group of 220 scientists on the increased likelihood and impact of extreme weather events and the connection to climate change.  The report is the first of its kind to document the increased severity of torrential rains and the resultant flooding, more intense and frequent storms and extended periods of drought across the world. The likely economic and social impact of record-breaking hot days, previously occurring once every 20 years but soon every other year, will be disastrous to at-risk communities such as older people, the poor and the young.  Massive cloudbursts that saturate and flood the land, instead of coming every 20 years, will soon arrive once in every five.  Conversely, extended droughts are more likely for southern Europe and central Europe, central North America, Central America and Mexico, north-east Brazil, and southern Africa.

In a chilling warning of what this would mean, Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics commented,

The report shows that if we do not stop the current steep rise in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, we will see much more warming and dramatic changes in extreme weather that are likely to overwhelm any attempts human populations might make to adapt to their impacts.

Christian Parenti documents the impact these changes are already having on vulnerable communities around the world in his new book Tropic of Chaos.

The IPCC report was released in time to inform the upcoming United Nations climate talks in Durban, known as COP-17 or Conference of the Parties, Year 17 and as a way to influence politicians over the need to stop talking like they cared about climate change and actually take steps to prevent it by initiating an international treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year.

Given the above facts, one might reasonably assume that the people we elected to protect and serve their populations would be rushing to Durban as fast as they possibly could, clutching these reports to their hearts, eager to address this clearly urgent and planetary-scale threat with the utmost speed and determination.  You might reasonably expect our leaders to be asking themselves questions such as, “how quickly can we move to a carbon-free energy system?  What measures should we put in place by the end of the year to start moving in this direction?  What international coordination needs to happen to make sure that we transfer all of our best and most effective non-carbon, low-impact technologies to developing countries to help them make the energy transition?”

Needless to say, such a sane and rational response is not at all part of the thinking that goes on in between the ears of heads of state.  In fact, in order to avoid being too embarrassingly close to a pointless conference where nothing is achieved, many of them aren’t even turning up.  Indeed, in Washington, climate negotiations are so low down the list of priorities that almost nobody is going from Capitol Hill and certainly no members of Congress.  Henry Waxman (D-Calif), who sponsored the failed and flawed climate legislation in 2009, responding to a question about the conference said, “I don’t know…I haven’t thought about it.”  Similarly, Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif) said that “It hasn’t been brought to my attention…I’m too busy here”.

Except that the only thing Congress seems to have successfully been busy with lately is passing agricultural legislation that keeps tomato paste on frozen pizzas classified as a vegetable so that it counts as part of school lunches.  Bowing to intense lobbying from the frozen food industry, salt and potato manufacturers, and ignoring the US government’s own agricultural department’s recommendations on how to make healthier school meals for our children, in a craven acquiescence to corporate power they took the $5.6 million spent lobbying on this bill by coca cola and other corporate interests and voted the new rules down.   Leaving aside the fact that tomatoes are, in fact, a fruit and with so much sugar, the paste could more accurately be defined as dessert, Congress has never let science dictate their votes and this is after all the USDA that tests meat for school lunch programs 5-10 times less frequently than the fast food chains, which, incredibly, often have stricter limits on bacterial infection of the meat.  According to a 2009 report in US Today:

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called “spent hens” because they’re past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don’t pass muster with Colonel Sanders— KFC won’t buy them — and they don’t pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on “quality considerations.

No wonder the approval rating for such a venal Congress is 9%; astoundingly, less than half what Richard Nixon polled at the height of Watergate (24%) or BP, at 16%, during the Gulf oil spill.  And, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, Americans prefer the US ‘going communist’ (11%) over their approval of Congress.

If Congress can define tomato paste as a vegetable and, in exchange for corporate campaign dollars, not worry about the physical and mental health consequences for American children, how easy will it be to ignore a conference that, in the words of Natural Resources Committee’s Democratic spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder, is “in South Africa, which is obviously a pretty long flight”.

As if that wasn’t farcical enough a comment, in other countries, it’s not any better.  Brazil was forced to move next year’s Rio+20 Earth Summit so that it didn’t conflict with the archaic British monarchy’s celebrations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  Despite that concession to an institution that should have gone out with the Dark Ages, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, self-acclaimed leader of the “greenest government ever”, still isn’t going to show up to the biggest environmental gathering in 20 years.

The real question we have to ask is: why are government leaders so committed to doing nothing about climate change?  Or, put another way, to quote John Vidal, the Guardian’s environmental correspondent:

If treasuries can find trillions to bail out dodgy banks, if financiers can be paid hundreds of millions in bonuses and the politics of Europe can be redrawn in just a few weeks, then why can’t the rich and big-emitting countries make a deal to try to avert what could be the greatest problem the planet has faced? In short, why are world leaders gambling with the fate of the planet?

Why indeed.  Secondly, what political strategies should we pursue so that we can change this dangerously pathetic and appalling state of affairs?  In other words, how can we raise the temperature of the movement, not the planet?

Because over the 17 years of international negotiations, even as the scientific evidence has dramatically increased and by any measure the rate of environmental devastation accelerated, politicians are moving backwards even from the weak promises they once used to make.

According to a report in the Guardian, rich nations are “giving up” on climate negotiations until 2016 and will then stipulate that there is no enforcement of any treaty until 2020 at the earliest.  In response, Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said “If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to [holding temperatures below 2⁰C] will be closed forever.”

As noted by a furious UN environment executive director Achim Steiner, putting off doing anything makes the task of doing something all the more difficult and less likely to be successful as greenhouse gases continue to grow instead of shrink:

Those countries that are currently talking about deferring an agreement [until] 2020 are essentially saying we are taking you from high risk to very high risk in terms of the effects of global warming. This is a choice – a political choice…Every year, we build more power plants. Every year, we build more buildings that are not efficient. Every year, our options [to avoid climate change] get less and less.

Clearly, corporate pressure can explain a lot; just ask your nearest Member of Congress.  In 1998 US corporations spent an incredible $1.4 billion on lobbying members of Congress.  That was eclipsed in 2010, when they spent a staggering $3.5 billion; there are more than 13,000 officially registered lobbyists working the corridors of Capitol Hill.

But risking the stability of the whole biosphere by unleashing uncontrollably vast planetary forces must be more systemic than the backhanders and under-the-table deals made by corrupt politicians in the service of corporate interests.  Otherwise, replacing Republicans with Democrats might have made a difference.  But we know from bitter experience it didn’t.  We also know it took massive social ferment and the replacement of multiple governments to elect a government in Bolivia that paid more than lip service to climate change, and even there the supposedly deep-green government of Evo Morales has been physically attacking indigenous protesters as they successfully fought to stop a roadway from carving open their land in order to develop fossil fuel options for the country.

At one end of the spectrum, Elisabeth Rosenthal, writing a frankly slightly nutty “analysis” piece in the New York Times entitled “What Happened to Global Warming?” believes ordinary American’s are to blame for their apparently genetically-inspired, perverse desire to drive juggernauts as expressions of personal freedom, lock up scientists, live in massive houses and waste tons of money they don’t have on energy bills and transportation costs:

Americans — who produce twice the emissions per capita that Europeans do — are in many ways wired to be holdouts. We prefer bigger cars and bigger homes. We value personal freedom, are suspicious of scientists, and tend to distrust the kind of sweeping government intervention required to confront rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Report on climate change, a report limited in terms of solutions as he abjures taking radical action on climate change but nevertheless, was much more perceptive than many environmental organizations when he argued that the root of the problem is, in fact, ‘free’ market capitalism:

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen. The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century. The problem is global and the response must be a collaboration on a global scale.

And from the other end of the political spectrum, Naomi Klein has an excellent piece in The Nation, “Capitalism vs. The Climate”, that argues that taking meaningful action on climate change is essentially an existential threat to the very fabric of the system because it attacks one of the prime operative features of capitalism; namely, that a system predicated on relentless and never-ending growth is incompatible with the requirements of a stable biosphere on a finite planet:

The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits.

What I take from this is that what we need is a social, economic and political revolution.  The replacement of capitalism with an economic and political model based on cooperation not competition, production for need, not profit and predicated on real democracy and active participation by an informed citizenry of equals; a society where there are no corporations and no countries, just collections of people democratically planning sustainable production methods and ways of living in harmony with nature rather than aggressively seeking to dominate it.  A society that in the words of Karl Marx, has a long-term outlook predicated on the simple maxim that production “has to minister to the entire range of permanent necessities of life required by the chain of successive generations” and do so “with the least expenditure of energy”.  I’d call such a system socialism.

While Klein shies away from this conclusion, leaving space for a reformed capitalism with a much reduced corporate sector somehow not tied to endless growth and a “managed transition to another economic paradigm” it is clear we need to win real reforms to build our organizational power and confidence, as well as slow down the rate of environmental degradation and buy ourselves some time.  Fortunately, after decades of defeats, we now have some victories: the recent success in stopping the approval of the XL tar sands pipeline and the cancellation of the vote to lift the moratorium on hydrofracking in the Delaware River basin; both awesome examples of the power of protest in the new climate of the Arab Spring and Occupy.  Klein highlights six things we need to fight for such as taxing the rich, re-regulating the corporations and banks, reviving public space for democratic debate and fighting for the necessity of government planning to make positive societal change.

We certainly need to do all those things, and the ongoing Egyptian revolution and Occupy protests across the world, make them all much more likely.  What seemed pie-in-the-sky idealistic dreaming a few short months ago, in this new spirit of global revolt against the 1%, so much more is now realizable and our horizon for the amount of change that is possible has suddenly shifted dramatically.

But the evidence that the political and economic elite will bow to public pressure and scientific reason and allow for or help facilitate a managed transition to another economic paradigm is incontrovertible; they won’t.  Read the following quote and guess who is speaking about what area of the world:

The United States has spoken out for a set of core principles that have guided our response to events, including opposition to the use of violence and repression, defense of universal rights including the freedom of peaceful assembly, and support for political and economic reform that meets the legitimate aspirations of ordinary people throughout the region.

That is part of a statement released by the White House’s US Press Secretary, November 25, 2011 talking about Egypt.  Clearly he hasn’t been watching US domestic TV.  Or taken a trip to Oakland, New York or 16 other US cities lately, where the state-backed use of violence and repression against the freedom of peaceful assembly has been on vivid and brutal display.  Surely, merely questioning the massive economic inequality rampant in America, and suggesting that the government we elected take some action to re-regulate the banks and corporations and tax the rich via peaceful assembly would seem like a right a democratic government and self-ascribed leader of the free world would support.  The blood on the streets and the pepper spray in the air across a swath of US cities suggests otherwise, not to mention federal intervention and coordination.

Those that run and profit from the operation of the system will stop at nothing to defend their privilege.  That extends into the international realm and brings us to another ecological contradiction intrinsic to capitalism not mentioned by Naomi Klein and left out of almost all debates and discussions of why nation states can’t agree on a climate deal.

The missing factor is the competition that goes on between countries in the service of their own set of corporations; in a word, imperialism.  Geopolitical intrigue and the jockeying for competitive advantage isn’t some occasional thing that a few larger or more belligerent countries engage in, it’s built into the operation of capitalism in just the same way as the requirement for constant growth.

One of the fundamental sticking points in Durban will be between developed nations that have made much of the fact that recent increases in emissions have come predominantly from developing countries which were exempt from binding emissions reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.  Led by the United States, OECD countries have used this argument to cudgel developing nations into agreeing to drop their insistence on any new climate agreement treating poor and rich countries differently.

Using this argument, OECD countries proclaim that they won’t do anything that would undermine their competitiveness when faced with economic competition from developing countries unconstrained by having to limit carbon emissions.  They reinforce their position by trotting out the argument that even if they took action it wouldn’t have any effect because the increases in emissions are coming from the developing world.

Leaving aside the fact that the developed world has a historical debt to pay for bringing the planet to the brink of biospheric crisis by its 150 year production of carbon dioxide, on which that development rests, the United States alone consumes 30% of world resources and produces 25% of CO₂ emissions with only 4% of world population.  The US could not only set an example to the rest of the world by investing seriously in renewable technologies but would simultaneously generate millions of jobs for those millions of Americans currently out of work.  But again, the rules of imperial competition between nation states override taking unilateral action to protect the only planet we have; the myopia of those who run the system and their fixation on profit taking prevents them from recognizing the slogan “There is no Planet B”.

One could argue that the US government has a point: don’t we need developing countries like China and India to reduce their emissions?  Of course, we do; however, the question is: how can this best be achieved?  By refusing to seriously invest in renewable energy technologies the US encourages other countries with less money and technological expertise to do likewise.  As President Obama has authorized the resumption of deep sea off-shore drilling as well as offshore drilling in the Arctic, there’s no incentive for others to do anything except continue to construct coal plants, build roads and clear-cut forests for biofuel production.

While 40% of emissions still come from OECD countries, it’s true that only 25% of the latest increase in emissions came from that source.  However, it is important to note that per capita emissions in the OECD are almost double those of China and more than six times those of India.  Furthermore, these figures are a serious distortion of which countries are really responsible for carbon emissions.  While the EU is likely going to achieve its Kyoto target of 5% emissions reductions from 1990 levels next year, this is only because they outsourced them.

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Under the IPCC accounting rules of only reporting territorial emissions, many developed countries have reported stabilized emissions. However, our results show that the global emissions associated with consumption in many developed countries have increased with a large share of the emissions originating in developing countries.”

If the carbon cost of imports from industry that was relocated to boost profit margins by taking advantage of lower labor costs and weaker health, labor, safety and environmental standards is added to the developed countries column, instead of stabilizing, emissions are shown to have increased by 7%.  Even without accounting for overseas manufacturing, the US is headed in the opposite direction: between 1990 and 2008 US emissions increased by 17%.  If imports are taken into account from US corporations now located overseas, primarily in China, the increase is 25%.  If China’s imports and exports are accounted for, Chinese emissions drop by 20%, putting the country well behind the United States.

As another example, take Obama’s recent trip to Asia.  Here is President Obama, having just dispatched US troops and aircraft to a base in Australia, essentially letting China know in no uncertain terms what will and will not be tolerated in the Pacific:

With most of the world’s nuclear power and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation, needless suffering or human progress. As President, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision — as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends…As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.  We will preserve our unique ability to project power and deter threats to peace…The United States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay.

The second intractable problem for capitalism in dealing with a global problem like climate change is that any effective plan has to be internationally coordinated because no major country is able to put forward and carry out unilateral actions that would contravene the laws of capitalist competition and undermine its competitiveness on the world market.  The intractable problem faced by the US in particular, with intense economic pressures from rising competitors and an economy built on the premise of endless cheap oil, is that it’s the country least capable of making concessions at climate talks.

As a result, US government representatives are constantly hunting for allies amongst other major polluting countries to bribe or browbeat into obstructing, watering-down and delaying any and all action toward a binding climate treaty.  Whatever the change in language, this is as true of President Obama’s administration as it was of George W. Bush’s.  It appears that in Durban the US will this time collaborate with major coal producer and nuclear ally India, with the likely help of Russia and Japan in order to block any attempt by vulnerable states to take firmer and quicker action to reduce emissions.

As some nations become desperate in the face of climate change, and infected with the power of the Occupy movement for change, some may attempt to force the issue against the interests of the major emitting countries.  In an exciting example of this, the former president of Costa Rica, José María Figueres, has called for vulnerable countries to “Occupy Durban” to force more serious negotiations.  Climate protesters in Durban outside the conference can use this potential split to make their own push for tighter emissions controls and a shift away from fossil fuels, just as Global Justice protesters did in Seattle in 1999 that led to the collapse of international trade talks.

However, it is clear that if we want real change with regard to climate negotiations, we will have to follow the Egyptian people and replace our governments with ones that are more responsive to the democratic demands of their people.  While we should obviously continue to protest outside of climate talks, we need to direct our energies to where we are more able to effect change, which is on the national level.  And if we really want to save our world, we need to see fighting for real reforms and the reining in of corporate power not as an endpoint, but rather as a stepping stone toward a completely different society.  One that, in contrast to a capitalist system based on endless growth, competition in pursuit of profit, exploitation, oppression and imperial warfare, will be based on real democracy and cooperation between all people and the planet we depend on.  For that, we will need a revolution.

Exempted from the proposed ban are aerosol spraying operations for agriculture, and for Lyme disease, Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), West Nile virus (WNV), and other disease vector control operations.

The hearing will be held at the Riverhead Legislative Auditorium, Evans K. Griffing Building, 300 Center Drive in Riverhead, NY at 2:30 pm.

If the public is able to convince legislators of the risk from such geo-engineering operations, the legislation will then be voted on at the December  20th session. Otherwise, the proposed ban will be tabled indefinitely.

Initiated by Cindy Pikoulas and her husband Jim, along with Siobhan Ciresi of Long Island Sky Watch (LISW), with the assistance of chemtrail opponent Rosalind Peterson of Agriculture Defense Coalition, the bill was finalized and proposed by legislator Edward P. Romaine (1st District).

Involved in Suffolk County government since 1989, Romaine is a fiscal conservative who prioritizes saving farmland and protecting the environment. In August, he organized Long Island’s first countywide farmers market, along with the Long Island Farm Bureau.

Romaine has represented the 1st District (eastern end of Long Island) continuously since 2005. He serves on the Environment, Planning & Agriculture Committee, which voted on November 28 to submit the proposed law banning such aerial spraying to a public hearing.

The Piloulases and Ciresi will speak on December 6 and are urging people to “pack the hearing” to show support for the ban.

“If this proposal becomes law in Suffolk County, Long Island, it would be the first in the nation. It would be a starting point for others to follow,” said LISW in a press release. “Eventually, our governments would have to investigate why our trees are dying in record numbers; why our waters contain toxic levels of aluminum, barium and strontium; why 90% of us are vitamin D deficient; why our crops are failing; and where all of this crazy weather is coming from.”

Cindy Pikoulas of LISW spoke with New York Sky Watch radio on November 20, when she advised that tree samples from Suffolk show high levels of barium, strontium and aluminum. She is asking Long Islanders to have their water and trees tested for these chemicals in order to build a body of evidence that would spur investigations by health and environment authorities.

In addition to attending the December 6 hearing, Long Islanders can contact their county legislators via their web site.

Are Exemptions Necessary?

Though exempted under the proposed ban, disease vector spraying may be a subterfuge for weather control operations, given the extreme rarity of EEV and WNV. According to the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services:

Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) is a rare but serious viral disease caused by a virus transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito with more severe symptoms than for West Nile virus. EEE is an arbovirus (short for arthropod-borne, meaning spread by insects). Birds are the source of infection for mosquitoes, which can sometimes transmit the infection to horses, other animals, and, in rare cases, people.

West Nile Virus (WNV) was first seen in the US in 1999, in the New York City area of Queens. WNV can live in a number of types of birds and is passed bird to bird by certain types of mosquitoes. Occasionally, an infected mosquito will pass the virus to humans or other animals. Most healthy people do not get sick from the virus, but sometimes it may cause symptoms.

Per the US Geological Survey, two horses caught WNV in 2011 and 12 caught EEE, none of them in Suffolk.  Of humans, 43 contracted WNV in New York State in 2011, four of them in Suffolk County.  Only one person contracted EEE in the entire state.

Of the other vector-borne diseases of concern to health authorities – St Louis Encephalitis, La Crosse Encephalitis, Powassan Virus, and locally-acquired Dengue Fever – no New Yorkers contracted any of them in 2011. (But 40 New Yorkers did contract Dengue Fever when traveling outside the US in 2011.)

Considering that the population of NYS is 19 million, the application of toxic chemicals purportedly to control for such rare vector-borne diseases where only 44 people became ill in 2011 seems absurd.

US health officials admit that Ugandans and Egyptians, where WNV was first discovered, develop a natural immunity before reaching adulthood.  Using toxic chemicals that pollute the environment, leading to cancer and respiratory diseases, instead of allowing humans to develop immunity to such diseases, is an unsustainable and irresponsible control method.

Whether these vector control spray programs are involved in other activities such as solar radiation or rainfall management is uncertain.  But, in addition to the obvious jets laying chemtrails at 30,000 feet, they may be involved in contributing to the high levels of aluminum, barium and strontium found in Suffolk waters and trees.

Below is the full text of Suffolk’s proposed legislation:

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WHEREAS, there was duly presented and introduced to this County Legislature at a meeting held on [December 6], 2011, a proposed local law entitled, “A Local Law To Protect Air Quality In Suffolk County” now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, that said local law be enacted in form as follows:

Local Law No. _____-2011, Suffolk  County, New York

A Local Law to Protect  Air Quality In Suffolk County

Be it  Enacted  by the County  Legislature of the County of Suffolk, as follows:

Section 1.  Legislative Intent

This Legislature hereby finds and determines that Suffolk County is a leader in environmental protection and has several programs to protect soil and groundwater from contamination.

This Legislature also finds and determines that air pollution is another environmental issue that can impact the health and safety of County residents and may also contaminate soil and groundwater.

This Legislature further finds and determines that concerns have been raised that business and government entities may be discharging polluting chemicals, including barium, sulfur, salts, and aluminum oxide, into the air, which may impact weather and other environmental elements.

This Legislature finds that such particulates eventually fall from the atmosphere, exposing the public to these air pollutants and, upon landing, may contaminate soil and water.

This Legislature determines that County residents may be exposed to these chemicals while they are in the atmosphere, which can cause respiratory and other health problems.

This Legislature also finds that, to protect County residents from potential harm, any person who plans to discharge these chemicals into the airspace over Suffolk County should first file an Environmental Impact Statement with and receive approval from the Department of Health Services, Division of Environmental Quality.

Therefore, the purpose of this law is to require any person who plans to discharge sulfur, barium, salts or aluminum oxide into the airspace above the County of Suffolk to file a complete Environmental Impact Statement with the County prior to taking such action.

Section 2.  Definitions

As used in this law, the following terms shall have the meanings indicated: “PERSON” shall mean any natural person, individual, corporation, unincorporated association, proprietorship, firm, partnership, joint venture, joint stock association, or other entity or business of any kind.

Section 3.  Requirements

Any person who plans to discharge sulfur, barium, salts or aluminum oxide into the airspace above the County of Suffolk must file a completed environmental impact form, as established in Section 4 of this law, with the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, Division of Environmental Quality and with the Clerk of the Suffolk County Legislature and receive the approval of the Division of Environmental Quality prior to engaging in such discharge.

Section 4.  Form Established

The Department of Health Services, Division of Environmental Quality is hereby authorized, empowered and directed to develop an environmental impact form to be used by persons wishing to discharge sulfur, barium, salts or aluminum oxide into the airspace above the County of Suffolk.  Such form shall require applicants to detail the nature and purpose of their proposed discharge and any potential environmental and/or public health impacts that may result from such discharge.

Section 5.  Exemption

The requirements set forth in this law shall not apply to any person engaging in aerosol spraying for agricultural or vector control purposes.

Section 6.  Penalties

A.  Any person who violates any provision of this law shall be liable for a civil penalty of up to $2,500 for an initial violation, with a fine of $5,000 for each subsequent violation.

B.  Any civil penalty may only be assessed by the Commissioner of Health Services following a hearing and opportunity for an alleged violator to be heard.

Section 7.  Rules and Regulations

The Commissioner of the County Department of Health Services is hereby authorized and empowered to issue and promulgate such rules and regulations as he or she deems necessary to implement and carry out the provisions of this law. Section 8.  Applicability.

This law shall apply to all actions occurring on or after the effective date of this law.

Section 9.  Severability

If any clause, sentence, paragraph, subdivision, section, or part of this law or the application thereof to any person, individual, corporation, firm, partnership, entity, or circumstance shall be adjudged by any court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid or unconstitutional, such order or judgment shall not affect, impair, or invalidate the remainder thereof, but shall be confined in its operation to the clause, sentence, paragraph, subdivision, section, or part of this law, or in its application to the person, individual, corporation, firm, partnership, entity, or circumstance directly involved in the controversy in which such order or judgment shall be rendered.

Section 10.  SEQRA Determination

This Legislature, being the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) lead agency, hereby finds and determines that this law constitutes a Type II action pursuant to Section 617.5(c)(20), (21), and/or (27) of Title 6 of the New York Code of Rules and Regulations (6 NYCRR) and within the meaning of Section 8-0109(2) of the New York Environmental  Conservation Law as a promulgation of regulations, rules, policies, procedures, and legislative decisions in connection with continuing agency administration, management and information collection.  The Suffolk County Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is hereby directed to circulate any appropriate SEQRA notices of determination of non-applicability or non-significance in accordance with this law.

Section 11.  Effective Date

This law shall take effect immediately upon filing in the Office of the Secretary of State.

Disorganized and still finding our footing, we nonetheless have already proven our value. The political discourse is being framed differently, big banks and huge financial entities are beginning to understand that their power may not be limitless. Corporations are learning that their grip on global culture may not be as firm as imagined. Most importantly, we are finding our voices and our power, and connecting in new ways with each passing moment.

Here in Cincinnati, we face challenges similar to other occupations. Our encampment was shut down after two weeks, with 145 citations and over 50 arrests, which led to a Federal lawsuit based on First Amendment rights. Since then we’ve been looking for a new, sustainable encampment, while still carrying out our various processes and actions.

We have had our successes. We targeted four local council members who supported the 1%, all were defeated. We joined with other Occupations in Bank Transfer Day, moving money and staging street theatre. We built an oil derrick to highlight local Senator and Super Committee Member Rob Portman’s unwillingness to rid us of oil and energy subsidies. Yet to me nothing is a greater success than adopting these five principles.

Peace, Love, Equality, Justice and Solidarity. Fine words, every one. And the idea behind each word is tremendously powerful and empowering. These words speak well for us. They create the basis for a system of ethics. Let’s take a moment to consider the implications of holding these principles.

1] An End to War. There can be no war with the principle of peace. It’s antithetical. As Albert Einstein said, “You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and for peace.” Any policies or actions that promote war cannot be condoned by Occupy Cincinnati. Also implied, an end to personal violence. We have far too many situations in the old culture where wounded and fear-driven folks lash out, power trip or otherwise act out in a fashion that is deleterious to human health. We wholeheartedly resist such behaviors.

2] Reversing Globalization. We cannot find these adopted principles in the system of globalization. Designed and built for the profit of the 1%, there is no equality or justice in extractive practices like mining and logging, child and underpaid labor and poorly made products. To honor our principles, we must necessarily extract ourselves from the globalized system to whatever extent we can, starting with spending our money locally and starving behemoths like Walmart.

3] Restoring Communities and Ecosystems. We have no equality when corporations ravage communities and living systems just to make a buck. We have no legal recourse when government sides with corporate interests. With these principles, the Occupation can work to create a generative, rather than extractive culture. Organic food production, sustainable, local energy solutions, community-building and getting involved with local government are all implied in the principles of equality and justice.

4] Reconstituting Government. Federal governments across the globe have proven time and time again where their loyalties lie, and it is not with we, the people. This Occupation must focus on reconstructing governments based on Internet-enabled technologies and human need. The archaic, dysfunctional, corrupt system of government that serves the 1% must be replaced.

This is powerful stuff. Revolutionary stuff. And yes, revolution is what we are about here in the Occupied Territories. Of course, with these principles our efforts mirror the efforts of Gandhi, King and other change agents who refused violence at every turn, and yet created something fundamentally better than the condition that existed previously.

With this worldwide Occupation, we begin to see the scope of what we are about. Creative acts of solidarity, fresh eruptions from the Arab Spring, talk of a constitutional assembly – doesn’t sound much like a fad. It sounds like revolution. But as we are committed to peace, it does not mirror bloody revolutions from the past [can’t speak for agents of the 1%]. It reflects something completely new under the sun, an uprising such as the world has never seen.

I encourage other Occupied Territories to adopt these or similar principles. Such principles form the frame we operate within, the lens through which we apply ourselves. And while we cannot control violence from the state, we can hold to our process and principles, and do all we can to make this R-Evolution as peaceful and agile as possible.

Washington continues to insist upon exercising world leadership in all key global endeavors, including the environment, but has failed dramatically in terms of climate change.

In fact, the White House is greatly expanding U.S. access to fossil fuel energy sources even as scientific and environmental organizations are intensifying their warnings about the need to immediately reduce greenhouse gas carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

Although the U.S. recently has ranked second to China in fossil fuel burning, it is by far the greatest polluter of the atmosphere in the last century and a half. Given the differences in population, America still uses three times more per capita than China.

White House policy is fixated on reducing dependence upon Middle Eastern oil and gas by greatly increasing the extraction of fossil fuels closer to home — mainly a vast increase in natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) throughout the United States, expanded drilling for offshore oil, and importing dirty tar sands oil from Canada.

While increasing the development and use of global warming fuels, President Obama is advancing no significant program to replace high carbon emitting fossil fuels with renewable non-carbon solar and wind power.

The U.S. government is subsidizing some major “green” corporations, providing them with nearly no-risk guarantees for developing solar and wind, but this remains a relatively minor enterprise. Progress made so far is being stalled by the unexpected abundance (and thus cheaper price) of domestic natural gas secreted in shale, more secure oil reserves than anticipated, and the probability of reduced federal and state subsidies.

In a major statement from London November 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) called for a “bold change of policy direction toward the use of low-carbon fuels within the next five years. If the major industrial states do not do so quickly, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system,” which is precisely what the Obama Administration is doing.

This recommendation seeks to prevent the rise in global temperatures in this century from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, which is based upon keeping carbon emissions in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm). Anything above the target standards will cause irreparable damage to life on Earth.

According to many scientists and environmental groups these standards are inadequate, and that 350 ppm is the maximum amount that can be accommodated without causing a disaster. Atmospheric carbon, which occurs naturally, has reached dangerous levels due to industrialization. It has increased from 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial era to approximately 392 ppm today, which is why it is said warming is well underway and its effects are being felt throughout the world.

Introducing the new report, IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven declared, “Growth, prosperity and rising population will inevitably push up energy needs over the coming decades…. Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies.”

The  Environment News Service reports that the “agency’s warning comes at a critical time in international climate change negotiations, as governments prepare for the annual UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28-Dec. 9. ‘If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door will be closed forever,’ IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned.’” (The main goal of the 17th climate summit is to agree on a resolution to replace the Kyoto Protocols, which will expire next year.)

The IEA describes itself as “an autonomous organization which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 28 member countries and beyond.” Its members represent the world’s leading capitalist countries. Greenpeace and some other environmental groups are critical of the group’s approval of tar sands oil, lower carbon fuels and nuclear energy. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are not IEA members.

Reporting October 26 on America’s hunt for more carbon-emitting fuels, the New York Times quoted Daniel Lashof, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, as declaring:

Giving new life to fossil fuels is a devil’s bargain, probably making solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult. Not only are you extending the fossil fuels era, but you are moving into fossil fuels that are dirtier and release more carbon pollution in the process of extracting and using them.

The Obama Administration has been leaning toward approving a $7 billion investment in a pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to Texas but encountered a fusillade of activist opposition from the environmental movement in recent months. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, has declared that “Tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth.” Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

Environmental movement criticisms have been compounded by objections from residents of Nebraska with concerns that pipeline spills might pollute the irreplaceable Ogallala aquifer, which occupies 10,000 square miles north to south from South Dakota to Texas and is a major source of water for the High Plains.

In August and September 1,200 anti-tar sands activists were arrested for offering civil disobedience in front of the White House. On November 6, 12,000 people surrounded the presidential mansion demanding an end to construction of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Four days later, President Obama announced that his final decision would now be postponed until months after next year’s elections, implying that the pipeline route might have to circumnavigate the  immense aquifer.

Some environmental groups have interpreted Obama’s delay as a victory, suggesting that the project is being abandoned, but this view is too optimistic. The White House seeks abundant and stable supplies of oil for the next several decades from sources other than (or in addition to) the volatile Middle East, and tar sands oil from nearby friendly Canada is a most attractive alternative. Canadian oil has been entering the U.S. for many years in existing pipelines, and this is continuing. In all probability, some version of Keystone will greatly increase the supply.

Environmentally-concerned Americans have also launched campaigns against fracking, mainly because of the danger to water supplies inherent in an extraction method that requires the high pressure injection of deadly chemicals deep underground.

The Obama Administration is so intent upon vastly increasing natural gas production that it has been brushing objections aside, as have state governors — such as New York State’s Andrew Cuomo — who argue that what really matters are the additional jobs and tax revenue from massive fracking operations.

Advocates of natural gas argue that burning gas for electricity emits 30% less carbon dioxide than oil, and about 45% less than coal. But recent studies have shown that the process of fracking releases sufficient stores of methane into the atmosphere to compensate for any reduction in carbon from natural gas. Methane creates a greenhouse heat trap about 20 times greater than carbon dioxide. The gas industry maintains that the reduction in emissions from natural gas “outweighs” the detrimental effects of methane.

The New York Times article points out that:

Temporary or permanent fracking bans have been put in place in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Other states are toughening drilling regulations, and the industry is responding with tighter wastewater management, while the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to complete a study on fracking next year. Nevertheless, gas shale drilling appears likely to continue at a fast pace in the most important gas-producing states.

The rest of the world is watching. Moratoriums have been put in place in parts of France, Germany, South Africa and the Canadian province of Quebec; Britain, Ukraine and other countries are moving cautiously forward. Still, the Energy Department projects that gas from shale could account for 14% of global supplies by 2030, with as many as 32 countries having production potential.

If world countries, led by the U.S., continue to disregard environmental objections to fracking, enhanced natural gas production combined with a major increase in oil production by the U.S., it will further subvert incentives toward ending use of fossil fuels. So far, shale gas extraction in the U.S. has increased 500% in the last five years, and that’s just the beginning.

Quoting Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, the Times concluded its article with these words: “The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades. Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy.”

It has been five months since Democratic former Vice President Al Gore stuck his neck out in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone by publicly criticizing Democrat Obama for inaction on reducing America’s addiction to fossil fuels. So far, Obama has done nothing but live up to Gore’s critique:

“President Obama,” he declared, “has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change…. The president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that ‘drill, baby, drill’ [a conservative slogan] is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.”

Washington’s refusal to take more than token steps to alleviate global warming would be relatively inconsequential were the U.S. a much smaller player on the world stage. But American governments have insisted for decades — based on economic strength and unparalleled military power — on being recognized as the world’s dominant and irreplaceable hegemonic state. Uncle Sam’s leadership is enormously influential, especially in the industrialized world, and America’s sluggish response toward global warming is a global disincentive toward taking speedy, responsible and united action.

U.S. financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthiest proportion of its population are “deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives,” economist Paul Krugman noted recently. These powerful elements are not prepared to accept the economic and political rearrangements required to transform America into an environmentally sound society of minimal carbon usage and many other ecological safeguards.

Such a transformation involves greater government investments, potentially smaller profits for many years, strategic alterations in the country’s disproportionate consumption of resources and products, and substantial changes beyond today’s gridlocked and essentially conservative political process.

In effect — given its disinclination to interfere in the workings of America’s neoliberal capitalist economy, even  to protect all life on Earth — Washington’s continuing unipolar leadership is guiding the world toward irreversible climate change.

The U.S. may change its ways, but economic and political realities suggest an alteration of this magnitude is hardly on the foreseeable agenda. Climate change, however, is taking place now. At  issue are two necessities: (1) strengthening of the environmental and social change movements in the U.S., and (2) a dramatic initiative by other powerful countries and regional blocs to take significant concerted global action to save the Earth regardless of Washington’s dithering.

We won’t be hitting empty overnight, but inevitably and soon, global demand for oil and natural gas will outstrip global extraction and supply. This situation may not sound so dire — until one considers the long-term implications. I study energy issues and have been teaching college classes on the subject for some years now. My understanding of the complexities of energy supplies and their interrelationships with the global economy, geopolitics, food production, transportation, and more, lead me to a sobering conclusion: oil depletion is truly a game changer for modern industrial societies. As evidenced by the Occupy Movement protests in U.S. cities and around the world, people everywhere are already experiencing the impacts of economic problems that stem, in part, from oil depletion — and this is just the beginning.

High prices of oil have historically translated into economic recession because oil isn’t just any commodity — it’s the driving force of the industrial world itself. If and when the global economy recovers significantly from the Great Recession, increased demand for oil will spur higher prices for this depleting resource, resulting in another economic downturn. As we approached the economic collapse in fall of 2008, oil production was running basically flat out. There was very little spare production capacity to be had in world oil markets. Oil prices spiked and placed significant economic strain on the heavily indebted, thereby contributing to the economic crisis. Given the likelihood of continued oil price volatility, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

But why can’t we simply find more oil or find effective substitutes? For one thing, we’ve waited much too long to avoid big problems, and for many reasons, simply replacing oil or finding much more of it aren’t exactly simple strategies. Understanding why this is so entails developing an understanding of the energy system as a whole within the context of broader society.

Let’s start with oil depletion. It’s a documented fact. Geologist Dr. M. King Hubbert predicted the 1970 peak in oil production in the U.S. — and yes, that’s over 40 years ago! In hindsight, peak production makes sense. Oil is nonrenewable and under pressure from the layers of rock and earth above it. The liquid oil is more than ready to escape upward through any crack or borehole that penetrates its cap rock, which means efforts needed to extract it are low at first. As more wells are drilled, production increases (and pressure within the field drops) until production peaks. After that, production declines as the oil becomes, in effect, harder to reach. Once foremost among petroleum exporting nations, the U.S. currently imports almost half of the oil it consumes. The figures were closer to 60% before the economic downturn, and a significant portion of what is counted as domestic oil supplies in these figures is actually biofuels, mostly corn-based ethanol. Many respected geologists who specialize in estimating oil reserves believe we have already passed the global production peak.

We have a problem — and the fixes cited by technological optimists don’t offer complete solutions. Simply finding a lot more oil is not an option. Global oil discoveries peaked in the middle 1960s. If this trend could be reversed by using technological advancements, there’s little doubt it would have been by now. The globe has been pretty thoroughly explored by petroleum geologists, and new finds typically don’t compare well in size to earlier ones.

We must also consider net energy. Early oil produced from a field requires little effort to extract, but later, the efforts required to “lift” oil from a declining field intensify so that the energy profit from the endeavor declines. Eventually, extraction becomes an energy-losing proposition. It takes more energy to get the oil out of the ground than is contained in the oil extracted. At this point, oil is not an energy source at all, but an energy sink. For some energy “sources” such as hydrogen that are cited as potential major contributors to a new energy economy, the net energy picture is particularly poor. Hydrogen must be refined from natural gas or electrolyzed from water. In accordance with the laws of thermodynamics, the resulting hydrogen actually has less energy available for use than was available from the electricity or the natural gas used to create the hydrogen. While hydrogen may prove useful as a storage medium for excess energy generated from renewable sources, it’s hardly an energy source.

Some optimists cite advanced technologies employed in discovering and producing oil as the answer to our supply problems. But they do so without acknowledging that these investments also represent energy investments and that the harder we work with these new technologies, the lower our net energy return. In any case, even if we could dramatically increase flows of petroleum using these technologies, doing so would only increase the potential for an energy crash later because we’d be more quickly using up the oil we have.

Some cite energy efficiency gains as pointing the way out of our energy conundrum, noting that over time, we’ve learned to do more with less energy. But efficiency means little without reduced total usage. In a context of worldwide population and economic growth, the global energy budget is rises quickly. Perhaps the main reason we don’t easily recognize the energy crisis in our midst is because the Great Recession and its aftermath have translated into reduced production and consumption by many, sometimes through the painful process of unemployment. In the energy world, increased efficiencies also correlate with increased energy density (more energy “bang” per unit of the material used). Increased efficiencies will be harder to achieve if we attempt to drive the globalized economy with renewable energy and coal — both of which are much less energy dense than oil.

Some cite natural gas as a substitute for oil and point to shale gas deposits, particularly in the northeastern U.S., as the answer to our energy problems. As geological consultant Arthur Berman has noted with regard to the Barnett Shale in Texas, the depletion rate for shale gas wells is extremely rapid, and estimates of total gas recovery potential are likely overstated. Furthermore, releasing the gas trapped in these formations requires hydraulic fracturing, a process that uses literally millions of gallons of water per well, not to mention the injection along with that water of toxic chemicals that can contaminate drinking water through accidental spills, deficient drilling practices, and perhaps other means. Do we really want to place our bets on yet another depletable energy source that has the potential to irreversibly damage our water? We can potentially live without oil, but we can’t live without water — not a single one of us. Some suggest we may rely on natural gas shipped by tanker across the ocean. This proposition would require heavy infrastructure (and, therefore, energy) investments, not to mention that the process of super cooling and shipping gas very negatively impacts net energy ratios. Natural gas is an efficient energy source when it can be shipped to users via pipeline, not when it’s transported long distance by tanker.

Oil shale and oil sands are also inefficient in terms of net energy as compared to petroleum. Oil sands are already being exploited as conventional oil supplies decline, but they won’t make up for conventional petroleum. What’s more, mining and processing of oil sands requires the utter destruction of ecosystems that are ravaged by strip mining, uses large amounts of fresh water, and releases large quantities of carbon dioxide, thereby exacerbating climate change. Is this a direction that we really want to go? As for oil shale, it isn’t oil at all, it’s source rock — oil that hasn’t been completely “cooked” in the earth’s crust. Recent experiments with in situ processing of oil shale have required using electric heating elements to heat the source rock underground for two the three years to finish the cooking process. In an effort to avoid groundwater contamination, experimental sites have also been surrounded by a layer of frozen ground. The net energy value of the oil obtained through such processes cannot possibly approximate that for conventional oil.

Transportation is a particularly sticky problem. The United States has bet on automobiles and trucks as the mainstays for transportation. Witness our underdeveloped rail system. With the global fleet numbering 700 million plus vehicles — each requiring the equivalent of about 90 barrels of oil to fabricate — and with miniscule to nonexistent infrastructure for alternative fuels, we face real problems. Some cite coal as a possible transportation fuel. Coal can be liquefied to produce synthetic petroleum. But we in the U.S. have no infrastructure for this, and there’s little of it globally. Dependence on coal for transportation would also require massive mining efforts — and we would be relying on a source of energy much less dense than petroleum (not to mention that we would seal our fate in terms of climate disaster).

Diesel vehicles can burn biodiesel or vegetable oil, but large scale growth and production of biofuels poses challenges. It’s not likely we could run all of our cars on biofuels the way we run them today on petroleum, even if we could change all our engines to diesels. The net energy harvested from biofuels production (when there is a positive net energy return) doesn’t come anywhere close to the net energy in oil. As we saw after the huge oil price spikes in the last decade, biofuels crops also compete for land with food crops when there are pricing advantages for producers to grow fuel crops. Renewable energy generated from wind and solar comes in the form of electricity, a fuel we don’t use in large measure for transportation. If we were to run our vehicles on electricity, we’d be back to the prospect of converting the immense global fleet to electric-drive vehicles, and we’d still face the question of what to do about large-scale shipping.

What about running industrial society on renewable energy? Currently, energy generated from renewable sources other than hydroelectricity (mostly large dams) and biomass (wood, animal dung, etc.) make up less than 1% of the world’s energy budget. Bringing enough renewable energy online to run the global economy as it is would require monumental efforts — technologically, politically, and in the business sector — not to mention a whole lot of energy. Don’t get me wrong, we do need more renewable energy generation, as much as possible. Countries and communities that know this and act on their knowledge will be more resilient in the years ahead — but we still need to change the way we live.

With regard to overall supply, oil isn’t likely to disappear overnight. A gradual decline in availability is quite possible, but rising global demand intensifies the potential for shortages. A growing world population, increasing consumerism, the spread of industrialism, and growing economies require ever more oil. What’s more, any significant negative growth in the global economy caused by an energy crisis could create cascading defaults and recession. The Great Recession and its vast social fallout are perhaps a timely foreshadowing of the immense and widespread economic and social effects of oil depletion — not to mention the simultaneously occurring massive disturbance and destruction of the natural world and human societies caused by fossil-fuel-generated climate change.

Our “options” are clear: try with all our might to hold back the energy watershed that is upon us, and waste our personal energy and creativity in doing so, or change the way we live. Can we change our minds and our energy systems in time to create a better world while doing so? Can we harvest energy without contributing significantly to global warming? What energy improvements can we make to our built environments? How can we retool our economy and our communities to soften the blows of petroleum’s decline? How can we reinvent fulfilling family and community life in a context of oil depletion? These are questions we must engage. The future health and security of people and nature the world over depend on it.

The answers we construct, individually and collectively, will indeed limit our dreams — but only if our dreams are about living “lifestyles of the rich and famous.” Limits to oil need not translate into limits to human creativity, limits to meaningful relationships with others and nature, or reduced personal growth. The challenges we face in the energy realm represent an opening for deep and wide ranging social change — and we need change. The dissatisfaction with the status quo evident in the Occupy Movement protests suggests we may be ready to change a lot of things, including the way we live and the dreams we have for a fulfilling life. The culture of celebrated hyper-individualism and “greed is good” may be unraveling in tandem with the emergence of the peak oil challenge. As many of us know, we are at a historic juncture. Will we find ways to run on empty with regard to oil and have full lives at the same time?

• This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.