Rachel's Democracy & Health News #966
Thursday, July 3, 2008
From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News #966 ..........[This story printer-friendly]
July 3, 2008
GETTING ALL OUR LEMMINGS IN A ROW
[Rachel's introduction: This coming week the G8 nations will meet in Japan to put the finishing touches on a plan to saddle the world's children with responsibility for trillions of tons of hazardous carbon dioxide.]
By Peter Montague
The G8 nations -- the world's eight richest countries -- will meet in Hokkaido, Japan next week to put the finishing touches on their plan to pass their carbon dioxide (CO2) problem along to all the world's children.
The G8 plan -- now fully spelled out in official documents -- is to bury carbon dioxide in the ground, hoping it will stay there forever, but in any case making it our children's problem, not ours.
The G8 is an exclusive club that includes Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the U.S. Since 2005, the G8 has been systematically putting together the pieces of its CO2-burial plan, which will be endorsed again at next week's meeting in Japan.
Burying carbon dioxide in the ground is called "carbon capture and storage", or CCS for short. CCS is being promoted as a "silver bullet" to the global warming problem, as a kind of speculative bubble of expectations has developed around it. CCS has been used for 35 years on a very small scale in oil fields, to loosen up sticky oil and help force it to the surface (the CO2 comes back out with the oil). But on a large scale CCS is untested and untried. Despite this fact, CCS is the basis for claiming that "clean coal" is a viable energy option for the world's future.
The U.S. had been building a coal-fired power plant to demonstrate large-scale CCS (and thus "clean coal") at Mattoon, Illinois -- a project called Futuregen -- but runaway costs forced the federal government to abandon the project in January.
In early June, at a meeting in Aomori, Japan, G8 representatives agreed to start 20 large-scale CCS projects by 2010 -- just two years from now. This extremely aggressive schedule perhaps indicates that the pressure on major CO2 emitters is becoming intolerable and they are growing desperate for a way out.
"We strongly support the recommendation that 20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects need to be launched globally by 2010... with a view to supporting technology development and cost reduction for the beginning of broad deployment of CCS by 2020," the G8 said in a statement after the Aomori meeting.
Notably, the Aomori meeting was attended by not only Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, but also by China, India and South Korea.
In late June, 80 chief executive officers (CEOs) of transnational corporations issued their own endorsement of CCS as the "solution" to global warming. Their report, "CEO Climate Policy Recommendations to G8 Leaders, July, 2008" acknowledged that CCS is essential, but also that free markets would not provide CCS, so taxpayers would have to do it:
"For non-mature technologies, however, markets will not be sufficient and enhanced RDD&D [research development, demonstration and deployment] policies will have to be encouraged. Photovoltaics, fourth generation nuclear and the area of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies for coal are good examples. Acceleration of the demonstration and deployment of a range of CCS technologies is particularly important because if all new coal fired electricity generation plants are not operating with CCS by 2015 to 2020 onward, it will be difficult to realize the target of 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050." (pg. 16, emphasis added)
Still, no one has ever addressed the most fundamental question about CCS: what would constitute a demonstration of "success?"
To make a dent in the global warming problem would require burying trillions of tons of CO2 a mile our more below ground thus creating a reservoir of hazardous gas that could leak back into the atmosphere at any time and begin to cook the planet and acidify the oceans. Even if only 0.01% of it leaked out each year -- a suggested industry standard -- two-thirds would escape in 10,000 years. Even CCS advocates acknowledge that this would be a catastrophe. How could a leak of only 0.01% per year be measured? How could humans remain alert to this enormous underground threat for centuries to come? Even if 0.01% leakage were detected, could anything be done about it? Who would be responsible for taking action? Who would pay?
The plain fact is, if the goal is to bury CO2 forever, success will be impossible to demonstrate. On whatever day such a demonstration is declared a "success," leakage could begin the following day. So any such demonstrations will be meaningless. Everyone involved knows this is true. This raises the possibility that the G8's goal isn't actual scientific verification of the technology -- but 20 "demonstrations" intended merely to lull the public into thinking that it's OK to build more coal plants because somehow someday CO2 will be safely captured and stored forever. By the time this bit of fakery is widely understood, the present generation of CEOs and politicians will be long dead and all the world's children will be left holding the bag.
By definition, the G8's CCS plan is intended to force future generations to deal with the consequences of our present-day cupidity -- a position that is morally indefensible.
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From: The Nation .........................................[This story printer-friendly]
July 3, 2008
DISASTER CAPITALISM: STATE OF EXTORTION
[Rachel's introduction: Today's preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis.]
By Naomi Klein
Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly right-wing media hosts had to prove their populist cred by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: "disaster capitalism." It usually goes well -- until it doesn't.
For instance, "independent conservative" radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: "I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down," Doyle announced. "We've invested $650 billion to liberate a nation of 25 million people. Shouldn't we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the Stinkin' Lincoln, at rush hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government?. Why don't we just take the oil? We've invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in ten days, not ten years." There were a couple of problems with Doyle's plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stickup in world history. The second, that he was too late: "We" are already heisting Iraq's oil, or at least are on the cusp of doing so.
It's been ten months since the publication of my book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which I argue that today's preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis. With the globe being rocked by multiple shocks, this seems like a good time to see how and where the strategy is being applied.
And the disaster capitalists have been busy--from private firefighters already on the scene in Northern California's wildfires, to land grabs in cyclone-hit Burma, to the housing bill making its way through Congress. The bill contains little in the way of affordable housing, shifts the burden of mortgage default to taxpayers and makes sure that the banks that made bad loans get some payouts. No wonder it is known in the hallways of Congress as "The Credit Suisse Plan," after one of the banks that generously proposed it.
Iraq Disaster: We Broke It, We (Just) Bought It
But these cases of disaster capitalism are amateurish compared with what is unfolding at Iraq's oil ministry. It started with no-bid service contracts announced for ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total (they have yet to be signed but are still on course). Paying multinationals for their technical expertise is not unusual. What is odd is that such contracts almost invariably go to oil service companies--not to the oil majors, whose work is exploring, producing and owning carbon wealth. As London-based oil expert Greg Muttitt points out, the contracts make sense only in the context of reports that the oil majors have insisted on the right of first refusal on subsequent contracts handed out to manage and produce Iraq's oil fields. In other words, other companies will be free to bid on those future contracts, but these companies will win.
One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of back-room arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oil fields, accounting for around half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq's oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms will keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25 percent for their Iraqi partners.
That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anticolonial struggles. According to Muttitt, the assumption until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop brand-new fields in Iraq--not to take over ones that are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. "The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company," he told me. This is a total reversal of that policy, giving INOC a mere 25 percent instead of the planned 100 percent.
So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Ironically, it is Iraq's suffering--its never-ending crisis--that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain its treasury of its main source of revenue. The logic goes like this: Iraq's oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology and the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq urgently needs to start producing more oil. Why? Again because of the war. The country is shattered, and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to Western firms have failed to rebuild the country. And that's where the new no-bid contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.
Several of the architects of the Iraq War no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator. On National Public Radio's To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as "a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future." Chalabi, who served as Iraq's oil under secretary and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as "a primary objective."
Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That means that the huge task of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure--including its oil infrastructure--is the financial responsibility of Iraq's invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations. (Recall that Saddam Hussein's regime paid $9 billion to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion.) Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75 percent of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.
Oil Price Shock: Give Us the Arctic or Never Drive Again
Iraq isn't the only country in the midst of an oil-related stickup. The Bush Administration is busily using a related crisis--the soaring price of fuel--to revive its dream of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And of drilling offshore. And in the rock- solid shale of the Green River Basin. "Congress must face a hard reality," said George W. Bush on June 18. "Unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today's painful levels--or even higher--our nation must produce more oil."
This is the President as Extortionist in Chief, with gas nozzle pointed to the head of his hostage--which happens to be the entire country. Give me ANWR, or everyone has to spend their summer vacations in the backyard. A final stickup from the cowboy President.
Despite the Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less bumper stickers, drilling in ANWR would have little discernible impact on actual global oil supplies, as its advocates well know. The argument that it could nonetheless bring down oil prices is based not on hard economics but on market psychoanalysis: drilling would "send a message" to the oil traders that more oil is on the way, which would cause them to start betting down the price.
Two points follow from this approach. First, trying to psych out hyperactive commodity traders is what passes for governing in the Bush era, even in the midst of a national emergency. Second, it will never work. If there is one thing we can predict from the oil market's recent behavior, it is that the price is going to keep going up regardless of what new supplies are announced.
Take the massive oil boom under way in Alberta's notorious tar sands. The tar sands (sometimes called the oil sands) have the same things going for them as Bush's proposed drill sites: they are nearby and perfectly secure, since the North American Free Trade Agreement contains a provision barring Canada from cutting off supply to the United States. And with little fanfare, oil from this largely untapped source has been pouring into the market, so much so that Canada is now the largest supplier of oil to the United States, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Between 2005 and 2007, Canada increased its exports to the States by almost 100 million barrels. Yet despite this significant increase in secure supplies, oil prices have been going up the entire time.
What is driving the ANWR push is not facts but pure shock doctrine strategy--the oil crisis has created the conditions in which it is possible to sell a previously unsellable (but highly profitable) policy.
Food Price Shock: Genetic Modification or Starvation
Intimately connected to the price of oil is the global food crisis. Not only do high gas prices drive up food costs but the boom in agrofuels has blurred the line between food and fuel, pushing food growers off their land and encouraging rampant speculation. Several Latin American countries have been pushing to re-examine the push for agrofuels and to have food recognized as a human right, not a mere commodity. United States Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte has other ideas. In the same speech touting the US commitment to emergency food aid, he called on countries to lower their "export restrictions and high tariffs" and eliminate "barriers to use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology." This was an admittedly more subtle stickup, but the message was clear: impoverished countries had better crack open their agricultural markets to American products and genetically modified seeds, or they could risk having their aid cut off.
Genetically modified crops have emerged as the cureall for the food crisis, at least according to the World Bank, the European Commission president (time to "bite the bullet") and Prime Minister of Britain Gordon Brown. And, of course, the agribusiness companies. "You cannot today feed the world without genetically modified organisms," Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestle, told the Financial Times recently. The problem with this argument, at least for now, is that there is no evidence that GMOs increase crop yields, and they often decrease them.
But even if there was a simple key to solving the global food crisis, would we really want it in the hands of the Nestles and Monsantos? What would it cost us to use it? In recent months Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF have been frenetically buying up patents on so-called "climate ready" seeds--plants that can grow in earth parched from drought and salinated from flooding.
In other words, plants built to survive a future of climate chaos. We already know the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its intellectual property, spying on and suing farmers who dare to save their seeds from one year to the next. We have seen patented AIDS medications fail to treat millions in sub-Saharan Africa. Why would patented "climate ready" crops be any different?
Meanwhile, amid all the talk of exciting new genetic and drilling technologies, the Bush Administration announced a moratorium of up to two years on new solar energy projects on federal lands--due, apparently, to environmental concerns. This is the final frontier for disaster capitalism. Our leaders are failing to invest in technology that will actually prevent a future of climate chaos, choosing instead to work hand in hand with those plotting innovative schemes to profit from the mayhem.
Privatizing Iraq's oil, ensuring global dominance for genetically modified crops, lowering the last of the trade barriers and opening the last of the wildlife refuges? Not so long ago, those goals were pursued through polite trade agreements, under the benign pseudonym "globalization." Now this discredited agenda is forced to ride on the backs of serial crises, selling itself as lifesaving medicine for a world in pain.
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Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002).
Copyright 2008 The Nation
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From: Truthout ...........................................[This story printer-friendly]
June 27, 2008
LIVING ON THE ICE SHELF
[Rachel's introduction: In England, the Geological Society has declared that the Holocene era has ended and the Anthropocene has begun -- a new geological era in which urban-industrial society has emerged as a geological force.]
By Mike Davis
1. Farewell to the Holocene
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.
This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.
The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.
In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.
As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.
At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.
To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.
2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?
The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.
The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different "storylines" about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel's major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC's confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the "business as usual" variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.
The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.
Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.
Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume.
The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.
Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of "energy independence") is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance "humankind's ability to accelerate global warming" and slow the urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed- carbon energy cycles."
3. Fin-du-Monde Boom
What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.
As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise "clean coal," despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as "being decades away from commercial viability."
Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration's "marquee demonstration project," FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of the public-private "partnership"; similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world's largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken.
On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak -- that peak oil moment -- whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.
An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the moment, approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will "reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020." As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, "more and more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]."
Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC's surplus was recycled through military purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to become the "subprime" loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using "sovereign wealth funds" to achieve a more active ownership in foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue to transform Arabia's sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters.
Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world.
This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.
4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?
Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use.
In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees -- each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so- called green capitalism.
And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?
Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.
As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seems highly likely.
And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.
Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously throttle growth.
5. The North's Ecological Debt
The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean?
To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?
Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of industrialization.
In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.
The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World Bank's "structural adjustment" agreements.
This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN- Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one -- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.
If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.
In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.
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Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.
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From: U.S. News & World Report .......................[This story printer-friendly]
June 25, 2008
CLIMATE CHANGE WILL HAVE DESTABILIZING CONSEQUENCES...
[Rachel's introduction: A classified study looks at the national security implications of global warming and finds international instability rising.]
By Kevin Whitelaw
U.S. intelligence agencies usually work hard to stay outside the political fray, but this week they waded firmly into the debate over climate change by producing an unsettling assessment of the national security implications of changing weather patterns.
"We assess that no country will be immune to the effects of climate change, but some will be able to cope more effectively than others," says Thomas Fingar, who heads the National Intelligence Council, which drafted the assessment, adding that sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Southeast Asia would be the hardest-hit regions. "However, the spillover -- from potentially increased migration and water-related disputes -- could have a harmful global impact."
The full report, issued as a National Intelligence Assessment, is classified, and officials say they are not planning to release it. The NIA is distinct from the better-known National Intelligence Estimates by being more speculative and relying more heavily on public sources. Both represent the consensus judgment of the nation's 16 intelligence agencies and carry great analytic weight in Washington.
Appearing before a congressional panel, Fingar discussed the report's findings, which focused heavily on the potential impact of climate change in the next two decades on agricultural production, severe weather effects, water resources, and the possibility of refugee flows from newly drought-ridden areas.
In Africa, for example, climate-related tensions are "a main contributor to instability," Fingar said. "We judge that sub-Saharan Africa will continue to be the most vulnerable to climate change because of multiple environmental, economic, political, and social stresses." In other words, African countries are among the least equipped countries to adapt to changing climactic patterns. Yields of some of Africa's more rainfall-dependent crops, for example, could plummet by up to 50 percent.
There could be similar problems in Asia, where populous nations are likely to experience an increase in either droughts or extreme weather that produces severe flooding. Most alarmingly, the assessment worries that between 120 million and 1.2 billion people could continue to experience what analysts politely term "water stress" with Asia's fast-growing population. This could create massive refugee flows as large groups of people leave for more stable areas.
But the intelligence community concluded that climate change alone is "unlikely to trigger state failure" or full-blown water wars between countries battling over increasingly scarce water resources.
And not all the effects of climate change are necessarily negative. The study pointed out that the United States could experience some economic boosts from cereal crop yields that are expected to rise by as much as 20 percent. But those gains could be offset by the costs of responding to more severe natural disasters and rebuilding expensive coastal infrastructure vulnerable to flooding.
Fingar was careful to note that the intelligence community did not research the science of climate change. Instead, it relied on midrange projections from the most recent report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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From: Wall Street Journal (pg. B1) .......................[This story printer-friendly]
July 2, 2008
COURT SCRAPS KEY LEAD-PAINT VERDICT
[Rachel's introduction: The supreme court of Rhode Island has reversed a 2006 jury verdict that would have forced paint companies to remove toxic lead pigment from all child-accessible Rhode Island buildings -- including schools and day-care centers.]
By Jeremy Singer-Vine And Joseph Pereira
The Rhode Island Supreme Court unanimously overturned a landmark verdict against three former manufacturers of lead paint, damaging a novel legal argument used by government prosecutors to get companies to help pay for lead clean-up costs.
In a 4-0 decision, the state high court reversed a 2006 jury verdict that would have forced NL Industries Inc., Sherwin-Williams Co. and Millennium Holdings LLC to remove lead pigment from all child- accessible Rhode Island buildings -- including schools and day-care centers -- and to fund educational and lead-prevention programs. The state had estimated costs of the remediation at $2.4 billion.
The Rhode Island case, filed in state superior court in Providence nine years ago, was being carefully watched by government prosecutors around the country because it was the first to be filed as a public- nuisance complaint, on grounds that the clean-up created a community havoc. The tactic followed nearly two decades of unsuccessful litigation by states against paint companies based on product- liability laws. The public-nuisance label traditionally is used against vagrancy, loitering or disturbing the peace, not hazardous products.
In an 81-page opinion, Chief Justice Frank Williams said that the court recognized the public-health hazard of lead paint, but "however grave the problem of lead poisoning is in Rhode Island, public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm." The court added that the case should have been dismissed before reaching a jury.
"It's not looking good for public-nuisance litigation," said Anthony Sebok, a professor of law at Yeshiva University in New York who has written about the Rhode Island case. "It was a complete and devastating loss for the state of Rhode Island."
Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch called the decision "enormously disappointing" and "legally and fundamentally wrong."
It remains to be seen how similar lawsuits in Ohio, Wisconsin and California will play out. Three other states have denied public- nuisance claims on dangerous products, including lead paint and firearms, in recent years. Courts in these states may have different views, of course, and are not bound by any other state's ruling. But the reasoning used in rulings such as the Rhode Island one can often have multistate influence. Prof. Sebok said the Rhode Island ruling could set off "a cascade effect" throughout the nation.
In California, a case brought by several counties and cities is pending before the state supreme court. In that case, filed in March 2000, Santa Clara County is suing a number of paint manufacturers -- including the three that were involved in the Rhode Island case -- on similar grounds. Other California jurisdictions have joined the suit, including San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Cruz County.
The ruling is expected to send states scrambling for new means of footing their enormous clean-up bills. The Rhode Island high court left a window open for governments to seek damages from "landlords who allow lead paint on their property to decay." Children can ingest lead by breathing lead dust or chewing on paint chips.
The decision comes as Congress and lawmakers in more than a dozen states are wrestling with the problem of allegedly dangerous levels of lead in a variety of imported children's products. In November, California sued Wal-Mart, along with 19 other toy makers and retailers, for allegedly selling toys whose lead content exceeded federal limits.
Rhode Island estimates that more than 1,100 children were poisoned with lead in 2004, and that over 37,000 have been since 1993. Lead poisoning can result in learning disabilities, comas, convulsions and sometimes death.
"It's painful to see the lower court ruling be reversed and to see the companies get off the hook," said Ralph Scott, community-projects director for the Alliance for Healthy Homes, formerly the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. The state had alleged that companies knew lead paint was hazardous while they sold it. Lead was effectively banned from paint in 1978.
Lawrence Cetrulo, an attorney for Sherwin-Williams, hailed the decision as a "death knell" for similar litigation across the country. He said it "drove a stake through the heart of all the cities and states...that have tried to shoehorn lead-paint abatement responsibilities into a liability case based on public nuisance."
Write to Joseph Pereira at joe.pereira@wsj.com
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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From: University of Florida ..............................[This story printer-friendly]
July 34, 2008
NEW STUDY LINKS AGRICULTURE TO SEXUAL ABNORMALITIES IN TOADS
[Rachel's introduction: "What we are finding in Bufo marinus [cane toads] might also occur in other animals, including other amphibian species and humans. In fact, reproductive abnormalities are increasing in humans and these increases could partially be due to exposure to pesticides."]
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A farm irrigation canal would seem a healthier place for toads than a ditch by a supermarket parking lot.
But University of Florida scientists have found the opposite is true. In a study with wide implications for a longstanding debate over whether agricultural chemicals pose a threat to amphibians, UF zoologists have found that toads in suburban areas are less likely to suffer from reproductive system abnormalities than toads near farms - where some had both testes and ovaries.
"As you increase agriculture," said Lou Guillette, a distinguished professor of zoology, "you have an increasing number of abnormalities."
Guillette is one of several UF authors of a paper on the research appearing in the online version of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The lead author is Krista McCoy, who did the work as part of her UF School of Natural Resources and the Environment dissertation.
Several past studies have suggested a link between herbicides commonly used in farming and sexual abnormalities in tadpoles and frogs. Such deformities may be responsible for declines in frogs documented in areas affected by agricultural contaminants, such as Sierra Nevada, Calif., McCoy said. Amphibians are declining worldwide and agricultural chemicals are considered to be one likely cause, she said. Others include pathogenic infections and habitat loss.
Past research has compared frogs collected from natural areas with those collected from agricultural areas. Other efforts have pointed to specific chemicals, including the herbicide Atrazine, as causing abnormalities. The UF study is the first peer-reviewed study to compare abnormalities in wild toads -- toads are a variety of frogs -- from heavily farmed areas with frogs from both partially farmed and completely suburban areas. In so doing, it highlights the difference between the impact of agriculture versus development.
"Our study is the first to explicitly ask, of these two areas of human disturbance, do we see a greater proportion of abnormal animals in one versus another?" Guillette said.
Because the results implicate agriculture, future research can narrow the focus to agricultural chemicals, McCoy said.
"Because we know what chemicals are used at these agricultural sites, we can begin to pin down the chemical cause of these abnormalities by conducting controlled experiments with each chemical alone and in combination," she said.
The researchers gathered giant toads, known scientifically as Bufo marinus, from five sites stretching from Lake Worth to Belle Glade and down to Homestead in South Florida. Bufo marinus is a very large, exotic, invasive, species known to be deadly to small animals. Guillette said the researchers studied the toad in part because they are easy to catch and their large size ensures enough blood for analysis. Also, he said, "they are common in other agricultural areas around the world," which means they are a good generalist species.
One of the sites consisted almost entirely of land devoted to sugar cane or vegetable farms. The amount of farmland declined in three other sites, with the last being entirely suburban. Researchers calculated the amount of farmland in each site using Google Earth images.
Each site was 2.1 square miles, with the toads collected at the center. That's because the toad's home range is known to be about 1.2 miles, and the researchers sought only those toads living entirely within each site. The researchers collected at least 20 toads from each site in 2005 and 2006.
Examination of the euthanized toads revealed a pattern: The more agricultural the land where they lived, the more sexual organ abnormalities or so-called "intersex" toads -- toads who have both female and male internal reproductive organs, not a normal condition for this and most species of amphibians.
While normal male toads' forelimbs are thicker and stronger than those of their female counterparts, more of the intersex frogs only found in agricultural areas had thin, weak forearms. Also, intersexes had fewer "nuptial pads," areas of scrappy skin on their feet used to grip females during copulation.
Where a sex was clear, the male toads appeared by far the most affected. Normal males are brown, while females are mottled with brown stripes. However, males from agricultural areas were mottled, looking like females.
Internally, the more agricultural the sites, the more feminized the males' reproductive organs. Many had both ovaries and testes. Not only that, both the impacted males and the intersex frogs had less of the male hormone testosterone than normal males, suggesting diminished reproductive capabilities, Guillette said.
Guillette and McCoy said the study's results may have important implications not only for other wild species, but also for people.
"What we are finding in Bufo marinus might also occur in other animals, including other amphibian species and humans," McCoy said. "In fact, reproductive abnormalities are increasing in humans and these increases could partially be due to exposure to pesticides."
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From: Planet Ark (Reuters) ...............................[This story printer-friendly]
July 04, 2008
US MIDWEST FLOODS SHOW IMPACT OF GLOBAL WARMING
[Rachel's introduction: "In Chicago, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an environmental group more disasters like the Midwest floods are likely."]
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON -- Floods like those that inundated the US Midwest are supposed to occur once every 500 years but this is the second since 1993, suggesting flawed forecasts that do not take global warming into account, conservation experts said on Tuesday.
"Although no single weather event can be attributed to global warming, it's critical to understand that a warming climate is supplying the very conditions that fuel these kinds of weather events," said Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation. Warmer air can carry more water, Staudt said in a telephone briefing, and this means more heavy precipitation in the central United States. Big Midwestern storms that used to be seen every 20 years or so will likely occur every four to six years by century's end, she said.
The idea that certain places along the Mississippi River and its tributaries will only flood once every 500 years may be based on mistaken assumptions that flood patterns do not change over time, said Nicholas Pinter of Southern Illinois University.
Pinter said these assumptions are contained in an analysis on Mississippi River flooding in the upper Midwest, led by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which among other things builds and maintains river levees.
In the last 35 years, there have been four floods in the Mississippi River basin that qualified as 100-year floods or higher according to the Army Corps' analysis, Pinter said.
BIGGER, MORE FREQUENT FLOODS
"It is an impossibility that those numbers can be correct," Pinter told reporters. "These are not random events. We're getting a systematic pattern of floods larger and/or more frequent than currently estimated by those calculations."
The Army Corps' analysis rejects any kind of climate change -- human- generated or naturally occurring -- as a mechanism that could alter flood patterns along the Mississippi over the last century, Pinter said.
He said the analysis also rejects the effects of land use and navigation construction over that period.
"We suggest the current flood, sadly, is a confirmation that... these numbers are probably invalid, underestimating the occurrence of floods up and down this river for a variety of mechanisms," Pinter said.
Given the impact of this year's Midwest floods, the National Wildlife Federation, a non-profit conservation group, called on Congress to hold immediate hearings to revise the National Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act.
In a letter to the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee, federation president Larry Schweiger noted that there was significant rebuilding in flood plains along the Mississippi after the 1993 floods.
"While there may have been an expectation that such floods would only happen every 500 years, scientists now warn that climate change will make such floods far more frequent," Schweiger wrote.
In Chicago, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told an environmental group more disasters like the Midwest floods are likely.
"Climate change is not something that is going to be smooth and linear," Pachauri told reporters. "We have built in a certain inertia, but if we don't do something about the problem, things will get much worse."
(Additional reporting by Erin Zureick in Chicago) (Editing by Bill Trott and Eric Beech)
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Rachel's Democracy & Health News highlights the connections between issues that are often considered separately or not at all.
The natural world is deteriorating and human health is declining because those who make the important decisions aren't the ones who bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress among workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy, intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided and therefore ruled by the few.
In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than, "Who gets to decide?" And, "How DO the few control the many, and what might be done about it?"
Rachel's Democracy and Health News is published as often as necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the subject.
Editors:
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Tim Montague - tim@rachel.org
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