AlterNet.org: Water

Keep the Arctic Cold: Why the Rush to Drill Alaska Must Be Stopped

Subhankar Banerjee, Seven Stories Press — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:23:00 -0700

A leading international voice on arctic conservation addresses President Obama’s strategy for tapping America’s northern frontier.

I wrote a letter to the editor as a follow up to the generous review “In the Beautiful,Threatened North” by Ian Frazier in The New York Review of Books of the anthology, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point that I edited. My letter, “Can Shell Be Stopped?” has just been published in the New York Review.

After the June 6 issue (with my letter) went to the printer a few significant things happened that relate to the letter that I’ll mention here briefly. On May 10, the White House published a 13-page document, “National Strategy for the Arctic Region.” It opens with a one-page introduction by President Obama. He begins with these words: “We in the lower forty-eight and Hawaii join Alaska’s residents in recognizing one simple truth that the Arctic is an amazing place.” All fifty-five contributors in Arctic Voices, I’m sure, will be very pleased with these words from the President. But before the tears of joy could flow down my cheeks, the droplets dried up as I began to read the second paragraph: “Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment but gives no specific details. This major report from the White House was released after we came to know that on midnight on May 7, the average global CO2 concentration had reached 400 parts per million (ppm). The pre-industrial average was 280 ppm. The Scientific American reported, “[T]he last time CO2 levels are thought to have been this high was more than 2.5 million years ago, an era known as the Pliocene.” This is so significant that Scientific American now plans to publish in the coming year a “400 ppm” series of articles, “to examine what this invisible line in the sky means for the global climate, the planet and all the living things on it, including human civilization.” And George Monbiot correctly pointed out in The Guardian, “The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350 ppm, as the 350.org campaign demands.” We may have forgotten, or didn’t pay attention, that the Arctic had reached 400 ppm almost exactly a year ago. A May 31, 2012 press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated, “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Barrow, Alaska, reached 400 parts per million (ppm) this spring, according to NOAA measurements, the first time a monthly average measurement for the greenhouse gas attained the 400 ppm mark in a remote location. … Carbon dioxide at six other remote northern sites in NOAA’s international cooperative air sampling network also reached 400 ppm at least once this spring: at a second site in Alaska and others in Canada, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and an island in the North Pacific.” Arctic is the barometer of our planet. When it comes to climate change, if you want to know what will happen tomorrow, do not hire an astrologer, instead simply pay attention to what’s happening in the Arctic today. Dr. James Hansen and I are currently engaged in a conversation that will be published in the paperback edition of Arctic Voices in August. As Jim told me, “We must keep the Arctic cold, for us to have a stable planet.” Drilling in the Arctic Ocean is a wrong path for the planet. By asking “Can Shell Be Stopped?” in the NYR, I wasn’t interested in philosophical contemplation but rather to figure out a practical path that might stop oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean–a small but significant step toward helping to “keep the Arctic cold.”

How Our National Parks Are Threatened by Fracking

Glenn Scherer, Blue Ridge Press — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:55:00 -0700

A booming and unregulated energy industry is quietly but quickly encroaching on some of our most cherished national parks with gas and oil drilling fields.

When I was a teenager, a friend and I cruised across the U.S., touring our national parks. What I remember most from that 1977 trip is rolling over vast, wild, unspoiled miles, heading toward the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Zion.

Three years later, I visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park with my fiancé. What I recall from that trip is Gatlinburg, the park’s garish gateway with its Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium, Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, Hillbilly Village, and other weird attractions vying for the attention of corndog and cotton candy-eating visitors.

Gatlinburg became a tourist eyesore by accident—born out of random uncontrolled development. A more serious accident is now occurring in the great open spaces downwind and downstream of such natural wonders as Grand Tetons National Park, Glacier National Park, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

The threat is fracking. A booming and unregulated energy industry is quietly but quickly encroaching on some of our most cherished national parks with gas and oil drilling fields.

“From Glacier National Park’s eastern boundary, visitors can throw a stone and hit any of 16 exploratory wells and their associated holding tanks, pump jacks, and machinery,” says a just released report by the National Parks Conservation Association Center for Park Research. “Visitors heading east from Glacier National Park encounter road signs urging caution against the poisonous gases that fracking operations emit.”

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a lesser-known preserve in the North Dakota Badlands, once offered stargazers some of the nation’s darkest most pristine night skies. Now, fracking fields just outside the park create a scene right out of the science fiction movie Blade Runner, with gas flares spewing flames high into the sky and huge trucks roaring by. Ironically, a proposed bridge and road to service a newly planned fracking field will soon dominate the view from the park’s Elkhorn Ranch, where President Theodore Roosevelt first conceived his influential conservation ideas.

Of today’s 401 national park units, 131 lie either directly above or fewer than 25 surface miles from major underground oil and gas deposits. More than 33 percent of America’s national parks could be impacted by fracking.

The number of fracked wells encroaching on national parks is currently still small, but about to skyrocket. In 2010, for example, there were 1,000 frack well pads in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale region west of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. That number is projected to rise to as many as 15,000 well pads in twenty years.

Fracking doesn’t belong near our national parks. Hundred-foot tall derricks dominate the drilling fields. Each well consumes acres of land for its concrete well pad, plus more land for roaring, air-polluting compressor stations; wastewater tanks and pits; miles of potentially leaky pipeline; and new roads that require thousands of truck trips to transport the millions of gallons of freshwater needed to frack a well, and to haul away toxic wastewater containing volatile organic compounds like benzene, toluene and xylene.

Add to this a witches brew of air pollution—fumes burned off of wells or that rise from wastewater pits that can contain carbon disulfide and carbonyl sulfide (smelling like rotten eggs); the neurotoxins methyl pyridine and dimethyl pyridine; and lung-damaging ozone.

Fracking isn’t just a toxic eyesore. Its infrastructure is bad for local business, and already putting pressure on people who earn a living through tourism, hunting and fishing. Outfitters near national parks complain that they can’t take hunters back to prime hunting areas because elk and deer have been driven off by drilling. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership notes on its website that “increases in energy development… are threatening public-lands hunting and fishing opportunities across the country.”

Fracking needs to be managed responsibly. There’s no reason we can’t increase domestic energy production while also protecting our nation’s most inspiring natural wonders. Protection may not even require an act of Congress. All that is likely needed is conscientious oversight by the Department of the Interior and the Obama administration.

©Blue Ridge Press 2013

Blue Ridge Press senior editor Glenn Scherer lives in Hardwick, Vermont.

Climate Tipping Point? Concentration of Carbon Dioxide Tops 400 ppm for First Time in Human History

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:46:00 -0700

The 400 ppm threshold is widely recognized as a dangerous level that could drastically worsen human-caused global warming.

AMY GOODMAN: Scientists are warning the planet has now reached a grim climate milestone not seen for two or three million years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 400 parts per million. The 400 ppm threshold has been an important marker in U.N. climate change negotiations, widely recognized as a dangerous level that could drastically worsen human-caused global warming.

The environmentalist group 350.org takes its name after the 350 parts per million threshold that scientists say is the maximum atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide for a safe planet. In a statement on the parts per million number hitting 400, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben said, quote, "The only question now is whether the relentless rise in carbon can be matched by a relentless rise in the activism necessary to stop it."

To find out more about the impacts of crossing the threshold, we’re joined now by leading climate scientist Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University, author of the recent book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Thank you for joining us from the public television station in State College, WPSU. Thanks so much, Michael Mann. Talk about the significance of this threshold being passed.

MICHAEL MANN: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

So, this number, 400 parts per million, what does it mean? It’s the number of molecules of CO2 for every million molecules of air; 400 of them are now CO2. Just two centuries ago, that number was only 280 parts per million. So if we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere at current rates, we’ll reach a doubling of the pre-industrial levels of CO2 within the next few decades.

Now, 400, what does that round number, 400, mean? Well, what it means is that, as you alluded to, we have to go several million years back in time to find a point in earth’s history where CO2 was as high as it is now. And, of course, we’re just blowing through this 400 ppm limit. If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades. We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.

AMY GOODMAN: Like what?

MICHAEL MANN: So, what we are already witnessing, in fact, the effects of climate change. If we look at the past year here in the U.S., last summer, the record heat, the record drought, the record wildfire that destroyed large forest areas in Colorado, New Mexico. We saw, you know, tremendous damage to our crops in the breadbasket of the country. We saw Arctic sea ice diminish to the lowest level we’ve ever seen, and it’s on a trajectory where there will be no ice in the Arctic at the end of the summer in perhaps a matter of 10 years or so. We also saw the devastation of Superstorm Sandy. Now, we can’t say that Hurricane Sandy was caused by climate change, but many of its characteristics are precisely the kinds of characteristics that we predict tropical storms and hurricanes will have if we continue to warm the planet. We will see more destructive tropical storms. We’ll see more flooding. We’ll see more drought. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because, remember, we’ve only just crossed 400 now. We will reach 450 ppm in a matter of a couple decades if we continue with business as usual.

AMY GOODMAN: How can this be stopped, Professor Mann?

MICHAEL MANN: Well, ultimately, you know, we have to find a way to move away from our addiction to fossil fuels. As former President George W. Bush once put it, we’re addicted to fossil fuels. We need to find a way to transition away from those means of obtaining energy, fossil fuel energy, that we know is degrading the climate and degrading the planet. We have to find a way to level the playing field so that the marketplace will allow renewable energy sources to compete with fossil fuel energy. We’re currently providing subsidies to fossil fuels, the very sources of energy that are degrading the climate, and not providing the appropriate incentives to developing alternative energy.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mann, I want to turn to the Keystone XL pipeline, the controversial pipeline which would deliver tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in Texas. Earlier this year, a State Department report concluded the Keystone XL pipeline does not threaten the global climate. A number of environmental groups opposed the conclusion in a report called "Cooking the Books." They said, quote, "In a world constrained by the realities of climate change, the proper measure of any project’s climate impact should not be based on the assumptions inherent in a business as usual scenario that guarantees climate disaster. ... There is a climate impact from burning 830,000 barrels per day of any crude that cannot be ignored," they wrote. Michael Mann, what do you think of the climatic effects of the Keystone XL pipeline, if it is approved by President Obama and the State Department?

MICHAEL MANN: Sure. And my understanding was that, in fact, that report was criticized by folks within the EPA, and so there was some question about the accuracy of that report.

But that aside, you know, the larger picture here, the Keystone XL pipeline, developing these tar sand oils in Canada, there have been some calculations that argue that, you know, even if we develop the full petroleum reserves from the tar sands, that we wouldn’t add to our global carbon emissions nearly as much as if we continue, for example, to burn coal. There’s a lot more coal available to burn than there is these tar sand oils.

On the other hand, I think it represents what’s wrong about our current prioritization. If we are to invest heavily in the infrastructure so we’re subsidizing efforts to get at this increasingly difficult reservoir of fossil fuel energy, if we are to incentivize that effort through certain government subsidies, then we’re going in exactly the opposite direction of where we need to be going. We’re actually simply developing more and more of the available fossil fuel reserves at a time when we have to be ramping them down. We need to be bringing our global carbon emissions to a peak within the next few years, and we need to ramp them down dramatically in the decades ahead, if we are going to avoid crossing that next sobering milestone, 450 parts per million in the atmosphere.

And so, it’s really not so much precisely how much carbon we’ll add to the atmosphere by building the Keystone XL pipeline as it is it’s an example of how we’re going the wrong direction. We need to follow what the rest of the world is doing. If you look to India and China, the developing world, they’re investing far more in renewable energy than we are here in the U.S. And this is in fact a matter of global competitiveness. We in the U.S. are falling behind because we’re letting the rest of the world move ahead and recognize that the future of our global economy is going to be in renewable energy.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, last week we reported that an environmental activist met Vice President Joe Biden in South Carolina. Her name was Elaine Cooper. And she wrote for the Sierra Club, saying, "I asked him" — she’s talking about Vice President Joe Biden— "about the administration’s commitment to making progress climate and whether the president would reject the pipeline." She said, "He looked at the Sierra Club hat on my head" — Biden did — "and [he] said, 'Yes, I do—I share your views—but I am in the minority.'" What does that suggest to you, Michael Mann? What message do you have for President Obama?

MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, I saw that. I read that interview, and it was a bit disturbing. You know, the president has talked a good game in the past few months since he won re-election. In his State of the Union address, I think he outlined very clearly the threat of continuing to worsen the climate change problem through our burning of fossil fuels. He acknowledged the threat that it represents to us, whether you’re talking about human health, food resources, water resources, national security. Across the board, if we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate greenhouse gas concentrations, the cost to society is going to be far greater than any cost of action. And the president has talked a good game in recent months. On the other hand, there are some—to those who read the tea leaves, there appear to be some signals that suggest that he may approve the Keystone XL pipeline. And if he were to do that, in my view, that would be a big mistake. Like I said before, it would be moving us in exactly the opposite direction of where we need to be moving.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Professor Mann, you have been targeted by climate skeptics for—climate change deniers for years. What is your message to them? And can you talk about the title of your book?

MICHAEL MANN: Sure thing. So, the title of the book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. And as a climate scientist who published an iconic graph called "the hockey stick," which shows how unusual recent warming is, I found myself in the crosshairs of the efforts to discredit the science of climate change, many of those efforts funded by vested interests who don’t want to see us move away from our addiction to fossil fuels. And so I recount my experiences in the book.

But I also talked about the larger issues involved. You know, for example, you alluded to the word "skeptic." Well, many of those who simply deny that climate change exists, we don’t call them skeptics, because that’s not skepticism. That’s just denial or contrarianism. Now, skepticism is a good thing in science, but it means looking at all sides of an issue. And so, when you talk about the uncertainties, there are uncertainties in, for example, the precise projections of how much sea-level rise we will see in the next century. But it turns out those uncertainties are not a reason for inaction, for the same reason that we purchase fire insurance—not because we think our houses are going to burn down, but because we need to hedge against that potentially catastrophic, low-probability outcome. Mitigating climate change is in fact a planetary insurance policy. And so, there’s room for discussion of uncertainty, and there’s room for a good-faith, worthy debate about what to do about this problem. There are valid points of view.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Mann, we’re going to have to leave it there.

MICHAEL MANN: There are valid points of view across the spectrum. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I thank you so much for being with us, leading climate scientist, distinguished professor of meteorology, speaking to us from Penn State University. His book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

5 Critical Actions Obama Needs to Take Right Now to Avert Massive Climate Disruption

Michael Brune, AlterNet — Mon, 06 May 2013 08:58:00 -0700

Each of these actions is within President Obama's power right now. If he's serious about addressing climate disruption, not one of them is optional.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

If all goes well, my parents will finally get to return home today. They live on the New Jersey Shore, on Chadwick Beach Island, next to Barnegat Bay. My brother, sisters, and I all grew up in the house, which my dad built with my uncle, almost fifty years ago.

Six months ago, Sandy took it apart.

By the time it hit the eastern seaboard, Sandy was an unusual hybrid of a post-tropical cyclone and an upper level low system. "Superstorms" like Sandy could develop without the influence of climate disruption, but warmer ocean temperatures and a shifting jet stream unquestionably have increased the odds. The scariest thing about Sandy is that such a freak of weather may no longer be so freakish.

A new norm of extreme weather is a daunting prospect. In Sandy's case, the damage to my childhood home was part of the worst U.S. natural disaster since hurricanes Katrina and Rita -- much more than $50 billion in damages and at least 72 deaths. But Sandy also destroyed something intangible -- our complacency. No longer can we assign the consequences of climate disruption to some distant future. When Sandy struck, the future rose with the sea and smashed into us head on. The question it left behind was this: What do we do about it?

For the past 100 days, Sierra Club members and supporters have answered that question loudly and clearly. We gathered in Washington, D.C., for the largest climate rally in history. We held town hall meetings and grassroots rallies across the country. And we helped send more than a million messages to Barack Obama -- telling him that we want bold action on climate disruption.

For his part, the president answered Sandy's challenge by talking about the climate crisis in his strongest words yet, both in the State of the Union and his inaugural address.

The president's words were welcome, but words will not be enough. Here are five critical actions we need him to take:

Reject the toxic Keystone XL pipeline.
Protect our water from coal plant pollution.
Close loopholes on fracking and protect our wildlands from oil and gas development.
Finalize strong standards for cleaner tailpipe emissions.
Move forward with standards against industrial pollution.

Each of these actions is within President Obama's power right now. If he's serious about addressing climate disruption, not one of them is optional.

Meanwhile, we have to keep our own voices raised. If you haven't added yours yet -- you can do it here. Together, we will move forward on climate -- and we need our president to lead the way.

James Hansen: The One Thing We Should Be Doing to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:17:00 -0700

The country's leading climatologist talks about what our future looks like if we continue along with business as usual -- and what we could do to prevent catastrophe.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who has done more to further our understanding of the impacts of climate change than Dr. James Hansen. After 46 years working a scientist and climatogolist for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen wasn’t content to simply catalog the dangers facing humanity and our planet — he has been ringing the alarm bell. “On a blistering June day in 1988 he was called before a Congressional committee and testified that human-induced global warming had begun,” the New York Times wrote in a recent story about Hansen. “Speaking to reporters afterward in his flat Midwestern accent, he uttered a sentence that would appear in news reports across the land: ‘It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’”

Over the next several decades as scientific evidence poured in about the threats from climate change, and as governments — including the U.S. — failed to take any meaningful action, Hansen stepped out of the lab and into the media spotlight. He has participated in climate change protests, including being arrested several times, and has been outspoken about urging the Obama administration to kill the Keystone XL pipeline proposal. He warned that building the pipeline would mean “game over” for the climate.

This week Hansen was awarded the 2013 Ridenhour Prize for Courage from the Fertel Foundation and the Nation Institute. Ridenhour prizes are named in honor of the late Ron Ridenhour, who blew the whistle on the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War and went on to become an award-winning investigative journalist.

“At a moment when a debate is raging about the treatment of whistleblowers, the Ridenhour Prizes recognize those who put their lives on the line to challenge the status quo,” said Randy Fertel, founder of the Fertel Foundation, which co-sponsors the prizes. “The 2013 winners represent voices who have come forward to speak truth on the most defining issues of our time.”

Hansen recently announced that he is stepping down from his post at NASA. He talked to AlterNet about what he plans to do next, what may be in store for our future, and the most important thing we can do to prevent catastrophic, runaway climate change.

Tara Lohan. First off, congratulations on your Ridenhour Prize for Courage. They selected you for your decades of hard work ringing the alarm bell about climate change. Does it get a little lonely out there for you?

James Hansen: Well, that is an interesting question I have never been asked before. I am a little surprised that the scientific community has allowed us to go so far down the line that it's almost too late to avoid the rather substantial climate change and practical impacts. It was not surprising at all that the scientific community or at least many people in it objected to my testimony in the late 1980s and was illustrated so well by the article that Dick Kerr wrote in Science Magazine that was called "Hansen vs. the World on the Greenhouse Threat."

It was interesting because in that article he interviews a lot of people at a meeting, which was described as a “get Hansen” meeting, but in any case, he got the comment from one of the scientists that said, “Well, if there was a secret ballot, a secret vote probably the majority of us would agree that this global warming was underway,” but they weren't ready to say so yet. And I can completely understand that, in the 1980s it was not yet statistically proven.

But what's a little disappointing is that we've reached a point where we should really be pounding on the desk of leaders and saying, “Hey, you've got to do something. You have to do something in a hurry or we're going to leave our children and grandchildren a situation that's out of their control. There will be large impacts, which they simply cannot do anything about.” And the basic physics for that is very well understood that the climate system has tremendous inertia, it does not respond quickly as humans or nature applies forces to the system. But now we know those forces, those human made forces — the CO2 amount and how it's changing is known very precisely. And we know the consequences on the century timescale are going to be enormous. So there's really no disagreement about that and the fact that we won't be able to control it.

So in that sense, the answer to your question is that I am disappointed that there aren’t more of my colleagues out there. On the other hand, it's not that most of them now disagree, I mean those who are in the category of knowing what you are talking about because of relevant expertise, actually say that they're glad I'm making noises because they think it's appropriate.

TL: A lot of people in the activist community like to point their fingers at government for a very good reason, but what do you think the scientific community should be doing?

JH: Well, I think the government should be asking the scientific community. We have a National Academy of Sciences that was formed at the request of Abraham Lincoln to advise the government on technical matters, which require scientific expertise. So if the government wants to do something it could ask the Academy to give it a report to provide some guidance and that's not really happening. Instead, we're allowing the politics to control the discussion and that then ends up leading to little if any action because politics is not going to allow it simply because there's such a preference among the fossil fuel industry and the people who are making a lot of money off of it to continue business as usual.

So the politics ends up in a stalemate. The scientific community has issued reports. The major scientific groups like the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society have pretty strong statements about the fact that humans are causing climate change and there will be consequences. So I'm not sure that it can do a lot more if it's not asked to provide specific guidance.

TL: Why do you think we are so incapable of taking action when we are presented with the overwhelming scientific evidence?

JH: Well, what I've learned in going to several different countries is that the money has a huge influence on national politics not only in the United States but in practically every country in the world. And the fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest industry in the world, so it becomes difficult to get government action without more pressure from the public. And that, in the case of this problem, is something that is really difficult because of the fact of this inertia and delayed response so the public doesn't see that much happening.

The difficulty is that because of this inertia of the system, we have only realized, the planet has only realized, about half of the effect of the gases that are already in the atmosphere — the rest is still in the pipeline and will occur over coming decades and this century. And that makes it very difficult. The public has many other issues on its mind like feeding their families and important practical issues. If they don't see a major effect then it's just not high enough on their priority list.

It's clear now to the scientific community that we should be doing something and yet we're not doing much. As I say, we're almost to the point where it's going to be unavoidable that we will have significant consequences this century, in the lifetime of today's young people.

TL: Based on that, where we stand right now, what does our future look like if we continue along the path we're on?

JH: Well, okay it still depends. If we continue on the path that we're on, which is continuing to actually increase CO2 emissions, then we're talking about a different planet by the end of the century in the sense that we could get warming of at least a few degrees celsius which would mean that, among other things, the two biggest effects that I'm concerned with are those that are irreversible. And if we continue on that business-as-usual pathway then the ice sheets are not going to be stable, they're going to begin to disintegrate rapidly, which will mean sea level rise of many meters. Scientists will argue about how much sea level rise will occur this century in the next 87 years, for some reason the year 2100 is picked as the year we're trying to estimate the change.

It's very hard to say when that collapse will occur. It's like the stock market, if the country has a stupid economic policy then eventually the stock market is going to reflect that with a collapse, but you can't predict exactly when it's going to occur. Anyway, in my opinion, we would get multi-meter sea level rise this century. Some other scientists argue that we'll only get about one meter this century and the multi-meter rise will be next century. But, in either case it means that all the coastal cities would have to be abandoned at some point whether it's this century or next century and that's thousands of cities around the world on coastlines. Cities develop from coastlines because commerce was by ships for much of history so that's one of the irreversible effects.

The other one is the extermination of species. If we begin to slow down emissions by the end of this decade, then we can keep the warming less than two degrees Celsius. In that case, I think most of the species can survive. But if we continue business as usual, the whole century, so that climate zones really shift a large amount so that species have to migrate to a different region in order to survive; then when that's combined with the other pressures we're putting on species, the other stresses that we're causing as humans basically take over the planet, it's going to mean that a large fraction of species get exterminated, which is another irreversible effect — one which is morally reprehensible.

But the practical thing, many people are not too concerned about sea level rise later this century or species extermination later this century. They are more concerned with climate events that are beginning to happen now. We can see that climate extremes are beginning to increase as expected with a globally warming because the distribution of anomalies from a normal climate is shifting such that the extreme events are more frequent. That's true both for temperature and for rainfall because the amount of rainfall depends upon the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, which increases as the planet gets warmer.

So you get more extreme rain events when you do get rain, but because of the increased temperature the droughts also increase in intensity and the fires that go with drought conditions become more intense and burn hotter. So we're beginning to see these more extreme paths. Also, storms that are driven by latent heat increase water vapor in the atmosphere also can be more powerful as the planet gets warmer. I think we're beginning to see that effect also. If we stay with business as usual, those effects will be larger and larger as we go decade by decade into the future.

TL: What kind of policy changes should we be advocating for immediately?

JH: Yes, that's a good question and it's actually quite clear what we should do. The fundamental fact is that as long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest energy to the consumer then we'll just keep burning that. That's what's happening so far. The truth is fossil fuels are not the cheapest. If we would eliminate the subsidies for them and if we would include in their price, the external costs of them — the human health effects of air pollution and water pollution from burning and mining of fossil fuels are presently worn by the public entirely without any of the health effects being charged to the fossil fuel industry. The public picks up their health costs and the effect of climate change. The increased climate extremes are already causing some very expensive events.

Either the public picks it up by just suffering the damage or the federal government may come in and provide relief of billions of dollars. But again, that comes out of the taxpayers’ pocket. So what we should do to solve the problem and get us to move to a clean energy future is to book a gradually rising price on carbon, which would be a fee that you collect from possible fuel companies at the domestic mine or the port of entry. So it's a very small number of sources and very accurately known. So you can just have a carbon fee which we suggest, for example, should be 10 dollars a ton to start with and increase year-by-year. The money that's collected should be distributed 100 percent back to the public, to all legal residents, in equal amount. That way people would have the resources needed to make changes over coming years.

When they buy a new vehicle, they buy one that's more efficient, they insulate their homes, they make choices. And it would provide the incentive for the business community, for entrepreneurs to develop low-carbon and no-carbon energy sources and products that are more energy efficient. And would stimulate our economy and make us much more competitive on international trading by making us leaders in clean energies. That is finally beginning to be recognized.

You may have noticed in the past two weeks, there was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, a conservative newspaper, by George Shultz and Gary Becker, which advocated exactly what I just described. The carbon fee with 100 percent of the money distributed to the public. So it does not make the government any bigger and it allows the market to determine what are the most efficient ways to move to a clean energy future. Yesterday, the Washington Post, which is a liberal newspaper, had an editorial saying essentially the same thing, they were pointing out that the European cap and trade system has collapsed and is completely ineffectual. That's what we've been saying for the last few years that cap and trade with offsets is a hokey system, which has no hopes of solving the climate problem. We need a simple honest approach, which makes fossil fuels pay their true cost to society and which stimulates the development of clean energy alternatives.

Unless you make fossil fuels pay their true costs, people will just keep burning them. The [Obama] administration's approach is, “Well, let's reduce coal use and make vehicles more efficient.” Those things will reduce U.S. carbon emissions, but they won't solve the problem because they reduce the demand for fossil fuels which makes them cheaper and somebody else will burn them.

The only way to solve the problem is to put an honest price on the fossil fuels. And it's going to need to be international. So the United States and China are going to have to get together and agree on the fact that they both will need to put a gradually rising price on carbon emissions. And I feel that's a doable thing because China knows that they will suffer from climate change more than most places. They have their 50 million people that are living near sea level. They have tremendous pollution, air and water pollution from fossil fuels. So they have a strong incentive for wanting to deal with this problem.

And to have a bilateral agreement between China and the U.S. is a practical solution. While trying to get 190 nations to agree with the Kyoto protocol type approach is hopeless as we've seen from the negotiations that have occurred over the last 20 years. That's kind of a truth telling, which we have to have. Otherwise, we just continue down this line where we pretend that the UN is going to solve the problem eventually and they're not doing anything to help.

TL: If governments can't move fast enough, and so far our government especially has not moved much at all, what's our plan B?

JH: It's interesting, I was at a meeting of some of the 20 top scientists in the country just a few weeks ago and they're already at the point of saying, “Well, we have to do geoengineering.” So they keep thinking of finding ways to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere, well it will be incredibly expensive and we will be leaving that job for young people. It's not clear that it will work, it's not clear that it will be practical. It will be so expensive that it will make no sense.

We really need to have a plan A, plan B just is frightening. That's why I think it's really important that the U.S. and China start talking to each other about this. And you know, there actually was a meeting within the last two weeks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese counterparts. One of the outcomes is that they will have some continuing talks between the two nations on the climate issue. And that is probably the most promising avenue for a plan A.

TL: I remember probably about five years or so ago everyone was talking about peak oil and then we had this resurgence of fossil fuels with the tar sands and fracking. Is the use of more unconventional sources more of a sign that we are in fact running out of the cheap and easy stuff and that we are running toward peak oil or does that mean the predictions of peak oil were actually off?

JH: Well, it's a sign that governments don't get it. That they think we just continue to go after every fossil fuel we can find including those that are very hard to get at, it takes a lot of energy to extract them and they're particularly dirty and cause other environmental problems as well as climate change. They don't get it, we can't exploit the unconventional fossil fuels without guaranteeing that our children and grandchildren will have problems that are out of their control. That's the message that has to get through.

I'm hoping that the Obama administration is beginning to understand this and that they will reject the Keystone Pipeline. That's becoming more likely than pundits have been suggesting because it is just crazy to approve that pipeline. It would guarantee that we do exploit a significant fraction of those tar sands. Whatever we extract out of there and put into the atmosphere we're going to have to take back out somehow and it's going to be very expensive and may be impossible. If it's impossible then our children will suffer the consequences.

So just by putting this moderate rising price on carbon you can be far more effective and more helpful for U.S. energy independence and economic development than you would be by approving that pipeline and producing a small number of jobs, temporary jobs associated with building a pipeline. You would get far more better jobs with this rising price on carbon because it would stimulate the development of clean energies and energy efficiency.

TL: I know that you have recently announced your retirement from your long-held post at NASA. What's next for you?

JH: I want to continue to do science so I have to generate non-government support for a couple of people to work with me on doing science. I will be able to hopefully spend more time on it because I won't have these administrative duties that I had with the government. But, it will also allow me to do things that I couldn't do as part of the government. For example, I'm working with Our Children's Trust on legal actions against the government for not protecting the rights of young people. I was not able to testify against the government when I was a government employee, but I can do that in the future.

And also, there are going to be some legal actions trying to stop the expansion of coal exports from the West Coast and legal actions to try to stop the pipelines, the tar sands pipelines both the east-west pipeline and the north-south one. And I will now have the time that I can contribute to the science aspect of those attempts to stop this senseless development of unconventional fossil fuels and continued reliance on coal. Because what the science tells us is we can't do that, we've got to leave most of the remaining coal in the ground and we've got to leave those unconventional fossil fuels in the ground.

TL: Given everything that you know and how much you understand about this, how is it that you stay hopeful?

JH: Well, that's fairly easy because if you look at our planet and nature it’s so incredible. With my grandchildren, we've been focusing on one particular species, the Monarch butterfly, which is just absolutely incredible. You have to preserve this incredible life on the planet. I believe as biologist Ed Wilson has argued that we can. It's possible that this present time in which we are putting so much pressure on other life on the planet, that this is a bottleneck and if we are smart we can win this battle and allow the other life on the planet to continue to exists, co-exist with us, and I think that's possible. But it's going to require that people understand the situation and put the pressure on governments to see that we have policies that will achieve that. I think it's still possible, but we're running out of time.

“Human Beings Have No Right to Water” and Other Words of Wisdom from Your Friendly Neighborhood Global Oligarch

Andrew Gavin Marshall, Andrewgavinmarshall.com — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:32:00 -0700

Privatization of our natural resources is leading to the inevitable extinction of our species, and possibly all life on earth.

In the 2005 documentary, We Feed the World, then-CEO of Nestlé, the world’s largest foodstuff corporation, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, shared some of his own views and ‘wisdom’ about the world and humanity. Brabeck believes that nature is not “good,” that there is nothing to worry about with GMO foods, that profits matter above all else, that people should work more, and that human beings do not have a right to water.

Today, he explained, “people believe that everything that comes from Nature is good,” marking a large change in perception, as previously, “we always learnt that Nature could be pitiless.” Humanity, Brabeck stated, “is now in the position of being able to provide some balance to Nature, but in spite of this we have something approaching a shibboleth that everything that comes from Nature is good.” He then referenced the “organic movement” as an example of this thinking, premising that “organic is best.” But rest assured, he corrected, “organic is not best.” In 15 years of GMO food consumption in the United States, “not one single case of illness has occurred.” In spite of this, he noted, “we’re all so uneasy about it in Europe, that something might happen to us.” This view, according to Brabeck, is “hypocrisy more than anything else.”

Water, Brabeck correctly pointed out, “is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world,” but added: “It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right.” Brabeck elaborated on this “extreme” view: “That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.” The other view, and thus, the “less extreme” view, he explained, “says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.” The biggest social responsibility of any CEO, Brabeck explained:

is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued, long term existence will we be in the position to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world. We’re in the position of being able to create jobs... If you want to create work, you have to work yourself, not as it was in the past where existing work was distributed. If you remember the main argument for the 35-hour week was that there was a certain amount of work and it would be better if we worked less and distributed the work amongst more people. That has proved quite clearly to be wrong. If you want to create more work you have to work more yourself. And with that we’ve got to create a positive image of the world for people, and I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be positive about the future. We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want and we still go around as if we were in mourning for something.

While watching a promotional video of a Nestlé factory in Japan, Brabeck commented, “You can see how modern these factories are; highly robotized, almost no people.” And of course, for someone claiming to be interested in creating jobs, there appears to be no glaring hypocrisy in praising factories with “almost no people.”

It’s important to note that this is not simply the personal view of some random corporate executive, but rather, that it reflects an institutional reality of corporations: the primary objective of a corporation – above all else – is to maximize short-term profits for shareholders. By definition, then, workers should work more and be paid less, the environment is only a concern so much as corporations have unhindered access to control and exploit the resources of the environment, and ultimately, it’s ‘good’ to replace workers with automation and robotics so that you don’t have to pay fewer or any workers, and thus, maximize profits. With this institutional – and ideological – structure (which was legally constructed by the state), concern for the environment, for water, for the world and for humanity can only be promoted if it can be used to advance corporate profits, or if it can be used for public relations purposes. Ultimately, it has to be hypocritical. A corporate executive cannot take an earnest concern in promoting the general welfare of the world, the environment, or humanity, because that it not the institutional function of a corporation, and no CEO that did such would be allowed to remain as CEO.

This is why it matters what Peter Brabeck thinks: he represents the type of individual – and the type of thinking – that is a product of and a requirement for running a successful multinational corporation, of the corporate culture itself. To the average person viewing his interview, it might come across as some sort of absurd tirade you’d expect from aNightline interview with some infamous serial killer, if that killer had been put in charge of a multinational corporation:

People have a ‘right’ to water? What an absurd notion! Next thing you’ll say is that child labour is bad, polluting the environment is bad, or that people have some sort of ‘right’ to... life! Imagine the audacity! All that matters is ‘profits,’ and what a wonderful thing it would be to have less people and more profits! Water isn’t a right, it’s only a necessity, so naturally, it makes sense to privatize it so that large multinational corporations like Nestlé can own the world’s water and ensure that only those who can pay can drink. Problem solved!

Sadly, though intentionally satirical, this is the essential view of Brabeck and others like him. And disturbingly, Brabeck’s influence is not confined to the board of Nestlé. Brabeck became the CEO of Nestlé in 1997, a position he served until 2008, at which time he resigned as CEO but remained as chairman of the board of directors of Nestlé. Apart from Nestlé, Brabeck serves as vice chairman of the board of directors of L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics and ‘beauty’ company; vice chairman of the board of Credit Suisse Group, one of the world’s largest banks; and is a member of the board of directors of Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s largest oil and energy conglomerates.

He was also a former board member of one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical conglomerates, Roche. Brabeck also serves as a member of the Foundation Board for the World Economic Forum (WEF), “the guardian of [the WEF’s] mission, values and brand... responsible for inspiring business and public confidence through an exemplary standard of governance.” Brabeck is also a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), a group of European corporate CEOs which directly advise and help steer policy for the European Union and its member countries. He has also attended meetings of theBilderberg group, an annual forum of 130 corporate, banking, media, political and military elites from Western Europe and North America.

Thus, through his multiple board memberships on some of the largest corporations on earth, as well as his leadership and participation in some of the leading international think tanks, forums and business associations, Brabeck has unhindered access to political and other elites around the world. When he speaks, powerful people listen.

Brabeck’s Brain

Brabeck has become an influential voice on issues of food and water, and not surprisingly so, considering he is chairman of the largest food service corporation on earth. Brabeck’s career goes back to when he was working for Nestlé in Chile in the early 1970s, when the left-leaning democratically-elected president Salvador Allende was “threatening to nationalize milk production, and Nestlé’s Chilean operations along with it.” A 1973 Chilean military coup – with the support of the CIA – put an end to that “threat” by bringing in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who murdered thousands of Chileans and established a ‘national security state’, imposing harsh economic measures to promote the interests of elite corporate and financial interests (what later became known as ‘neoliberalism’).

In a 2009 article for Foreign Policy magazine, Brabeck declared: “Water is the new gold, and a few savvy countries and companies are already banking on it.” In a 2010 article for the Guardian, Brabeck wrote that, “[w]hile our collective attention has been focused on depleting supplies of fossil fuels, we have been largely ignoring the simple fact that, unless radical changes are made, we will run out of water first, and soon.” What the world needs, according to Brabeck, is “to set a price that more accurately values our most precious commodity,” and that, [t]he era of water at throwaway prices is coming to an end.” In other words, water should become increasingly expensive, according to Brabeck. Countries, he wrote, should recognize “that not all water use should be regarded as equal.”

In a discussion with the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Brabeck spoke against the use of biofuels – converting food into fuel – and suggested that this was the primary cause of increased food prices (though in reality, food price increases are primarily the result of speculation by major banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase). Brabeck noted the relationship between his business – food – and major geopolitical issues, stating: “What we call today the Arab Spring... really started as a protest against ever-increasing food prices.” One “solution,” he suggested, was to provide a “market” for water as “the best guidance that you can have.” If water was a ‘market’ product, it wouldn’t be wasted on growing food for fuel, but focus on food for consumption – and preferably (in his view), genetically modified foods. After all, he said, “if the market forces are there the investments are going to be made.” Brabeck suggested that the world could “feed nine billion people,” providing them with water and fuel, but only on the condition that “welet the market do its thing.”

Brabeck co-authored a 2011 article for the Wall Street Journal in which he stated that in order to provide “universal access to clean water, there is simply no other choice but to price water at a reasonable rate,” and that roughly 1.8 billion people on earth lack access to clean drinking water “because of poor water management and governance practices, and the lack of political will.” Brabeck’s job then, as chairman of Nestlé, is to help create the “political will” to make water into a modern “market” product.

Now before praising Brabeck for his ‘enlightened’ activism on the issue of water scarcity and providing the world’s poor with access to clean drinking water (which are very real and urgent issues needing attention), Brabeck himself has stressed that his interest in the issue of water has nothing to do with actually addressing these issues in a meaningful way, or for the benefit of the earth and humanity. No, his motivation is much more simple than this.

In a 2010 interview for BigThink, Brabeck noted: “If Nestlé and myself have become very vocal in the area of water, it was not because of any philanthropic idea, it was very simple: by analyzing... what is the single most important factor for the sustainability of Nestlé, water came as [the] number one subject.” This is what led Brabeck and Nestlé into the issue of water “sustainability,” he explained. “I think this is part of a company’s responsibility,” and added: “Now, if I was in a different industry, I would have a different subject, certainly, that I would be focusing on.”

Brabeck was asked if industries should “have a role in finding solutions to environmental issues that affect their business,” to which he replied: “Yes, because it is in the interest of our shareholders... If I want to convince my shareholders that this industry is a long-term sustainable industry, I have to ensure that all aspects that are vital for this company are sustainable... When I see, like in our case, that one of the aspects – which is water, which is needed in order to produce the raw materials for our company – if this is not sustainable, then my enterprise is not sustainable. So therefore I have to do something about it. So shareholder interest and societal interest are common.”

Thus, when Brabeck and Nestlé promote “water sustainability,” what they are really promoting is the sustainability of Nestlé’s access to and control over water resources. How is that best achieved? Well, since Nestlé is a large multinational corporation, the natural solution is to promote ‘market’ control of water, which means privatization and monopolization of the world’s water supply into a few corporate hands.

In a 2011 conversation with the editor of Time Magazine at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brabeck referred to a recent World Economic Forum meeting where the issue of “corporate social responsibility” was the main subject of discussion, when corporate executives “started to talk about [how] we have to give back to society,” Brabeck spoke up and stated: “I don’t feel that we have to give back to society, because we have not been stealing from society.” Brabeck explained to the Council on Foreign Relations that he felt such a concept was the purview of philanthropy, and “this was a problem for the CEO of any public company, because I personally believe that no CEO of a public company should be allowed to make philanthropy... I think anybody who does philanthropy should do it with his own money and not the money of the shareholders.” Engaging in corporate social responsibility, Brabeck explained, “was an additional cost.”

At the 2008 World Economic Forum, a consortium of corporations and international organizations formed the 2030 Water Resources Group, chaired by Peter Brabeck. It was established in order to “shape the agenda” for the discussion of water resources, and to create “new models for collaboration” between public and private enterprises. The governing council of the 2030 WRG is chaired by Brabeck and includes the executive vice president and CEO of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investment arm of the World Bank, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the chief business officer and managing director of the World Economic Forum, the president of the African Development Bank, the chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, the president of the Asian Development Bank, the director-general of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, and the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, among others.

At the World Water Forum in 2012 – an event largely attended by the global proponents of water privatization, Nestlé among their most enthusiastic supporters – Brabeck suggested that the 2030 Water Resources Group represents a “global public-private initiative” which could help in “providing tools and information on best practice” as well as “guidance and new policy ideas on water resource scarcity.”

Brabeck and Nestlé had been in talks with the Canadian provincial government of Alberta in planning for a potential “water exchange,” to – in the words of Maclean’s magazine – “turn water into money.” In 2012, the University of Alberta bestowed an honorary degree upon Peter Brabeck “for his work as a responsible steward for water around the world.” Protests were organized at the university to oppose the ‘honor,’ with a representative from the public interest group, the Council of Canadians, noting: “I’m afraid that the university is positioning themselves on the side of the commodifiers, the people who want to say that water is not a human right that everyone has the right to, but is just a product that can be bought and sold.” A professor at the university stated: “I’m ashamed at this point, about what the university is doing and I’m also very concerned about the way the president of the university has been demonizing people who oppose this.” As another U of A professor stated: “What Nestlé does is take what clean water there is in which poor people are relying on, bottle it and then sell it to wealthier people at an exorbitant profit.”

The Global Water Privatization Agenda

Water privatization is an extremely vicious operation, where the quality of – and access to – water resources diminishes or even vanishes, while the costs explode. When it comes to the privatization of water, there is no such thing as “competition” in how the word is generally interpreted: there are only a handful of global corporations that undertake massive water privatizations. The two most prominent are the French-based Suez Environment and Veolia Environment, but also include Thames Water, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, among others. For a world in which food has already been turned into a “market commodity” and has been “financialized,” leading to massive food price increases, hunger riots, and immense profits for a few corporations and banks, the prospect of water privatization is even more disturbing.

The agenda of water privatization is organized at the international level, largely promoted through the World Water Forum and the World Water Council. The World Water Council (WWC) was established in 1996 as a French-based non-profit organization with over 400 members from intergovernmental organizations, government agencies, corporations, corporate-dominated NGOs and environmental organizations, water companies, international organizations and academic institutions.

Every three years, the WWC hosts a World Water Forum, the first of which took place in 1997, and the 6th conference in 2012 was attended by thousands of participants from countries and institutions all over the world get together to decide the future of water, and of course, promote the privatization of this essential resource to human life. The 6th World Water Forum, hosted in Marseilles, France, was primarily sponsored by the French government and the World Water Council, but included a number of other contributors, including: the African Development Bank, African Union Commission, Arab Water Council, Asian Development Bank, the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, the European Parliament, the European Water Association, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the Global Environment Facility, Inter-American Development Bank, Nature Conservancy, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Organization of American States (OAS), Oxfam, the World Bank, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Health Organization, the World Wildlife Fund; and a number of corporate sponsors, including: RioTinto Alcan, EDF, Suez Environment, Veolia, and HSBC. Clearly, they have human andenvironmental interests at heart.

The World Bank is a major promoter of water privatization, as much of its aid to ‘developing’ countries was earmarked for water privatization schemes which inevitably benefit major corporations, in co-operation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the U.S. Treasury. One of the first major water privatization schemed funded by the World Bank was in Argentina, for which the Bank “advised” the government of Argentina in 1991 on the bidding and contracting of the water concession, setting a model for what would be promoted around the world. The World Bank’s investment arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), loaned roughly $1 billion to the Argentine government for three water and sewage projects in the country, and even bought a 5% stake in the concession, thus becoming a part owner. When the concession for Buenos Aires was opened up, the French sent representatives from Veolia and Suez, which formed the consortium Aguas Argentinas, and of course, the costs for water services went up. Between 1993, when the contract with the French companies was signed, and 1997, the Aguas Argentinas consortium gained more influence with Argentine President Carlos Menem and his Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, who would hold meetings with the president of Suez as well as the President of France, Jacques Chirac. By 2002, the water rates (cost of water) in Buenos Aires had increased by 177%since the beginning of the concession.

In the 1990s, the amount of World Bank water privatization projects increased ten-fold, with 31% of World Bank water supply and sanitation projects between 1990 and 2001 including conditions of private-sector involvement, despite the fact that the projects consistently failed in terms of providing cheaper and better water to larger areas. But of course, they were highly profitable for large corporations, so naturally, they continued to be promoted and supported (and subsidized).

One of the most notable examples of water privatization schemes was in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. In 1998, an IMF loan to Bolivia demanded conditions of “structural reform,” the selling off of “all remaining public enterprises,” including water. In 1999, the World Bank told the Bolivian government to end its subsidies for water services, and that same year, the government leased the Cochabamba Water System to a consortium of multinational corporations, Aguas del Tunari, which included the American corporation Bechtel. After granting the consortium a 40-year lease, the government passed a law which would make residents pay the full cost of water services. In January of 2000, protests in Cochabamba shut down the city for four days, striking and establishing roadblocks, mobilizing against the water price increases which doubled or tripled their water bills. Protests continued in February, met with riot police and tear gas, injuring 175 people.

By April, the protests began to spread to other Bolivian cities and rural communities, and during a “state of siege” (essentially martial law) declared by Bolivian president Hugo Banzer, a 17-year old boy, Victor Hugo Daza, was shot and killed by a Bolivian Army captain, who was trained as the U.S. military academy, the School of the Americas. As riot police continued to meet protesters with tear gas and live ammunition, more people were killed, and dozens more injured. On April 10, the government conceded to the people, ending the contract with the corporate consortium and granting the people to control their water system through a grassroots coalition led by the protest organizers.

Two days later, World Bank President James Wolfensohn stated that the people of Bolivia should pay for their water services. On August 6, 2001, the president of Bolivia resigned, and the Vice President Jorge Quiroga, a former IBM executive, was sworn in as the new president to serve the remainder of the term until August of 2002. Meanwhile, the water consortium, deeply offended at the prospect of people taking control of their own resources, attempted to take legal action against the government of Bolivia for violating the contract. Bechtel was seeking $25 million in compensation for its “losses,” while recording a yearly profit of $14 billion, whereas the national budget of Bolivia was a mere $2.7 billion. The situation ultimately led to a type of social revolution which brought to power the first indigenous Bolivian leader in the country’s history, Evo Morales.

This, of course, has not stopped the World Bank and IMF – and the imperial governments which finance them – from promoting water privatization around the world for the exclusive benefit of a handful of multinational corporations. The World Bank promotes water privatization across Africa in order to “ease the continent’s water crisis,” by making water more expensive and less accessible.

As the communications director of the World Bank in 2003, Paul Mitchell, explained, “Water is crucial to life – we have to get water to poor people,” adding: “There are a lot of myths about privatization.” I would agree. Though the myth that it ‘works’ is what I would propose, but Mitchell instead suggested that, “[p]rivate sector participation is simply to manage the asset to make it function for the people in the country.” Except that it doesn’t. But don’t worry, decreasing water standards, dismantling water distribution, and rapidly increasing the costs of water to the poorest regions on earth is good, according to Mitchell and the World Bank. He told the BBC that what the World Bank is most interested in is the “best way to get water to poor people.” Perhaps he misspoke and meant to say, “the best way to take water from poor people,” because that’s what actually happens.

In 2003, the World Bank funded a water privatization scheme in the country of Tanzania, supported by the British government, and granting the concession to a consortium called City Water, owned by the British company Biwater, which worked with a German engineering firm, Gauff, to provide water to the city of Dar es Salaam and the surrounding region. It was one of the most ambitious water privatization schemes in Africa, with $140 million in World Bank funding, and, wrote John Vidal in the Guardian, it “was intended to be a model for how the world’s poorest communities could be lifted out of poverty.”

The agreement included conditions for the consortium to install new pipelines for water distribution. The British government’s Department for International Development gave a 440,000-pound contract to the British neoliberal think tank, Adam Smith International, “to do public-relations work for the project.” Tanzania’s best-known gospel singer was hired to perform a pop song about the benefits of privatization, mentioning electricity, telephones, the ports, railways, and of course, water. Both the IMF and World Bank made the water scheme a condition for “aid” they gave to the country. Less than one year into the ten-year contract, the private consortium, City Water, stopped paying its monthly fee for leasing the government’s pipes and infrastructure provided by the public water company, Dawasa, while simultaneously insisting that its own fees be raised. An unpublished World Bank report even noted: “The primary assumption on the part of almost all involved, particularly on the donor side, was that it would be very hard, if not impossible, for the private operator [City Water] to perform worse than Dawasa. But that is what happened.” The World Bank as a whole, however, endorsed the program as “highly satisfactory,” and rightly so, because it was doing what it was intended to do: provide profits for private corporations at the expense of poor people.

By 2005, the company had not built any new pipes, it had not spent the meager investments it promised, and the water quality declined. As British government “aid” money was poured into privatization propaganda, a video was produced which included the phrase: “Our old industries are dry like crops and privatization brings the rain.” Actually, privatization attaches a price-tag to rain. Thus, in 2005, the government of Tanzania ended the contract with City Water, and arrested the three company executives, deporting them back to Britain. As is typical, the British company, Biwater, then began to file a lawsuit against the Tanzanian government for breach of contract, wanting to collect $20-25 million. A press release from Biwater at the time wrote: “We have been left with no choice... If a signal goes out that governments are free to expropriate foreign investments with impunity,” investors would flee, and this would, of course, “deal a massive blow to the development goals of Tanzania and other countries in Africa.”

The sixth World Water Forum in Marseilles in 2012 brought together some 19,000 participants, where the French Development Minister Henri de Raincourt proposed a “global water and environment management scheme,” adding: “The French government is not alone in its conviction that a global environment agency is needed more than ever.” A parallel conference was held – the Alternative World Water Forum – which featured critics of water privatization. Gustave Massiah, a representative of the anti-globalization group Attac, stated, “Should a global water fund be in control, giving concessions to multinational companies, then that’s not a solution for us. On the contrary, that would only add to the problems of the current system.”

Another member of Attac, Jacques Cambon, used to be the head of SAFEGE’s Africa branch, a subsidiary of the water conglomerate Suez. Cambon was critical of the idea of a global water fund, warning against centralization, and further explained that the World Bank “has almost always financed large-scale projects that were not in tune with local conditions.” Maria Theresa Lauron, a Philippine activist, shared the story of water privatization in the Philippines, saying, “Since 1997, prices went up by 450 to 800 percent... At the same time, the water quality has gone down. Many people get ill because of bad water; a year ago some 600 people died as a result of bacteria in the water because the private company didn’t do proper water checks.” But then, why would the company do such a thing? It’s not like it’s particularly profitable to be concerned with human welfare.

In Europe, the European Commission had been pushing water privatization as a condition for development funds between 2002 and 2010, specifically in several central and eastern European countries which were dependent upon EU grants. Since the European debt crisis, the European Commission had made water privatization a condition for Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Greece is privatizing its water companies, Portugal is being pressured to sell its national water company, Aguas do Portugal, and in Italy, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Commission were pushing water privatization, even though a national referendum in July of 2011 saw the people of Italy reject such a scheme by 95%.

In this context, among the global institutions and corporations of power and influence, it is perhaps less surprising to imagine the chairman of Nestlé suggesting that human beings having a “right” to water is rather “extreme.” And for a very simple reason: that’s not profitable for Nestlé, even though it might be good for humanity and the earth. It’s about priorities, and in our world, priorities are set by multinational corporations, banks, and global oligarchs. As Nestlé would have us think, corporate and social interests are not opposed, as corporations – through their ‘enlightened’ self-interest and profit-seeking motives – will almost accidentally make the world a better place. Now, while neoliberal orthodoxy functions on the basis of people simply accepting this premise without investigation (like any religious belief), perhaps it would be worth looking at Nestlé as an example for corporate benefaction for the world and humanity.

Nestlé's Corporate Social Responsibility: Making the World Safe for Nestlé... and Incidentally Destroying the World

As a major multinational corporation, Nestlé has a proven track record of exploiting labour, destroying the environment, engaging in human rights violations, but of course – and most importantly – it makes big profits. In 2012, Nestlé was taking in major profits from ‘emerging markets’ in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, some emerging market profits began to slow down in 2013. This was partly the result ofa horsemeat scandal which required companies like Nestlé to intensify the screening of their food products.

Less than a year prior, Nestlé was complaining that “over-regulation” of the food industry was “undermining individual responsibility,” which is another way of saying that responsibility for products and their safety should be passed from the producer to the consumer. In other words, if you’re stupid enough to buy Nestlé products, it’s your fault if you get diabetes or eat horsemeat, and therefore, it’s your responsibility, not the responsibility of Nestlé. Fair enough! We’re stupid enough to accept corporations ruling over us, therefore, what right do we have to complain about all the horrendous crimes and destruction they cause? A cynic could perhaps argue such a point.

One of Nestlé’s most famous PR problems was that of marketing artificial baby milk, which sprung to headlines in the 1970s following the publication of “The Baby Killer,” accusing the company of getting Third World mothers hooked on formula. As research was proving that breastfeeding was healthier, Nestlé marketed its baby formula as a way for women to ‘Westernize’ and join the modern world, handing out pamphlets and promotional samples, with companies hiring “sales girls in nurses’ uniforms (sometimes qualified, sometimes not)” in order to drop by homes and sell formula. Women tried to save money on the formula by diluting it, often times with contaminated water. As the London-based organization War on Want noted: “The results can be seen in the clinics and hospitals, the slums and graveyards of the Third World... Children whose bodies have wasted away until all that is left is a big head on top of the shriveled body of an old man.” An official with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) blamed baby formula for “a million infant deaths every year through malnutrition and diarrheal diseases.”

Mike Muller, the author of “The Baby Killer” back in 1974, wrote an article for the Guardian in 2013 in which he mentioned that he gave Peter Brabeck a “present” at the World Economic Forum, a signed copyof the report. The report had sparked a global boycott of Nestlé and the company responded with lawsuits.

Nestlé has also been implicated for its support of palm-oil plantations, which have led to increased deforestation and the destruction of orangutan habitats in Indonesia. A Greenpeace publication noted that, “at least 1500 orangutans died in 2006 as a result of deliberate attacks by plantation workers and loss of habitat due to the expansion of oil palm plantations.” A social media campaign was launched against Nestlé for its role in supporting palm oil plantations, deforestation, and the destruction of orangutan habitats and lives. The campaign pressured Nestlé to decrease its “deforestation footprint.”

As Nestlé has been expanding its presence in Africa, it has also aroused more controversy in its operations on the continent. Nestlé purchases one-tenth of the world’s cocoa, most of which comes from the Ivory Coast, where the company has been implicated in the use of child labour. In 2001, U.S. legislation required companies to engage in “self-regulation” which called for “slave free” labeling on all cocoa products. This “self regulation,” however, “failed to deliver” – imagine that! – as one study carried out by Tulane University with funding from the U.S. government revealed that roughly 2 million children were working on cocoa-related activities in both Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Even an internal audit carried out by the company found that Nestlé was guilty of “numerous” violations of child labour laws. Nestlé’s head of operations stated, “The use of child labor in our cocoa supply goes against everything we stand for.” So naturally, they will continue to use child labour.

Peter Brabeck stated that it’s “nearly impossible” to end the practice, and he compared the practice to that of farming in Switzerland: “You go to Switzerland... still today, in the month of September, schools have one week holiday so students can help in the wine harvesting... In those developing countries, this also happens,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations. While acknowledging that this “is basically child labor and slave labor in some African markets,” it is “a challenge which is not very easy to tackle,” noting that there is “a very fine edge” of what is acceptable regarding “child labor in [the] agricultural environment.” He added: “It’s almost natural.” Thus, Brabeck explained, “you have to look at it differently,” and that it was not the job of Nestlé to tell parents that their children can’t work on cocoa plantations/farms, “which is ridiculous,” he suggested: “But what we are saying is we will help you that your child has access for schooling.” So clearly there is no problem with using child slavery, just so long as the children get some schooling... presumably, in their ‘off-hours’ from slavery. Problem solved!

While Brabeck and Nestlé have made a big issue of water scarcity, which again, is an incredibly important issue, their solutions revolve around “pricing” water at a market value, and thus encouraging privatization. Indeed, a global water grab has been a defining feature of the past several years (coupled with a great global land grab), in which investors, countries, banks and corporations have been buying up vast tracts of land (primarily in sub-Saharan Africa) for virtually nothing, pushing off the populations which live off the land, taking all the resources, water, and clearing the land of towns and villages, to convert them into industrial agricultural plantations to develop food and other crops for export, while domestic populations are pushed deeper into poverty, hunger, and are deprived of access to water. Peter Brabeck has referred to the land grabs as really being about water: “For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be seen as the most valuable part of the deal.” This, noted Brabeck, is “the great water grab.”

And of course, Nestlé would know something about water grabs, as it has become very good at implementing them. In past years, the company has been increasingly buying land where it is taking the fresh water resources, bottling them in plastic bottles and selling them to the public at exorbitant prices. In 2008, as Nestlé was planning to build a bottling water plant in McCloud, California, the Attorney General opposed the plan, noting: “It takes massive quantities of oil to produce plastic water bottles and to ship them in diesel trucks across the United States... Nestlé will face swift legal challenge if it does not fully evaluate the environmental impact of diverting millions of gallons of spring water from the McCloud River into billions of plastic water bottles.” Nestlé already operated roughly 50 springs across the country, and was acquiring more, such as a plan to draw roughly 65 million gallons of water from a spring in Colorado, despite fierce opposition to the deal.

Years of opposition to the plans of Nestlé in McCloud finally resulted in the company giving up on its efforts there. However, the company quickly moved on to finding new locations to take water and make a profit while destroying the environment (just an added bonus, of course). The corporation controls one-third of the U.S. market in bottled water, selling it as 70 different brand names, including Perrier, Arrowhead, Deer Park and Poland Spring. The two other large bottled water companies are Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, though Nestlé had earned a reputation “in targeting rural communities for spring water, a move that has earned it fierce opposition across the U.S. from towns worried about losing their precious water resources.” And water grabs by Nestlé as well as opposition continue to engulf towns and states and cities across the country, with one more recent case in Oregon.

Nestlé has aroused controversy for its relations with labour, exploiting farmers, pollution, and human rights violations, among many other things. Nestlé has been implicated in the kidnapping and murder of a union activist and employee of the company’s subsidiary in Colombia, with a judge demanding the prosecutor to “investigate leading managers of Nestle-Cicolac to clarify their likely involvement and/or planning of the murder of union leader Luciano Enrique Romero Molina.” In 2012, a Colombian trade union and a human rights group filed charges against Nestlé for negligence over the murder of their former employee Romero.

More recently, Nestlé has been found liable over spying on NGOs, with the company hiring a private security company to infiltrate an anti-globalization group, and while a judge ordered the company to pay compensation, a Nestlé spokesperson stated that, “incitement to infiltration is against Nestlé’s corporate business principles.” Just like child slavery, presumably. But not to worry, the spokesman said, “we will take appropriate action.”

Peter Brabeck, who it should be noted, also sits on the boards of Exxon, L’Oréal, and the banking giant Credit Suisse, warned in 2009 that the global economic crisis would be “very deep” and that, “this crisis will go on for a long period.” On top of that, the food crisis would be “getting worse” over time, hitting poor people the hardest. However, propping up the financial sector through massive bailouts was, in his view,“absolutely essential.” But not to worry, as banks are bailed out by governments, who hand the bill to the population, which pays for the crisis through reduced standards of living and exploitation (which we call “austerity” and “structural reform” measures), Nestlé has been ableto adapt to a new market of impoverished people, selling cheaper products to more people who now have less money. And better yet, it’s been making massive profits. And remember, according to Brabeck, isn’t that all that really matters?

This is the world according to corporations. Unfortunately, while it creates enormous wealth, it is also leading to the inevitable extinction of our species, and possibly all life on earth. But that’s not a concern of corporations, so it doesn’t concern those who run corporations, who make the important decisions, and pressure and purchase our politicians.

I wonder... what would the world be like if people were able to make decisions?

There’s only one way to know.

Get Ready for Higher Prices and Less Energy Security: Our Natural Gas Reserves Are Being Plundered For Export

Brad Jacobson, AlterNet — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:57:00 -0700

A deeply flawed study that ignores the harmful environmental and health impacts of gas drilling is being used to rally for exports.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Unlimited export of U.S. natural gas would have enormous implications on the future of the nation's economy, environment and domestic energy choices. Yet a burgeoning chorus in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, is calling for the swift approval of 19 liquid natural gas (LNG) export permits.

The acceptance of these permits would unleash an unprecedented frenzy of domestic high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, just to meet daily production rates under decades-long contractual obligations. If accepted, the total of the permits currently under review by the Department of Energy for LNG export would be equal to 28.54 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day, approximately 45 percent of what the U.S. is projected to consume daily in 2013, according to the U.S. Energy Administration.

Congressional supporters of unlimited exports argue that turning the U.S. into a major net exporter of LNG would not only boost our economy and create jobs, but also -- seeming to defy the basic tenets of supply and demand -- sustain low domestic natural gas prices, increase our energy security and propel us to energy independence. Some have even contended that such exports would smooth out boom-and-bust cycles and stabilize the price of natural gas.

By law, the Natural Gas Act requires the Department of Energy to grant export permits of LNG to non-free trade agreement countries only if such exports are deemed in the public interest. LNG exports to countries the U.S. has free-trade agreements with, such as Canada and Mexico, do not require a public interest determination.

On the Senate floor last month, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued, "What could be inconsistent with this for the public interest? This is something that would be cheaper gas for us and give us total independence in a matter of weeks."

At an event last year sponsored by the trade group America's Natural Gas Alliance, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said, "Exports of natural gas ... are not expected to play a significant role in setting prices here at home."

In a statement released by his office, Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), told AlterNet, "Concerns that natural gas exports will significantly drive up the price of natural gas for domestic use are overblown."

He added, "Additionally, even with dramatic growth in LNG markets abroad and use of natural gas at home, the U.S. has more than enough gas to satisfy both markets for a long time."

But many experts close to the issue -- backed by multiple studies, real-world numbers and historical trends -- say these elected leaders are either not leveling with the American public or are simply ill-informed.

"Members of Congress are not energy experts so they are easily confused," said Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas. "And their religion is free market. It's got nothing to do with reality, especially energy markets."

Patzek, an expert in unconventional gas recovery who has extensively studied U.S. shale plays, called congressional boosters of unlimited exports "delusional" in an interview with AlterNet.

"This is the same argument over and over again," he added. "If we have a boom, then twice the boom is always better. Right? Well, not necessarily."

Domestically, natural gas remains cheap, hovering around $3.50 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). But in Europe and Asia, respectively, prices are three to nearly five times that amount.

The current glut of natural gas in the U.S. has kept prices low for both consumers' electricity bills and for energy-intensive areas of the economy, such as the revitalized domestic manufacturing sector, which uses natural gas for feedstock. But over the last couple of years, gas companies have been losing money because supply has outpaced demand and returns on natural gas at its domestic price became too low to warrant the cost of production.

Exporting LNG to the highest bidder overseas would greatly benefit the profits of gas companies and also some companies involved in its export. But many experts agree, and multiple studies reveal, that it would have the dual effect of raising prices domestically to levels that would both hurt consumers and all other energy-intensive sectors of the economy.

"If we are forced to pay $12 to $16 per Mcf, well, then our economy's going bust," Patzek said.

"I don't know of anybody who's studied this who doesn't acknowledge that prices will go up," said Art Berman, an oil and gas geologist who heads the Houston-based geological consulting firm Labyrinth Consulting. "So if we lock ourselves into 20-year contracts to export X number of billions of cubic feet a day, well, that's going to increase the price. And that's really what it's all about."

Berman's research on actual U.S. shale well production, as opposed to mere projections, has led him and others to question industry and government mantras boasting of America's ever-abundant supply of natural gas reserves. With industry and government projections upward of 100 years of untapped domestic natural gas, Berman, based on the rate of returns from drilled shale plays across the nation, estimates that a more realistic number would be around 20-25 years of supply.

That's without factoring in the impact on supply if the U.S. becomes a major exporter. Patzek said industry and government projections of natural gas reserves are merely "speculation," which is why the use of this resource demands "moderation." Using these reserves in moderation, he said it's probable that several decades of untapped domestic natural gas remains. But what's undeniable, he added, was that opening our supply to limitless exports would force the U.S. to deplete these finite reserves faster, needlessly squandering them.

"How does exporting a strategic natural resource make you more energy independent?" Berman said in an interview with AlterNet. "If you're selling it to somebody else, then by definition you're decreasing your own supply."

He continued, "Signing long-term contracts that require you to export natural gas, if anything, only decreases your energy independence."

Eben Burnham-Snyder, a spokesman for House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), agreed.

"Every single analysis of natural gas exporting has concluded that domestic prices will increase," Burnham-Snyder said in an email to AlterNet. "That's based on basic economic theory."

He continued, "Sending more of our natural gas resources abroad, instead of keeping more of it here for consumers and manufacturers and providing a diverse energy supply, is not a policy to make us more energy secure...[it] makes us less independent, not more."

Berman added, "These companies have stupidly, imprudently overproduced their own product to the point they can't make money at the price they've created themselves. So now they're looking for a solution to that problem, and they've managed to convince a number of idiots in Congress that this is a good idea."

No congressional supporters contacted by AlterNet would explain how exporting natural gas would, in turn, increase the country's energy security and energy independence.

Supporters Rally Around "Seriously Flawed" Study

Congressional supporters of unfettered natural gas exports were buoyed by last year's economic impact study commissioned by the Department of Energy. The report, conducted by the outside firm NERA Economic Consulting, concluded that although domestic natural gas prices would rise moderately and some sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, would be adversely affected, the "U.S. would experience net economic benefits from increased LNG exports."

Following its release, 110 bipartisan members of the House of Representatives fired off a letter urging Energy Secretary Steven Chu to hasten approval of all LNG export permits.

When criticisms of the NERA study began pouring in, a bipartisan group of senators, including James Inhofe (R-OK), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), David Vitter (R-LA) and Mark Begich (D-AK), followed up with a letter of their own to Secretary Chu, insisting he listen to "the sound science and economic theory that comprises" the study's conclusions.

But the NERA study was not only assailed for questionable modeling and omitting economic impacts on the environment, health and local jobs -- such as farms and the businesses they support -- but also for NERA's troubling history of conducting favorable studies for both the tobacco and coal industries.

In a January 2013 letter to the Energy Department, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, ripped the NERA report, calling it "seriously flawed" to the point of rendering "this study insufficient for the Department to use in any export determination."

Shortcomings Wyden highlighted include NERA using two-year-old energy figures to project the domestic consumption of natural gas, failing to fully assess the effect of rising prices on households and businesses, inadequately accounting for production impacts on various regional markets, and omitting the result of higher prices on different socioeconomic groups. All of which, Wyden noted, the Energy Department is tasked to assess in order to meet public interest determinations under the Natural Gas Act.

After its release, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said the study reveals, though downplays, that such exports would "constitute a massive transfer of wealth from working Americans to natural gas production and export companies."

"Most Americans don't own stock in natural gas companies, but nearly all Americans use natural gas and buy goods created using low-cost natural gas," Markey spokesman Burnham-Snyder told AlterNet. "Unlimited exports of natural gas will benefit only a very few, while leaving the rest of America to pay the increased costs from higher natural gas prices."

The Energy Department first commissioned a companion study conducted by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent branch of the Department. The study, published in January 2012, focused on how increased natural gas exports would impact domestic consumption, production and prices.

The report concludes:

Increased natural gas exports lead to higher domestic natural gas prices, increased domestic natural gas production, reduced domestic natural gas consumption, and increased natural gas imports from Canada via pipeline.

Yet even this EIA assessment, as Wyden noted to the Energy Department, made its calculations based on estimated export volumes far lower than the total of the permits now under review. The EIA projected between a low volume of 6 billion cubic feet per day and a high volume of 12 billion cubic feet per day. So even its high range is dwarfed by the roughly 29 billion cubic feet per day now being proposed.

But the findings of an independent Purdue University study, released after the NERA analysis, were even more stark and directly challenged NERA's conclusions.

"The major conclusion of this research is that permitting natural gas exports causes a small reduction in US GDP and also increases GHG emissions and other environmental emissions such as particulates. There is a loss of labor and capital income in all energy intensive sectors, and electricity prices increase."

The authors continue, "The major differences between our results and the other major study (NERA) are that we get considerably higher natural gas price impacts, and we do not get export revenue as large. The higher natural gas prices cause pervasive losses throughout the commercial, industrial, and residential sectors."

In a final note, the authors caution, "Given all the results of this analysis, it is clear that policy makers need to be very careful in approving US natural gas exports. While we are normally disciples of the free trade orthodoxy, one must examine the evidence in each case. We have done that, and the analysis shows that this case is different. Using the natural gas in the US is more advantageous than exports, both economically and environmentally."

Environmental and Health Impacts Left Out of the Mix

Environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Sierra Club, also slammed the study for failing to assess environmental impacts of increased domestic fracking on both the economy and health of local communities in which drilling would occur and on the overall global climate.

The Sierra Club revealed that the NERA study's main supporting point for a net economic benefit from exports was built on ignoring negative environmental impacts.

Applying federal government estimates, the group calculatedthat the increase in natural gas exports would pump an additional 689,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere each year at a staggering social cost of $430,625,000. This additional cost would nullify more than 20 percent of the GDP increase projected in the NERA study, which would shift the slight net gain from exports to a net loss.

Jeff Deyette, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that methane leakage issues, both in the act of fracking and extraction and in the transport of natural gas, demand greater evaluation.

"Given how potent methane is, even modest amounts could make natural gas as bad or worse than coal from a total greenhouse gas emissions standpoint," said Deyette.

The NRDC noted the NERA report "ignores environmental externalities, including global warming, air pollution, water pollution and other pollution impacts" and "wholly neglects to estimate public health and environmental damages that are routinely estimated in regulatory impact analyses."

Henry Henderson, director of the Midwest Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted that the negative drilling impacts on communities don't show up in GDP estimates or corporate annual reports.

"There are long-term impacts on property values and the economies of rural communities that are not properly measured by simply the cost of selling natural gas on the market," said Henderson in a recent interview with AlterNet.

"They are jobs that come and go as opposed to impacts that remain in perpetuity," he said.

This impact has already been seen in states that were home to the early fracking boom, such as Pennsylvania. As a January report by the Center for Public Integrity detailed, the prospect of exporting natural gas was not part of the bargain when Pennsylvanians agreed to open their state to fracking.

So now, adding insult to injury, people in towns who've already suffered environmental, health and economic degradation from this extractive process are "surprised, stunned, angry and upset" to discover these same companies not only want to drill in higher volumes but also seek to export the gas without regard for the increased price or the continued negative drilling effects in their communities.

Patzek, of the University of Texas, noted that in later stages of exploitation of a resource such as hydrocarbons, we tend to go from using faraway places with very concentrated hydrocarbons, such as West Texas or the Middle East, to lesser quality, more difficult and dilute resources, which are close to where people live.

"We are at that stage right now and it's only going to get worse," he said. "We will be encroaching more and more on where people live."

Patzek added, "We don't seem to be able to go beyond the next boom-or-bust cycle and ask for a little bit longer planning. This thought that there is a common good and a common future that we all have has vanished."

EPA Slams State’s Draft Impact Statement For Keystone XL

Ryan Koronowski, Climate Progress — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:39:00 -0700

Here are the reasons EPA said that the State Department’s assessment needs more work.

On the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, EPA rated the adequacy of the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) as having “Insufficient Information.”

Yesterday was the last day to submit public comments to the State Department regarding the proposed pipeline that would transport 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil through the U.S. per day.

EPA’s Cynthia Giles, the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Enforcement, has submitted the agency’s public comment. They could have rated the adequacy of the impact statement three different ways: “Adequate,” “Insufficient Information,” or “Inadequate.” They rated it “Insufficient Information,” which means that they do not know enough to fully assess the environmental impacts of a tar sands pipeline traversing the continent.

Here are the reasons EPA said that State’s DEIS needs more work:

Increased carbon pollution: EPA acknowledged the DEIS’s attempt to do a life-cycle analysis of the pipeline’s emissions, which found that emissions from oil sands crude would be 81 percent higher than regular crude, or an incremental increase of 18.7 million metric tons of CO2 per year. EPA noted that “If GHG intensity of oil sands crude is not reduced, over a 50 year period the additional CO2 from oil sands crude transported by the pipeline could be as much as 935 million metric tons.” These statistics are alarming, yet EPA’s analysis did not stop there.
Not inevitable: Like other experts, EPA doubted State’s assurance that this tar sands oil would come out of the ground with the Keystone pipeline or without it:
The market analysis and the conclusion that oil sands crude will find a way to market: With or without the Project is the central finding that supports the DSEIS’s conclusions regarding the Project’s potential GHG emissions impacts. Because the market analysis is so central to this key conclusion, we think it is important that it be as complete and accurate as possible.
It then goes on to detail the ways in which this market analysis is incomplete: It uses outdated modeling, and the expense and infeasibility of rail shipping as an alternative to Keystone both need to be considered.
Pipelines don’t pump themselves: EPA recommends that renewable energy be used to power the pumping stations along the pipeline, because otherwise the constructed pipeline itself will actively emit GhG emissions.
Tar sands oil is particularly dirty to clean up: The EPA notes that diluted bitumen is very dense and sinks to the bottom of rivers and lakes. The 2010 Enbridge spill will require dredging, because normal cleanup methods do not suffice. The Keystone pipeline would be 36 inches in diameter — larger than the pipe that leaked 20,000 barrels of oil in the Enbridge spill. EPA notes that dilbit contains some very toxic materials “such as benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and heavy metals” that “could cause long-term chronic toxicological impacts” to wildlife. EPA recommends including a seriously revamped and rethought response plan as conditions before any permit is issued to build a pipeline.
Who needs drinking water?: Though Keystone’e proponents received praise for moving the original route away from the Sand Hills, it still crosses the Ogallala Aquifer. The EPA notes there is another way: “The alternative laid out in the DSEIS that would avoid the Ogallala Aquifer is the I-90 Corridor Alternative, which largely follows the path of existing pipelines.” There were additional alternatives that State’s EIS did not address, and EPA asked it to do so.

That does not sound like the a “no-brainer” that Keystone’s advocates have described. That sounds exactly like the nation’s top environmental cops on the beat responding to an assessment of a project made by a firm being paid by the pipeline’s owner.

Sandra Steingraber's Moving Letter: From Jail on Earth Day

Sandra Steingraber, AlterNet — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:43:00 -0700

Steingraber issued a letter from Chemung County Jail in Elmira, New York after being jailed for civil disobedience.

The following was letter was written from the Chemung County Jail in Elmira, New York where Steingraber is serving a fifteen day sentence for blockading a gas compression riglast month owned by the Inergy gas company near her home in the Finger Lakes region of the state.

This morning – I have no idea what time this morning, as there are no clocks in jail, and the florescent lights are on all night long – I heard the familiar chirping of English sparrows and the liquid notes of a cardinal. And there seemed to be another bird too – one who sang a burbling tune. Not a robin–wren? The buzzing, banging, clanking of jail and the growled announcements of guards on their two-way radios – which also go on all night – drowned it out. But the world, I knew, was out there somewhere.

The best way to deal with jail is to exude patience, and wrap it around a core of resolve and surrender. According to New York state law, all inmates upon arrival are isolated from the general population until they are tested for tuberculosis and that test comes back negative. Typically, that takes three days. Isolation means you are locked inside your cell with no access to the phone (the phone for cell block D happens to be located, tantalizingly, four feet from my bars - just out of reach); no access to books (the two books I have in my cell, lent to me by an empathetic inmate, are the Bible and Nora Roberts’ Carolina Moon, which is a 470-page paperback whose opening sentence is, “She woke in the body of a dead friend.”); and, of course, no access to wi fi, cell phones, e-mail or the internet.

I am writing with a borrowed pencil on the back of the “Chemung County Inmate Request Form,” which is a half sheet of paper. I am writing small and revising in my head. (Forgive the paragraphing – I’m trying to save space.)

Yesterday, I was told that no medical personnel were available to administer my TB test. When I was called down to the nurse this morning, she asked why I didn’t have my TB test yesterday. Of course, she was available yesterday. The resulting delay means that I will join the prison population and be released from 24 hour lock-down on Monday, rather than Sunday.

Frustration will be counter-productive and place me closer to despair. Let–it–go surrender, ironically, keeps me in touch with my resolve.

So, Monday, which is Earth Day, I will emerge from my cell and join the ecosystem of the Chemung County Jail, where the women’s voices are loud and defiant. Stingray (not her actual nickname), broke a tooth yesterday. When she showed it to officer Murphy’s Law (that’s his actual nickname) and said, “the other half is in my cell,” Murphy’s Law replied, “So, you think the tooth fairy’s going to come?” And then he left.

But she stood at the iron door and called for pain meds, over and over in a voice that I use for rally speeches. Full oration. Projecting to the rafters. Stingray is six months pregnant.

She got her pain meds.

Stingray is my inspiration. How can I use my time here – separated from the whole human race by the layers of steel and concrete – to speak loudly and defiantly about the business plans of a company called Inergy that seeks to turn my Finger Lakes home into a transportation and storage hub for fossil fuel gases? It is wrong to compress and bury explosive gases in salt caverns beside and beneath a lake – Seneca – that serves as a source of drinking water for 100,000 people. It is wrong to construct a flare stack on the banks of this lake, which will contribute hazardous air pollutants, including death-dealing ozone, into the air. It is wrong for DEC and EPA and FERC to turn a blind eye to a company that has, for the last 12 quarters, exceeded its permitted discharge of chemicals into this lake. It is wrong for a company to claim that basic geological knowledge about the bedrock itself, is a proprietary trade secret and hide it from the public and from the scientific community. It is wrong to deepen our dependency on fossil fuels in a time of climate emergency.

I could express these ideas more eloquently if there were coffee in jail. There is not.

I was led to cell #1 in block D of the Chemung County jail by three things. One is the decision of Inergy to industrialize the Finger Lakes region where I live and, in so doing, aid and abet the fracking industry by erecting a massive storage depot near the birthplace of my son. I consider this an act of desecration. That’s what biologists call the proximate cause of my decision to commit an act of trespass by blockading the Inergy’s compressor station driveway.

The ultimate cause is a commentary published last fall in the journal that all biologists read – Nature – by Jeremy Grantham, who is not a scientist, but an economist. He noted that all the projections for climate change – even the worst case scenarios – were being overtaken by real-life data. In other words, our climate situation is worse than we thought – even when we assumed the worst. Mr. Grantham then exhorted scientists who have this knowledge to be bold – noting that no one is paying attention to this data: “Be persuasive, be bold, be arrested (if necessary).”

So, here I am, ringing the alarm bell from my isolation cell on Earth Day. May my voice be as un-ignorable as Stingray’s.

The third reason is this one: seven years ago, when my son was four years old, he asked to be a polar bear for Halloween, and so I went to work sewing him a costume from a chenille bedspread. It was with the knowledge that the costume would almost certainly outlast the species. Out on the street that night – holding a plastic pumpkin will with KitKat bars – I saw many species heading towards extinction; children dressed as frogs, bees, monarch butterflies, and the icon of Halloween itself – the little brown bat.

The kinship that children feel for animals and their ongoing disappearance from us literally brought me to my knees that night, on a sidewalk in my own village. It was love that got me back up. It was love that brought me to this jail cell.

My children need a world with pollinators and plankton stocks and a stable climate. They need lake shores that do not have explosive hydrocarbon gases buried underneath.

The fossil fuel party must come to an end. I am shouting at an iron door. Can you hear me now?

Yoko Ono Imagines a Future Without Fracking

Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:50:00 -0700

Ono's campaign against hydraulic fracking calls to New Yorkers through a dramatic window installation.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Artist Yoko Ono has an impassioned message for America: We don't have to poison our water supply to make money.

On Friday evening at Manhattan's ABC Carpet & Home, environmentally minded New Yorkers, including a sprinkling of celebs like Susan Sarandon, gathered to celebrate the opening of "Imagine No Fracking," a striking window installation designed by Ono, who recently caused a stir by tweeting a photograph of John Lennon's bloody glasses to protest gun violence.

Riffing on Lennon's unforgettable song "Imagine," Ono sends out a call for unity in the fight for clean drinking water and alternative approaches to natural gas extraction. The project involves several 6-foot-high posters showing an antifracking message in stencil lettering, signed Y.O. In addition to “Imagine No Fracking,” posters show a variety of slogans, including “Don’t Frack New York,” “Fracking Kills,” and the straightforward -- if not exactly catchy -- “Pretty Soon There Will Be No More Water To Drink.”

"Imagine No Fracking" is part of a larger series at ABC Carpet & Home this month designed to open a dialogue with industry leaders, politicians, activists, and citizens on a highly divisive issue. Paulette Cole, CEO & creative director of ABC Carpet & Home, emphasized the importance of protecting our most essential natural resourse: water.

Yoko Ono, looking trim and stylish at age 80, with a jauntily tipped fedora, made a plea for halting a practice whose dangers may far outweigh any short-term gains. Mind-body guru Deepak Chopra offered a meditation on our human connection to nature, while Sarandon urged artists to find creative ways to address the public on the issue.

New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo was called upon by several speakers, including Josh Fox, the director of the new documentary Gasland 2, to stand up to the gas industry and ban fracking.

Musical performances included the always powerful Amy Ray of Indigo Girls and the astonishingly talented Sara Bareilles, who, in honor of the night's theme of water, sang a soulful rendition of Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay."

Cuomo has been accused of delaying the decision-making process on fracking in the Marcellus Shale. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that for the first time, New Yorkers reject the idea of drilling for natural gas by a margin of 46 to 39 percent.

Josh Fox's 'Gasland' Sequel Opens, a Tour Through a Land of Abandoned Homes and Broken Promises

Alison Rose Levy, AlterNet — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:59:00 -0700

Gasland Part II contends that an industry should not be allowed to break what it cannot fix.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Gasland Part II, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, takes us deep into the heartland of America, a land overtaken by gas extraction via fracking. The iconic and recurring depictions of water-on-fire seen in the first Gasland, in the new film serve as postcards from a travelogue through a land of broken promises, abandoned homes, and extinguished rights.

The first Gasland, (which was released in 2010 and nominated for a 2011 Academy Award) became this country’s wake-up call about fracking, the first prod for millions to look beyond the industry-engineered PR facade. Banjo music played throughout the soundtrack revealed director Josh Fox’s chosen musical instrument. But Fox became a kind of Pied Piper for a growing grass roots movement that questioned the need for fracking. Challenging the inroads claimed by the multinational gas and oil industry, fractivism is a popular and youth-driven pushback that these powerful industries are neither accustomed nor equipped to deal with.

Gasland and Gasland Part II (and films like them) unmask the human debt incurred by an array of corporate Goliaths. It turns the lens on those joining the ranks of the Davids—ordinary citizens that awaken from the American dream to discover their way of life has been redefined by impersonal corporate entities, intent on constructing new superhighways towards profits‑—right over the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Gasland Part II continues Fox’s exploration by offering textured, in-depth profiles of half a dozen or so families in geographically diverse locations, from Australia, to Wyoming to Pennsylvania. Fox’s camera takes us into the homes of straight-talking folks who worked hard to secure their corner of the heartland.

Over the course of the film, we watch them move from disbelief to indignation to disillusionment, as they learn that no one’s willing to make industries accountable, even when a town loses its water. Texas homeowner Steve Lipsky built a million dollar plus dream home for his wife and family. With ample square footage, the Lipsky home was surrounded by sky-high picture windows, stunning views, and cascading pools. The customized bathroom came complete with an oversized whirlpool tub that now stands empty. Test results showed water so contaminated by nearby fracking activities that EPA officials privately advised the family never to drink it. But in a theme of civilian betrayal that recurs throughout the film, Lipsky claims that mid-level government regulators retracted their findings, rejected key opportunities to rein in the offending companies, and kept revelatory test results locked away from public access.

Gasland Part II documents what happens when people discover that the standard American protections are as prone to fail as the cement casings on gas extraction pipelines. (Industry documents shown in the film reveal that all casings fail over the next thirty years, and many much sooner, thus setting the stage for aquifer contamination by fracking chemicals, and methane.)

For me, it was a poignant Earth Day reminder that (as the film notes) the destruction of communities by the fossil fuel extraction industry is as old as the industry itself. For decades, this took place among indigenous populations, though few noticed. As Gasland Part II poignantly reveals, what’s different now is that it’s happening to white Americans. In some cases the film’s subjects are former Republicans, even a few who once clambered for drilling, without understanding that the hope of a fair partnership between Goliath and David is as doomed as a Kardashian marriage. Especially, when, as Gasland Part II uncovers, industry documents recommend the use of psy-ops (psychological operations, a military tactic deployed in combat zones) to manage community divisions in fracking regions. This may not be the change people were wanting to believe in.

No longer are the old forests clear-cut for drill rigs located in outlying areas inhabited by ethnic “others.” Now it’s Pennsylvania’s public lands and forests, which were industrialized by Governor Tom Corbett, elected, as the film shows, with substantial gas and oil industry contributions. Now it’s America falling far beneath its first world allies (according to a wide range of measures compiled in international studies) and transitioning into a new status. As the film documents, a government once so proud of its democracy, it sought to export it, now over-rules the rights of its citizens. In Dimock, Pennsylvania, the film tracks the history of the town’s aquifer contamination, which affected the drinking water in many homes. The PA government first promised to construct a pipeline of potable water at industry expense, but following Corbett’s election, retracted that plan and left many townsfolk permanently without water.

As a result, many were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements in exchange for buy-outs so that they could move for the sake of their health. In one poignant scene, Fox films an outspoken and charismatic community leader named Victoria Switzer, as prior to signing, she “practices” being silent. Many of those profiled in Gasland II have undergone a similar fate and abandoned their zero value homes or accepted buyouts in exchange for silence. Louis Meeks, a Wyoming farmer, explains that he received such an offer. His reply, “Move and leave my neighbors here? What kind of an axxxxxe do you think I am?”

And for what, this loss of rights, of homes, of voices? In order to exploit resources now destined for export to other countries. In the film, economic analyst Deborah Rogers explains her view that once gas is liquefied for export to China (where gas prices are high), the currently low U.S. gas prices will mount, creating a consumer squeeze. Americans will have invested their tax dollars in gas infrastructures based on the promise of cheap energy. But that energy won’t be there.

Gasland Part II contends that an industry should not be allowed to break what it cannot fix. The aftermaths of contamination often endure. The film opens with the use of Corexit, (a product banned in Britain) that dispersed and hid the massive amounts of oil released into the Gulf of Mexico by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill. But Corexit didn’t remove the oil or redress the damage. Instead, it “killed the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico,” according to biologist Wilma Subra, interviewed in the film.

There is no current technology to purify the fracking waste that is shale gas extraction’s by-product. There is no current technology to restore the water supply of the 15 million Americans reliant on the Delaware River, should the Delaware River Basin, which flows through five states, becomes contaminated through nearby fracking or pipeline infrastructural activity. Nor is climate change, which climatologist, Robert Howarth reveals is greatly increased by both methane release and the entire life cycle of drilling activity, reversible.

Fortunately, there is existing technology that can solve the energy problem—it’s renewable energy technology. As the film makes clear, shale gas is no bridge to a renewable energy future. It’s a detour away fromrenewables, a dead-end. As Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson discloses in the film, the technology for renewables has evolved so thoroughly that 100% of U.S. energy needs could now be supplied by wind, complemented by some use of solar and water energy. Jacobson and his colleagues at the Solutions Project are devising a detailed plan to meet the needs of New York State spelling out all of the requirements, along with the jobs to be created.

In its evocative human scale report, Gasland Part II zooms in on the early stages of social disruption due to extreme energy extraction leads. The people profiled in the film are earthy and real. Their voices can be heard and counted. Though tens of thousands may be affected globally, the devastation has not currently progressed to a point where news reports detail mind-numbingly large numbers of the afflicted. Unless the concerns the film highlights are heeded, more extreme forms of devastation could lie ahead. Why undergo such risks when there are economically viable ways to meet our energy needs now and into the future, that don’t entail contamination, earthquake activity, and displacement?

Gasland Part II will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival and will debut nationally on HBO this summer.

What Will Inspire You to Take Action? 5 Earth Day Photos You Should See

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 14:24:00 -0700

What will it take before we have a critical mass to move us toward a sustainable future?

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Since 2011, when I first read Deep Green Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay I’ve been haunted by a question Jensen posed in the book’s preface.

He asks, “Where is your threshold for resistance?”

He goes on to write that 90 percent of the large fish in our oceans are gone. At what point do you get angry and fight back? “Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94? Would you wait till they killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99?” he writes. “How about 100 percent? Would you fight back then?”

The question doesn’t just pertain to fish. “There is 10 times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans, 97 percent of native forests are destroyed, 98 percent of native grasslands are destroyed, amphibian populations are collapsing, and so on,” he writes. “Two hundred species are driven extinct each and every day.”

The dark cloud of climate change hangs over us, each new report bringing worse news. And the political climate is no better -- anyone not concerned with oil industry profits is branded anti-American or anti-jobs, and our elected officials have run from any meaningful action, straight into the arms of industry. Add to this a slurry of articles that have either declared environmentalism dead or the movement itself a failure, and it would seem we’re in a pretty tough spot.

“We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet,” Bill McKibben wrote this month in Rolling Stone. “In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, ‘So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?’”

What did you do?

Forty three years after millions of people gathered for the first Earth Day, this is where we stand. It’s a precarious spot at best. I keep coming back to that poem attributed to Martin Niemöller; there are various versions, but it goes something like this:

First they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Written during the rise of Nazi Germany, it became a powerful reminder of the consequences of staying silent. Today, the poem takes me to a different frame of mind. I wonder, as we destroyed our fisheries, who spoke up? What about our forests, our farmlands, our wildlife? What about our wild lands and sacred places? Our clean air and clean water? Who will speak up for the people of Appalachia being devastated by mountaintop-removal mining? What about those fighting against fracking or the Keystone XL pipeline or tar sands mining?

When the next toxic spill or superstorm happens in your neighborhood, who do you think will stand up and say something? When the planet we live on tips past the point of repair, what is left to say?

“Where is your threshold for resistance?”

I’m not among those who count the environmental movement as dead. I think it’s reinventing itself; I’m just hoping it happens in time.

If the environmental movement succeeds, it will be because it becomes something else entirely; because people stop seeing these issues as something for lefties or treehuggers or liberals or the like and start realizing that these issues are important if you’re human – if you care about your community, your family and essentials like healthy food, a livable climate, clean air and water.

“There are plenty of horrors to make you weep this Earth Day,” Jim Hightower wrote this week. “But tears don't bring change. That comes only from the determined effort of ordinary grassroots people to organize, strategize and mobilize. The good news for our Earth and our own existence is that such people are on the move in every part of America. They're confronting the greedheads and boneheads, creating effective energy alternatives, forging fresh and sensible polices, lifting heads out of the sand -- and producing the change we must have.”

Today is a good day to take stock of the things that keep us going: the people who inspire change. Here are five images I’ve seen lately that are reminders of such things.

1. What Love Looks Like

Tags:

tim dechristopher

Photo Credit:

Ed Kosmicki/ Yes! Magazine

(Photo by Ed Kosmicki/ Yes! Magazine)

Today, after serving two years in federal prison, Tim DeChristopher was released. You may have heard of him, “Bidder 70,” and how he disrupted an oil and gas lease auction, but perhaps you don’t know the whole story, or what motivated him. “When I jumped into that auction, I had no idea who would be there to catch me,” he said. “But people came from many different paths to form this activist community that holds one another.”

The activist community he helped to start, Peaceful Uprising, wrote, “Tim urged activists to take the long view, and be ready to go to jail to defend their principles and their cause. ‘We don’t need to figure out how to keep me out of jail,’ Tim explained to a concerned Santa Fe supporter. ‘We need to figure out how to get more people intojail.’”

So what motivated Tim? His action wasn’t premeditated; it was an act of courage and love. Peaceful Uprising explains:

While Tim was taking his final exams at the University of Utah, advocates for Utah’s wilderness like Robert Redford and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance were attempting to bring attention to a controversial auction of Utah public lands, orchestrated by the outgoing Bush Administration. The auction included parcels adjacent to cherished natural resources like Canyonlands National Park. SUWA and other regional advocates brought a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management in efforts to halt the auction pending further review and public comment. Through no fault of SUWA or their allies, the lawsuit could not settle the issue prior to the auction. On December 19th, Tim finished his last final exam and took TRAX to the protest that SUWA and others had organized outside of the auction. On arrival, Tim decided that the protest needed to be moved from outside of the auction to inside, where the action was happening. With no prior plan of action, Tim entered the building where the auction was held and approached the registration desk. When asked if he was there to bid, Tim made a quick decision. He registered as Bidder 70 and entered the auction.

Tim intended to stand up and make a speech or create some other kind of disruption. Once inside, however, Tim recognized the opportunity to stop the auction in a more effective, enduring fashion. He sat quietly with his bidder paddle lowered, until he saw a friend from his church openly weeping at the sterile transfer of beloved red rock lands away from the public trust and into the hands of energy giants. It was then that Tim decided to act.

At first, Tim simply pushed up the parcels’ prices (some starting as low as two dollars per acre, and were ultimately sold for $240 per acre). Once almost half of the parcels had been sold to oil and gas companies, Tim felt he could no longer bear to lose any more public lands. Tim bid on and won every subsequent parcel, until he was recognized as an outlier and escorted from the auction.

Tim refused to take a plea deal and was sentenced to two years. He offered these words at the end of his trial:

You can steer my commitment to a healthy and just world if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow.

2. Direct Action

(Photo by Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance)

A few weeks ago I wrote about Nancy Zorn, the 79-year-old Oklahoma grandmother who decided to take action against construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and locked her neck to a piece of heavy machinery. She is one of many people who have been engaged in direct action for months to stop pipeline construction. For those who think this kind of monkey wrenching is the domain of young radicals, think again. Actions against the Keystone have involved people of all ages, backgrounds and political affiliations.

Here is what Zorn had to say about what motivated her:

… There is the Cree Indian prophecy, which inspired Greenpeace. “There will come a time when the Earth grows sick and when it does, a tribe will gather from all the cultures of the world who believe in deeds and not words. They will work to heal it… they will be known as the “warriors of the Rainbow.” Scientists estimate that burning more than 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide risks catastrophe for life on earth. Energy corporations now have five times that amount in their reserves and will burn it all unless we stop them. The time for speculation and debate is over. I hope this one small action today will inspire many to become warriors of the rainbow. The earth needs us all.

3. Solidarity

(Photo by 350.org, India Beyond Coal)

Last November 10, actions took place all across India to move the country beyond coal. India gets 66 percent of its electricity from coal and is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. India Beyond Coal, a project of 350.org, raised awareness through creative actions.

The group wrote:

Our excessive dependence on coal threatens a future where we can pull millions of Indians out of poverty. Rising costs of coal, reduced availability, excessive deforestation, negative health impacts and the climate crisis are strong reasons to begin the transition towards renewable energy and energy efficiency.

There were many great photos from the action, but I loved this one in particular because it spoke to our interconnectedness, and how much more apparent that becomes every day we face environmental catastrophes.

This photo captures the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance of South Africa standing in solidarity with India. If anyone knows the problems coal burning and mining can create, it’s South Africans. The country gets 90 percent of its electricity from coal and is the fourth largest coal exporter in the world.

If we’re going to solve our climate crisis, it will be through looking at the big picture and thinking about other people – even if they live on different continents.

4. Bright Lights

(Photo by Solar Lancaster)

We can’t spend all of our time fighting against things like dirty energy, we have to also fight for things. The brightest light in the latter fight is likely solar energy. It will never be our entire saving grace – it can be poorly used and it still has environmental impacts. But, we’ve only just begun to understand its potential if we actually put some resources and smarts behind it -- and it’s encouraging.

In Lancaster, California, the New York Timesreported that the high desert city will “require that almost all new homes either come equipped with solar panels or be in subdivisions that produce one kilowatt of solar energy per house.” About time!

And there are other exciting efforts happening. Earlier this year Mosaic launched as a crowd-sourcing project to let ordinary people help invest in solar development. If big business and big donors aren’t willing to move this change along, let’s see if the rest of us collectively can.

Small, distributed solar projects that can be made available to all people, regardless of their income, is an enlightening idea.

5. One Watershed at a Time

(Photo by Doddridge County Watershed Association)

Last week the local watershed group in Doddridge County, West Virginia got together for a cleanup day. Earth-shattering? No. But really awesome, anyway. There are thousands of local watershed groups across the country. They’re usually small, volunteer-driven and underfunded, but their impacts can be great -- especially if you consider all their actions collectively.

I got to meet some members of the Doddridge County Watershed Association and they’re an admirable bunch. They formed after a significant spill or dump of chemicals by the gas drilling industry endangered nearby Buckeye Creek, posing a threat to wildlife and drinking water.

Since that time members have learned how to use monitoring equipment to test water supplies. In an area of the Marcellus Shale where the fracking industry has run rampant, the group is now a key watchdog and community asset.

To be sure, we need to act at every level of society, from individuals and small communities, right up to international bodies. We need people asking, “What is my threshold for resistance?” and faced with all our envrionmental problems, “What did I do?”

Three Years After the BP Spill and the Gulf Is Still a Mess

Maureen Nandini Mitra, Earth Island Journal — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 14:20:00 -0700

Most people have lost faith the in the recovery process, says photojournalist Julie Dermansky.

Three years after an explosion at British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers, injured dozens, and set off the worst oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, the waters along Gulf Coast seems almost back to normal. Much of the oil is gone. New Orleans-based photographer Julie Dermansky says there’s still a lot left. The oil, she says, is often hard to locate because it has a tendency to play hide and seek.

Dermansky, who photographed the spill in 2010 “pretty much non-stop for four months, has been doggedly following the story for the past three years — reading up all the research she can lay her hands on, making trips out to the worst impacted areas in Louisiana every few months, and talking to people from affected communities. In the early days of the spill the spill she was hired by several major publications, including The Times, London, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel.

But these days she travels without assignment, covering expenses on her own since few publications hire photographers or reporters to cover what’s now an old news story. Last, Dermansky again visited the beaches and marshes along the Louisiana and Mississippi coast — some of the worst hit areas where crews are still cleaning up tar mats and tar balls. I spoke with Dermansky via email and over the phone about her trip and her assessment of the situation in the Gulf Coast.

Maureen Nandini Mitra: What did you find on your recent trip out to Grand Isle, Bay Jimmy in Louisiana, and the Mississippi coast?

Julie Dermansy: There was oil sheen stirred up from the turbulence in the Bay Jimmy PJ Hahn Plaquemines Parish director of coastal zone management, who I accompanied on an oil spotting trip, turned over some of the dead marsh grass and exposed roots covered in hardened oil. There was also hardened oil on top of some of the surface we walked on. With each step on the surface, oil sheen spread around my boots. Much of the vegetation there is now dead. That’s tragic as with less vegetation coastal erosion, already a problem before the spill, has intensified. A rainbow oil sheen has moved over parts of the marsh surface. There were signs of life though: small crabs moving around, snails and, raccoon paw prints.

On Grand Isle, at the state park, I found tar balls ranging from the size of a quarter to eight inches long. The beach was not blanketed in them but you could find one every couple of feet.

On the beach in Mississippi, from Waveland to Pass Christian, I found tar balls and dead animals including a Kemp's Ridely turtle. Though finding dead animals on the beach is not uncommon, I find the quantity of dead animals on the shore in Mississippi alarming. How the animals are dying is impossible to say. There is no proof the deaths are BP related as none of the scientific studies done on the dolphins and sea turtles have been released. The results of those studies are controlled by the NRDA [Natural Resources Damage Assessment] and are part the evidence being used in the current civil trial going on against BP in New Orleans.

MNM: You mentioned earlier that this is a difficult story to cover because of the "hide and seek oil plays." Could you elaborate on that?

JD: From the start of covering the spill it was every photojournalists task to find the oil. There would be a sighting one day and if you could get yourself out to those coordinates you very well may have found it gone. Odds are it wouldn't be in the same place. It kept, and keeps, moving with the tides. Last week the tide is higher then usual and there was a south wind, so odds were if you went to Bay Jimmy where the oil had hit the hardest, you wouldn’t find anything. When I went on Monday (April 15) with PJ Hahn, he was surprised and saddened we found as much as we did.

It is the same with the beaches. You can read/see a report of tar balls at a beach and go the next day and not find any. This happened from the very start of the

MNM: You've been recording the impact of the spill for three years now, what are your thoughts on the clean up?

JD: Each oil spill is different and in some instances, like this one, unprecedented. I'd have to say in this case the clean up effort was/is inadequate.

Many factors play into any spill like the depth the oil is coming from, the kind of oil (crude or refined) how an area’s tides will affect where the oil hits the shore, what a storm will do to the spread of the oil etc. — all factors in how a clean up will need to happen. Since these things can't be predicted, there is no perfect clean up scenario. On top of that, reports I read indicate that clean up materials, vessels, booms etc, needed to contain and clean up the spill were not on hand when the Macondo well blew up.

From what I saw of the initial clean up, it didn't make sense to me. Many of the oiled pelicans that died, died needlessly. Booms were put up around barrier islands that serve as pelican rookeries. The booms collected oil into what became a death trap that many pelicans landed directly in. The areas the oil collected in the boom could have been vacuumed

Since the response seemed ragtag, Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser set up his own task; force and used Shop-Vacs to vacuum the surface of Bay Jimmy. The idea caught on and then BP and the Coastguard; brought in industrial vacuuming setups for the job.

Early on BP chose to dump large quantities of controversial dispersants. Other non toxic options to break up the oil were offered as solutions but BP choose not to use them.

The clean up, along with all other factors of the spill, leave us with more questions than answers.

MNM: What are the key challenges those working to restore the environment are facing?

JD: The key factor is getting the funding to start restoration projects The money BP has had to pay for restoring the coast has been set aside (a $1 billion advance payment was settled upon) but not released and it is unclear who will get what to get the job done. Restoring the marsh must start fast because it landmass is eroding at a faster clip since the spill.

MNM: How good/bad do you think the situation is now?

JD: The barrier islands look very bad to me, but one must note they were in trouble before the spill due to coastal erosion. I have no doubt the spill has sped up the process. I have seen some of the smaller islands that birds nest on literally disappear in the past three years. The oil killed the marsh grass and the mangrove roots leaving the islands with nothing to hold them together and now some are completely gone.

As far as the amount of tar balls washing up on beaches — it varies from day to day. BP's claims that the Gulf Coast as back to normal are simply not so.

How the oil is affecting people's health is another issue, and as with the impact on wildlife, answering this question without scientific data is impossible.

I think anyone who professes to know what the long-term impact on the Gulf will be is not credible. It is too early to know if there will be a collapse of any of the species in the food chain, if the seafood is safe or not, and if people who lived close to the spill or worked to clean it up will suffer long term impacts.

MNM: How are local communities coping with the impact three years on?

JD: Most people I know who have been directly affected by the spill have lost faith in the recovery process. They tried to give BP the benefit of the doubt and work with [claims czarKenneth] Feinberg, who was tasked by BP to handle the claims after the initial claims process failed. People were asked to fill out paperwork over and over again and their claims were still rejected for reasons not made clear to them. No one seems satisfied that their elected officials fought the fight for them. Most of them don't believe any money will not trickle down to them at all.

For some there has been no recovery and they are left barely scraping by. Those fighting BP in the courts fear only the lawyers will come out ahead.

The Vietnamese community has had a particularly hard time coming up with figures to claim since much of their income was based on a barter system. The language barrier has been an added issue for them. Many in that community have given up and moved on.

The people I’ve met who received some money in the initial claims process don’t feel justly compensated.

How the rest of the funds will be distributed is still unclear. BP just tried to have some of the claims their own appointed claims czar (after Feinberg was replaced in March 2012) put in for challenged. A judge blocked that challenge however.

MNM: What has been the most difficult part of covering this story?

JD: The most alarming thing for me was that BP controlled media access and the Coast Guard and local governments acquiesced. Detail police where hired by BP to stop journalists like myself from documenting the spill. This is going on again in Arkansas with the EXXON pipeline spill. I find this policy highly objectionable. During the BP spill the mainstream press fought back and BP had to back down, but overall it was always a battle to get close to the oil.

I managed to get to some beaches the day the oil hit for the first time, before they had been closed down. I did whatever it took to get my images. I challenged BP officials who asked for my ID by asking them for theirs and letting them know, I don't answer to BP. The media should have access to industrial disaster areas if the public is ever going to get a true picture of the damage.

Resource Shock: How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion

Michael T. Klare, Tom Dispatch — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:24:00 -0700

Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

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Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios -- a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change -- are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected.

To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.

Resource Shortages and Resource Wars

Start with one simple given: the prospect of future scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water, land, food, and critical minerals. This in itself would guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction, and war.

It is important to note that absolute scarcity doesn’t have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate supplies to meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanized and industrialized global population is enough. Given the wave of extinctions that scientists are recording, some resources -- particular species of fish, animals, and trees, for example -- will become less abundant in the decades to come, and may even disappear altogether. But key materials for modern civilization like oil, uranium, and copper will simply prove harder and more costly to acquire, leading to supply bottlenecks and periodic shortages.

Oil -- the single most important commodity in the international economy -- provides an apt example. Although global oil supplies may actually grow in the coming decades, many experts doubt that they can be expanded sufficiently to meet the needs of a rising global middle class that is, for instance, expected to buy millions of new cars in the near future. In its 2011 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency claimed that an anticipated global oil demand of 104 million barrels per day in 2035 will be satisfied. This, the report suggested, would be thanks in large part to additional supplies of “unconventional oil” (Canadian tar sands, shale oil, and so on), as well as 55 million barrels of new oil from fields “yet to be found” and “yet to be developed.”

However, many analysts scoff at this optimistic assessment, arguing that rising production costs (for energy that will be ever more difficult and costly to extract), environmental opposition, warfare, corruption, and other impediments will make it extremely difficult to achieve increases of this magnitude. In other words, even if production manages for a time to top the 2010 level of 87 million barrels per day, the goal of 104 million barrels will never be reached and the world’s major consumers will face virtual, if not absolute, scarcity.

Water provides another potent example. On an annual basis, the supply of drinking water provided by natural precipitation remains more or less constant: about 40,000 cubic kilometers. But much of this precipitation lands on Greenland, Antarctica, Siberia, and inner Amazonia where there are very few people, so the supply available to major concentrations of humanity is often surprisingly limited. In many regions with high population levels, water supplies are already relatively sparse. This is especially true of North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, where the demand for water continues to grow as a result of rising populations, urbanization, and the emergence of new water-intensive industries. The result, even when the supply remains constant, is an environment of increasing scarcity.

Wherever you look, the picture is roughly the same: supplies of critical resources may be rising or falling, but rarely do they appear to be outpacing demand, producing a sense of widespread and systemic scarcity. However generated, a perception of scarcity -- or imminent scarcity -- regularly leads to anxiety, resentment, hostility, and contentiousness. This pattern is very well understood, and has been evident throughout human history.

In his book Constant Battles, for example, Steven LeBlanc, director of collections for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, notes that many ancient civilizations experienced higher levels of warfare when faced with resource shortages brought about by population growth, crop failures, or persistent drought. Jared Diamond, author of the bestseller Collapse, has detected a similar pattern in Mayan civilization and the Anasazi culture of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. More recently, concern over adequate food for the home population was a significant factor in Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Germany’s invasions of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941, according to Lizzie Collingham, author of The Taste of War.

Although the global supply of most basic commodities has grown enormously since the end of World War II, analysts see the persistence of resource-related conflict in areas where materials remain scarce or there is anxiety about the future reliability of supplies. Many experts believe, for example, that the fighting in Darfur and other war-ravaged areas of North Africa has been driven, at least in part, by competition among desert tribes for access to scarce water supplies, exacerbated in some cases by rising population levels.

“In Darfur,” says a 2009 report from the U.N. Environment Programme on the role of natural resources in the conflict, “recurrent drought, increasing demographic pressures, and political marginalization are among the forces that have pushed the region into a spiral of lawlessness and violence that has led to 300,000 deaths and the displacement of more than two million people since 2003.”

Anxiety over future supplies is often also a factor in conflicts that break out over access to oil or control of contested undersea reserves of oil and natural gas. In 1979, for instance, when the Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Washington began to fear that someday it might be denied access to Persian Gulf oil. At that point, President Jimmy Carter promptly announced what came to be called the Carter Doctrine. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter affirmed that any move to impede the flow of oil from the Gulf would be viewed as a threat to America’s “vital interests” and would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.”

In 1990, this principle was invoked by President George H.W. Bush to justify intervention in the first Persian Gulf War, just as his son would use it, in part, to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, it remains the basis for U.S. plans to employ force to stop the Iranians from closing the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean through which about 35% of the world’s seaborne oil commerce passes.

Recently, a set of resource conflicts have been rising toward the boiling point between China and its neighbors in Southeast Asia when it comes to control of offshore oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea. Although the resulting naval clashes have yet to result in a loss of life, a strong possibility of military escalation exists. A similar situation has also arisen in the East China Sea, where China and Japan are jousting for control over similarly valuable undersea reserves. Meanwhile, in the South Atlantic Ocean, Argentina and Britain are once again squabbling over the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by the Argentinians) because oil has been discovered in surrounding waters.

By all accounts, resource-driven potential conflicts like these will only multiply in the years ahead as demand rises, supplies dwindle, and more of what remains will be found in disputed areas. In a 2012 study titled Resources Futures, the respected British think-tank Chatham House expressed particular concern about possible resource wars over water, especially in areas like the Nile and Jordan River basins where several groups or countries must share the same river for the majority of their water supplies and few possess the wherewithal to develop alternatives. “Against this backdrop of tight supplies and competition, issues related to water rights, prices, and pollution are becoming contentious,” the report noted. “In areas with limited capacity to govern shared resources, balance competing demands, and mobilize new investments, tensions over water may erupt into more open confrontations.”

Heading for a Resource-Shock World

Tensions like these would be destined to grow by themselves because in so many areas supplies of key resources will not be able to keep up with demand. As it happens, though, they are not “by themselves.” On this planet, a second major force has entered the equation in a significant way. With the growing reality of climate change, everything becomes a lot more terrifying.

Normally, when we consider the impact of climate change, we think primarily about the environment -- the melting Arctic ice cap or Greenland ice shield, rising global sea levels, intensifying storms, expanding deserts, and endangered or disappearing species like the polar bear. But a growing number of experts are coming to realize that the most potent effects of climate change will be experienced by humans directly through the impairment or wholesale destruction of habitats upon which we rely for food production, industrial activities, or simply to live. Essentially, climate change will wreak its havoc on us by constraining our access to the basics of life: vital resources that include food, water, land, and energy. This will be devastating to human life, even as it significantly increases the danger of resource conflicts of all sorts erupting.

We already know enough about the future effects of climate change to predict the following with reasonable confidence:

Rising sea levels will in the next half-century erase many coastal areas, destroying large cities, critical infrastructure (including roads, railroads, ports, airports, pipelines, refineries, and power plants), and prime agricultural land.
Diminished rainfall and prolonged droughts will turn once-verdant croplands into dust bowls, reducing food output and turning millions into “climate refugees.”
More severe storms and intense heat waves will kill crops, trigger forest fires, cause floods, and destroy critical infrastructure.

No one can predict how much food, land, water, and energy will be lost as a result of this onslaught (and other climate-change effects that are harder to predict or even possibly imagine), but the cumulative effect will undoubtedly be staggering. In Resources Futures, Chatham House offers a particularly dire warning when it comes to the threat of diminished precipitation to rain-fed agriculture. “By 2020,” the report says, “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%” in some areas. The highest rates of loss are expected to be in Africa, where reliance on rain-fed farming is greatest, but agriculture in China, India, Pakistan, and Central Asia is also likely to be severely affected.

Heat waves, droughts, and other effects of climate change will also reduce the flow of many vital rivers, diminishing water supplies for irrigation, hydro-electricity power facilities, and nuclear reactors (which need massive amounts of water for cooling purposes). The melting of glaciers, especially in the Andes in Latin America and the Himalayas in South Asia, will also rob communities and cities of crucial water supplies. An expected increase in the frequency of hurricanes and typhoons will pose a growing threat to offshore oil rigs, coastal refineries, transmission lines, and other components of the global energy system.

The melting of the Arctic ice cap will open that region to oil and gas exploration, but an increase in iceberg activity will make all efforts to exploit that region’s energy supplies perilous and exceedingly costly. Longer growing seasons in the north, especially Siberia and Canada’s northern provinces, might compensate to some degree for the desiccation of croplands in more southerly latitudes. However, moving the global agricultural system (and the world’s farmers) northward from abandoned farmlands in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Argentina, and Australia would be a daunting prospect.

It is safe to assume that climate change, especially when combined with growing supply shortages, will result in a significant reduction in the planet’s vital resources, augmenting the kinds of pressures that have historically led to conflict, even under better circumstances. In this way, according to the Chatham House report, climate change is best understood as a “threat multiplier... a key factor exacerbating existing resource vulnerability” in states already prone to such disorders.

Like other experts on the subject, Chatham House’s analysts claim, for example, that climate change will reduce crop output in many areas, sending global food prices soaring and triggering unrest among those already pushed to the limit under existing conditions. “Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as droughts, heat waves, and floods, will also result in much larger and frequent local harvest shocks around the world… These shocks will affect global food prices whenever key centers of agricultural production area are hit -- further amplifying global food price volatility.” This, in turn, will increase the likelihood of civil unrest.

When, for instance, a brutal heat wave decimated Russia’s wheat crop during the summer of 2010, the global price of wheat (and so of that staple of life, bread) began an inexorable upward climb, reaching particularly high levels in North Africa and the Middle East. With local governments unwilling or unable to help desperate populations, anger over impossible-to-afford food merged with resentment toward autocratic regimes to trigger the massive popular outburst we know as the Arab Spring.

Many such explosions are likely in the future, Chatham House suggests, if current trends continue as climate change and resource scarcity meld into a single reality in our world. A single provocative question from that group should haunt us all: “Are we on the cusp of a new world order dominated by struggles over access to affordable resources?”

For the U.S. intelligence community, which appears to have been influenced by the report, the response was blunt. In March, for the first time, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper listed “competition and scarcity involving natural resources” as a national security threat on a par with global terrorism, cyberwar, and nuclear proliferation.

“Many countries important to the United States are vulnerable to natural resource shocks that degrade economic development, frustrate attempts to democratize, raise the risk of regime-threatening instability, and aggravate regional tensions,” he wrote in his prepared statement for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.”

There was a new phrase embedded in his comments: “resource shocks.” It catches something of the world we’re barreling toward, and the language is striking for an intelligence community that, like the government it serves, has largely played down or ignored the dangers of climate change. For the first time, senior government analysts may be coming to appreciate what energy experts, resource analysts, and scientists have long been warning about: the unbridled consumption of the world’s natural resources, combined with the advent of extreme climate change, could produce a global explosion of human chaos and conflict. We are now heading directly into a resource-shock world.

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left, just published in paperback by Picador. A documentary movie based on his book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on Facebook by clicking here.

This Earth Day Should We Be Weeping or Cheering?

Jim Hightower, AlterNet — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:31:00 -0700

There are plenty of horrors to make you weep this Earth Day. But tears don't bring change.

Earth Day cometh -- the 43rd year of this national focus on the state of our globe. So, how is Earth doing? Should we be weeping ... or cheering?

Both.

The first step to any recovery is recognition of the obvious: Earth has a problem. In fact, beaucoup of them. For example, despite the squawking of profiteering polluters and professional deniers, our very atmosphere -- without which everyone and everything is dead -- is rapidly being degenerated by our own addiction to fossil fuel, literally altering Earth's climate in disastrous ways. Yet, as we burn, energy corporations blithely fiddle.

They're fiddling with tar sands oil in Alberta, Canada, uncaring about the vast amounts of ozone-destroying carbon that will be released by ripping open Northern Alberta's boreal forest to get at the junk oil, or about the extra carbon-dioxide contamination that will come from processing this especially toxic sludge at Big Oil's Gulf Coast refineries.

Also, they're fiddling with the Earth itself, by fracking deep underground shale to bring gas and oil -- plus more ozone-depleting methane -- to the surface. And they're still fiddling with the priceless ecology of America's ancient Appalachian Mountains and streams by exploding off the mountaintops -- merely to make it easier and cheaper for Big Coal to extract the ozone-killing carbon.

There are plenty of horrors to make you weep this Earth Day. But tears don't bring change. That comes only from the determined effort of ordinary grassroots people to organize, strategize and mobilize. The good news for our Earth and our own existence is that such people are on the move in every part of America. They're confronting the greedheads and boneheads, creating effective energy alternatives, forging fresh and sensible polices, lifting heads out of the sand -- and producing the change we must have.

The courageous and tenacious mountaineers of Appalachia, for example, are at last beginning to score big victories in their long, hard fight against the coal giants, including winning an agreement last November from one, Patriot Coal, to cease all mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Also, from Vermont to California, the frackers are getting fracked, as local groups are winning fights in city halls, legislatures and courts to stop the rampant exploitation of their land, water and communities. And, all across the country, including in the reddest of red states, grassroots advocates are producing a sensible shift from fossil-fuel dependency to renewable fuels and conservation.

That's what Earth Day is about, so don't weep -- cheer the progress we've made, and join the movement for more.

In fact, some communities are going so far as to imagine achieving "net zero." That's the wonky name attached to an elegant idea, namely a conversion to total renewable energy, complete recycling and a culture of conservation to bring humankind's carbon footprint into a sustainable balance with a healthy earth.

Now, imagine the least likely place you'd expect this net zero ideal to take root -- and even flourish. How about oil-saturated Texas? Yes! On an Army base, no less. Astonishingly, America's sustainable energy future is being pioneered in El Paso on a sprawling military base named Fort Bliss, home to 35,000 soldiers.

The post already has a 1.4 megawatt solar array and rooftop solar panels on all base housing (generating 13.4 megawatts of energy), and it's in partnership with El Paso Electric to complete a 200-acre, 20-megawatt solar farm by 2015.

It also has a plan with the city of El Paso to convert the post's waste into energy, and it's engaged in wind, geothermal and conservation projects. Adding to the effort, base officials are encouraging the use of energy-efficient vehicles -- and even building bicycle lanes throughout the base.

The Army! Who knew they cared?

Practically everyone on the base is committed to achieving the goal of net zero by 2018, meaning the base will generate all of the energy it uses -- and do it with renewables. The troops have planted nearly 15,000 trees and have become converts to recycling. To encourage the latter, the base commander, Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, has put the million-dollar-a-year recycling revenue that Fort Bliss earns into skating parks, exercise facilities and other morale-boosting recreation projects.

"Everybody is getting involved," he says, noting that the effort is changing behavior and fostering a conservation culture, which he hopes "our soldiers will take with them when they go on."

There's hope for the Earth when even the Army begins to care, take action and change attitudes. In this case, let's all "join the Army."

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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