what's going on...

THE WAR ON (BLANK)

2007-02-21T09:54:00.000Z

INSTRUCTIONS: Fill in the blank with the name of any group of people, nation, substance, or activitiy that threatens to destroy the American way of life and everything America stands for.

Americans must come together and give government the tools and funding needed to end the menace of (BLANK). The Special Commission for the Study of (BLANK) made up of former government officials working at a prestigious Washington think tank recently issued a report that reveals the true danger of (BLANK). The report clearly states that if government does not act now to deal with (BLANK), millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules will suffer needlessly and our way of life will be put into jeopardy.

The Special Commission's report calls for a war on (BLANK) and provides a blueprint to deal with eliminating the threats posed by (BLANK). The report recommends that the President should immediately appoint a task force to form a network with various local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, federal intelligence agencies, and the Pentagon in order to mount a well organized attack on (BLANK).

The Special Commission suggests forming an international coalition with friends and allies abroad who share our concern over the (BLANK) menace. Of course, the war on (BLANK) must be fought most vigorously on American soil. This means giving authorities special powers to deal with the elusive and dangerous people involved with (BLANK). The Commission's report suggests specific legislation needed to give the government the powers to deal with (BLANK).

Freedoms that Americans have become used to will have to be temporarily curtailed in order for government to mount an effective campaign to eradict the threat of (BLANK). The government must have the ability to identify and target anyone who is involed in any manner with (BLANK).

This may mean that Americans will have to give up some of their privacy until the war on (BLANK) is won. The war on (BLANK) requires authorities to be able to conduct random searches, monitor financial transactions, monitor communications, detain suspects, and interrogate detainees.

Americans must also be informed of the financial costs of the war on (BLANK). Fighting the gathering dangers of (BLANK) will not come cheap. But, no cost is too great to prevent the destruction of the American way of life.

Experts predict that it may take many years to win the war on (BLANK) and it may cost hundreds of billions of dollars to eliminate the threat (BLANK) poses to America. The Commission's report suggests that the war on (BLANK) can be financed through borrowing in order to protect Americans from costly tax increases. The report notes that most Americans have been supportive of deficit spending for other wars.

Americans working together and supporting the war on (BLANK) will ensure that the war on (BLANK) will be won. There can be no question that if the blueprint outlined in the report issued by the Special Commission for the Study of (BLANK) is followed, we will win the war on (BLANK) and guarantee future generations the same security and freedom that we all cherish.

737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire

2007-02-21T09:44:00.000Z

By Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books.

With more than 2,500,000 U.S. personnel serving across the planet and military bases spread across each continent, it's time to face up to the fact that our American democracy has spawned a global empire.

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial "footprint" and the militarism that grows with it.

It is not easy, however, to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records available to the public on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual inventories from 2002 to 2005 of real property it owns around the world, the Base Structure Report, there has been an immense churning in the numbers of installations.

The total of America's military bases in other people's countries in 2005, according to official sources, was 737. Reflecting massive deployments to Iraq and the pursuit of President Bush's strategy of preemptive war, the trend line for numbers of overseas bases continues to go up.

Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005 -- mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets -- almost exactly equals Britain's thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

Using data from fiscal year 2005, the Pentagon bureaucrats calculated that its overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic products of most countries -- and an estimated $658.1 billion for all of them, foreign and domestic (a base's "worth" is based on a Department of Defense estimate of what it would cost to replace it). During fiscal 2005, the military high command deployed to our overseas bases some 196,975 uniformed personnel as well as an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employed an additional 81,425 locally hired foreigners.

The worldwide total of U.S. military personnel in 2005, including those based domestically, was 1,840,062 supported by an additional 473,306 Defense Department civil service employees and 203,328 local hires. Its overseas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and 16,527 more that it leased. The size of these holdings was recorded in the inventory as covering 687,347 acres overseas and 29,819,492 acres worldwide, making the Pentagon easily one of the world's largest landlords.

These numbers, although staggeringly big, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2005 Base Structure Report fails, for instance, to mention any garrisons in Kosovo (or Serbia, of which Kosovo is still officially a province) -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained ever since by the KBR corporation (formerly known as Kellogg Brown Root), a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston.

The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq (106 garrisons as of May 2005), Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though the U.S. military has established colossal base structures in the Persian Gulf and Central Asian areas since 9/11. By way of excuse, a note in the preface says that "facilities provided by other nations at foreign locations" are not included, although this is not strictly true. The report does include twenty sites in Turkey, all owned by the Turkish government and used jointly with the Americans. The Pentagon continues to omit from its accounts most of the $5 billion worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure.

In some cases, foreign countries themselves have tried to keep their U.S. bases secret, fearing embarrassment if their collusion with American imperialism were revealed. In other instances, the Pentagon seems to want to play down the building of facilities aimed at dominating energy sources, or, in a related situation, retaining a network of bases that would keep Iraq under our hegemony regardless of the wishes of any future Iraqi government. The U.S. government tries not to divulge any information about the bases we use to eavesdrop on global communications, or our nuclear deployments, which, as William Arkin, an authority on the subject, writes, "[have] violated its treaty obligations. The U.S. was lying to many of its closest allies, even in NATO, about its nuclear designs. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, hundreds of bases, and dozens of ships and submarines existed in a special secret world of their own with no rational military or even 'deterrence' justification."

In Jordan, to take but one example, we have secretly deployed up to five thousand troops in bases on the Iraqi and Syrian borders. (Jordan has also cooperated with the CIA in torturing prisoners we deliver to them for "interrogation.") Nonetheless, Jordan continues to stress that it has no special arrangements with the United States, no bases, and no American military presence.

The country is formally sovereign but actually a satellite of the United States and has been so for at least the past ten years. Similarly, before our withdrawal from Saudi Arabia in 2003, we habitually denied that we maintained a fleet of enormous and easily observed B-52 bombers in Jeddah because that was what the Saudi government demanded. So long as military bureaucrats can continue to enforce a culture of secrecy to protect themselves, no one will know the true size of our baseworld, least of all the elected representatives of the American people.

In 2005, deployments at home and abroad were in a state of considerable flux. This was said to be caused both by a long overdue change in the strategy for maintaining our global dominance and by the closing of surplus bases at home. In reality, many of the changes seemed to be determined largely by the Bush administration's urge to punish nations and domestic states that had not supported its efforts in Iraq and to reward those that had. Thus, within the United States, bases were being relocated to the South, to states with cultures, as the Christian Science Monitor put it, "more tied to martial traditions" than the Northeast, the northern Middle West, or the Pacific Coast. According to a North Carolina businessman gloating over his new customers, "The military is going where it is wanted and valued most."

In part, the realignment revolved around the Pentagon's decision to bring home by 2007 or 2008 two army divisions from Germany -- the First Armored Division and the First Infantry Division -- and one brigade (3,500 men) of the Second Infantry Division from South Korea (which, in 2005, was officially rehoused at Fort Carson, Colorado). So long as the Iraq insurgency continues, the forces involved are mostly overseas and the facilities at home are not ready for them (nor is there enough money budgeted to get them ready).

Nonetheless, sooner or later, up to 70,000 troops and 100,000 family members will have to be accommodated within the United States. The attendant 2005 "base closings" in the United States are actually a base consolidation and enlargement program with tremendous infusions of money and customers going to a few selected hub areas. At the same time, what sounds like a retrenchment in the empire abroad is really proving to be an exponential growth in new types of bases -- without dependents and the amenities they would require -- in very remote areas where the U.S. military has never been before.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was obvious to anyone who thought about it that the huge concentrations of American military might in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea were no longer needed to meet possible military threats. There were not going to be future wars with the Soviet Union or any country connected to any of those places.

In 1991, the first Bush administration should have begun decommissioning or redeploying redundant forces; and, in fact, the Clinton administration did close some bases in Germany, such as those protecting the Fulda Gap, once envisioned as the likeliest route for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But nothing was really done in those years to plan for the strategic repositioning of the American military outside the United States.

By the end of the 1990s, the neoconservatives were developing their grandiose theories to promote overt imperialism by the "lone superpower" -- including preventive and preemptive unilateral military action, spreading democracy abroad at the point of a gun, obstructing the rise of any "near-peer" country or bloc of countries that might challenge U.S. military supremacy, and a vision of a "democratic" Middle East that would supply us with all the oil we wanted. A component of their grand design was a redeployment and streamlining of the military. The initial rationale was for a program of transformation that would turn the armed forces into a lighter, more agile, more high-tech military, which, it was imagined, would free up funds that could be invested in imperial policing.

What came to be known as "defense transformation" first began to be publicly bandied about during the 2000 presidential election campaign. Then 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq intervened. In August 2002, when the whole neocon program began to be put into action, it centered above all on a quick, easy war to incorporate Iraq into the empire. By this time, civilian leaders in the Pentagon had become dangerously overconfident because of what they perceived as America's military brilliance and invincibility as demonstrated in its 2001 campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda -- a strategy that involved reigniting the Afghan civil war through huge payoffs to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance warlords and the massive use of American airpower to support their advance on Kabul.

In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unveiled his "1-4-2-1 defense strategy" to replace the Clinton era's plan for having a military capable of fighting two wars -- in the Middle East and Northeast Asia -- simultaneously. Now, war planners were to prepare to defend the United States while building and assembling forces capable of "deterring aggression and coercion" in four "critical regions": Europe, Northeast Asia (South Korea and Japan), East Asia (the Taiwan Strait), and the Middle East, be able to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and "win decisively" (in the sense of "regime change" and occupation) in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing."As the military analyst William M. Arkin commented, "[With] American military forces ... already stretched to the limit, the new strategy goes far beyond preparing for reactive contingencies and reads more like a plan for picking fights in new parts of the world."

A seemingly easy three-week victory over Saddam Hussein's forces in the spring of 2003 only reconfirmed these plans. The U.S. military was now thought to be so magnificent that it could accomplish any task assigned to it. The collapse of the Baathist regime in Baghdad also emboldened Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to use "transformation" to penalize nations that had been, at best, lukewarm about America's unilateralism -- Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Turkey -- and to reward those whose leaders had welcomed Operation Iraqi Freedom, including such old allies as Japan and Italy but also former communist countries such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. The result was the Department of Defense's Integrated Global Presence and Basing Strategy, known informally as the "Global Posture Review."

President Bush first mentioned it in a statement on November 21, 2003, in which he pledged to "realign the global posture" of the United States. He reiterated the phrase and elaborated on it on August 16, 2004, in a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati. Because Bush's Cincinnati address was part of the 2004 presidential election campaign, his comments were not taken very seriously at the time. While he did say that the United States would reduce its troop strength in Europe and Asia by 60,000 to 70,000, he assured his listeners that this would take a decade to accomplish -- well beyond his term in office -- and made a series of promises that sounded more like a reenlistment pitch than a statement of strategy.

"Over the coming decade, we'll deploy a more agile and more flexible force, which means that more of our troops will be stationed and deployed from here at home. We'll move some of our troops and capabilities to new locations, so they can surge quickly to deal with unexpected threats. ... It will reduce the stress on our troops and our military families. ... See, our service members will have more time on the home front, and more predictability and fewer moves over a career. Our military spouses will have fewer job changes, greater stability, more time for their kids and to spend with their families at home."

On September 23, 2004, however, Secretary Rumsfeld disclosed the first concrete details of the plan to the Senate Armed Services Committee. With characteristic grandiosity, he described it as "the biggest re-structuring of America's global forces since 1945." Quoting then undersecretary Douglas Feith, he added, "During the Cold War we had a strong sense that we knew where the major risks and fights were going to be, so we could deploy people right there. We're operating now [with] an entirely different concept. We need to be able to do [the] whole range of military operations, from combat to peacekeeping, anywhere in the world pretty quickly."

Though this may sound plausible enough, in basing terms it opens up a vast landscape of diplomatic and bureaucratic minefields that Rumsfeld's militarists surely underestimated. In order to expand into new areas, the Departments of State and Defense must negotiate with the host countries such things as Status of Forces Agreements, or SOFAs, which are discussed in detail in the next chapter. In addition, they must conclude many other required protocols, such as access rights for our aircraft and ships into foreign territory and airspace, and Article 98 Agreements. The latter refer to article 98 of the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute, which allows countries to exempt U.S. citizens on their territory from the ICC's jurisdiction.

Such immunity agreements were congressionally mandated by the American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002, even though the European Union holds that they are illegal. Still other necessary accords are acquisitions and cross-servicing agreements or ACSAs, which concern the supply and storage of jet fuel, ammunition, and so forth; terms of leases on real property; levels of bilateral political and economic aid to the United States (so-called host-nation support); training and exercise arrangements (Are night landings allowed? Live firing drills?); and environmental pollution liabilities.

When the United States is not present in a country as its conqueror or military savior, as it was in Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II and in South Korea after the 1953 Korean War armistice, it is much more difficult to secure the kinds of agreements that allow the Pentagon to do anything it wants and that cause a host nation to pick up a large part of the costs of doing so. When not based on conquest, the structure of the American empire of bases comes to look exceedingly fragile.

From the book NEMESIS: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2006 by Chalmers Johnson. All rights reserved.

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World

2007-02-17T21:30:00.000Z

By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.

The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.

U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.

The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.

A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.

Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.

But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.

They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.

So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings---which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.

Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.

In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?

No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?

The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.

In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.

The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.

Use Community: Smaller Footprints, Cooler Stuff and More Cash

2007-02-17T19:49:00.000Z

Alex Steffen

If we want to build a society which is both prosperous and sustainable, we're going to need to innovate ways of delivering the material goods which underpin that prosperity at a small fraction of the ecological cost they exact today. We must learn to live large while leaving tiny ecological footprints.

We have extremely huge footprints today. If every person lived as the average wealthy American does today, we'd need almost ten planets worth of resources to sustain ourselves, while the gap between our consumption and the capacities of the planet's natural systems has already crossed into overshoot, threatening mass-extinctions and catastrophic climate change.

If we're going to have a bright green future -- if we want to avoid living out the rest of our lives in one long emergency, a kind of constant Katrina -- we need to reinvent our lives now, immediately, on a radical scale. British researchers found that in order to reach sustainable prosperity, Londoners would have to shrink their ecological impacts 80% in the next four decades. For affluent Americans, the number may be more like 90%. And the more we learn about the extent of the damage we're causing the planet, the shorter our timeframes for change become. I suspect that we need to be thinking more along the lines of cutting our impact in half in the next ten years.

Impossible, you say? I think not.

I believe that three main barriers present themselves.

First, we must learn to see the damage we already do. Most of the ecological devastation we cause happens in ways and places which are obscured from our eyes. You might say it happens off-stage: when we turn the ignition key, we don't see the glaciers of Greenland melting; when we throw out our our old television, we don't see its toxic chemicals and heavy metals seeping from the landfill into the groundwater; when we install a new hardwood floor, we don't see the rainforest disappearing in a cloud of chainsaw smoke.

But we ought to see these things. We ought to know the backstory. I believe the next decade will see a lot of artists, activists and culture-jammers finding new ways of highlighting the negative backstories of the goods and services we buy (especially when other choices with better stories exist).

Observation changes behavior. Telling the history of the stuff in our lives is a great way to induce us to change, of course -- for instance, most people will never again want a fur coat once they know what happens to the animals who were wearing that fur before -- but there are even more powerful ways to harness the force of sustained observation. Congestion taxes, for instance, can dramatically alter driving behavior in a very short time. Simply installing home energy meters often leads to a drop in energy use: when we can see immediately the consequences of leaving a light bulb burning unnecessarily, we have an added incentive to switch it off.

Second, we need to make better things. We can shrink our footprints quite a bit through better design and engineering of the products in our lives, by making things which use no raw materials, function at near-optimal energy efficiency, are non-toxic and can be completely recycled or re-used at the end of their lives. That may sound utterly utopian, but we may actually be able to accomplish much of this redesign in the next couple decades, as better tools for designing more sustainably (like computer-aided design programs that take into account not only the strength and function of the materials a designer is playing with using, but their ecological and social impacts) meet emerging technologies and materials. Indeed, some of us are already much farther ahead in this race than others -- the Japanese, for example, have created an extremely prosperous society with an ecological footprint less than half as large as that of most Americans. And there are extremely encouraging signs that designers, engineers and architects around the world are taking the need for transformative change seriously.

Sometimes, we need to see the system in which that good is embedded in a fresh light. Take Netflix. Most of us don't think of it this way, but this DVD-by-mail service is actually a great model of sustainability innovation. Consider: when many North Americans want to watch a movie at home, they get in their cars, drive to a big box store, park in a huge parking lot, shop for an available title under the hot lights with the HVAC whooshing air around above them, pay for their film, drive home, watch their film and then repeat the process. When I watch a Netflix movie, though, I drive nowhere. The postal carrier is already coming to my house to drop of my other mail, so the added effort to get me my movie is negligible. I still get to see Lethal Smoking Gun With a Vengeance 4 or whatever, but my drives to and from the store, and even the store itself, have been dematerialized. The DVD itself is unchanged, yet my movie sits more lightly on the planet.

Third, we need a revolution in how we think about the things we have. We've focused quite a bit here on the concept of product-service systems, and for good reason: transforming one's relationship with objects from one of ownership to one of use offers perhaps the greatest immediately available leverage point for greening our lives.

Take power drills. Supposedly, the average power drill is used for somewhere between six and twenty minutes in its entire lifetime. And yet supposedly almost half of all American households own one. If you think of all the energy and materials it takes to make, store and then dispose of those drills -- all the plastic and metal parts; all the trucks used to ship them and stores built to sell them; all the landfills they wind up in -- the ecological cost of each minute of drilling can be seen to be absurdly large, and thus each hole we put in the wall comes with a chunk of planetary destruction already attached.

But what we want is the hole, not the drill. That is, most of us, most of the time, would be perfectly happy not owning the drill itself if we had the ability to make that hole in the wall in a reasonably convenient manner when the need arose. What if we could substitute, in other words, a hole-drilling service for owning a drill?

We can. Already there are tool libraries, tool-sharing services, and companies that will rent you a drill when you want one. Other models are possible as well, and such product-service systems are not limited to hand tools.

Car sharing offers a great example. With mobile phones, swipe cards and walkshed technologies. it's easy to find the nearest car, quickly make a reservation, walk over and swipe your way inside. Indeed, in sufficiently dense neighborhoods, using a shared car is significantly easier than owning your own car. It can also save you serious cash. It fits perfectly with an urban, high-tech lifestyle.

Even better, car sharing offers major ecological benefits. Because as much as half the energy ever used by a car (and almost all of the material resources) are used not in the operation of the car but in its manufacture and disposal, sharing cars has an immediate and major ecological benefit attached. If three people share one car to do the same amount of driving they used to do in three separate cars, they have roughly one-third the backstory impact on those trips that they used to.

And it turns out that a lot of people can use the same few cars. Zipcar founder Robin Chase told me that they have found that every efficiently-used shared car can replace as many as 20 private cars (that is, cars which users either sell or decide not to buy in the first place). That means that the backstory impacts of all those trips drops to as little as 5% of what it once was.

But the beneficial impacts of car-sharing don't stop there. Because car-sharers' driving time is limited and measured (most pay by the hour), they tend to use it more efficiently, making fewer trips and planning routes more effectively, all of which means that they tend to use less fuel to accomplish the same tasks. Also, because the cars are being used more, they spend less time sitting in parking lots, and as car-sharing becomes more common, we can slash the number of parking spaces in our cities [anyone have a good number for parking-spaces-per-auto in the U.S.?], greatly reducing the amount of space we need to cover with asphalt (if shared cars and carpools were given priority access to the remaining spaces, this would have the additional advantage of disincentivizing people driving alone. We may not go car-free anytime soon, but we could go car-sensible tomorrow.) Perhaps the PARK(ing) kids have the right idea after all. Overall, though it may not be right for everyone, car sharing delivers most of the comfort and utility for less money and a fraction of the footprint of driving one's own car around.

What's more, why stop with drills and cars? We already share exercise equipment (gyms), books (libraries), outdoor space (parks) and short-haul rides (taxis); what kind of a scenario might present itself if we took the concept one step further?

Like many people, I want less clutter and hassle in my life. I already have too much stuff I have to store, too many things I have to maintain and keep track of; I even have, I've decided, too much space (despite loving my home, the first I've ever owned, I find that I could easily, perhaps even more happily, live in half the square footage). All of these things take up much of the time, energy and money I might otherwise apply to having the experiences I want in my life. I want an institutional tool for owning less and doing more.

Let's call it a use community. Imagine a member-owned facility located in the heart of a dense urban neighborhood where I could not only access a tool library, a laundry room, a gym and a shared car, or what-have-you, but access a whole suite of services designed to outsource my responsibility for owning or buying things.

For instance, I love to entertain, and so it is a real pleasure to have a dining room and a decent kitchen. But the reality is that I entertain more than a couple guests at most once a month. And I am told that in New York a company already offers studio dwellers access to a professional kitchen and well-appointed dining room, for a fee. If I had access to a place I could throw bigger dinner parties, I could easily live in a much smaller home and not worry that my kitchen stove only has four burners (and two of those don't work so well).

In a similar way, I have a home office. Now that Worldchanging is both so all-consuming and headquartered in a great, funky space, I spend almost no time working at home, but as someone who's often made my living freelancing and consulting, a home office was long an essential. Or was it? Already there are some amazing groups out there offering shared offices: WorkSpace in Vancouver is a fabulous example (they hosted our Vancouver book tour event), but there are other cool models as well, like the Hub and Aula.

Like a lot of urban people, I love third places like cafes, bars and art spaces, but often wrestle with the discomforting reality that in most third places I have limited ability to influence my surroundings. This is the problem rich people solve by joining exclusive private clubs and our grandparents solved by joining fraternal organizations (like Fred Flintstone's Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes), but those aren't the only models for sharing social space. Take for instance the McLeod Residence, an experimental project here in Seattle which aims to create a member-driven art/social space where everyone can have a voice in creating something cool out of the raw materials of square footage and fun allies.

One could also over-lay this basis of shared space and shared objects with systems for informal sharing -- like Sharer! or RentAThing, even a place-based FreeCycle -- so that me and my fellow members could function as one large, informal, distributed product-service system on top of the formal program. Heck, we could even go the whole nine yards and host various neighborly technologies like yellow chairs.

Combined purchasing power and shared facilities could also make the best available sustainable products more accessible. Services like CSAs would be a snap, but that's only the beginning. If I as an individual buy a super-green washing machine, it may take years to "earn out" (to have saved me more in water and energy costs than the difference in price between the green machine and cheaper, more wasteful alternatives). Ten people using that same machine, however, would earn out much more quickly (as well as reducing their individual backstory footprints), meaning they could live more sustainably, more cheaply. Similarly, with a shared facility, pushing the building itself to reflect cutting-edge best practices would become more cost-effective. Why shouldn't my use community's facility be something like the Jubilee Wharf? The money we saved would be our own.

I'd bet that a comprehensive survey of both my ecological impact now and the life I'd like to be living would reveal a ton of ways in which I could give up things I now own or purchase, replace them with things I use and share, and in the process not only greatly reduce my impact on the planet but actually get more life through the energy and money I'd save. (Indeed, an interesting subject I won't pursue here is the sudden explosion of financial models through which people can act to their mutual benefit -- not only what are called Mutual Benefit Corporations here in the US, but Tenancy-in-Common arrangements, joint ownership agreements and various forms of time-shares and cooperatives. Wealthy people already understand this principle well, creating corporations to share things like hunting lodges and golf courses -- what if a community of users did the same? I am pretty intrigued by the possibilities such mechanisms offer people looking to create innovative new systems of sharing.)

Building passion for such an institution would take creating some serious service envy, but that might be easier than old school marketers might think, especially if the execution of the idea lead visibly to the bright green trifecta of having cooler stuff, more money and less impact on the planet.

The impacts might be broader still. One of our goals here must be the redefinition of stylish affluence, not only because the affluent of the Global North are directly responsible for a fairly large share of global pollution, but because it is their lifestyle which is being emulated and adopted by the affluent in the emerging economies. If we can change the way we deliver affluence here, we can share affluence there without losing the great wager. That seems worth some experimentation.

The Mystery of Consciousness

2007-02-02T14:45:00.000Z

By Steven Pinker

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In
the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could
open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the
jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative
state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So
picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they
scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active
parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in
language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of
her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing
places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis,
the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were
barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it
appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.

Try to comprehend
what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and
caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at
your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do
you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a
voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could
experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these
questions have answers, would they change our policies toward
unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's
play?

The report of this unusual case last September was just
the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of
consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and
late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of
cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has
taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never
be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be
human have been shaken.

It shouldn't be surprising that research
on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other
topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the
most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a
soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to
meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself,
the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality
through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction
that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the
essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.

To make
scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to
clear away some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on
language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain
damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that
indicate that someone's home. Nor can consciousness be equated with
self-awareness. At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise
or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold.

THE "EASY" AND "HARD" PROBLEMS

WHAT
REMAINS IS NOT ONE PROBLEM ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS BUT two, which the
philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard
Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the
sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is,
scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough
brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.

What
exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the
difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of
information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your
daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are
conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your
behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules
that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle
contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They
must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and
see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and
reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.

The
Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental
computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it
evolved.

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels
like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why
there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green
thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things
and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also
actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that
isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response
to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never
get to know."

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective
experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because
no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a
genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly,
everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a
mystery.

Although neither problem has been solved,
neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature
they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the
field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing
hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches
consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain.
Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain
like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

THE BRAIN AS MACHINE

SCIENTISTS
HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are
mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every
aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI,
cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the
blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a
person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the
person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.

And
consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations.
Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person
to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as
a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals
that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can
profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs
the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for
epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the
soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.

And when the
physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell
the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact
the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago)
turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not
the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but
symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a
team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body
experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which
vision and bodily sensations converge.

THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL

ANOTHER
STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the
intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a
control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and
pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns
out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain.
These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the
others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts
the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Take
the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got
people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning,
those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists
understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones
given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because
the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good
reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked,
they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used
to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."

It's
not only decisions in sketchy circumstances that get rationalized but
also the texture of our immediate experience. We all feel we are
conscious of a rich and detailed world in front of our eyes. Yet
outside the dead center of our gaze, vision is amazingly coarse. Just
try holding your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting
your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every
time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two
pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the
change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on
whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This
fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an
example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own
consciousness.

Our authorship of voluntary
actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation
between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan
Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of
a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's
armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is
moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person
behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he
feels as if he is actually in command of the arms.

The brain's
spin doctoring is displayed even more dramatically in neurological
conditions in which the healthy parts of the brain explain away the
foibles of the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because
they are part of the self). A patient who fails to experience a
visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife but who
acknowledges that she looks and acts just like her deduces that she is
an amazingly well-trained impostor. A patient who believes he is at
home and is shown the hospital elevator says without missing a beat,
"You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed."

Why
does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in
which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One
reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed
today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision
circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle
twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being
delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of
attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are
most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring
out what to do next. The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens
consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post
their results and monitor the results of the others.

BELIEVING OUR OWN LIES

A
SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is
strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people
have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent
agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies,
ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or
self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep
compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our
interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data
around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too
far out of touch with reality.

What about the brain itself? You
might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of
awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The
trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's
consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique,
called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left
eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for
consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds,
then horizontal stripes, and so on.

A low-tech
way to experience the effect yourself is to look through a paper tube
at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of
your left eye. After a few seconds, a white hole in your hand should
appear, then disappear, then reappear.

Monkeys experience
binocular rivalry. They can learn to press a button every time their
perception flips, while their brains are impaled with electrodes that
record any change in activity. Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis found
that the earliest way stations for visual input in the back of the
brain barely budged as the monkeys' consciousness flipped from one
state to another. Instead, it was a region that sits further down the
information stream and that registers coherent shapes and objects that
tracks the monkeys' awareness. Now this doesn't mean that this place on
the underside of the brain is the TV screen of consciousness. What it
means, according to a theory by Crick and his collaborator Christof
Koch, is that consciousness resides only in the "higher" parts of the
brain that are connected to circuits for emotion and decision making,
just what one would expect from the blackboard metaphor.

WAVES OF BRAIN

CONSCIOUSNESS
IN THE BRAIN CAN BE TRACKED NOT JUST IN SPACE but also in time.
Neuroscientists have long known that consciousness depends on certain
frequencies of oscillation in the electroencephalograph (EEG). These
brain waves consist of loops of activation between the cortex (the
wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (the cluster of hubs at
the center that serve as input-output relay stations). Large, slow,
regular waves signal a coma, anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller,
faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves
are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow
consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in
far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for
motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio
transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough,
when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display,
the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition
oscillate in synchrony, while the ones representing the eye that is
suppressed fall out of synch.

So neuroscientists are well on the
way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of
the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually
cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem?

TACKLING THE HARD PROBLEM

TO
APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could
ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and
I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color
that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder
whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or
me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the
crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer
Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this
was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.

No
one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as
an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the
mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game
that provides no insight.

Many philosophers, like Daniel
Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about
zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because
nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you
could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths
make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what
emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing
in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving
nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with
incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our
own experience.

The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem
among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will
eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem.
Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the
inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem
even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they
say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny
consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the
soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information
processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple
consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people
find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger
Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum
mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum
mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe
quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

And then there is
the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo
when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The
brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their
limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in
memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't
intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the
outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This
is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be
demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of
consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly
makes it all clear to us.

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and
Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will
locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many
nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle
the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also
seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for
our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In
his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe
worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that
will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem
tame."

TOWARD A NEW MORALITY

MY OWN VIEW
IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder
basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's
not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will
reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression.
That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of
other beings--the core of morality.

As every student in
Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone
except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have
feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice,
as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize
that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other
people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience
becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the
question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or
a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact
that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to
deny our common capacity to suffer.

And when you think about it,
the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all
because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most
famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in
the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

Think,
too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It
is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury
the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather
than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose
than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious
and fragile gift.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of
Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct, How the
Mind Works and The Blank Slate

Another Species of Denial

2007-01-31T20:51:00.000Z

George Monbiot

It is a testament to the power of money that Nicholas Stern’s report should have swung the argument for drastic action, even before anyone has finished reading it. He appears to have demonstrated what many of us suspected: that it would cost much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it. Useful as this finding is, I hope it doesn’t mean that the debate will now concentrate on money. The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not pounds. As Stern reminded us yesterday, there would be a moral imperative to seek to prevent mass death even if the economic case did not stack up.

But at least almost everyone now agrees that we must act, if not at the necessary speed. If we’re to have a high chance of preventing global temperatures from rising by 2C (3.6F) above preindustrial levels, we need, in the rich nations, a 90% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. The greater part of the cut has to be made at the beginning of this period. To see why, picture two graphs with time on the horizontal axis and the rate of emissions plotted vertically. On one graph the line falls like a ski jump: a steep drop followed by a shallow tail. On the other it falls like the trajectory of a bullet. The area under each line represents the total volume of greenhouse gases produced in that period. They fall to the same point by the same date, but far more gases have been produced in the second case, making runaway climate change more likely.

So how do we do it without bringing civilisation crashing down? Here is a plan for drastic but affordable action that the government could take. It goes much further than the proposals discussed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown yesterday, for the reason that this is what the science demands.

1. Set a target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions based on the latest science. The government is using outdated figures, aiming for a 60% reduction by 2050. Even the annual 3% cut proposed in the early day motion calling for a new climate change bill does not go far enough. Timescale: immediately.

2. Use that target to set an annual carbon cap, which falls on the ski-jump trajectory. Then use the cap to set a personal carbon ration. Every citizen is given a free annual quota of carbon dioxide. He or she spends it by buying gas and electricity, petrol and train and plane tickets. If they run out, they must buy the rest from someone who has used less than his or her quota. This accounts for about 40% of the carbon dioxide we produce. The remainder is auctioned off to companies. It’s a simpler and fairer approach than either green taxation or the EU’s emissions trading scheme, and it also provides people with a powerful incentive to demand low-carbon technologies. Timescale: a full scheme in place by January 2009.

3. Introduce a new set of building regulations, with three objectives. A. Imposing strict energy-efficiency requirements on all major refurbishments (costing £3,000 or more). Timescale: in force by June 2007. B. Obliging landlords to bring their houses up to high energy-efficiency standards before they can rent them out. Timescale: to cover all new rentals from January 2008. C. Ensuring that all new homes in the UK are built to the German Passivhaus standard (which requires no heating system). Timescale: in force by 2012.

4. Ban the sale of incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other wasteful and unnecessary technologies. Introduce a stiff “feebate” system for all electronic goods sold in the UK, with the least efficient taxed heavily and the most efficient receiving tax discounts. Every year the standards in each category rise. Timescale: fully implemented by November 2007.

5. Redeploy money now earmarked for new nuclear missiles towards a massive investment in energy generation and distribution. Two schemes in particular require government support to make them commercially viable: very large wind farms, many miles offshore, connected to the grid with high-voltage direct-current cables; and a hydrogen pipeline network to take over from the natural gas grid as the primary means of delivering fuel for home heating. Timescale: both programmes commence at the end of 2007 and are completed by 2018.

6. Promote the development of a new national coach network. City-centre coach stations are shut down and moved to motorway junctions. Urban public transport networks are extended to meet them. The coaches travel on dedicated lanes and never leave the motorways. Journeys by public transport then become as fast as journeys by car, while saving 90% of emissions. It is self-financing, through the sale of the land now used for coach stations. Timescale: commences in 2008; completed by 2020.

7. Oblige all chains of filling stations to supply leasable electric car batteries. This provides electric cars with unlimited mileage: as the battery runs down, you pull into a forecourt; a crane lifts it out and drops in a fresh one. The batteries are charged overnight with surplus electricity from offshore wind farms. Timescale: fully operational by 2011.

8. Abandon the road-building and road-widening programme, and spend the money on tackling climate change. The government has earmarked £11.4bn for road expansion. It claims to be allocating just £545m a year to “spending policies that tackle climate change”. Timescale: immediately.

9. Freeze and then reduce UK airport capacity. While capacity remains high there will be constant upward pressure on any scheme the government introduces to limit flights. We need a freeze on all new airport construction and the introduction of a national quota for landing slots, to be reduced by 90% by 2030. Timescale: immediately.

10. Legislate for the closure of all out-of-town superstores, and their replacement with a warehouse and delivery system. Shops use a staggering amount of energy (six times as much electricity per square metre as factories, for example), and major reductions are hard to achieve: Tesco’s “state of the art” energy-saving store at Diss in Norfolk has managed to cut its energy use by only 20%. Warehouses containing the same quantity of goods use roughly 5% of the energy. Out-of-town shops are also hardwired to the car – delivery vehicles use 70% less fuel. Timescale: fully implemented by 2012.

These timescales might seem extraordinarily ambitious. They are, by contrast to the current glacial pace of change. But when the US entered the second world war it turned the economy around on a sixpence. Carmakers began producing aircraft and missiles within a year, and amphibious vehicles in 90 days, from a standing start. And that was 65 years ago. If we want this to happen, we can make it happen. It will require more economic intervention than we are used to, and some pretty brutal emergency planning policies (with little time or scope for objections). But if you believe that these are worse than mass death then there is something wrong with your value system.

Climate change is not just a moral question: it is the moral question of the 21st century. There is one position even more morally culpable than denial. That is to accept that it’s happening and that its results will be catastrophic, but to fail to take the measures needed to prevent it.

George Monbiot’s latest book is Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning.

Missing presumed tortured

2007-01-29T23:24:00.000Z

Stephen Grey

Published 20 November 2006

More than 7,000 prisoners have been captured in America's war on terror. Just 700 ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Between extraordinary rendition to foreign jails and disappearance into the CIA's "black sites", what happened to the rest?

Sana'a, Yemen. By the gates of the Old City, Muhammad Bashmilah was walking, talking, and laughing in the crowd - behaving like a man without a care in the world. Bargaining with the spice traders and joking with passers-by; at last he was free.

A 33-year-old businessman, Bashmilah has an impish sense of humour; his eyes sparkled as he chatted about his country and the khat leaves that all the young men were chewing. But when I began my interview by asking for the story of his past three years, his mood shifted. His face narrowed, his eyes calmed, and he stared beyond me - as if looking directly into the nether world from which he had so recently emerged.

For 11 months, Bashmilah was held in one of the CIA's most secret prisons - its so-called "black sites" - so secret that he had no idea in which country, or even on which continent, he was being held. He was flown there, in chains and wearing a blindfold, from another jail in Afghanistan; his guards wore masks; and he was held in a 10ft by 13ft cell with two video cameras that watched his every move. He was shackled to the floor with a chain of 110 links.

From the times of evening prayer given to him by the guards, the cold winter temperatures, and the number of hours spent flying to this secret jail, he suspected that he was held somewhere in eastern Europe - but he could not be sure.

When he arrived at the prison, said Bashmilah, he was greeted by an interrogator with the words: "Welcome to your new home." He implied that Bashmilah would never be released. "I had gone there without any reason, without any proof, without any accusation," he said. His mental state collapsed and he went on hunger strike for ten days - until he was force-fed food through his nostrils. Finally released after months in detention without being charged with any crime, Bashmilah was one of the first prisoners to provide an inside account of the most secret part of the CIA's detention system.

On 6 September, President George W Bush finally confirmed the existence of secret CIA jails such as the one that held Bashmilah. He added something chilling - a declaration that there were now "no terrorists in the CIA programme", that the many prisoners held with Bashmilah were all gone. It was a statement that hinted at something very dark - that the United States has "disappeared" hundreds of prisoners to an uncertain fate.

Let's examine the arithmetic of this systematic disappearance. In the first years after the attacks of 11 September, thousands of Taliban or suspected terrorist suspects were captured. Just in Afghanistan, the US admitted processing more than 6,000 prisoners. Pakistan has said it handed over around 500 captives to the US; Iran said it sent 1,000 across the border to Afghanistan. Of all these, some were released and just over 700 ended up in Guantanamo, Cuba. But the simple act of subtraction shows that thousands are missing. More than five years after 9/11, where are they all? We know that many were rendered to foreign jails, both by the CIA and directly by the US military. But how many precisely? The answer is still classified. No audit of the fate of all these souls has ever been published.

Bush's next big scandal

Since the publications of photographs from Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has faced a string of scandals concerning its conduct of the war on terror: from abuses of prisoners by the US military, to the rendition of terrorist suspects to jails in places such as Egypt and Syria, where torture is routine, a process first described in the New Statesman in May 2004. International outrage, inquiries launched against CIA activities by prosecutors in Europe, as well as clear instructions from the US Supreme Court that, in its reaction to 9/11, Congress had not issued the president with a "blank cheque", have all challenged the administration's venture into what vice-president Dick Cheney called "the dark side" of warfare.

But if Bush hoped to appease his critics with his public acknowledgement of the CIA's secret programmes, and his promise to bring some of America's most important captives to an open military trial at Guantanamo, then he will be disappointed. After last week's midterm elections, the administration will face legislators more emboldened to probe its conduct. And the issue of disappearances - of the fate of the missing prisoners held by the CIA and the Pentagon - threatens to become the next big scandal.

It was in early 2002, when the camp at Guantanamo Bay was opening up, that I heard from a source close to the CIA that most of the media were missing the point. As cameras showed images of chained prisoners being wheeled across the base on trolleys, there was predictable outrage. But the source described these images as "the press release".

This was what Washington wanted the world to see. Beyond Cuba was a concealed network of prisons around the globe that were becoming home to thousands more prisoners. The CIA had its own secret facilities, but many more were held in jails run by foreign allies. There are some good operational reasons for keeping the arrest of suspected terrorists secret. Sometimes, in the short term, deception makes good tactical sense; staying quiet about an arrest may keep the enemy guessing. Sometimes it can be for diplomatic reasons: secrecy may help to persuade countries such as Egypt to accept a prisoner.

But why is it so sensitive to confirm what happened to these prisoners, to detail how many were transferred where and when? Why should a country receiving prisoners be so embarrassed? And why - when countries such as Egypt have come clean and said "yes, we received 70 to 80 prisoners rendered by the United States" - will the United States itself not confirm what it did? Despite admitting, in general, that the CIA carries out renditions, the US has yet to own up to a single specific case of transferring a prisoner to foreign custody.

The explanation for the secrecy is one that most of the CIA officers involved in rendition will quite freely admit - a transfer to places such as Egypt or Uzbekistan (a country known for boiling prisoners alive) will inevitably involve torture. And knowingly sending a prisoner to face torture is, under both US and international law, an illegal act. Revealing the fate of the missing prisoners may be just too politically embarrassing.

Justifying war with torture

One of those "disappeared", for example, is the former al- Qaeda camp commander Ibn-al Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured in late 2001. Al-Libi was first interrogated by the FBI but, according to those involved, he was then snatched by the CIA and rendered to Cairo. It was while he was under Egyptian interrogation that al-Libi provided an important piece of "testimony": that Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship with al-Qaeda. It was an erroneous claim, since formally withdrawn by the CIA, but was used as part of the justification for the war in Iraq. Al-Libi's anonymous testimony was cited by Colin Powell before the United Nations. But no one mentioned where the intelligence came from.

After his interrogation in Egypt, al-Libi was sent back to US custody in Afghanistan. But now he has disappeared. Perhaps he has been sent to Libya? He is certainly a more important prisoner than the vast majority at Guantanamo. Yet sending al-Libi to the Cuban camp, put ting him on public trial and allowing him to tell his story would be a political disaster. So he remains hidden.

Other key prisoners are missing too - others whose stories would shock the public conscience. The US, for example, has never acknowledged what it did with German citizen Mohammed Haydar Zammar. He was captured in December 2001, one of the first in custody who was connected to the Hamburg cell that carried out the 9/11 attacks. And, again, instead of being held in US hands, he was rendered in secret to Damascus. He has never been brought to a public trial or had any chance to reveal how he was treated.

The cases of al-Libi and Zammar, who according to fellow prisoners in Syria was brutally tortured, illustrate the corrosive effect of the policy of disappearance. While the secrecy may protect the US from legal jeopardy and from political embarrassment, it also makes the threat of torture self-fulfilling. If you send a prisoner to Damascus, Tripoli or Tashkent, how can you hope to protect that prisoner - to ensure a fair trial or see that he stays alive - if you keep that rendition quiet? Secrecy protects the torturer; and it denies those innocent, those wrongly accused of crimes of terrorism and caught up in these renditions, any chance of justice.

Last month, Bush signed into law his new Military Commissions Act, which provides for the trial at Guantanamo of top al-Qaeda leaders. The act grants fewer rights to defendants than the Nazis got at Nuremberg. And yet, in this strange world, the rights now granted to men such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who devised the 9/11 attack and who will now be brought to trial, still rank far higher than the rights of the small fry, those much less significant players behind bars in foreign jails. In this new justice, the big terrorists are granted privileges, and the other missing prisoners, subtracted from the public record, are disappeared off the face of the earth. That's the mathematics of torture.

Stephen Grey is the author of "Ghost Plane: the inside story of the CIA's secret rendition programme" published by C Hurst Co (£16.95)

14 European countries admit allowing the CIA to run secret prisons or carry out renditions on their territory

7,000+ prisoners have been captured in America's war on terror

450 prisoners are thought to be held at Guantanamo

10 prisoners at Guantanamo have been convicted

40 countries have citizens held in Guantanamo

$18,000 was spent by two alleged CIA agents at the Milan-Savoy hotel during an illegal rendition operation in Italy

Research by Maria Stella

An Impartial Interrogation of George W. Bush

2007-01-29T23:23:00.001Z

by George McGovern

/>Senator George McGovern delivered these remarks at the National Press Club January 12. They are published here as part of Moral Compass, a series focusing on the spoken word.

I'm glad to be back at the National Press Club. Indeed, at the age of eighty-four, I'm glad to be anywhere. In my younger years when the subject of aging came up, trying to sound worldly wise, I would say, "It doesn't matter so much the number of years you have, but what you do with those years." I don't say that anymore. I now want to reach a hundred. Why? Because I thoroughly enjoy life and there are so many things I must still do before entering the mystery beyond. The most urgent of these is to get American soldiers out of the Iraqi hellhole Bush-Cheney and their neoconservative theorists have created in what was once called the cradle of civilization. It is believed to be the location of the Garden of Eden. I mention the neoconservative theorists to recall Walter Lippman's observance, "There is nothing so dangerous as a belligerent professor."

One of the things I miss about my eighteen years in the US Senate are the stories of the old Southern Democrats. I didn't always vote with them, but I loved their technique of responding to an opponent's questions with a humorous story. Once when Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina had to handle a tough question from Mike Mansfield, he said, "You know, Mr. Leader, that question reminds me of the old Baptist preacher who was telling a class of Sunday school boys the creation story. 'God created Adam and Eve and from this union came two sons, Cain and Abel and thus the human race developed.' A boy in the class then asked, 'Reverend, where did Cain and Abel get their wives?' After frowning for a moment, the preacher replied, 'Young man--it's impertinent questions like that that's hurtin' religion.'"

Well, Mr. Bush, Jr. I have some impertinent questions for you.

Mr. President, Sir, when reporter Bob Woodward asked you if you had consulted with your father before ordering our army into Iraq you said, "No, he's not the father you call on a decision like this. I talked to my heavenly Father above." My question, Mr. President: If God asked you to bombard, invade and occupy Iraq for four years, why did he send an opposite message to the Pope? Did you not know that your father, George Bush, Sr., his Secretary of State James Baker and his National Security Advisor General Scowcroft were all opposed to your invasion? Wouldn't you, our troops, the American people and the Iraqis all be much better off if you had listened to your more experienced elders including your earthly father? Instead of blaming God for the awful catastrophe you have unleashed in Iraq, wouldn't it have been less self-righteous if you had fallen back on the oft-quoted explanation of wrongdoing, "The devil made me do it?"

And Mr. President, after the 9/11 hit against the Twin Towers in New York, which gained us the sympathy and support of the entire world, why did you then order the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11? Are you aware that your actions destroyed the international reservoir of good will towards the United States? What is the cost to America of shattering the standing and influence of our country in the eyes of the world?

Why, Mr. President did you pressure the CIA to report falsely that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons? And when you ordered your Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to go to New York and present to the UN the Administration's "evidence" that Iraq was an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, were you aware that after reading this deceitful statement to the UN, Mr. Powell told an aid that the so-called evidence was "bullshit"?

Is it reasonable to you, President Bush, that Colin Powell told you near the end of your first term that he would not be in your Administration if you were to receive a second term? What decent person could survive two full terms of forced lying and deceit?

And Mr. President, how do you enjoy your leisure time, and how can you sleep at night knowing that 3,014 young Americans have died in a war you mistakenly ordered? What do you say to the 48,000 young Americans who have been crippled for life in mind or body? What is your reaction to the conclusion of the leading British medical journal (Lancet) that since you ordered the bombardment and occupation of Iraq four years ago, 600,000 Iraqi men, women and children have been killed? What do you think of the destruction of the Iraqi's homes, their electrical and water systems, their public buildings?

And Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while neither of you has ever been in combat (Mr. Cheney asking and receiving five deferments from the Vietnam War), have you not at least read or been briefed on the terrible costs of that ill-advised and seemingly endless American war in tiny Vietnam? Do you realize that another Texas President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, declined to seek a second term in part because he had lost his credibility over the disastrous war in Vietnam? Are you aware that one of the chief architects of that war, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, resigned his office and years later published a book declaring that the war was all a tragic mistake? Do you know this recent history in which 58,000 young Americans died in the process of killing 2 million Vietnamese men, women and children? If you do not know about this terrible blunder in Vietnam, are you not ignoring the conclusion of one of our great philosophers: "Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it." And, Mr. President, in your ignorance of the lessons of Vietnam, are you not condemning our troops and our people to repeat the same tragedy in Iraq?

During the long years between 1963 and 1975 when I fought to end the American war in Vietnam, first as a US Senator from South Dakota and then as my party's nominee for President, my four daughters ganged up on my one night. "Dad, why don't you give up this battle? You've been speaking out against this crazy war since we were little kids. When you won the Democratic presidential nomination, you got snowed under by President Nixon." In reply I said, "Just remember that sometimes in history even a tragic mistake produces something good. The good about Vietnam is that it is such a terrible blunder, we'll never go down that road again." Mr. President, we're going down that road again. So, what do I tell my daughters? And what do you tell your daughters?

Mr. President, I do not speak either as a pacifist or a draft dodger. I speak as one who after the attack on Pearl Harbor, volunteered at the age of nineteen for the Army Air Corps and flew thirty-five missions as a B-24 bomber. I believed in that war then and I still do sixty-five years later. And so did the rest of America. Mr. President, are you missing the intellectual and moral capacity to know the difference between a justified war and a war of folly in Vietnam or Iraq?

Public opinion polls indicate that two-thirds of the American people think that the war in Iraq has been a mistake on your part. It is widely believed that this war was the central reason Democrats captured control of both houses of Congress. Polls among the people of Iraq indicate that nearly all Iraqis want our military presence in their country for the last four years to end now. Why do you persist in defying public opinion in both the United States and Iraq and throughout the other countries around the globe? Do you see yourself as omniscient? What is your view of the doctrine of self-determination, which we Americans hold dear?

And wonder of wonders, Mr. President, after such needless death and destruction, first in the Vietnamese jungle and now in the Arabian desert, how can you order 21,500 more American troops to Iraq? Are you aware that as the war in Vietnam went from bad to worse, our leaders sent in more troops and wasted more billions of dollars until we had 550,000 US troops in that little country? It makes me shudder as an aging bomber pilot to remember that we dropped more bombs on the Vietnamese and their country than the total of all the bombs dropped by all the air forces around the world in World War II. Do you, Mr. President, honestly believe that we need tens of thousands of additional troops plus a supplemental military appropriation of $200 billion before we can bring our troops home from this nightmare in ancient Baghdad?

In your initial campaign for the Presidency, Mr. Bush, you described yourself as a "compassionate conservative". What is compassionate about consigning America's youth to a needless and seemingly endless war that has now lasted longer than World War II? And what is conservative about reducing the taxes needed to finance this war and instead running our national debt to nine trillion dollars with money borrowed from China, Japan, Germany and Britain? Is this wild deficit financing your idea of conservatism? Mr. President, how can a true conservative be indifferent to the steadily rising cost of a war that claims over $7 billion a month, $237 million every day? Are you troubled to know as a conservative that just the interest on our skyrocketing national debt is $760,000 every day. Mr. President, our Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, estimates that if the war were to continue until 2010 as you have indicated it might, the cost would be over a trillion dollars.

Perhaps, Mr. President, you should ponder the words of a genuine conservative - England's nineteenth-century member of Parliament, Edmund Burke: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood".

And, Mr. President at a time when your most respected generals have concluded that the chaos and conflict in Iraq cannot be resolved by more American dollars and more American young bodies, do you ever consider the needs here at home of our own anxious and troubled society? What about the words of another true conservative, General and President Dwight Eisenhower who said that, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."

And, Mr. President, would not you and all the rest of us do well to ponder the farewell words of President Eisenhower: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Finally, Mr. President, I ask have you kept your oath of office to uphold the Constitution when you use what you call the war on terrorism to undermine the Bill of Rights? On what constitutional theory do you seize and imprison suspects without charge, sometimes torturing them in foreign jails? On what constitutional or legal basis have you tapped the phones of Americans without approval of the courts as required by law? Are you above the Constitution, above the law, and above the Geneva accords? If we are fighting for freedom in Iraq as you say, why are you so indifferent to protecting liberty here in America?

Many Americans are now saying in effect, "The American war in Iraq has created a horrible mess but how can we now walk away from it?" William Polk, a former Harvard and University of Chicago professor of Middle East Studies and a former State Department expert on the Middle East, has teamed up with me on a recent book requested by Simon and Schuster. It is entitled, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. I feel awkward praising it, so I give you the respected journalist of the New York Times, and now of Newsweek, Anna Quindlen who told Charlie Rose on his excellent TV program: "There is a wonderful book I am recommending to everyone. It's a very small, readable book by George McGovern and William Polk called Out of Iraq. And it just very quickly runs you through the history of the country, the makeup of the country, how we got in, the arguments for getting in--many of which don't withstand scrutiny--and how we can get out. It's like a little primer. I think the entire nation should read it and then we will be united."

If you need a second for the judgment of Anna Quindlen, I give you the esteemed Library Journal: "In this crisp and cogently argued book, former Senator McGovern and scholar Polk offer a trenchant and straightforward critique of the war in Iraq. What makes their highly readable book unique is that it not only argues why the United States needs to disengage militarily from Iraq now...but also clearly delineates practical steps for troop withdrawal...Essential reading for anybody who wants to cut through the maze of confusion that surrounds current US policy in Iraq, this book is highly recommended for public and academic libraries."

Professor Polk is a descendant of President Polk and the brother of the noted George Polk, is here today from his home in southern France and he will join me at the podium as I conclude this impartial interrogation of President Bush. And now, members of the National Press Club and your guests, it's your turn to cross-examine Bill Polk and me in, of course, an equally impartial manner.

George McGovern, senator from South Dakota from 1962 to 1980 and Democratic candidate for President in 1972, is the author of The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time.

Global Warming: the Final Verdict

2007-01-29T23:23:00.000Z

A study by the world's leading experts says global warming will happen faster and be more devastating than previously thought

by Robin McKie

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,' said one senior UK climate expert.

Climate concerns are likely to dominate international politics next month. President Bush is to make the issue a part of his state of the union address on Wednesday while the IPCC report's final version is set for release on 2 February in a set of global news conferences.

Although the final wording of the report is still being worked on, the draft indicates that scientists now have their clearest idea so far about future climate changes, as well as about recent events. It points out that:

· 12 of the past 13 years were the warmest since records began;

· ocean temperatures have risen at least three kilometres beneath the surface;

· glaciers, snow cover and permafrost have decreased in both hemispheres;

· sea levels are rising at the rate of almost 2mm a year;

· cold days, nights and frost have become rarer while hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent.

And the cause is clear, say the authors: 'It is very likely that [man-made] greenhouse gas increases caused most of the average temperature increases since the mid-20th century,' says the report.

To date, these changes have caused global temperatures to rise by 0.6C. The most likely outcome of continuing rises in greenhouses gases will be to make the planet a further 3C hotter by 2100, although the report acknowledges that rises of 4.5C to 5C could be experienced. Ice-cap melting, rises in sea levels, flooding, cyclones and storms will be an inevitable consequence.

Past assessments by the IPCC have suggested such scenarios are 'likely' to occur this century. Its latest report, based on sophisticated computer models and more detailed observations of snow cover loss, sea level rises and the spread of deserts, is far more robust and confident. Now the panel writes of changes as 'extremely likely' and 'almost certain'.

And in a specific rebuff to sceptics who still argue natural variation in the Sun's output is the real cause of climate change, the panel says mankind's industrial emissions have had five times more effect on the climate than any fluctuations in solar radiation. We are the masters of our own destruction, in short.

There is some comfort, however. The panel believes the Gulf Stream will go on bathing Britain with its warm waters for the next 100 years. Some researchers have said it could be disrupted by cold waters pouring off Greenland's melting ice sheets, plunging western Europe into a mini Ice Age, as depicted in the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow.

The report reflects climate scientists' growing fears that Earth is nearing the stage when carbon dioxide rises will bring irreversible change to the planet. 'We are seeing vast sections of Antarctic ice disappearing at an alarming rate,' said climate expert Chris Rapley, in a phone call to The Observer from the Antarctic Peninsula last week. 'That means we can expect to see sea levels rise at about a metre a century from now on - and that will have devastating consequences.'

However, there is still hope, said Peter Cox of Exeter University. 'We are like alcoholics who have got as far as admitting there is a problem. It is a start. Now we have got to start drying out - which means reducing our carbon output.'

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Saving The Planet: Empty Gestures

2007-01-29T23:22:00.000Z

Do you recycle - and then fly to New York for the weekend? It's the inconsistency of our attempts to save the planet that really bugs Nigel Pollitt

by Nigel Pollitt

At Christmas I was given a copy of the book of the film An Inconvenient Truth, by the American politician Al Gore. It was from two people. One of them drives an SUV and both are frequent fliers. I was given the present at a gathering under recessed halogen spotlights, a popular system that, typically, doubles the electricity consumed by a room's lighting and greatly increases ceiling heat-loss. Few in the room were wearing anything that, by the standards of earlier ages, could have been considered winter clothing. Some of the food on the table - figs and blueberries - originated several thousand miles away. And, while tap-water in the area is quaffable, bottled mineral water from France accompanied our celebration.

The six adults and two children present were people who, if cornered, would probably say that Something Should Be Done about rising carbon emissions. As well as this, all the adults were cooks, and cooks are the people most likely to understand that doubling a very small but potent ingredient can have a very big effect on a result. Carbon dioxide is less than 1 per cent of the atmosphere. Yet doubling it, which is what we're heading towards, is sending the planet to the emergency room.

This month, the EU's environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, called the struggle to halt climate change a "world war". The Tories are pitching for an 80 per cent cut in UK carbon emissions by 2050. Even the Confederation of British Industry has a task force on it.

But we, in our homes and on holiday, go on as before. The friend who raved about the Al Gore film whacks up the heat and wears a T-shirt indoors. I bang on about halogen downlights but do nothing about the picturesque but colossally leaky wooden sash windows in my picturesque but colossally leaky Victorian house. If my 1880s stained glass was under threat, I'd get a handgun. What's going on?

"People see it as such a big, difficult problem. They ask how on Earth can they influence it in their day-to-day behaviour," says Nick Pidgeon, a professor of applied psychology at Cardiff University, and the co-author of several studies on attitudes to climate change. "They say overwhelmingly that the Government or international community should be responsible for action, but are not changing their own behaviour because it all seems too much."

It's also about connecting, he says. "We understand the consequences of climate change, but there's a disconnect with our actions. People don't think about climate change when they get in the car. And when taking a risk [of damaging the climate] has personal benefits, there's much less pressure to change behaviour. Getting in the car has an immediate benefit."

And although Commissioner Dimas talks of world war, Hitler hasn't invaded Poland yet. There has been Katrina and some extra drought, but the Gulf Stream still pumps Caribbean warmth to Europe. We haven't seen crop failure in Hampshire. Bread still comes from the supermarket.

There's also that tic that psychologists call cognitive dissonance. If reality has square edges, you file them down. You buy a diesel car. Then you read about the dangers of unburnt nanoparticles, but brighten up when a friend says that diesel cars have lower CO2 emissions.

Last year I was invited to India by a friend. I felt awful about burning, in a few hours, the equivalent of a couple of years of my normal carbon output and, for this among other reasons, did not go. But I could have filed down those square edges, couldn't I? Reduced the dissonance. After all, as one friend said, we only produce 2 per cent of global carbon in Britain. China and India are the problem. The friend who invited me commented: "I think the plane is going to fly that day whether you are on it or not."

My own response was to say, if there were rationing of long-haul flights to a globally sustainable level, I would go. There isn't, and I didn't.

The point is that, bizarrely, dealing with climate change is, so far, presented to us as a lifestyle choice. The current ads from the Energy Saving Trust urging us to switch off are the equivalent of wartime posters saying how it would be really helpful if you could black out your windows during air-raids. Accordingly, our response to the threat of climate change is lost in complex and contradictory individual responses. There's the sense too, of the futility of boycott. Why should I stop flying if no one else does?

As Mike Childs, a climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, points out: "At the moment the economic signals [to the individual] are that climate change doesn't really matter. The economic signals don't suggest you should do the right thing. So there may have to be punitive taxes on flying to India or Prague, so you say, 'that's a ridiculous amount of money, I can't afford to fly there'."

Should there be rationing? Coupons for carbon? "The idea of a trading scheme, with tradeable quotas, say in aviation, has its attractions," says Childs. "Then it's not all down to the individual." He accepts, however, that there may have to be "catastrophe that creates a groundswell of public pressure" for drastic action.

In the past, wars were won using the brutality of conscription. Cities were defended and populations fed through regulations and rationing. If human populations are to survive against a far bigger threat than Hitler or al-Qa'ida or avian flu, won't governments have to be brutal? Turn off the power, perhaps? It's been done before, so surely it's do-able. We won't fly for our holidays and we won't drink Evian and maybe we'll even enjoy the spirit of the carbon blitz. If we're lucky, the Gulf Stream won't turn off and we won't end up with the climate of Newfoundland.

But according to Professor Pidgeon, we're just not going to change our behaviour enough voluntarily. "We could all end up with low-energy lightbulbs but still flying to the Alps for the weekend. Under those circumstances, a government is going to have to take some pretty tough action."

We are challenged, morally, to change our behavior, as individuals, but the bigger challenge is for our leaders to come up with a proper coordinated survival plan. They'll need our backing.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

It is not being a spoilsport to point out that oranges are not a protein source

2007-01-29T23:20:00.000Z

by Gar Lipow

David Roberts strongly objected to a critique of offsets and especially of credits for tree planting. The critique was originally made in the comments section of a post on a "carbon neutral" Super Bowl.

Bruce Sterling chimed in, noting that nobody can compete for purity with the dead. This is first rate irony, but unless the intention is that no one should ever criticize false solutions, no matter how wrongheaded, it only has bite if the solutions critiqued actually work. Tree planting may do all sorts of good things, but outside the tropics, it is not a significant way to fight global warming.

Let's start by looking at the Livermore study (PDF) showing that tree planting outside of tropical zones does not result in net cooling. The key here is albedo -- reflectivity of light. Trees are darker than the grass they replace. (If soil is wet and fertile enough for trees but does not have them, odds are there will be grass or other ground cover.)

So, more sunlight is converted into the long-wave radiation that greenhouse gases trap. A number of commentators on the Super Bowl post sneered at the idea that albedo can significantly affect global warming. But it is a known feedback, and one of the ways the melting of the icecaps speeds climate chaos. At the low level of potential sequestration we are talking about it is significant.

In the tropics, conditions are different. In the intense sun of that environment, tree photosynthesis is far superior to grass photosynthesis; also, trees transpire more than grass. (Transpiration is a process whereby plants emit water vapor -- as part of the circulation of nutrients, but also for cooling purposes.)

There are still problems with the tree plantations that are the most common form of tree planting in the tropics. In terms of global warming, these problems include the fact that the trees are often replacing other trees, and they are often harvested. In terms of other ecological effects, these plantations are usually monocultures, reducing biodiversity. In terms of human effects, local inhabitants are often thrown off their land to make way for these plantations. However, not all tropical tree planting is in such plantations; tree planting can make real contributions to tropical life. (Even then, carbon credits are not the right way to encourage tree planting: more on this later.)

Now is this rock solid consensus science? No; though I will note it was peer reviewed before publication, and a year after publication has stood up to all criticism so far. But I would compare critiques made of the net energy of corn ethanol. Even if corn ethanol produces a tiny amount of net energy, the difference between net input and output is so small that you would be much better off investing the money in other things. (Cellulosic ethanol is an entirely different story.) At the moment, the argument that planting trees outside the tropics results in net warming has not been refuted. But even if it is, I suspect the refutation won't show any large net sequestration. I predict that any successful rebuttal will show such a small net sequestration per tree that you can gain much greater reductions by investing money in expensive PV electricity generation. In fact, I will bet a Super Bowl t-shirt on that, if anyone is interested in a wager.

Note, by the way, that this is not an argument for cutting down existing trees, which contain decades or centuries of stored carbon. It is not even an argument against planting trees outside the tropics. (Net heating is very small and can easily be compensated for by other types of savings.) It is an argument against planting new trees outside the tropics with fighting global warming as the main goal. It is simple realism not to do what doesn't work, or attribute some virtue to a process that it does not possess.

Offsets in general are a really poor idea, but even where trees do sequester carbon, offset credits from trees are an especially bad idea. First, most tree offsets (including those purchased for the Super Bowl) are planted after purchase. That means you emit, now, and the offset occurs over the decades that follow. Even if the sequestration is calculated correctly, feedback from carbon emissions ensures that this results in a net loss. That is, you emit X amount of carbon. This results in Y additional feedback. But you only offset X.

Worse, the offset numbers can't be right. The problem is that carbon fixation in plant matter varies a lot -- between species, between the same species in differing micro-climates and soil, between the same trees at differing times. You really can't predict how much carbon a tree sequesters. If you can't put a number on it, it still might be a good idea to encourage it. But if you can't put a number on it, it is a really bad idea to use like a medieval indulgence, an excuse for emitting carbon elsewhere.

This is a problem with offsets in general. With offsets, even production of renewable energy, you can't know how much would have been done in any case. This is known as the "additionality" problem, because no one knows how much additional reduction you are gaining. Further, since we don't have the ability to visit alternate worlds and see what would have happened, we will never know. So when you grant someone credit for a quarter ton of emission reductions, and someone buys that and uses it to emit a quarter ton of CO2, you never know whether you have really broken even or whether you have actually increased net emissions. Both buyer and seller have a strong incentive to assume that the result is a wash; we have no certain way to detect whether their guess is correct or not. So emission credits are the ultimate contradiction -- a market mechanism trying to work without feedback; price signaling that does not convey information.

I have problems with emission trading in general. But when someone has a target they must comply with, and can generate credits only by exceeding that target, at least you're selling something measurable. In comparison, project-based offsets are a nightmare; there is really no feedback beyond the market collapsing from too much counterfeit currency.

Tree planting and encouraging renewables are both good things. But they don't offset carbon emissions, and should not be hyped as doing so by an environmental magazine. Oranges are healthy and good tasting. But they are not a significant protein source. Your local nutritionist can expect criticism if they say otherwise.

Climate Change Action

2006-12-23T21:10:00.000Z

George Monbiot

From Monbiot.com

It is a testament to the power of money that Nicholas Stern’s report should have swung the argument for drastic action, even before anyone has finished reading it. He appears to have demonstrated what many of us suspected: that it would cost much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it. Useful as this finding is, I hope it doesn’t mean that the debate will now concentrate on money. The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not pounds. As Stern reminded us yesterday, there would be a moral imperative to seek to prevent mass death even if the economic case did not stack up.

But at least almost everyone now agrees that we must act, if not at the necessary speed. If we’re to have a high chance of preventing global temperatures from rising by 2C (3.6F) above preindustrial levels, we need, in the rich nations, a 90% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. The greater part of the cut has to be made at the beginning of this period. To see why, picture two graphs with time on the horizontal axis and the rate of emissions plotted vertically. On one graph the line falls like a ski jump: a steep drop followed by a shallow tail. On the other it falls like the trajectory of a bullet. The area under each line represents the total volume of greenhouse gases produced in that period. They fall to the same point by the same date, but far more gases have been produced in the second case, making runaway climate change more likely.

So how do we do it without bringing civilisation crashing down? Here is a plan for drastic but affordable action that the government could take. It goes much further than the proposals discussed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown yesterday, for the reason that this is what the science demands.

1. Set a target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions based on the latest science. The government is using outdated figures, aiming for a 60% reduction by 2050. Even the annual 3% cut proposed in the early day motion calling for a new climate change bill does not go far enough. Timescale: immediately.

2. Use that target to set an annual carbon cap, which falls on the ski-jump trajectory. Then use the cap to set a personal carbon ration. Every citizen is given a free annual quota of carbon dioxide. He or she spends it by buying gas and electricity, petrol and train and plane tickets. If they run out, they must buy the rest from someone who has used less than his or her quota. This accounts for about 40% of the carbon dioxide we produce. The remainder is auctioned off to companies. It’s a simpler and fairer approach than either green taxation or the EU’s emissions trading scheme, and it also provides people with a powerful incentive to demand low-carbon technologies. Timescale: a full scheme in place by January 2009.

3. Introduce a new set of building regulations, with three objectives. A. Imposing strict energy-efficiency requirements on all major refurbishments (costing £3,000 or more). Timescale: in force by June 2007. B. Obliging landlords to bring their houses up to high energy-efficiency standards before they can rent them out. Timescale: to cover all new rentals from January 2008. C. Ensuring that all new homes in the UK are built to the German Passivhaus standard (which requires no heating system). Timescale: in force by 2012.

4. Ban the sale of incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other wasteful and unnecessary technologies. Introduce a stiff “feebate” system for all electronic goods sold in the UK, with the least efficient taxed heavily and the most efficient receiving tax discounts. Every year the standards in each category rise. Timescale: fully implemented by November 2007.

5. Redeploy money now earmarked for new nuclear missiles towards a massive investment in energy generation and distribution. Two schemes in particular require government support to make them commercially viable: very large wind farms, many miles offshore, connected to the grid with high-voltage direct-current cables; and a hydrogen pipeline network to take over from the natural gas grid as the primary means of delivering fuel for home heating. Timescale: both programmes commence at the end of 2007 and are completed by 2018.

6. Promote the development of a new national coach network. City-centre coach stations are shut down and moved to motorway junctions. Urban public transport networks are extended to meet them. The coaches travel on dedicated lanes and never leave the motorways. Journeys by public transport then become as fast as journeys by car, while saving 90% of emissions. It is self-financing, through the sale of the land now used for coach stations. Timescale: commences in 2008; completed by 2020.

7. Oblige all chains of filling stations to supply leasable electric car batteries. This provides electric cars with unlimited mileage: as the battery runs down, you pull into a forecourt; a crane lifts it out and drops in a fresh one. The batteries are charged overnight with surplus electricity from offshore wind farms. Timescale: fully operational by 2011.

8. Abandon the road-building and road-widening programme, and spend the money on tackling climate change. The government has earmarked £11.4bn for road expansion. It claims to be allocating just £545m a year to “spending policies that tackle climate change”. Timescale: immediately.

9. Freeze and then reduce UK airport capacity. While capacity remains high there will be constant upward pressure on any scheme the government introduces to limit flights. We need a freeze on all new airport construction and the introduction of a national quota for landing slots, to be reduced by 90% by 2030. Timescale: immediately.

10. Legislate for the closure of all out-of-town superstores, and their replacement with a warehouse and delivery system. Shops use a staggering amount of energy (six times as much electricity per square metre as factories, for example), and major reductions are hard to achieve: Tesco’s “state of the art” energy-saving store at Diss in Norfolk has managed to cut its energy use by only 20%. Warehouses containing the same quantity of goods use roughly 5% of the energy. Out-of-town shops are also hardwired to the car – delivery vehicles use 70% less fuel. Timescale: fully implemented by 2012.

These timescales might seem extraordinarily ambitious. They are, by contrast to the current glacial pace of change. But when the US entered the second world war it turned the economy around on a sixpence. Carmakers began producing aircraft and missiles within a year, and amphibious vehicles in 90 days, from a standing start. And that was 65 years ago. If we want this to happen, we can make it happen. It will require more economic intervention than we are used to, and some pretty brutal emergency planning policies (with little time or scope for objections). But if you believe that these are worse than mass death then there is something wrong with your value system.

Climate change is not just a moral question: it is the moral question of the 21st century. There is one position even more morally culpable than denial. That is to accept that it’s happening and that its results will be catastrophic, but to fail to take the measures needed to prevent it.

George Monbiot’s latest book is Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning.

A New Narrative

2006-11-10T23:08:00.000Z

Jeremy Seabrook

It is significant that Sir Nicholas Stern has
presented the dangers of climate change, in terms of an “economic”
threat to the world. It is more usual to see the workings of the
economic system as a challenge to the resource-base of the planet. This
dexterous turnabout manages to preserve the primordial importance of
the economy over the conditions that sustain life itself. There are
good reasons for this volte-face.

The present ecological
crisis – the threat of climate change, pollution of the elements
indispensable for life, resource-depletion and loss of biodiversity –
is itself a consequence of efforts to resolve earlier economic
conflict. In the early industrial era, the most intractable issue was
the alienation of an impoverished labouring class, which grew out of a
wasting peasantry to serve the factory system. The enduring poverty and
exploitation of these people seemed inevitable, destined to remain
forever deprived of the most elementary necessities of survival.

The
question that preoccupied ruling elites was the reconciliation of the
working class to a society from which it seemed permanently estranged.
This took on greater urgency as the 19th century advanced, workers
learned to combine and organise, and the struggle between capital and
labour defined itself more clearly. The potential power of the workers
made wealth and privilege fearful, an anxiety increased by the writings
of Karl Marx, the organisation of political parties under the influence
of his sulphurous revolutionary prophecies, and aggravated subsequently
by revolution in Russia in 1917 and in China just over 30 years later.

Clearly,
the survival of capitalism depended on attaching its people more
securely to itself, and on its ability to lure them from the
temptations of socialism. This it did very effectively indeed, by the
creation, not only of the welfare state, but even more significantly,
of the consumer society, which overwhelmed the people with the riches
it showered upon them in an avalanche of rewards, prizes, offers and
free gifts – the very opposite of the impoverishment without end
forecast by Marx.

Of course, this required an abusive
exploitation of resources, the effects of which were not, at the time,
foreseen: in the economic calculus, the treasures of the planet were
merely “raw materials”, a factor of production, just as labour had
been, until labour threatened to revolt.

Now it is the
“raw materials”, the natural world itself, which is in revolt against
an industrial system that threatens to return the planet to chapter one
of Genesis, when “the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon
the face of the deep.”

The response to the internal
problems of industrialism led directly to the appearance of an external
contradiction of even greater magnitude: it is now a question not of
reconciling a refractory and potentially subversive people, but of
reconciling the planet itself to the system which weighs with such
fateful violence upon it.

This also shows that the victory
of capitalism over socialism, following with the downfall of the Soviet
Union 15 years ago, far from being the ultimate triumph it was made out
to be, was merely a temporary distraction from the menace to the world
of a competitive struggle between two aspects of the same system. It
was not just a crisis of socialism, but of industrialism itself.

Since
the collapse of communism the only system left in contention, instead
of reflecting on its purpose and direction, and modifying its values,
swiftly sought to occupy the space evacuated by its vanquished rival.
So spectacular has the wealth been arising from this exuberant
expansion, that almost no country in the world has failed to follow the
same version of wealth, progress and development.

In the
process, intensified resource-use, contamination by 40,000 or so
chemicals in the global environment, the effects on climate, the
consequences of the uninhibited extension of global capital, now
threaten the world beyond anything previously wrought by human activity
upon earth.

That the beneficiaries of this process have
become addicted to its continuation into perpetuity only intensifies
the danger. Democracy has come to mean the ability of governments to
sustain the voracious system that knows nothing of limits, since it
promises infinite economic growth in a finite world. It is predicated
upon the limitless dilation of appetite in a world whose limits were
officially recognised at least 30 years ago – first by the limits to
growth of the club of Rome in 1972, then by the North-South Brandt
Commission in 1983, the Brundlandt report in 1987 and the South
Commission in 1990.

It is common wisdom that no government
can expect to be elected if it fails to guarantee the rising income
which alone ensures continuity of the only version of freedom now on
offer – that freedom to go on consuming like there is no tomorrow,
surely the most self-fulfilling prophecy ever formulated by the
reckless accountants of the calculus of permanent growth and expansion.

A
way of life which embodies exorbitance, waste and excess now bears down
upon a perishing resource base; and with the demands of the “Asian
giants”, India, China and the rest, no alternative path has been
crafted to the well-beaten track of their mentors. Yet they are now
expected to bypass the very processes whereby the west became rich, and
which it still preaches to the rest of the world.

What a
savage paradox, that a way of life, conceived to ensure social peace
when first established, should engender conflict, violence and
resource-wars, now that it has spread to the whole planet.

It
is not the salvaging of the social and economic system that should be
at the heart of the current emergency, but a reassurance that the
resource base upon which all systems depend will be conserved, so that
it may provide a secure sufficiency for all humanity for an indefinite
future.

This cannot be assured by horror stories about the
monetary cost, by technological fixes, by faith in conquering other
worlds, by belief in the redemptive capacity of science, or the
ingenuity of humanity to promote limitlessness in a bounded world. It
requires an alternative and convincing story of survival, an energising
myth that will inspire collective action, a narrative that tells of a
different kind of emancipation; just as capitalism once promised
undreamed of wealth that would cure the ancient human scourge of
poverty, and as Marx told the workers to unite since they had nothing
to lose but their chains. These old myths have served their purpose,
and no longer carry a plausible guarantee of liberation. This age
awaits its empowering ideology, its renewal of hope, its fable of
deliverance.

It is not the know-alls, experts, scientists,
or the brains swimming in the aimless circularity of high-powered
thinktanks that will rescue us. It is, however, just conceivable, that
a modest myth, which speaks of a joyful frugality, an austere delight
in the rediscovery of the riches of human resourcefulness allied to
restraint in the use of material resources, might do so. But that would
require an act of faith to transcend former ideologies of hope, which
have been reduced by events into the gloomiest counsels of despair.
This is, of course, scarcely the province of bureaucrats, however
worthy. It belongs to the transforming power of faith in ourselves to
rise to the urgency of what now stares us in the face.

Too Little, Too Late?

2006-11-10T23:07:00.000Z

Mark Lynas

If someone had told me, just six months ago,
that the UK government would be sponsoring a major report which – in
Tony Blair’s words – “demolishes the last remaining argument for
inaction on climate change”, I would have refused to believe it. Yet,
so it came to pass with the publication of the Stern report. In
accepting the report’s findings, the government achieved several things
at once. First, it regained ground lost to the Tories and countered
David Cameron’s dog-sled photo opportunity in the Arctic. Second, it
suggested that Gordon Brown – as the man who commissioned Lord Stern
and who introduced several proposals at the report’s launch – would be
a prime minister who “gets it” on climate.

Last, and most
usefully, the government has helped environmentalists tear down the
last bastion of climate-change denial: economics. For several years the
Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg has generated unwarranted press
attention with his gatherings of famous economists who have declared
that climate change is too expensive to tackle and that we would be
better off spending the money elsewhere.

Now, Nicholas
Stern has ridden out in full armour and slain the Lomborgian dragon.
His 700-page report entirely demolishes that last ditch of
climate-change denial – that the world “cannot afford” to cut
fossil-fuel emissions. Stern points out that the potential cost comes
in at roughly 1 per cent of global GDP, a tiny price to pay for averting the greatest crisis ever to face human civilisation.

This
in itself is cause for celebration: after years of deliberation and the
submission of thousands of pages of evidence, Stern has come to
essentially the same conclusion as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace:
that “we can grow and be green”. And this draws the sting from
objections made by renegade rich countries such as Australia and the
United States, whose governments persist in claiming, absurdly, that
even making tiny Kyoto-style cuts would bankrupt them. I have some
objections to a purely economic approach to climate change. How do you
assign a monetary value to the disappearance of the polar bear, for
example? How do you put a price on people losing their livelihoods, and
their lives, to droughts, floods and food shortages? But the forthright
approach of the Stern report makes it, in many ways, more radical than
numerous papers put out recently by environmental groups.

Stern challenge

Stern
also implicitly throws down a challenge to the British government with
regard to its own policies, a challenge that the government must
respond to urgently if it is to avoid charges of hypocrisy. First, it
should make the bold stroke of cancelling the entire £12bn roads
programme: the last thing we need now is to be spending billions on
catering for motorists when pitiful amounts of cash are being spent on
helping households use less energy and generate their own power. Next,
as I argued two weeks ago in these pages, David Mili band must embrace
carbon rationing with enthusiasm and announce a strategy for national
implementation.

Crucially, the government must commit
itself to a clearer framework for the next stage of international
negotiations: as Stern points out, the UK’s carbon emissions are only 2
per cent of the global total and an equitable agreement based on
contraction and convergence is the only way to bring in China, India
and other developing nations.

Nicholas Stern’s report
could be a step change in British politics. As always, there is a
catch, and it is a grave one: Stern’s 1 per cent price tag would not
actually save us from the worst effects of global warming.
Specifically, his figure refers to the estimated cost of stabilising
atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels at 500-550 parts per million (ppm).
We are currently at 430ppm. Stabilising in the 500-550ppm range would
require global emissions to peak in the next ten to 20 years, and then
fall by between 1 and 3 per cent a year.

However, the
European Union and many environmental groups believe that global
warming must never exceed 2°C. That danger threshold, according to the
latest science, is the line beyond which global warming could run
rapidly out of control because of “positive feedbacks” – the collapse
of the Amazon rainforest or the release of methane from melting
permafrost in Siberia. But, according to Stern’s own figures, his
550ppm stabilisation target gives us only a 10 per cent chance of
keeping temperature increases below 2°, and a 50-50 chance of passing
3°. This is rather like playing Russian roulette with four out of the
five chambers loaded – the odds are not just silly, but suicidal. Stern
dismisses the target of 450ppm, which is much more likely to keep us
within the magic 2° threshold, as “almost out of reach, given that we
are likely to reach this level within ten years”.

Yet what choice do we have but to grasp at this straw? It might cost much more than 1 per cent of GDP,
but the earth does not strike bargains: we have to reach the targets
that are set by the planet, or else go out of business. Two degrees is
that target, and yes, we have less than ten years to act.

Climate Change Action

2006-11-10T23:06:00.000Z

Small is Useless

2006-10-06T19:50:00.000Z

Micro generation can’t solve climate change.

By George Monbiot. Published in New Scientist, 3rd October 2006

In seeking to work out how a 90% cut in carbon emissions could be achieved
in the rich nations by 2030, I have made many surprising findings. But
none has shocked me as much as the discovery that renewable micro
generation has been grossly overhyped. Those who maintain that our own
homes can produce all the renewable electricity and heat they need have
harmed the campaign to stop climate chaos, by sowing complacency and
misdirecting our efforts.

Last year, the environmental
architect Bill Dunster, who designed the famous BedZed zero-carbon
development outside London, published a brochure claiming that “up to
half of your annual electric needs can be met by a near silent micro
wind turbine”(1). The turbine he specified has a diameter of 1.75
metres. A few months later Building for a Future magazine,
which supports renewable energy, published an analysis of micro wind
machines. At 4 metres per second – a high average wind speed for most
parts of the UK - a 1.75 metre turbine
produces about 5% of a household’s annual electricity(2). To provide
the 50% Bill Dunster advertises, you would need a machine 4 metres in
diameter(3). The lateral thrust it exerted would rip your house to bits.

Turbulence
makes wind generators even less efficient. To avoid it, you must place
them at least 11 metres above any obstacle within 100 metres(4). On
most houses, this means constructing a minor hazard to aircraft. The
higher the pole, the more likely you are to inflict serious damage to
your house. In almost all circumstances, micro wind turbines are a
waste of time and money.

In his book Half Gone, Jeremy
Leggett, the chief executive of Solar Century, claims that “even in the
cloudy UK, more electricity than the nation currently uses could be
generated by putting PV roof tiles on all suitable roofs.”(5) This is a
big claim, so you would expect it to come from a good source: a
peer-reviewed journal, perhaps. Here is the reference Leggett gives:
“’Solar Energy: brilliantly simple’, BP pamphlet, available on UK
petrol forecourts”(6).

The Energy Technology Support Unit
(now Future Energy Solutions ) calculated that if solar electricity
could somehow achieve an efficiency of 12-15% at all points
of the compass, the “maximum practicable resource” in 2025 would be 266
terawatt hours (TWh) per year(7). Total electricity demand in the UK is
currently 407TWh(8). But Leggett’s claim is far more misleading than
this suggests.

The first reason is that solar panels facing
north are less efficient than solar panels facing south. The second is
that seeking to generate all our electricity by this means would be
staggeringly and pointlessly expensive – there are far better ways of
spending the same money. The International Energy Agency’s MARKAL
model gives a cost per tonne of carbon saved by solar electricity in
2020 of between £2200 and £3300. Onshore macro wind power, by contrast,
varies between a saving of £40 and a cost of £130 a tonne(9).

The
third problem is that the supply of solar electricity is poorly matched
to demand. In the UK, demand peaks on winter evenings. Even if we could
produce 407TWh a year from solar panels on our roofs, only some of it
could be used. There would be a surge of production in the summer,
during the middle of the day, and very little in the winter. While
solar panels might reasonably supply 5-10% of our electricity, the size
and inefficiency of the energy storage and standby power system
required makes a purely solar network impossible.

Similar
constraints affect all micro renewables: a report by a team at Imperial
College shows that if 50% of our homes were fitted with solar water
heaters, they would produce 0.056 exajoules of heat, or 2.3% of our
total demand(10); while AEA Technology
suggests that domestic heat pumps could supply only 0.022 eJ of the
UK’s current heat consumption, or under 1%(11). This doesn’t mean they
are not worth installing, just that they can’t solve the problem by
themselves.

Some campaigners accept that micro generators
can make only a small contribution, but argue that they are still
useful, as they wake people up to green issues. It seems more likely
that these overhyped devices will have the opposite effect, as their
owners discover how badly they have been ripped off and their
neighbours are driven insane by the constant yawing and stalling of a
windmill on a turbulent roof.

Far from shutting down the national grid, as the Green MEP Caroline
Lucas has suggested(12), we should be greatly expanding it, in order to
produce electricity where renewable energy is most abundant. This
means, above all, a massive investment in offshore windfarms. A recent
government report suggests there is a potential offshore wind resource
off the coast of England and Wales of 3,200TWh(13). High voltage direct
current cables, which lose much less electricity in transmission than
an AC network, would allow us to make use of a larger area of the
continental shelf than before. This means we can generate more
electricity more reliably, avoid any visual impact from the land and
keep out of the routes taken by migratory birds. Much bigger turbines
would realise economies of scale hitherto unavailable.

The electricity system cannot be run on wind alone. But surely it’s clear
that building giant offshore windmills is a far better use of our time
and money than putting mini-turbines in places where they will generate
more anger than power.

George Monbiot’s book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published this week by Penguin.

The Carbon Offset Con

2006-09-27T22:19:00.000Z

Adam Ma’anit

From The New Internationalist

‘For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.’ HL Mencken, journalist and social critic (1880-1956)

When British physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in 1972 of his dream of the ‘greening of the galaxy’ – in which humans would populate the stars by means of massive genetically engineered trees planted on comets – few took him seriously. Likewise when he advocated triggering nuclear explosions underneath space probes as a means of propulsion, most gave the idea a bemused miss. Dyson is, however, a tenacious character. When in 1977 he advocated using trees to soak up excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, people took notice.1 Third time lucky.

The timing was certainly perfect. Scientific understanding about climate change was just beginning to provoke industry concerns that governments might soon start to crack down on corporate polluters. Seeking ways to head off this dreadful prospect – which one industry group once referred to as the ‘road to serfdom’ – some companies started to explore ways to ‘offset’ their emissions by using tree plantations rather than cut pollution at source.

It wasn’t until 1989 that the first carbon offset project was launched, conceived by US power company, Applied Energy Services (AES), together with the environmental think-tank World Resources Institute, the official US aid agency USAID, and the big development NGO, CARE. At the time, AES was looking for regulatory approval for a new 183 megawatt coal-fired power plant in Connecticut. It eventually got the go-ahead thanks to its ‘mitigation’ project in the Western Highlands region of Guatemala. The project entailed planting 50 million non-native pine and eucalyptus trees on some 40,000 small farm holdings in this deeply impoverished region, which in theory would ‘soak up’ the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions expected to be generated for the lifetime of the plant.2

According to Hannah Wittman of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the project was a dismal failure. ‘What it did first and foremost was to take access to the trees out of the hands of ordinary people.’ An external evaluation revealed that subsistence activities undertaken by the largely indigenous population, such as gathering fuelwood for cooking, were now criminalized and conflicts erupted over rights to the trees, excarcerbating existing tensions over access to resources and local decision-making. Initially the tree species used were largely inappropriate for the area and resulted in land degradation. The evaluators, Winrock International, concluded in 1999 – 10 years after the project began – that AES’s offset target was falling far below the expected level. By 2001, farmers were still not receiving direct payments for the trees they planted and looked after and many were not aware that these trees were being used for storing carbon for AES. These problems, however, did not prevent the company from getting approval for its coal-fired power plant.2 Dyson’s legacy

But what some call ‘failure’, the offset industry calls ‘learning by doing’ – and it has been ‘learning by doing’ ever since. What could have been regarded as another one of Dyson’s more wacky notions is now part of a multi-billion dollar market that involves everyone from the world’s largest transnationals, governments, the World Bank and the UN, down to ‘boutique’ merchant banks, mom-and-pop offset companies, consultancies, and NGOs. The World Bank estimated the global carbon market, of which tree-planting is just one part, to be worth $11 billion at the end of 2005 – 10 times the value of the previous year.3

Carbon is now a hot commodity – and carbon offsets have arrived in the public consciousness. When you take a flight or rent a car, chances are the carbon emissions from that activity might already be ‘neutralized’ through some corporate scheme, or you may be given the option to neutralize them. The G8 meeting in Scotland last year was ‘carbon neutral’ according to its organizers, so too the élite business schmooze-fest, the World Economic Forum in Davos. It seems everyone is in on the game.

A rush of blood to the head

When it was announced that Coldplay’s latest album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, would be offset with 10,000 mango trees in Karnataka, India, it was met with much fanfare. After all, rock super-groups rarely addressed the environmental impacts of things like CD production, and so there was much positive publicity. Other rock stars were also clamouring for their own ‘celebrity forests’. Fans too could get in on the act. For just 25 dollars fans could get a certificate from the Carbon Neutral Company (formerly Future Forests) – the British offset company that devised the scheme – affirming that they had dedicated trees in ‘The Coldplay Forest’. A recent investigation into the scheme, however, revealed that all that glitters is not necessarily green.

A report in the Sunday Telegraph stated that, of the 10,000 trees that were supposedly distributed to small farmers in this largely dry Indian state, only a few hundred were found to be still alive. The rest perished through lack of water and inadequate financial and infrastructure support from the Carbon Neutral Company and its partners.

One of the project participants, Anandi Sharan Mieli of Women for Sustainable Development, accused the Carbon Neutral Company of having a ‘condescending’ attitude. ‘They do it for their interests, not really for reducing emissions. They do it because it’s good money,’ she was quoted as saying. The Carbon Neutral Company, however, blames Mieli’s group for not meeting its ‘contractual obligations’ to provide the necessary irrigation and support. Coldplay themselves claim no responsibility. According to a spokesperson for the band, ‘Coldplay signed up to the scheme in good faith with Future Forests and it’s in their hands. There are loads of bands involved in this kind of thing. For a band on the road all the time, it would be difficult to monitor a forest.’4

And there’s the rub. In the global carbon market, from its very inception in the AES scheme to ‘The Coldplay Forest’ and many more projects today, there is a complex chain of responsibility. Each link in that chain actually assumes little or no responsibility, so no-one is ultimately responsible (see ‘Uprooted’). Project partners blame project funders. Funders blame contractors. Contractors blame verifiers. Somehow everyone still manages to make money – except, often, local people.

But what is this whole offsets business about? Does planting trees or investing in other offsets projects solve climate change? Fossil fiction

‘The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond – but I say, “Diamond, what! This is carbon.” And my diamond may be coal or soot and my theme is carbon.’ DH Lawrence, writer (1885-1930)

Climate change is ultimately a narrative of oil, coal and gas. It is the story of humanity’s plundering of the earth’s fossil carbon, burning it and releasing it into the active carbon cycle, in turn disrupting the balance of carbon in air, soil and seas. If we were to succeed in harvesting all the ‘locked’ carbon in fossil fuels and setting it free to circulate in the atmosphere, we’d render the earth inhospitable to life as we know it. Unless we want to live on Venus, our task therefore is to leave that fossil carbon in the ground. This basic requirement, however, is precisely what the carbon market (of which offsets are a part) has been set up to avoid.

Rather than stop the flow of oil, coal and gas, the offset industry tells us that we can continue as normal. We can drive as much as want, fly as much as we want, and eat our non-organic Coldplay mangoes in the Canadian winter. We need not reduce; in fact we can now consume our way out of the problem. Now we can buy offsets on top of our Caribbean holiday and thus ‘neutralize’ our impacts. It is a seductive argument.

But it is a falsehood – a con.

That flight to Bermuda has an immediate impact on the climate. Aircraft emissions are of particular concern as not only do they release carbon dioxide and other pollutants, but also trail water vapour which has a significant heat-trapping effect in the atmosphere. Aircraft are also the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions as more of us are flying – and more frequently. If aircraft emissions are not reduced significantly, climate change will only accelerate.

Devil’s orchards

Offsets do nothing about the very immediate impact of such emissions. Tree plantations at most provide temporary storage for carbon dioxide but even that is not immediate and the science is hotly disputed. Trees take time to grow and are susceptible to disease, fire, timber harvesting and natural decay (see ‘10 things you should know about tree “offsets”’, page 7). Oliver Rackham, a Cambridge University botanist and landscape historian, describes the problem succinctly: ‘Telling people to plant trees [to solve climate change] is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.’

Tree planting projects have also often resulted in dramatic conflicts between local peoples dispossessed from their land and the big plantation companies grabbing it. These are not merely protracted courthouse conflicts, but at times pitched battles as people are often wounded and sometimes killed trying to reclaim their homes and livelihoods. Monoculture tree plantations such as of the ever popular eucalyptus and pine come with a string of negatives – including depletion of the water table, increased soil acidity, biodiversity loss and pesticide contamination. Some indigenous groups in the Amazon refer to them as ‘devil’s orchards’.

The plantation industry is now also experimenting with controversial super-carbon-absorbing varieties of genetically engineered trees to claim more offset potential and also to make them easy to pulp for paper. In short, the tree has become for many environmental groups and communities no longer an iconic symbol of the green movement, but often a metaphor for oppression, ecological devastation and misery.

It is precisely because of all the criticism by environmental groups and the bad press that has resulted, that offset companies have ramped-up investments in other types of projects besides trees. The new wave of offsets is likely to be in bioenergy – energy derived from agricultural and animal waste (biomass) and crops (biofuels). If the official offsets market, the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol, is anything to go by, than the new wave has already arrived. Over half of CDM’s registered projects (see ‘Carbon Offsets – The Facts’ page 14-15) are in bioenergy, mostly associated with the sugar, rice, corn and palm industries. The bioenergy revolution brings with it its own controversies, not least the question of land rights and concerns about genetic engineering. Equally, there is the possibility that expanded biofuel plantations could further threaten the world’s remaining natural forests. And lastly, there are concerns that the energy required to produce such fuels would be more than the energy they would in turn produce. All these issues are just beginning to surface and the offsets market will likely play a big role.

But for the moment the consumer demand for trees is strong and many companies are reluctant to forego such projects altogether. Planting a tree endures as the ultimate ‘good’ deed for many (even though in many cases offset companies don’t even plant trees, they just take credit for existing ones).

CO2lonialism

Another problem of the carbon market is its emphasis on the Global South. A majority of the world’s offset projects, especially those of the CDM, take place in the South, and there are a number of reasons for this. Foremost is cost. It is simply cheaper to invest in projects in Latin America, Africa or most of Asia than it would be in Europe or North America.

The other is spin.

Projects that suggest some sort of ‘development’ benefit for people in the South, such as Coldplay’s mango trees in India, have more appeal to potential ‘consumers’ of those carbon ‘offsets’ simply because they appeal to their charitable impulse. This ‘win-win’ ethic is a major selling point for an industry that is practically built on conscience. Not only does the consumer get to salve their eco-guilt but now they can feel even better with the knowledge that they’ve funded cooking stoves for Bangladeshi villagers.

The offset industry’s message is simple and seductive. The more you fly and the more you offset as a result, the more stoves impoverished families get. You don’t need to change your lifestyle, the climate will be saved, and poor communities will benefit – win-win-win. With a sell like that, it’s no wonder the carbon market is booming.

It is precisely for this reason that offsetters and governments are so fixated on the Majority World. When the announcement was made that the G8 meeting in Scotland in 2005 would be ‘carbon neutral’, the British host Government made a point of saying that the money would go to ‘clean development’ projects in Africa. A year later there is still no clarity on what specific projects have been funded to offset the summit’s emissions and what criteria were used. But such accountability doesn’t matter. The G8 needed to demonstrate action on its two core issues of Africa and climate change, and the positive press reports about the offsets announcement were proof that the strategy worked. This of course is a common feature of G8 summits. Some years ago the world’s eight most industrialized countries announced a commitment to deliver renewable energy to a billion people by 2020. To date there is little sign of movement on this pledge.

Few of us have the time, energy, expertise and diligence to follow up these claims and monitor the projects; therefore we only have the Government’s word for it. This is true of much of the carbon market as a whole. Distance serves them well.

I raise this issue with Climate Care founder and entrepreneur Mike Mason in his Oxford office. I show him the article in which Trusha Reddy reveals problems with their energy-efficient light bulb project in South Africa (see ‘Blinded by the Light’, page 12). I explain that it is difficult for ordinary consumers of offsets to be able to judge independently the merits of a project, especially when they are so far away. ‘Why? We’ve done that. We’ve visited all of our projects and have seen them for ourselves,’ remarks Mason. I suggest that he would have a vested interest in supporting his own company’s projects and that few people have his wealth and resources to be able to do such a first-hand investigation. He denies this, arguing that it is in his interests to ensure his company only invests in ‘sound’ projects. ‘Anyway,’ he adds, ‘we don’t solve South Africa’s problems.’ He then qualifies that by arguing that by saving energy, people are saving money.

‘I would rather that 100 per cent of people offset their emissions from flights than 50 per cent of those people not fly at all,’ argues Mason.

Which brings us to the final point – keeping carbon in the ground.

Since climate change is caused for the most part by extracting and then burning fossil carbon – oil, coal and gas – then any solution to climate change must aim to move us away from this dependency. For once that carbon is ‘liberated’ into the atmosphere, it compounds an already monumental problem. Carbon conundrums

Offsets slot into the oil, coal and gas continuum – they do not challenge it. Some argue that offsets at least educate the public about their carbon emissions, but what exactly does it teach? That it is OK to fly and drive so long as you pay some third party a small fee to ease your conscience? That we can consume our way out of a problem caused by our consumption in the first place?

One company, Australian-based Climate Friendly, promises us that ‘in five minutes and for the cost of a cappuccino a week you can go climate neutral’.5 Another, US-based Drive Neutral advertises that ‘for about the cost of a single tank of gas, you can neutralize your CO2 emissions for an entire year’.6

Many individuals and small organizations that buy offsets are probably eco-literate and do make other changes necessary to reduce their environmental impacts. But there are many that don’t. After all, if you truly believed that you were carbon neutral just for the cost of a cappuccino, what’s to stop you from flying for that weekend shopping trip to New York or Paris?

For those corporations fully dependent on and profiting from fossil fuels, offsets are a lifesaver. Oil giant BP has long been a carbon market enthusiast. A major investor in the World Bank’s carbon funds which sponsor dubious projects in the South, such as plantation projects in Brazil (see ‘Forest Fever’), BP now also offers Australian consumers its ‘Global Choice’ programme whereby the company offsets any of its petrol used to fill up your tank.7 At the same time, BP is well on the way towards completing its highly controversial pipeline spanning Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. The Baku-Ceyhan-Tbilisi pipeline has been criticised by Amnesty International for threatening human rights in the three countries. Campaigners also warn that the $5 billion dollar pipeline project will cause ‘far more than the pollution from every car, truck, bus and train in the UK’ in terms of carbon emissions.8

Ford motor company has just launched its own offset initiative in partnership with US offsetter TerraPass.9 The average fuel economy for a Ford car is 18.8 miles per gallon. That’s last in US Environmental Protection Agency list of top six automakers.10 According to environmental studies professor Michael Dorsey of Dartmouth College in the US, ‘Ford is playing games and peddling gimmicks in its new partnership with TerraPass. If Ford wants to reduce CO2 and get serious about climate change it will increase its fleet’s overall miles per gallon (MPG) and not peddle spurious offsets based on cooked MPG numbers.’

Ford is also a member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a US corporate think-tank that has just released a series of television commercials in the US dismissing the notion that climate change is a problem. ‘Carbon dioxide: THEY call it “pollution”, WE call it “life”,’ proclaim the adverts.

This is the carbon con. Offsets do little to challenge our consumption of fossil fuels. And if we are to avert the worst excesses of climate change, we must end our reliance on those fuels quickly. Offsets do not fundamentally challenge the huge inequities in the world. In fact, they sometimes make them worse. Offsetting doesn’t pressure companies to switch from fossil fuels to renewables or encourage governments to regulate polluting companies. It doesn’t stop airport runways being built, planes being flown, cars being driven or even coal-fired power plants being brought online. In fact, it encourages them to continue and expand. It feeds on the good intentions of consumers and ethical business so that the fossil-fuel industry can thrive.

Wild enthusiasm for the carbon market has fuelled investments in other Dyson-esque schemes such as emerging markets in ‘wetlands banking’ and ‘endangered species credit-trading’.11 It is but one part of a vigorous attempt to marketize environmentalism itself and force us to rely on those markets rather than democratic institutions for our ‘solutions’. And it does nothing to solve climate change.

Carbon positive

Climate change is an issue we shouldn’t be ‘neutral’ on. Carbon offsets are at best a distraction and at worst a grandiose carbon laundering scheme. We need to grab hold of our responsibility for climate change and take action now. There is absolutely nothing wrong with funding renewables and even some well-designed and appropriate tree-planting projects. Just don’t equate them with a ‘license to pollute’. A ‘carbon positive’ agenda sees through the offset industry’s gambit and relies on a more fundamental commitment to solving climate change.

There are no easy answers. Solving climate change requires difficult choices to be made. But if seen in the context of wider social change, the movement is vast and strong. After all, there are vibrant global movements seeking to bring lasting and meaningful debt cancellation, end fossil fuel subsidies, reform the world trade system, and reinvigorate democratic control over our economies. Seen in this light, progress on any of these fronts has real benefits for the climate. According to Patrick Bond of the South African Centre for Civil Society, ‘If the World Bank were not holding the reigns on most Southern states’ monetary policy, more local fiscal resources could be used for renewables.’

The solution to climate change is social change. Tall order? Yes. Pipe dream? Perhaps. But it is ultimately what’s needed – and at least, seen from this perspective, we have a lot of friends and allies. After all, if Freeman Dyson can strike lucky with his wacky ideas, why can’t we?

What’s with all the carbon?

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that is released when fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal are burned.

Carbon in the context of this article refers to CO2 as well as other carbon-based greenhouse gases such as methane (CH4).

Carbon offsets are projects that are designed supposedly to ‘absorb’ carbon from the atmosphere – such as tree plantations – or assume savings in emissions that wouldn’t otherwise have been made – investments in energy-efficient light bulbs.

Carbon trading refers to the trade in ‘rights to pollute’ be they in the form of pollution quotas set by governments or ‘credits’ generated from offset projects.

The carbon market broadly refers to the market in offsets as well as pollution permit trading. There is an ‘official’ carbon market set out under the rules of the Kyoto Protocol (which includes both offset projects and permit-trading for compliance purposes), and a ‘voluntary’ market whereby individuals and companies volunteer to fund offset projects. Although commonly referred to as a ‘commodity’ market – like oil or coffee – by traders, the World Bank recently likened the global carbon trade to ‘currency’

How Much Reality Can You Take?

2006-09-25T09:24:00.000Z

Does anyone really want to stop climate change?

By George Monbiot.

You have to pinch yourself. Until now, the Sun has denounced environmentalists as “loonies” and “eco beards”. Last week it published “photographic proof that climate change is real.”(1). In a page that could have come straight from a Greenpeace pamphlet, it laid down ten “rules” for its readers to follow – “Use public transport when possible; use energy-saving lightbulbs; turn off electric gadgets at the wall; do not use a tumble dryer …”(2).

Two weeks ago, the Economist also recanted. In the past it has asserted that “Mr Bush was right to reject the prohibitively expensive Kyoto pact”(3). It co-published the Copenhagen Consensus papers, which put climate change at the bottom of the list of global priorities(4). Now, in a special issue devoted to scaring the living daylights out of its readers, it maintains that “the slice of global output that would have to be spent to control emissions is probably … below 1%.”(5) It calls for carbon taxes and an ambitious programme of government spending.

Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial. But I’m not celebrating yet. The danger is not that we will stop talking about climate change, or recognising that it presents an existential threat to humankind. The danger is that we will talk ourselves to Kingdom Come.

If the biosphere is wrecked, it will not be done by those who couldn’t give a damn about it, as they now belong to a diminishing minority. It will be destroyed by nice, well-meaning, cosmopolitan people who accept the case for cutting emissions, but who won’t change by one iota the way they live. I know people who profess to care deeply about global warming, but who would sooner drink Toilet Duck than get rid of their agas, patio heaters and plasma TVs, all of which are staggeringly wasteful. A recent brochure published by the Co-operative Bank boasts that its “solar tower” in Manchester “will generate enough electricity every year to make 9 million cups of tea.” On the previous page, it urges its customers “to live the dream and purchase that perfect holiday home … With low cost flights now available, jetting off to your home in the sun at the drop of a hat is far more achievable than you think.”(6)

While environmentalism has always been characterised as a middle-class concern, and while this has often been unfair, there is now an undeniable nexus of class politics and morally-superior consumerism. People allow themselves to believe that their impact on the planet is lower than that of the great unwashed because they shop at Waitrose rather than Asda, buy tomme de savoie instead of processed cheese slices and take eco-safaris in the Serengeti instead of package holidays in Torremolinos. In reality, carbon emissions are closely correlated to income: the richer you are, the more likely you are to be wrecking the planet, however much stripped wood and hand-thrown crockery there is in your kitchen.

It doesn’t help that politicians, businesses and even climate change campaigners seek to shield us from the brutal truth of just how much has to change. Last week Friends of the Earth published the report it had commissioned from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which laid out the case for a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050(7). This caused astonishment in the media. But other calculations, using the same sources, show that even this ambitious target is two decades too late(8). It becomes rather complicated, but please bear with me, for our future rests on these numbers.

The Tyndall Centre says that to prevent the earth from warming by more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere must be stabilised at 450 parts per million or less (they currently stand at 380). But this, as its sources show, is plainly insufficient(9). The reason is that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not the only greenhouse gas. The others – such as methane, nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons – boost its impacts by around 15%. When you add the concentrations of CO2 and the other greenhouse gases together, you get a figure known as “CO2 equivalent”. But the Tyndall centre uses “CO2” and “CO2 equivalent” interchangeably, which leads to an embarrassing scientific mishmash.

“Concentrations of 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent or lower”, it says, provide a “reasonable-to-high probability of not exceeding 2 degrees C”(10). This is true, but the report is not calling for a limit of 450 parts of “CO2 equivalent”. It is calling for a limit of 450 parts of CO2, which means at least 500 parts of CO2 equivalent. At this level, there is a low-to-very-low probability of keeping the temperature rise to below 2 degrees(11,12). So why on earth has this reputable scientific institution muddled the figures?

You can find the answer on page 16 of the report. “As with all client-consultant relationships, boundary conditions were established within which to conduct the analysis. ... Friends of the Earth, in conjunction with a consortium of NGOs and with increasing cross-party support from MPs, have been lobbying hard for the introduction of a ‘climate change bill’ ... [The bill] is founded essentially on a correlation of 2°C with 450 parts per million of CO2.”

In other words, Friends of the Earth had already set the target before it asked its researchers to find out what the target should be. I suspect that it chose the wrong number because it believed a 90% cut by 2030 would not be politically acceptable.

This echoes the refusal of Sir David King, the chief scientist, to call for a target of less than 550 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, on the grounds that it would be “politically unrealistic”(13). The message seems to be that the science can go to hell – we will tell people what we think they can bear.

So we all deceive ourselves and deceive each other about the change that needs to take place. The middle classes think they have gone green because they buy organic cotton pyjamas and handmade soaps with bits of leaf in them – though they still heat their conservatories and retain their holiday homes in Croatia. The people who should be confronting them with hard truths balk at the scale of the challenge. And the politicians won’t jump until the rest of us do.

On Sunday the Liberal Democrats announced that they are making climate change their top political priority, and on Tuesday they voted to shift taxation from people to pollution. At first sight it looks bold, but then you discover that they have scarcely touched the problem. While total tax receipts in the United Kingdom amount to £350 billion a year(14), they intend to shift just £8 billion – or 2.3%.

So the question which now confronts everyone – politicians, campaign groups, scientists, readers of the Guardian as well as the Economist and the Sun – is this: how much reality can you take? Do you really want to stop climate chaos, or do you just want to feel better about yourself?

George Monbiot’s book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is now published by Penguin. He has also launched a new website – turnuptheheat.org – exposing fake corporate initiatives on climate change.

An 87% Cut by 2030

2006-09-22T09:27:00.000Z

That’s what we need in the United Kingdom to avoid catastrophic climate change

By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, 21st September 2006

There are three things on which almost all climate scientists are now agreed. The first is that manmade climate change is real. The second is that we need to take action. The third is that, to avert catastrophic effects on both humans and ecosystems, we should seek to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Two degrees is the point at which some of the most dangerous processes catalysed by climate change could become irreversible. This includes the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which between them could raise global sea levels by seven metres(1). It includes the drying out of many parts of Africa, and the inundation by salt water of the aquifers used by cities such as Shanghai, Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, Karachi, Lagos, Buenos Aires and Lima(2). It also means runaway positive feedback, as the Arctic tundras begin to release the methane they contain(3), and the Amazon rainforest dies off, turning trees back into carbon dioxide(4,5). In other words, if the planet warms by 2 degrees, 3 or 4 degrees becomes almost inevitable.

So by how much do we need to cut carbon emissions if we are to stop this from happening? The most persuasive analysis I have seen was compiled by a man called Colin Forrest(6). He is not a professional climate scientist, but the figures he uses have been published in peer-reviewed journals. He argues his case as follows:

Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact in Germany have estimated that holding global temperatures to below 2 degrees means stabilising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at or below the equivalent of 440 parts of carbon dioxide per million(7). While the carbon dioxide concentration currently stands at 380 parts, the other greenhouse gases raise this to an equivalent of 440 or 450. In other words, if everything else were equal, greenhouse gas concentrations in 2030 would need to be roughly the same as they are today.

Unfortunately, everything else is not equal. By 2030, according to a paper published by scientists at the Met Office, the total capacity of the biosphere to absorb carbon will have reduced from the current 4 billion tonnes a year to 2.7 billion(8). To maintain equilibrium at that point, in other words, the world’s population can emit no more than 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon a year in 2030. As we currently produce around 7 billion, this implies a global reduction of 60%. In 2030, the world’s people are likely to number around 8.2 billion. By dividing the total carbon sink (2.7 billion tonnes) by the number of people, we find that to achieve stabilisation the weight of carbon emissions per person should be no greater than 0.33 tonnes. If this problem is to be handled fairly, everyone should have the same entitlement to release carbon, at a rate no greater than 0.33 tonnes per year.

In the rich countries, this means an average cut by 2030 of around 90%. The United Kingdom, for example, currently releases 2.6 tonnes of carbon (9.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide) per capita(9), so would need to reduce its emissions by 87%. Germany requires a cut of 88%, France of 83%, the United States, Canada and Australia, 94%. By contrast, the Kyoto Protocol – the only international agreement that has been struck so far – commits its signatories to cut their carbon emissions by a total of 5.2% by 2012.

These could be underestimates. The Potsdam Institute calculates that with the equivalent of 440 parts of carbon dioxide per million of air in the atmosphere, there is a 67% chance of holding the temperature rise to below 2 degrees(10). Another study suggests that to obtain a 90% chance of stabilisation below 2 degrees, you would need to keep the concentration below 400 parts per million – 40 or 50 parts below the current level(11). Because the carbon released now stays in the atmosphere for some 200 years and causes climate change many years into the future, there is perhaps a 30% chance that we have already blown it. We might already be committed to 2 degrees.

But to use this as an excuse for inaction is like remaining on a railway track while the train is hurtling towards you. We might not have time to jump out of the way, but if we don’t attempt it, the disaster is bound to happen. If we in the United Kingdom are to bear our fair share of dealing with climate change, we must cut our emissions by 87% in 24 years.

George Monbiot’s book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published this week by Penguin. He has also launched a new website exposing the false green claims of corporations and celebrities – www.turnuptheheat.org

References:

1. Eg Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001. Climate Change 2001:
Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg2/005.htm

2. Conference of the International Association of Hydrogeologists, reported by Fred Pearce, 16th April 2005. Cities may be abandoned as salt water invades. New Scientist.

3. Fred Pearce, 11th August 2005. Climate warning as Siberia melts. New Scientist.

4. Sharon A. Cowling et al, 29th March 2004. Contrasting simulated past and future responses of the Amazonian forest to atmospheric change. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Vol 359, pp539-47.

5. Meteorological Office, April 2005. International Symposium on the Stabilisation of Greenhouse Gases: tables of impacts. Table 3 Major Impacts of Climate Change on the Earth System. Hadley Centre, Met Office, Exeter, UK http://www.stabilisation2005.com/impacts/impacts_earth_system.pdf

6. Colin Forrest, 2005. The Cutting Edge: Climate Science to April 2005.

http://www.climate-crisis.net/downloads/THE_CUTTING_EDGE_CLIMATE_SCIENCE_TO_APRIL_05.pdf

7. Bill Hare and Malte Meinshausen, 2004. How Much Warming Are We Committed To And How Much Can Be Avoided? PIK report 93, Figure 7, page 24. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. http://www.pik-potsdam.de/publications/pik_reports/reports/pr.93/pr93.pdf

8. Extracted by Colin Forrest from Chris D. Jones et al, 9th May 2003. Strong carbon cycle feedbacks in a climate model with interactive CO2 and sulphate aerosols. Geophysical Research Letters. Vol 30, p1479.

9. Energy Information Administration, 2005. International Energy Annual 2003. Table H.1cco2 World Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Consumption and Flaring of Fossil Fuels, 1980-2003. http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1cco2.xls

10. Bill Hare and Malte Meinshausen, ibid.

11. Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou, 2005. Honesty About Dangerous Climate Change.

http://www.ecoequity.org/ceo/ceo_8_2.htm

The Modern Successor to the Slave Trade

2006-09-14T09:30:00.000Z

No longer should the peace business be undermined by the arms business

by Desmond Tutu

For many years, I've been involved in the peace business, doing what I can to help people overcome their differences. In doing so, I've also learnt a lot about the business of war: the arms trade. In my opinion it is the modern slave trade. It is an industry out of control: every day more than 1,000 people are killed by conventional weapons. The vast majority of those people are innocent men, women and children.

There have been international treaties to control the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons for decades. Yet, despite the mounting death toll, there is still no treaty governing sales of all conventional weapons from handguns to attack helicopters. As a result, weapons fall into the wrong hands all too easily, fuelling human rights abuses, prolonging wars and digging countries deeper into poverty.

This is allowed to continue because of the complicity of governments, especially rich countries' governments, which turn a blind eye to the appalling human suffering associated with the proliferation of weapons.

Every year, small arms alone kill more people than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. Many more people are injured, terrorised or driven from their homes by armed violence. Even as you read this, one of these human tragedies is unfolding somewhere on the planet.

Take the Democratic Republic of Congo, where armed violence recently flared up again, and millions have died during almost a decade of conflict. Despite a UN arms embargo against armed groups in the country, weapons have continued to flood in from all over the world.

Arms found during weapons collections include those made in Germany, France, Israel, USA and Russia. The only common denominator is that nearly all these weapons were manufactured outside Africa. Five rich countries manufacture the vast majority of the world's weapons. In 2005, Russia, the United States, France, Germany and the UK accounted for an estimated 82 per cent of the global arms market. And it's big business: the amount rich countries spend on fighting HIV/Aids every year represents just 18 days' global spending on arms.

But while the profits flow back to the developed world, the effects of the arms trade are predominantly felt in developing countries. More than two-thirds of the value of all arms are sold to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

In addition to the deaths, injuries and rapes perpetrated with these weapons, the cost of conflict goes deeper still, destroying health and education systems.

For example, in northern Uganda, which has been devastated by 20 years of armed conflict, it has been estimated that 250,000 children do not attend school. The war in northern Uganda, which may be finally coming to an end, has been fuelled by supplies of foreign-made weapons. And, as with so many wars, the heaviest toll has been on the region's children. Children under five are always the most vulnerable to disease, and in a war zone adequate medical care is often not available.

The world could eradicate poverty in a few generations were only a fraction of the expenditure on the war business to be spent on peace. An average of $22bn is spent on arms by countries in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa every year, according to estimates for the US Congress. This sum would have enabled those countries to put every child in school and to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015, fulfilling two of the Millennium Development Goals.

This year, the world has the chance to finally say no to the continuing scandal of the unregulated weapons trade. In October, governments will vote on a resolution at the UN General Assembly to start working towards an Arms Trade Treaty. That Treaty would be based on a simple principle: no weapons for violations of international law. In other words, a ban on selling weapons if there is a clear risk they will be used to abuse human rights or fuel conflict. The UN resolution has been put forward by the governments of Australia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Kenya, and the UK. These governments believe the idea of an Arms Trade Treaty is one whose time has come.

I agree. We must end impunity for governments who authorise the supply of weapons when they know there's a great danger those weapons will be used for gross human rights abuses. Great strides are being made towards ending impunity for war criminals. It cannot be acceptable that their arms suppliers continue to escape punishment. No longer should the peace business be undermined by the arms business. I call on all governments to put the control of the international arms trade at the top of their agenda.

The Bush-Blair Alliance Mystery

2006-09-12T12:00:00.000Z

It seemed like the ultimate strategic alliance, but future generations of Britons might wonder what, if any, benefits came out of the Bush-Blair relationship. The Prime Minister’s friendship with President George W. Bush is regarded as “one of the great political riddles of our time,” as former Labour insider Mark Seddon puts it, a riddle that seemingly no one can solve: is it a marriage of convenience or star-crossed hubris? Blair may simply have applied the long-held diplomatic advice to “hug them close” in a bid to maintain the so-called “special relationship” with the US begun by Churchill. As former UK Ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer puts it, “Look at the balance sheet. Britain and the U.S. have been for years each other’s largest foreign investor.” Despite this history, however, Meyer argues that the current situation is due to “a failure in London at the highest level to have a clear vision of the national interest and to negotiate accordingly.”

The unsettling fact is that Blair’s alliance with Bush may have been based more on personal convictions rather than sheer pragmatism. Not only did he believe in Saddam’s WMD in the run-up to invasion, he was obsessed with the threat posed by such weapons since 1997 – three years before Dubya was even elected. Certainly he did not need a hand to hold on the road to war, having taken his country into five conflicts in his first six years in office, an unprecedented record. As the late Liberal Democrat peer, Roy Jenkins put it: “My view is that the prime minister, far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little too Manichean for my perhaps now-jaded taste seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white.”

Blair foreshadowed Bush’s nation-building aspirations as well: in a 1999 US speech he announced a “doctrine of international community,” arguing that military intervention could be warranted to create more democratic and “secure” societies. Blair’s failure to consult with career diplomats and lawyers in his own foreign office before making the speech was also telling. “Not good on details,” one foreign office employee muttered darkly, “and worryingly simple minded.” Or as the IRA’s codename put it, Naïve Idiot.

Perhaps it was this very naivety and lack of attention to detail that led to Iraq. Buoyed by a personal conviction that the threat was real and with the best of intentions that he could mesh Bush’s Freudian post 9/11 foreign policies with those of the progressive left, Blair simply failed to work into his marriage of convenience the incompatibility of liberal interventionism with US threats of pre-emption and overwhelming force.

As George Galloway noted in a recent telephone interview the riddle may never be solved, just as an error made on the international stage, even with the best of intentions, cannot always be forgiven. “I wish I knew . . . why did Tony Blair join it?” he said. “Certainly, it’s been utterly ruinous to his political reputation. He will be followed into the history books and the grave with this mark of Cain on his forehead. He will be remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush over a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven’t yet reached the bottom. All I can say from my own conversations with him are that I think both he and Bush are possessed of a kind of messianic belief that somebody, God perhaps, gave them the job of shouldering the white man’s burden, which is the world. Someone gave them the right to step outside of international law; go anywhere, do anything, pay any price in other people’s blood, to reshape the world in their image; in the image they want to see. And I think that both men will be damned in history. Both men have made their respective countries the two most hated countries in the world.”

"The World As I See It" by Einstein

2006-09-01T13:43:00.000Z

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."
"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Albert Einstein

Bad Pharma

2006-08-31T08:32:00.000Z

Before pharma-giant Glaxosmithkline (GSK) was sued by the state of New York in June 2004, over two million children and adolescents in the United States were popping Paxil to treat their depression. Doctors comfortably prescribed the drug because published clinical trials – while showing mixed effects on children – did not reveal anything overwhelmingly negative. It was the best information they had, and it turned out to be completely misleading.

In the lawsuit, New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer argued that GSK had only published one of the five Paxil trials it ran. While the published test revealed mixed results, the four unpublished ones showed no benefits from the drug, and in fact suggested Paxil increased the risk of suicide. An internal gsk memo told the company to manage the release of the data effectively, “to minimize any potential negative commercial impact.”

That big pharma can tamper with the solid medical knowledge our doctors rely on is a terrifying wakeup call for patients – and it’s a story all too common, says Richard Smith, former head of the British Medical Journal. In an article in the Public Library of Science online journal, he said pharmaceutical companies routinely manipulate results to ensure favorable results, then get their trials published in the major medical journals to boost sales. Most of our information may be skewed, writes Smith, since industry sponsors two-thirds to three-quarters of trials found in the four major medical journals – Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

The examples from recent years drive home the fact that profit – rather than our health – motivates the actions of pharmaceutical companies. That explains why drug salesmen with quotas to meet encourage doctors to prescribe Paxil to children (American sales: $2.6 billion in 2002), why drugs like Vioxx can stay on the market despite being known to increase heart attack and stroke (worldwide sales: $2.5 billion for Merck in 2003), and why drugs like Neurontin can be forcefully marketed to cure everything else alongside the epilepsy it is designed to treat (worldwide sales: $2.3 billion in 2002). US pharmaceutical companies spend about $6,000-7,000 per doctor on direct marketing alone, offering everything from mugs and pens to gourmet meals and luxury trips.

But while big pharma steps up the pressure, those on the front lines are drawing a line in the sand. The grassroots medical group No Free Lunch has had hundreds of American medical professionals sign on to its anti-marketing pledge. Forced by Spitzer’s lawsuit, GSK revealed all of its negative studies on Paxil and formed its own registry to display all of the clinical trials it has sponsored and will sponsor. And after facing up to their complicity in the drug-info sham, medical journals are changing the way they do business. In an article in Newsweek, Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine reiterates a call for an international registry of clinical trials – which would make all trial data available to the public, good or bad – and says that 11 major US medical journals have agreed not to publish any studies unless the trial is published in a similar public database. It’s voluntary, but it’s a step on the way to protecting our most precious resource – our health.

The Real Terrorism Plot

2006-08-24T13:31:00.000Z

Ramzy Baroud

And yet another menacing terror plot was thwarted 10 August, with the arrest of 24 suspects, all British Muslims. It was an ominous conspiracy aimed at committing “mass murder” on an “unimaginable” scale, British authorities quickly concluded. US authorities hastily joined the action, too claiming a decisive victory over the plotters, thanks in part to the quick thinking of and awesome coordination between US security and intelligence branches. Britain congratulated the US; the US thanked Britain; both saluted Pakistan and its ever-loyal leadership, itself conducting a brutal war against undefined, shadowy groups that emerge and vanish, all too conveniently, and too neatly.

Moments after the shocking announcement, as security threat levels reached their peak in the US and Britain, the debate commenced and it relentlessly continues: Why would a British Muslim choose such a destructive path while living in a democratic society, where change, at least theoretically, is possible through peaceful means?

The media also sprung into action. Ready-to-serve answers were deftly provided by all the usual experts, instantly infusing more conventional wisdom upon a vulnerable public. Attempts to contextualise terrorism within a political milieu were decidedly torpedoed. Despite years of war that seem to have achieved nothing but “mass murder” on an “unimaginable” scale, no one should dare explain the true roots of terrorism; one may explain why poor neighbourhoods in America yield greater crime rates than others, or why abused children become abusers themselves, or even why US soldiers in Iraq often “snap” and massacre entire families, but terrorism that involves Muslims should not in any way be discussed outside its useful parameters of a misguided generation with a radical interpretation of religion: the Islam that produces “Muslim fascists” as President George W Bush termed it.

Very few moderate, or sensible voices are consulted in such debates. British media proves no exception, examining the viewpoints of the utterly fundamentalist or the utterly liberal. The first wants a return to the Islamic caliphate, with London as its capital, and the latter dismisses as hogwash the attempt to examine the government’s foreign policy as a reason of radicalisation searing among an already embattled and alienated young Muslim generation.

Expectedly, a letter that was signed by three Muslim MPs and 38 organisations accusing Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreign policy in Iraq, and his support of the Israeli carnage in Lebanon, of “putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad” hardly changed anything. British Home Secretary John Reid found the mere suggestion of a link unacceptable. Many others followed suit. If anything, the terror plot will strengthen the argument of those eager to harden terror laws, widen the gap between peoples from different religions, but most dangerously give yet more leash to those who champion war as a solution to conflict.

One week before the alleged plot was impeded, 100,000 people in London marched in protest at the British government’s position—particularly that of Blair in support of Israel’s war of “self-defence” in Lebanon. Hundreds of protesters threw children’s shoes near the doorsteps of the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. They were meant to symbolise the number of children killed in this war, mostly by the Israeli army. I gazed at the impromptu memorial as I held Lebanese and Palestinian flags. Thinking of the tiny bodies of hundreds of children, mingled underneath tons of concrete in Lebanon and Gaza gave me that ever-familiar chill of dejection. Only the nudge of a police officer to my shoulder forced me to move along.

What is radicalisation but a culmination of bitterness, resentment and anger that lurk desperately inside, which often translate to despicable behaviour: terrorism? But if terrorism is killing innocent civilians to achieve political ends, then how else can one explain the American-British war on Iraq with a death toll that has long passed the 100,000 mark? Or the ongoing war in Afghanistan? Or Israel’s wars in Palestine and Lebanon, and the funding or abetting of these wars by the US and British governments?

Is it not rational to deduce that “mass murder” in the Middle East, happening at such an “unimaginable” scale, could lead to a culmination of bitterness, resentment, anger and radicalisation that would unavoidably yield terrorism? And since Muslims seem to be the primary target of this mass murder, is it not equally rational to expect that the perpetrators of such terrorist acts might mostly be Muslims?

The insistence on disallowing this argument as one imparted primarily by terror “apologists” is often induced with equal determination to prolong the terrorising wars, of which civilians are the primary victims. A change of course might be understood as bowing to terrorists, as Spain is often accused of doing. Thus the carnage in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan must continue. This seems to be the underlying logic in refusing to acknowledge the urgency of a fundamental shift in foreign policy, in Britain as well as in the United States.

Those who cautiously attempted to link the terrorist acts of 11 September to America’s political, financial and military support of the State of Israel were dismissed, even shunned, whenever they disseminated their logic. Only the drums of war were to be heard. Now, nearly five years later, are we any closer to global peace and tranquillity? How many more lives must be wasted, how much more blood must be shed, and how many more children’s shoes must be piled up on Downing Street to realise that cluster bombs don’t hold the keys to peace, nor do the torture camps of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay?

One must not accept the logic of those who believe that blowing up innocent travellers is a prudent response to blowing up Lebanese children seeking shelter in a half standing building in South Lebanon, however inhumane. But to continue to pretend that those who carry out acts of “mass murder” at an “unimaginable” scale in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East are not perpetrators of terrorism themselves—whether directly or by inspiring a cycle terrorist responses—is to resign to doing nothing in defence of the innocent, British, Palestinian or Lebanese, which, I believe, is equally repugnant.

We Can Build A Healthy Global Society

2006-08-21T15:57:00.000Z

David Korten

By what name will future generations know our time?

Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption exceeded Earth's capacity to sustain and led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet's resources, and a dramatic dieback of the human population? Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the time of the Great Turning, when their forebears embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, and learned to live in creative partnership with one another and Earth?

We face a defining choice between two contrasting models for organizing human affairs. Give them the generic names Empire and Earth Community. Absent an understanding of the history and implications of this choice, we may squander valuable time and resources on efforts to preserve or mend cultures and institutions that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.

Empire organizes by domination at all levels, from relations among nations to relations among family members. Empire brings fortune to the few, condemns the majority to misery and servitude, suppresses the creative potential of all, and appropriates much of the wealth of human societies to maintain the institutions of domination.

Earth Community, by contrast, organizes by partnership, unleashes the human potential for creative co-operation, and shares resources and surpluses for the good of all. Supporting evidence for the possibilities of Earth Community comes from the findings of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and religious mysticism. It was the human way before Empire; we must make a choice to re-learn how to live by its principles.

Developments distinctive to our time are telling us that Empire has reached the limits of the exploitation that people and Earth will sustain. A mounting perfect economic storm born of a convergence of peak oil, climate change, and an imbalanced U.S. economy dependent on debts it can never repay is poised to bring a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life. We have the power to choose, however, whether the consequences play out as a terminal crisis or an epic opportunity. The Great Turning is not a prophecy. It is a possibility.

According to cultural historian Riane Eisler, early humans evolved within a cultural and institutional frame of Earth Community. They organized to meet their needs by cooperating with life rather than by dominating it. Then some 5,000 years ago, beginning in Mesopotamia, our ancestors made a tragic turn from Earth Community to Empire. They turned away from a reverence for the generative power of life -- represented by female gods or nature spirits -- to a reverence for hierarchy and the power of the sword -- represented by distant, usually male, gods. The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the arbitrary rule of the powerful, often ruthless, king.

The peoples of the dominant human societies lost their sense of attachment to the living earth, and societies became divided between the rulers and the ruled, exploiters and exploited. The brutal competition for power created a relentless play-or-die, rule-or-be-ruled dynamic of violence and oppression and served to elevate the most ruthless to the highest positions of power. Since the fateful turn, the major portion of the resources available to human societies has been diverted from meeting the needs of life to supporting the military forces, prisons, palaces, temples, and patronage for retainers and propagandists on which the system of domination in turn depends. Great civilizations built by ambitious rulers fell to successive waves of corruption and conquest.

The primary institutional form of Empire has morphed from the city-state to the nation-state to the global corporation, but the underlying pattern of domination remains. It is axiomatic: for a few to be on top, many must be on the bottom. The powerful control and institutionalize the processes by which it will be decided who enjoys the privilege and who pays the price, a choice that commonly results in arbitrarily excluding from power whole groups of persons based on race and gender.

Herein lies a crucial insight. If we look for the source of the social pathologies increasingly evident in our culture, we find they have a common origin in the dominator relations of Empire that have survived largely intact in spite of the democratic reforms of the past two centuries. The sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction that have plagued human societies for 5,000 years, and have now brought us to the brink of a potential terminal crisis, all flow from this common source. Freeing ourselves from these pathologies depends on a common solution -- replacing the underlying dominator cultures and institutions of Empire with the partnership cultures and institutions of Earth Community. Unfortunately, we cannot look to imperial powerholders to lead the way.

History shows that as empires crumble the ruling elites become ever more corrupt and ruthless in their drive to secure their own power -- a dynamic now playing out in the United States. We Americans base our identity in large measure on the myth that our nation has always embodied the highest principles of democracy, and is devoted to spreading peace and justice to the world.

But there has always been tension between America's high ideals and its reality as a modern version of Empire. The freedom promised by the Bill of Rights contrasts starkly with the enshrinement of slavery elsewhere in the original articles of the Constitution. The protection of property, an idea central to the American dream, stands in contradiction to the fact that our nation was built on land taken by force from Native Americans. Although we consider the vote to be the hallmark of our democracy, it took nearly 200 years before that right was extended to all citizens.

Americans acculturated to the ideals of America find it difficult to comprehend what our rulers are doing, most of which is at odds with notions of egalitarianism, justice, and democracy. Within the frame of historical reality, it is perfectly clear: they are playing out the endgame of Empire, seeking to consolidate power through increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic policies.

Wise choices necessarily rest on a foundation of truth. The Great Turning depends on awakening to deep truths long denied.

Empire's true believers maintain that the inherent flaws in our human nature lead to a natural propensity to greed, violence, and lust for power. Social order and material progress depend, therefore, on imposing elite rule and market discipline to channel these dark tendencies to positive ends. Psychologists who study the developmental pathways of the individual consciousness observe a more complex reality. Just as we grow up in our physical capacities and potential given proper physical nourishment and exercise, we also grow up in the capacities and potential of our consciousness, given proper social and emotional nourishment and exercise.

Over a lifetime, those who enjoy the requisite emotional support traverse a pathway from the narcissistic, undifferentiated magical consciousness of the newborn to the fully mature, inclusive, and multidimensional spiritual consciousness of the wise elder. The lower, more narcissistic, orders of consciousness are perfectly normal for young children, but become sociopathic in adults and are easily encouraged and manipulated by advertisers and demagogues. The higher orders of consciousness are a necessary foundation of mature democracy. Perhaps Empire's greatest tragedy is that its cultures and institutions systematically suppress our progress to the higher orders of consciousness.

Given that Empire has prevailed for 5,000 years, a turn from Empire to Earth Community might seem a hopeless fantasy if not for the evidence from values surveys that a global awakening to the higher levels of human consciousness is already underway. This awakening is driven in part by a communications revolution that defies elite censorship and is breaking down the geographical barriers to intercultural exchange.

The consequences of the awakening are manifest in the civil rights, women's, environmental, peace, and other social movements. These movements in turn gain energy from the growing leadership of women, communities of color, and indigenous peoples, and from a shift in the demographic balance in favor of older age groups more likely to have achieved the higher-order consciousness of the wise elder.

It is fortuitous that we humans have achieved the means to make a collective choice as a species to free ourselves from Empire's seemingly inexorable compete-or-die logic at the precise moment we face the imperative to do so. The speed at which institutional and technological advances have created possibilities wholly new to the human experience is stunning.

Just over 60 years ago, we created the United Nations, which, for all its imperfections, made it possible for the first time for representatives of all the world's nations and people to meet in a neutral space to resolve differences through dialogue rather than force of arms.

Less than 50 years ago, our species ventured into space to look back and see ourselves as one people sharing a common destiny on a living space ship.

In little more than 10 years our communications technologies have given us the ability, should we choose to use it, to link every human on the planet into a seamless web of nearly costless communication and cooperation.

Already our new technological capability has made possible the interconnection of the millions of people who are learning to work as a dynamic, self--directing social organism that transcends boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality and functions as a shared conscience of the species. We call this social or-ganism global civil society. On February 15, 2003, it brought more than 10 million people to the streets of the world's cities, towns, and villages to call for peace in the face of the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They accomplished this monumental collective action without a central organization, budget, or charismatic leader through social processes never before possible on such a scale. This was but a foretaste of the possibilities for radically new forms of partnership organization now within our reach.

We humans live by stories. The key to making a choice for Earth Community is recognizing that the foundation of Empire's power does not lie in its instruments of physical violence. It lies in Empire's ability to control the stories by which we define ourselves and our possibilities in order to perpetuate the myths on which the legitimacy of the dominator relations of Empire depend. To change the human future, we must change our defining stories.

For 5,000 years, the ruling class has cultivated, rewarded, and amplified the voices of those storytellers whose stories affirm the righteousness of Empire and deny the higher-order potentials of our nature that would allow us to live with one another in peace and cooperation. There have always been those among us who sense the possibilities of Earth Community, but their stories have been marginalized or silenced by Empire's instruments of intimidation. The stories endlessly repeated by the scribes of Empire become the stories most believed. Stories of more hopeful possibilities go unheard or unheeded and those who discern the truth are unable to identify and support one another in the common cause of truth telling. Fortunately, the new communications technologies are breaking this pattern. As truth-tellers reach a wider audience, the myths of Empire become harder to maintain.

The struggle to define the prevailing cultural stories largely defines contemporary cultural politics in the United States. A far-right alliance of elitist corporate plutocrats and religious theocrats has gained control of the political discourse in the United States not by force of their numbers, which are relatively small, but by controlling the stories by which the prevailing culture defines the pathway to prosperity, security, and meaning. In each instance, the far right's favored versions of these stories affirm the dominator relations of Empire.

The imperial prosperity story says that an eternally growing economy benefits everyone. To grow the economy, we need wealthy people who can invest in enterprises that create jobs. Thus, we must support the wealthy by cutting their taxes and eliminating regulations that create barriers to accumulating wealth. We must also eliminate welfare programs in order to teach the poor the value of working hard at whatever wages the market offers.

The imperial security story tells of a dangerous world, filled with criminals, terrorists, and enemies. The only way to insure our safety is through major expenditures on the military and the police to maintain order by physical force.

The imperial meaning story reinforces the other two, featuring a God who rewards righteousness with wealth and power and mandates that they rule over the poor who justly suffer divine punishment for their sins.

These stories all serve to alienate us from the community of life and deny the positive potentials of our nature, while affirming the legitimacy of economic inequality, the use of physical force to maintain imperial order, and the special righteousness of those in power.

It is not enough, as many in the United States are doing, to debate the details of tax and education policies, budgets, war, and trade agreements in search of a positive political agenda. Nor is it enough to craft slogans with broad mass appeal aimed at winning the next election or policy debate. We must infuse the mainstream culture with stories of Earth Community. As the stories of Empire nurture a culture of domination, the stories of Earth Community nurture a culture of partnership. They affirm the positive potentials of our human nature and show that realizing true prosperity, security, and meaning depends on creating vibrant, caring, interlinked communities that support all persons in realizing their full humanity. Sharing the joyful news of our human possibilities through word and action is perhaps the most important aspect of the Great Work of our time.

Changing the prevailing stories in the United States may be easier to accomplish than we might think. The apparent political divisions notwithstanding, U.S. polling data reveal a startling degree of consensus on key issues. Eighty-three percent of Americans believe that as a society the United States is focused on the wrong priorities. Supermajorities want to see greater priority given to children, family, community, and a healthy environment. Americans also want a world that puts people ahead of profits, spiritual values ahead of financial values, and international cooperation ahead of international domination. These Earth Community values are in fact widely shared by both conservatives and liberals.

Our nation is on the wrong course not because Americans have the wrong values. It is on the wrong course because of remnant imperial institutions that give unaccountable power to a small alliance of right-wing extremists who call themselves conservative and claim to support family and community values, but whose preferred economic and social policies constitute a ruthless war against children, families, communities, and the environment.

The distinctive human capacity for reflection and intentional choice carries a corresponding moral responsibility to care for one another and the planet. Indeed, our deepest desire is to live in loving relationships with one another. The hunger for loving families and communities is a powerful, but latent, unifying force and the potential foundation of a winning political coalition dedicated to creating societies that support every person in actualizing his or her highest potential.

In these turbulent and often frightening times, it is important to remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment in the whole of the human experience. We have the opportunity to turn away from Empire and to embrace Earth Community as a conscious collective choice. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Incredible...

2006-08-19T07:26:00.000Z

Lebanon and the London Terror Scare

2006-08-13T12:40:00.000Z

Robert Fisk

When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house—just as they vibrated across all of Beirut—as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: “Terror Plot”. Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favorite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favorite police force—the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him—had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.

I’m sure our readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects—or “British-born Muslims” as the BBC defined them in its special form of “soft” racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?)—are still in custody in a couple of weeks’ time.

And I’m sure it’s quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday—with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’s shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak—to save the world. After all, it’s scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armored vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day—again quite by chance, of course—that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair’s intended invasion of Iraq.

So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting “Islamic fascism”. There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror—although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.

And there, of course, was the same old problem. To protect the British people—and the American people—from “Islamic terror”, we must have lots and lots of heavily armed policemen and soldiers and plainclothes police and endless departments of anti-terrorism, homeland security and other more sordid folk like the American torturers—some of them sadistic women—at Abu Ghraib and Baghram and Guantanamo. Yet the only way to protect ourselves from the real violence which may—and probably will—be visited upon us, is to deal, morally, with courage and with justice, with the tragedy of Lebanon and “Palestine” and Iraq and Afghanistan. And this we will not do.

I would, frankly, love to have Paul Stephenson out in Beirut to counter a little terror in my part of the world—Hizbollah terror and Israeli terror. But this, of course, is something that Paul and his lads don’t have the spittle for. It’s one thing to sound off about the alleged iniquities of alleged suspects of an alleged plot to create alleged terror—quite another to deal with the causes of that terror and to do so in the face of great danger.

I was amused to see that Bush—just before my electricity was cut off again—still mendaciously tells us that the “terrorists” hate us because of “our freedoms”. Not because we support the Israelis who have massacred refugee columns, fired into Red Cross ambulances and slaughtered more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians—here indeed are crimes for Paul Stephenson to investigate—but because they hate our “freedoms”.

And I notice with despair that our journalists again suck on the hind tit of authority, quoting endless (and anonymous) “security sources” without once challenging their information or the timing of Paul’s “terror plot” discoveries or the nature of the details—somehow, “fizzy drinks bottles” doesn’t quite work for me—nor the reasons why, if this whole panjandrum is correct, anyone would want to carry out such atrocities. We are told that the arrested men are Muslims. Now isn’t that interesting? Muslims. This means that many of them—or their families—originally come from south-west Asia and the Middle East, from the area that encompasses Afghanistan, Iraq, “Palestine” and Lebanon.

In the old days, chaps like Paul used to pull out a map when faced with folk of different origins or religion or indeed different names. Indeed, if Paul Stephenson takes a school atlas, he’ll notice that there are an awful lot of violent problems and injustice and suffering and—a speciality, it seems, of the Metropolitan Police—of death in the area from which the families of these “Muslims” come.

Could there be a connection, I wonder? Dare we look for a motive for the crime, or rather the “alleged crime”? The Met used to be pretty good at looking for motives. But not, of course, in the “war on terror”, where—if he really searched for real motives—my favorite policeman would swiftly be back on the beat as Constable Paul Stephenson.

Take yesterday morning. On day 31of the Israeli version of the “war on terror”—a conflict to which Paul and the lads in blue apparently subscribe by proxy—an Israeli aircraft blew up the only remaining bridge to the Syrian frontier in northern Lebanon, in the mountainous and beautiful Akka district above the Mediterranean. With their usual sensitivity, the pilots who bombed the bridge—no terrorists they, mark you—chose to destroy the bridge when ordinary cars were crossing. So they massacred the 12 civilians who happened to be on the bridge. In the real world, we call that a war crime. Indeed, it’s a crime worthy of the attention of Paul and his lads. But alas, Stephenson’s job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened.

Personally, I’m all for arresting criminals, be they of the “Islamic fascist” variety or the Bin Laden variety or the Israeli variety—their warriors of the air really should be arrested next time they drop into Heathrow—or the American variety (Abu Ghraib cum laude) and indeed of the kind that blow out the brains of Tube train passengers. But I don’t think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice. And I have to say, watching his performance before the next power cut last night, I thought he was doing a pretty good job for his masters.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk’s new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

Frankenstein Fuels

2006-08-05T14:46:00.000Z

Mark Lynas

From The New Statesman Late every summer, large areas of central Borneo become invisible. There’s no magic involved – most of the densely forested island simply gets covered with a pall of thick smoke. Huge areas of forest burn, while beneath the ground peat many metres thick smoulders on for months. These trees are burning in a good cause, however. They are burning to help save the world from global warming.

Here is how the logic goes. As the natural forest is cleared, land opens up for lucrative palm-oil plantations. Palm oil is a feedstock for biodiesel, the “carbon-neutral” fuel that the European Union is trying to encourage by converting its vehicle fleet. By reducing use of fossil fuels for its cars and trucks, the EU believes it can reduce its carbon emissions and thereby help mitigate global warming. Everyone is happy. (Except the orang-utan. It gets to go extinct.)

It’s a con, of course. In 1997, the single worst year of Indonesian forest- and peat-burning, 2.67 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide were released by the fires, equivalent to 40 per cent of the year’s entire emissions from burning fossil fuels. That was a particularly bad year: most summers, the emissions are only a billion or so tonnes, or about 15 per cent of total human emissions. The biggest Indonesian fires, in 1997 and 1998, took place on plantation company land, while in neighbouring Malaysia 87 per cent of recent deforestation has occurred to make way for palm-oil plantations. It is stretching credulity to argue that biofuels produced through this destructive process are helping combat climate change.

The EU is undaunted (though it has undertaken a public consultation), and persists with a target that 5.75 per cent of its vehicle fuels should be “renewable” by the year 2010. Not all of this will come from tropical sources such as palm oil – but nor can their importation be restricted on environmental grounds. The campaigning journalist George Monbiot has discovered that world trade rules would prevent the EU taking any measures to restrict imports of palm oil produced on deforested lands. Free trade comes first.

Some of this “deforestation diesel” will be processed and refined in the UK. A company called Biofuels Corporation has just finished building a biodiesel plant at Seal Sands, near Middlesbrough, and supplies fuel throughout the UK. With an annual production capacity of 284 million litres of biodiesel, it is strategically located next to a deep-water port to ease its access to imports of palm and other vegetable oils. A spokesman confirmed that imported palm oil from Malaysia is being used as feedstock, and that the source cannot at present be guaranteed as “rainforest-free”. A second company, Greenergy Biofuels, is putting up a £13.5m plant at Immingham on Humberside, and plans another. Palm oil is again expected to be one of the main feedstocks imported.

As the promise of profits increases, the big players are beginning to get involved. The two largest external stakes in Greenergy Biofuels are held by Tesco and Cargill. Tesco will shift the product on its petrol forecourts, while Cargill – one of two giants that dominate the world food market – will supply the feedstock. Gone are the days when biofuels meant bearded hippies running their clapped-out vans on recycled chip fat.

Even the oil majors are sniffing around this new market. BP has teamed up with DuPont to develop a liquid fuel called biobutanol, derived from sugar cane or corn starch, which they aim to launch in the UK next year as an additive to petrol. In the meantime, the oil giant is ploughing half a billion dollars into biofuels research at a new academic laboratory called the Energy Biosciences Institute. Indeed, “biosciences” are what it’s all about. Speak to anyone in the corporate energy or agricultural sectors and they will probably go dewy-eyed about the technological “convergence” of energy, food, genetics – in fact, just about everything. In the biotechnology industry the atmosphere is reminiscent of the heady days of genetic modification, before the companies realised that consumers didn’t want to eat “Frankenstein foods”. Frankenstein fuels, however, might prove an easier sell.

The GM industry now plans to reinvent itself, following the example of the nuclear industry, on the back of climate change. “Producing genetically modified crops for non-food purposes, as a renewable source of alternative fuels, may provide the basis for a more rational and balanced consideration of the technology and its potential benefits, away from the disproportionate hysteria which has so often accompanied the debate over GM foods,” suggests the Agricultural Bio technology Council, an umbrella organisation for the biggest biotech companies. The Swiss corporation Syngenta is already marketing a variety of GM corn – one not approved for human consumption or animal feed – specifically inten ded for ethanol biofuels. It has just applied, with support from the UK, for an EU import licence – even though it admits it “cannot exclude” the possibility that some of this corn will find its way into the normal supply chain. The European biotech association EuropaBio is delighted with the EU’s biofuels initiative. “Biotechnology will help to meet Europe’s carbon-dioxide emission reduction targets, reduce our dependence on oil imports and provide another useful income stream for our farmers,” enthuses its secretary general, Johan Vanhemelrijck.

In the United States, biofuels are welcomed as a way to help wean the country off its dependence on oil produced by shady, Allah-obsessed Arabs. “Every gallon of renewable, domestically produced fuel we use is a gallon we don’t have to get from other countries,” beams Congressman Kenny Hulshof, a Republican sponsor of the Renewable Fuels and Energy Independence Promotion Act being considered by Congress. Not surprisingly, the American Soybean Association is also a supporter. “ASA is urging all soybean growers to contact their members of Congress and ask them to co-sponsor this legislation,” says its president, Bob Metz, in a press release. “The toll-free number for the Congress operator is 1-888-355-3588.”

In America, biofuels combine patriotism with economic self-interest in a seamless match. Farmers love it because biodiesel and ethanol are brewed from agricultural commodities, helping drive up farm-gate prices. Red-state senators love it because federal tax subsidies keep Republican-voting farmers happy. Even George W Bush loves it: “I like the idea of a policy that combines agriculture and modern science with the energy needs of the American people,” the president told the Renewable Fuels Association in April.

Democrats and Republicans are united in touting ethanol. “All incumbents and challen gers in Midwestern farm country are by definition ethanolics,” the agricultural policy adviser Ken Cook told the New York Times. There are 40 ethanol plants under construction, and the US is poised to overtake Brazil (which uses sugar cane on a large scale to make the fuel) as the world’s largest producer within a year. Cargill’s CEO compares the transformation to “a gold rush”.

But not everybody loves biofuels. David Pimentel, professor of insect ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, hates them. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” he complains. Pimentel’s own studies have concluded that making ethanol from corn uses 30 per cent more energy than the finished fuel produces, because fossil fuels are used at every stage in the production process, from cultivation (in fertilisers) to transportation. “Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidised food burning,” he fumes.

Pimentel is not alone in thinking that burning food in cars while global harvests decline is not necessarily a good idea. China, with its enormous population, is already having second thoughts about going down the biofuels path. “Basically this country has such a large population that the top priority for land use is food crops,” says Dr Sergio Trindade, an expert on biofuels. The same problem will doubtless hamper the biofuels revolution in Europe. According to one study, meeting the EU’s 5.75 per cent target for its vehicles will require about a quarter of Europe’s agricultural land. For the even more car-dependent US, it would take 1.8 billion acres of farmland – four times the country’s total arable area – to produce enough soya biodiesel to cover annual petrol consumption.

So which gets priority: cars or people? A very simple answer to this land/fuel conundrum would be for people to use their cars less, and to cycle and walk more. But discouraging car use is not at the top of any politician’s agenda, either in Europe or the US. Meanwhile, our leaders must be seen to be doing something about the rising greenhouse-gas emissions from road tran sport, so biofuels are the perfect technofix.

The dilemma might bring to mind Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the alien Ford Prefect took the name of a car because – looking down from above at all the busy roads and motorways – he had mistaken them for the dominant life form. If cars chug happily around between massed ranks of starving people in our biofuelled future, then perhaps Ford Prefect won’t have got it so wrong after all.

Josh Ritter: musician, poet, hero...

2006-08-05T14:32:00.000Z

2006-07-22T09:49:00.000Z

Discuss CAT : : Masters : : Sustainable Living

Arming Britain Against Democratic Protest

2006-07-16T15:23:00.000Z

Protester Brian Haw Outside London's Parliament Building. Photo: Jeff Moore/MAXPP

Beleaguered home office secretary Charles Clarke took time out from his recent headlong rush towards the parliamentary backbenches to take a swipe at the press. UK journalists, he complained, were too fond of bandying about “lazy and deceitful” phrases and, in the “absence of a genuinely dangerous and evil totalitarian dictatorship to fight” visited some of those slurs on the blameless UK government, branding it fascist and totalitarian, a hijacker of democracy and destroyer of the rule of law, and an advocate of police states, gulags and apartheid.

No one could accuse Fleet Street of willful understatement. But while the oft-used British lament is that the UK “is only 10 years behind” whatever craziness its citizens see in the US, in one respect Britain is a transatlantic trailblazer: Blair’s government has exceeded the fantasies of even the most avowed neocon when it comes to dismantling civil liberties and safeguards in the wake of 9/11. And has been busy “disturbing the normal legal processes,” as the Prime Minister puts it, by passing three crime and security bills a year since the War on Terror began.

As The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins noted, “The posing of some global menace to curtail civil rights and justify repressive laws is the oldest game in the book and does indeed recall an ‘ism’ which, in deference to the home secretary, we dare not name.” And as George Monbiot warned, “No act has been passed over the last 20 years with the aim of preventing anti-social behaviour, trespass, harassment and terrorism which has not also been deployed to criminalise a peaceful public engagement in politics.”

So when Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old Jewish concentration camp survivor and Labour party member of 57 years, was briefly detained by police after shouting “nonsense” at the Foreign Secretary during the 2005 party conference, he was held under anti-terrorism legislation. Had he shouted out “nonsense” twice, he could have been charged under the Protection from Harassment Act – originally designed to target stalkers. Such legislation has already been used to arrest an animal rights protestor for sending two polite emails to a drug company executive, and to prosecute two peace campaigners at Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill military intelligence base for “causing harassment, alarm or distress” to American servicemen by standing outside the gates holding a placard that read “George W. Bush? Oh dear!” And last October six Lancaster University students were convicted of aggravated trespass after entering their lecture theatre for three minutes to hand out leaflets to staff attending a seminar organized by Shell, GlaxoSmithKline, bae systems, and DuPont on how to commercialize university research.

But the most effective weapon against democratic protest is the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. While the incitement to religious hatred clause provided numerous column inches and a marvellous distraction as the bill was debated, few noticed Section 132 which bans all spontaneous protests in any area “designated” by government, including the square kilometer around parliament. This clause was tailormade to evict the 56-year-old father-of-seven and peace campaigner Brian Haw from his five-year makeshift camp on a Westminster traffic island that MPs must pass on their way to the House of Commons. So it was with some mirth that the press dubbed Section 132 “Haw’s Law” when journalists discovered he was the only man in Britain to receive immunity from prosecution because his protest preceded the new law. Until May 8 that is, when after having his nose broken three times (by, variously, an English woman, a US marine from the American embassy and a man claiming to be from Israeli intelligence), and surviving one divorce, two arrests, and four eviction attempts, the House of Lords called time on his dignified protest by upholding the Government’s appeal against the Worcester carpenter.

But how could such a sweeping assault on democracy happen in Britain, with its robust press and extensive experience of terrorism without previous displays of hysteria? Maybe it’s because it’s not the country it once was. Creeping authoritarianism has entered all aspects of everyday life, exposing residents to unprecedented levels of surveillance and punishment.

Already the most-watched country in the world, with 4 million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people – perched like steel crows above roads, towns and city centers, by the end of 2006, Britons will be the first to have all their car journeys monitored using a network of speed cameras and automatic number plate recognition technology housed in a monitoring center capable of processing as many as 50 million plates a day. The system was devised to catch drivers without tax and insurance, but the movements of all citizens, even those who committed no offence, will be stored for up to six years.

Pedestrians are also being targeted. Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 all criminal offences, no matter how minor, are now arrestable. Residents face fines of up to £100 for a range of misdemeanours including discarding cigarettes on the street, putting trash cans out on the wrong day, and failing to stifle car alarms. Children stopped by police can have their DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned. So far 24,000 samples are already in the National DNA Database. When the national identity card scheme is made law, their parents will join them, paying £300 each for compulsory cards that store biometric data and contain radio frequency chips to eventually enable authorities to scan crowds of demonstrators for names and addresses.

“Already we’ve become used to police filming demonstrations for the same purpose,” noted George Monbiot, “When they started it, ten years ago, it caused outrage. But now we don’t even notice them, not even to the extent of waving and shouting ‘hello mum.’ Like every other intrusion on our privacy, it has become normal. It will not require a tyrannical government to deprive us of our freedom. Step by voluntary step we have given it up already.”

But then there’s little resistance to future tyranny either. Clarke was sacked after Labour’s worst local election result in 30 years when voters swung abruptly to the right. Like a nation of uneasy children, the electorate could not forgive him for first failing to deport and then losing hundreds of foreign criminals. In a country learning to fear immigrants and implicitly trust surveillance and punishment, this lapse from the man responsible for watching over them and curtailing so many freedoms in the name of public safety was unforgivable.

So voters chose the UK’s only fascist party in record numbers instead, and the British National Party doubled its number of English Councillors. No one in government or civil liberties circles seemed remotely surprised.

Maria Hampton

Creationism: The Real Story

2006-06-27T10:02:00.000Z

by: James Boyne

Creationism: 20,000 years ago God created the universe. He did Earth in 7 days---first he did the frame; then the water; then the dirt; then the air; then the trees and plants (the landscaping); then the animals, fishies and birdies; and then the guy and the girl, Adam and Eve, He named them.

He gave Adam a pee pee to make him a man. Adam got lonely, for obvious reasons; started to fall into a deep depression.

God took a rib from Adam. He ripped it right out of Adams chest; no anesthesia or nothing. God put it in some water with some Miracle Grow or something and he created Eve. This means that God Himself cloned Eve from Adam’s rib. God also liked to do “stem cell research” in His spare time. And to Eve, He gave a wee wee to make her a woman. He made them to be about 30 years old according to the most recently available photographs of them of which there are numerous reprints in most Christian schools.

The pee pee, in combination with the wee wee worked out good (or well, depending on the proper use of English). Adam could now be a man; and Eve was given the right to be a woman, if she behaved and didn’t get out of hand, or start to have hot flashes and freak out once a month.

God created the menstrual cycle for Eve. He gave her cramps. It was a mess. And sometimes Eve could be a real bitch. Adam could never understand it.

The menstrual cycle was one of God’s master achievements. The only way Eve could get rid of her damn menstrual cycle was to let Adam and his pee pee come in direct contact with her wee wee which resulted in her menstrual cycle shutting down for 9 months. However, the alternative of giving birth was hardly a welcome trade off.

The menstrual cycle was one of God’s crowning glories of mis-design----a true engineering disaster. It is responsible for more lost human productivity, lost wages, lost work, and spontaneous outbursts of rage and violence than any other of God’s mistakes. It does accomplish one very important thing----it keeps men “in check”. It is the one thing that makes a man “back off”-----a woman who can flip out for no reason. God was going to give Man a menstrual cycle also but when He drew up the plans, at the last minute, being that this was the time of Creationism, he decided to give Adam some testicles instead. God can do anything He wants. He’s God. So God just said, “Let there be a menstrual cycle” and it just happened. And then He said, “Let there be testicles” and it just happened. This is Creationism at its most basic. All Christians should be taught this.

Note: The human spine was God’s second biggest design failure. Some say that the real reason that God has not come back to Earth is because He would have a multi-trillion dollar, class action lawsuit slapped against Him for the almost criminally incompetent design of the human spine. Anyone who has taken Electricity 101 knows that you don’t snake a million little electrical wires (with no color codes) through a liquid medium where they come in contact with each other and with sharp objects like bones. I mean, what was God thinking ! Oh well, let’s get back to Adam and Eve.

Anyway, they lived near a big apple tree and a snake came by that was really the Devil but he spoke good English. The snake spoke to Eve and said, "Eat the apple if you want to be happy". The Devil was some kind of local fresh fruit salesman so Eve did not suspect that this was a trick to see if she could be lured into the mortal sin of eating an apple. She had also been told to eat lots of fruits and vegetables all her life (ever since she was Created at the age of 30), and to eat a balanced diet so she just did not know the snake was the Devil in disguise.. She thought it was just some ordinary snake giving her a hard time about not eating apples.

Eve tried to resist but how can you NOT eat an apple when a snake speaks real good English and tells you not to eat the apple. It's like telling a woman to NOT eat the chocolates on St. Valentines Day. Adam just stood around looking suspicious. So Eve went and took a bite out of the nice red apple.

At that point God got really mad because this was all just a "set up" to see if Eve, the one with the wee wee, could resist the commands of the Devil who was disguised as a snake. So God yelled out from up in Heaven, "Eve, you have sinned, you ate the feakin' apple".

Adam said, "Holy Shit, Eve, look what you've done now. Christ, our goose is cooked". God made Adam an accomplice of Eve's and He cast them out of the Garden of Eden which was a pretty nice garden back in those days (which is where the term "garden apartments comes from).

From there it was all down hill for the two of them. All of a sudden they had to start wearing clothes and stuff. Eve had two sons named Cain and Able (they didn't have last names because they were the first people on Earth and God didn't give them a birth certificate or anything; not even a Social Security number).

Eve never had any girls with wee wee's; just the two boys with the pee pee things. Figure that one out?

Cain got in a big fight with Able one day and Cain killed Able which enabled Jeffrey Archer, a British novelist, to write a best selling book and call it Cain and Able. I read the book. It was one of my favorite and it had nothing to do with Adam and Eve; just a story of two brothers.

Oh yeah, by this time Adam had been laid off from his job as "first human being on Earth, CEO"; God revoked his pension and cancelled his health care insurance (and they didn't have COBRA back in those days). He eventually got injured real bad when Eve clobbered him in a domestic dispute involving the two boys who were older now and still hadn't moved out of the house but were allegedly on drugs, using up what little money Adam had saved when he was employed as "first human being on Earth, CEO". Eventually, it is believed Adam and Eve got divorced. No one really knows how we evolved since that time since Evolution doesn’t exist, only Creationism, and God wasn't in the business of creating one person after another, after another, after another. It’s tiring. So God gave us two choices: we could use the wee wee and the pee pee to reproduce if we didn’t mind dealing with the whole menstrual cycle mess; or we could clone each other and keep it nice and clean and simple.

As humans we failed to discover cloning for thousands of years and so stuck with the old fashion routine of actual physical contact between pee pee and wee wee.

About 18,000 years later Jesus Christ was born. Jesus didn't have a father because his mother was a Virgin. The neighborhood decided to call her the Blessed Virgin Mary. No one could hardly believe it, so they started to make statues of Mary with little water plates on them so birds could come down and get a drink of water on the Mary statutes. Most of the Blessed Virgin Mary statutes are in the front yards of Italians living mainly on Long Island, New York today. No one knows why?

Oh yeah, Mary married a much older guy named Saint Joseph. He became a saint because he was old and Mary was pretty good looking and young. And Saint Joseph never had sex with Mary, even though she got pregnant. Saint Joseph was quiet. He never said much. No one knows where he worked. But one night he and Mary took off on a donkey to make a thousand mile trip through the desert. It was considered normal behavior back in those days. There was no "slow speed car chase" to head off Saint Joseph before he reached the Sinai/Egypt border.

Everyone just said, "Oh, there goes the older man with the pregnant teenage girl; off on a nice 1000 mile vacation on a donkey. Isn't that nice" The Blessed Virgin Mary tried to cover it all up because she knew she would be stoned to death if her folks ever found out she was pregnant. Rumors had it that Joe didn't even really do it. It was some teenager next door who was the real father of Jesus, but he took off like a "bat out of Hell" when Mary told him she had missed her period.

Then of course, the whole story got out of hand, which is where we are today.

And that's where the story ends of how God created the world. It's called Creationism.

Matthew: Psalm IV: Verse 24 from the Book of Creationism.
Luke: Psalm VXI: Verse 63 from the Book of Ludicrous.

Footnote: In the Bible, the word used for the pee pee was originally “the doodle” however, through the centuries “doodle” came to represent a word of vulgarity, hence, “doodle” is never, ever allowed---not in any version of the Bible and not even on TV during prime time hours.

Conclusion: Evolution can be proven because in the year 2000 we have electrical sockets and plugs called "the male plug" and "the female socket". These two items which can be purchased in any local Ace Hardware Store, evolved from Adam and Eve themselves. It is direct proof that the wee wee and the pee pee that God Himself designed and created at the time of Creationism eventually evolved through the process of Evolution into the modern day electrical apparatus. So, the next time you are in at Home Depot ask the clerk "can you tell my where I would find the pee pee and the wee wee" and they will know exactly what you are talking about. So help me God !

Not Enough Fish in the Sea

2006-06-20T16:25:00.000Z

We need omega-3 oils for our brains to function properly. But where will they come from?

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th June 2006.

The more it is tested, the more compelling the hypothesis becomes. Dyslexia, ADHD, dyspraxia and other neurological problems seem to be associated with a deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids, especially in the womb(1,2,3,4). The evidence of a link with depression, chronic fatigue syndrome and dementia is less clear, but still suggestive(5,6,7). None of these conditions are caused exclusively by a lack of these chemicals, or can be entirely remedied by their application, but it’s becoming pretty obvious that some of our most persistent modern diseases are, at least in part, diseases of deficiency.

The more it is tested, the more compelling the hypothesis becomes. Dyslexia, ADHD, dyspraxia and other neurological problems seem to be associated with a deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids, especially in the womb(1,2,3,4). The evidence of a link with depression, chronic fatigue syndrome and dementia is less clear, but still suggestive(5,6,7). None of these conditions are caused exclusively by a lack of these chemicals, or can be entirely remedied by their application, but it’s becoming pretty obvious that some of our most persistent modern diseases are, at least in part, diseases of deficiency.Last year, for example, researchers at Oxford published a study of 117 children suffering from dyspraxia(8). Dyspraxia causes learning difficulties, disruptive behaviour and social problems. It affects about 5% of children. Some of the children were given supplements of omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, others were given placebos. The results were extraordinary. In three months the reading age of the experimental group rose by an average of 9.5 months, while the control group’s rose by 3.3. Other studies have shown major improvements in attention, behaviour and IQ(9).

This shouldn’t surprise us. During the Palaeolithic, human beings ate roughly the same amount of omega-3 fatty acids as omega-6s(10). Today we eat 17 times as much omega-6 as omega-3. Omega-6s are found in vegetable oils, while most of the omega-3s we eat come from fish. John Stein, a professor of physiology at Oxford who specialises in dyslexia, believes that fish oils permitted humans to make their great cognitive leap forwards(11). The concentration of omega-3s in the brain, he says, could provide more evidence that human beings were, for a while, semi-aquatic(12).

Stein believes that when the cells which are partly responsible for visual perception – the magnocellular neurones – are deficient in omega-3s, they don’t form as many connections with other cells, and don’t pass on information as efficiently. Their impaired development explains, for example, why many dyslexic children find that letters appear to jump around on the page.

So at first sight the government’s investigation into the idea of giving fish oil capsules to schoolchildren seems sensible. The food standards agency is conducting a review of the effects of omega-3s on childrens’ behaviour and performance in school. Alan Johnson, the secretary of state for education, is taking an interest(13). Given the accumulating weight of evidence, it would surprising if he does not decide to go ahead. Already, companies such as St Ivel and Marks and Spencer are selling foods laced with omega-3s.

There is only one problem: there are not enough fish. In March an article in the British Medical Journal observed that “we are faced with a paradox. Health recommendations advise increased consumption of oily fish and fish oils within limits, on the grounds that intake is generally low. However … we probably do not have a sustainable supply of long chain omega 3 fats.”(14) Our brain food is disappearing.

If you want to know why, read Charles Clover’s beautifully-written book The End of the Line(15). Clover travelled all over the world, showing how the grotesque mismanagement of fish stocks has spread like an infectious disease. Governments help their fishermen to wipe out local shoals, then pay them to build bigger and more powerful boats so they can go further afield. When they have cleaned up their own continental shelves, they are paid by taxpayers to destroy other people’s stocks. The European Union, for example, has bought our pampered fishermen the right to steal protein from the malnourished people of Senegal and Angola. West African stocks are now going the same way as North Sea cod and Mediterranean tuna.

I first realised just how mad our fishing policies have become when playing a game of ultimate frisbee in my local park. Taking a long dive, I landed with my nose in the grass. It smelt of fish. To the astonishment of passers-by, I crawled across the lawns, sniffing them. The whole park had been fertilised with fishmeal. Fish are used to feed cattle, pigs, poultry and other fish – in the farms now proliferating all over the world. Those rearing salmon, cod and tuna, for example, produce about half as much fish as they consume. Until 1996, when public outrage brought the practice to halt, a power station in Denmark was running on fish oil(16,17). Now I have discovered that the US Department of Energy is subsidising the conversion of fish oil into biodiesel, through its “regional biomass energy program”. It hopes that fish will be used to provide electricity and heating to homes in Alaska. It describes them as “a sustainable energy supply”(18).

Three years after Ransom Myers and Boris Worm published their seminal study in Nature, showing that global stocks of predatory fish have declined by 90%(19), nothing has changed. The fish stall in my local market still sells steaks from the ocean’s charismatic megafauna: swordfish, sharks and tuna, despite the fact that their conservation status is now, in many cases, similar to that of the Siberian tiger. Even the Guardian’s Weekend magazine publishes recipes for endangered species. Yesterday, the European Fisheries Council reversed the only sensible policy it has ever introduced. Having dropped them in 2002, it has decided to reinstate subsidies for new boat engines(20). Once again we will be paying billions to support over-fishing. Franco rose to power with the help of the whalers and industrial fishermen of his native Galicia. Somehow the old fascists in Vigo – the centre of the European industry’s power – still seem to exercise an extraordinary degree of control.

If fish stocks were allowed to recover and fishing policies reflected scientific advice, there might just about be enough to go round. To introduce mass medication with fish oil under current circumstances could be a recipe for the complete collapse of global stocks. Yet somehow we have to prevent many thousands of lives from being ruined by what appears to be a growing problem of malnutrition.

Some plants – such as flax and hemp – contain omega-3 oils, but not of the long-chain varieties our cell membranes need. Only some people can convert them, and even then slowly and inefficiently(21,22,23, 24). But a few weeks ago, a Swiss company called eau+ published a press release claiming that it has been farming “a secret strain of algae called V-Pure” which produces the right kind of fatty acids. It says it’s on the verge of commercialising a supplement(25). As the claims and the terrible names put me in mind of the slushiest kind of New Age therapy, I was, at first, suspicious. So I went to see Professor Stein to ask him whether it was likely to be true. He could be said to have a countervailing interest: his brother is the celebrity fish chef Rick Stein. But he happened to have met the company’s founder the day before, and he was impressed. The oils produced by some species of algae, he told me, are chemically identical to those found in fish: in fact this is where the fish get from them from. “I think they’re fairly optimistic about the timescale. But there is no theoretical impediment. I haven’t yet seen his evidence, but I formed a very strong impression that he is an honest man.”

He had better be, and his project had better work. Otherwise the human race is destined to take a great cognitive leap backwards.

www.monbiot.com

18 years on...

2006-06-19T15:36:00.000Z

Why it's over for America

2006-06-17T14:07:00.000Z

An inability to protect its citizens. The belief that it is above the law. A lack of democracy. Three defining characteristics of the 'failed state'. And that, says Noam Chomsky, is exactly what the US is becoming. In an exclusive extract from his devastating new book, America's leading thinker explains how his country lost its way

By Noam Chomsky

05/30/06 "The Independent" -- -- The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes. It is important to stress the government, because the population, not surprisingly, does not agree.

That brings up a fourth issue that should deeply concern Americans, and the world: the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy, one of the reasons for the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that, as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, "the American 'system' as a whole is in real trouble - that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values [of] equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy".

The "system" is coming to have some of the features of failed states, to adopt a currently fashionable notion that is conventionally applied to states regarded as potential threats to our security (like Iraq) or as needing our intervention to rescue the population from severe internal threats (like Haiti). Though the concept is recognised to be, according to the journal Foreign Affairs, "frustratingly imprecise", some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified. One is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction. Another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And if they have democratic forms, they suffer from a serious "democratic deficit" that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance.

Among the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and one of the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror. If we allow ourselves to do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of "failed states" right at home.

No one familiar with history should be surprised that the growing democratic deficit in the United States is accompanied by declaration of messianic missions to bring democracy to a suffering world. Declarations of noble intent by systems of power are rarely complete fabrication, and the same is true in this case. Under some conditions, forms of democracy are indeed acceptable. Abroad, as the leading scholar-advocate of "democracy promotion" concludes, we find a "strong line of continuity": democracy is acceptable if and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests (Thomas Carothers). In modified form, the doctrine holds at home as well.

The basic dilemma facing policymakers is sometimes candidly recognised at the dovish liberal extreme of the spectrum, for example, by Robert Pastor, President Carter's national security adviser for Latin America. He explained why the administration had to support the murderous and corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua, and, when that proved impossible, to try at least to maintain the US-trained National Guard even as it was massacring the population "with a brutality a nation usually reserves for its enemy", killing some 40,000 people. The reason was the familiar one: "The United States did not want to control Nicaragua or the other nations of the region, but it also did not want developments to get out of control. It wanted Nicaraguans to act independently, except when doing so would affect US interests adversely."

Similar dilemmas faced Bush administration planners after their invasion of Iraq. They want Iraqis "to act independently, except when doing so would affect US interests adversely". Iraq must therefore be sovereign and democratic, but within limits. It must somehow be constructed as an obedient client state, much in the manner of the traditional order in Central America. At a general level, the pattern is familiar, reaching to the opposite extreme of institutional structures. The Kremlin was able to maintain satellites that were run by domestic political and military forces, with the iron fist poised. Germany was able to do much the same in occupied Europe even while it was at war, as did fascist Japan in Man-churia (its Manchukuo). Fascist Italy achieved similar results in North Africa while carrying out virtual genocide that in no way harmed its favourable image in the West and possibly inspired Hitler. Traditional imperial and neocolonial systems illustrate many variations on similar themes.

To achieve the traditional goals in Iraq has proven to be surprisingly difficult, despite unusually favourable circumstances. The dilemma of combining a measure of independence with firm control arose in a stark form not long after the invasion, as mass non-violent resistance compelled the invaders to accept far more Iraqi initiative than they had anticipated. The outcome even evoked the nightmarish prospect of a more or less democratic and sovereign Iraq taking its place in a loose Shiite alliance comprising Iran, Shiite Iraq, and possibly the nearby Shiite-dominated regions of Saudi Arabia, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of Washington.

The situation could get worse. Iran might give up on hopes that Europe could become independent of the United States, and turn eastward. Highly relevant background is discussed by Selig Harrison, a leading specialist on these topics. "The nuclear negotiations between Iran and the European Union were based on a bargain that the EU, held back by the US, has failed to honour," Harrison observes.

"The bargain was that Iran would suspend uranium enrichment, and the EU would undertake security guarantees. The language of the joint declaration was "unambiguous. 'A mutually acceptable agreement,' it said, would not only provide 'objective guarantees' that Iran's nuclear programme is 'exclusively for peaceful purposes' but would 'equally provide firm commitments on security issues.'"

The phrase "security issues" is a thinly veiled reference to the threats by the United States and Israel to bomb Iran, and preparations to do so. The model regularly adduced is Israel's bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, which appears to have initiated Saddam's nuclear weapons programs, another demonstration that violence tends to elicit violence. Any attempt to execute similar plans against Iran could lead to immediate violence, as is surely understood in Washington. During a visit to Tehran, the influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned that his militia would defend Iran in the case of any attack, "one of the strongest signs yet", the Washington Post reported, "that Iraq could become a battleground in any Western conflict with Iran, raising the spectre of Iraqi Shiite militias - or perhaps even the US-trained Shiite-dominated military - taking on American troops here in sympathy with Iran." The Sadrist bloc, which registered substantial gains in the December 2005 elections, may soon become the most powerful single political force in Iraq. It is consciously pursuing the model of other successful Islamist groups, such as Hamas in Palestine, combining strong resistance to military occupation with grassroots social organising and service to the poor.

Washington's unwillingness to allow regional security issues to be considered is nothing new. It has also arisen repeatedly in the confrontation with Iraq. In the background is the matter of Israeli nuclear weapons, a topic that Washington bars from international consideration. Beyond that lurks what Harrison rightly describes as "the central problem facing the global non-proliferation regime": the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligation "to phase out their own nuclear weapons" - and, in Washington's case, formal rejection of the obligation.

Unlike Europe, China refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary reason for the growing fear of China on the part of US planners. Much of Iran's oil already goes to China, and China is providing Iran with weapons, presumably considered a deterrent to US threats. Still more uncomfortable for Washington is the fact that, according to the Financial Times, "the Sino-Saudi relationship has developed dramatically", including Chinese military aid to Saudi Arabia and gas exploration rights for China. By 2005, Saudi Arabia provided about 17 per cent of China's oil imports. Chinese and Saudi oil companies have signed deals for drilling and construction of a huge refinery (with Exxon Mobil as a partner). A January 2006 visit by Saudi king Abdullah to Beijing was expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi memorandum of understanding calling for "increased cooperation and investment between the two countries in oil, natural gas, and minerals".

Indian analyst Aijaz Ahmad observes that Iran could "emerge as the virtual linchpin in the making, over the next decade or so, of what China and Russia have come to regard as an absolutely indispensable Asian Energy Security Grid, for breaking Western control of the world's energy supplies and securing the great industrial revolution of Asia". South Korea and southeast Asian countries are likely to join, possibly Japan as well. A crucial question is how India will react. It rejected US pressures to withdraw from an oil pipeline deal with Iran. On the other hand, India joined the United States and the EU in voting for an anti-Iranian resolution at the IAEA, joining also in their hypocrisy, since India rejects the NPT regime to which Iran, so far, appears to be largely conforming. Ahmad reports that India may have secretly reversed its stand under Iranian threats to terminate a $20bn gas deal. Washington later warned India that its "nuclear deal with the US could be ditched" if India did not go along with US demands, eliciting a sharp rejoinder from the Indian foreign ministry and an evasive tempering of the warning by the US embassy.

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move toward greater independence has seriously troubled US planners since World War II, and concerns have significantly increased as the tripolar order has continued to evolve, along with new south-south interactions and rapidly growing EU engagement with China.

US intelligence has projected that the United States, while controlling Middle East oil for the traditional reasons, will itself rely mainly on more stable Atlantic Basin resources (West Africa, western hemisphere). Control of Middle East oil is now far from a sure thing, and these expectations are also threatened by developments in the western hemisphere, accelerated by Bush administration policies that have left the United States remarkably isolated in the global arena. The Bush administration has even succeeded in alienating Canada, an impressive feat.

Canada's minister of natural resources said that within a few years one quarter of the oil that Canada now sends to the United States may go to China instead. In a further blow to Washington's energy policies, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, Venezuela, has forged probably the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government. Latin America as a whole is increasing trade and other relations with China, with some setbacks, but likely expansion, in particular for raw materials exporters like Brazil and Chile.

Meanwhile, Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming very close, each relying on its comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing low-cost oil while in return Cuba organises literacy and health programs, sending thousands of highly skilled professionals, teachers, and doctors, who work in the poorest and most neglected areas, as they do elsewhere in the Third World. Cuba-Venezuela projects are extending to the Caribbean countries, where Cuban doctors are providing healthcare to thousands of people with Venezuelan funding. Operation Miracle, as it is called, is described by Jamaica's ambassador to Cuba as "an example of integration and south-south cooperation", and is generating great enthusiasm among the poor majority. Cuban medical assistance is also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most horrendous tragedies of recent years was the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. In addition to the huge toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to face brutal winter weather with little shelter, food, or medical assistance. One has to turn to the South Asian press to read that "Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan", paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), and that President Musharraf expressed his "deep gratitude" for the "spirit and compassion" of the Cuban medical teams.

Some analysts have suggested that Cuba and Venezuela might even unite, a step towards further integration of Latin America in a bloc that is more independent from the United States. Venezuela has joined Mercosur, the South American customs union, a move described by Argentine president Nestor Kirchner as "a milestone" in the development of this trading bloc, and welcomed as opening "a new chapter in our integration" by Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Independent experts say that "adding Venezuela to the bloc furthers its geopolitical vision of eventually spreading Mercosur to the rest of the region".

At a meeting to mark Venezuela's entry into Mercosur, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said, "We cannot allow this to be purely an economic project, one for the elites and for the transnational companies," a not very oblique reference to the US-sponsored "Free Trade Agreement for the Americas", which has aroused strong public opposition. Venezuela also supplied Argentina with fuel oil to help stave off an energy crisis, and bought almost a third of Argentine debt issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the control of the US-dominated IMF after two decades of disastrous effects of conformity to its rules. The IMF has "acted towards our country as a promoter and a vehicle of policies that caused poverty and pain among the Argentine people", President Kirchner said in announcing his decision to pay almost $1 trillion to rid itself of the IMF forever. Radically violating IMF rules, Argentina enjoyed a substantial recovery from the disaster left by IMF policies.

Steps toward independent regional integration advanced further with the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia in December 2005, the first president from the indigenous majority. Morales moved quickly to reach energy accords with Venezuela.

Though Central America was largely disciplined by Reaganite violence and terror, the rest of the hemisphere is falling out of control, particularly from Venezuela to Argentina, which was the poster child of the IMF and the Treasury Department until its economy collapsed under the policies they imposed. Much of the region has left-centre governments. The indigenous populations have become much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, both major energy producers, where they either want oil and gas to be domestically controlled or, in some cases, oppose production altogether. Many indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives, societies, and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New Yorkers can sit in SUVs in traffic gridlock. Some are even calling for an "Indian nation" in South America. Meanwhile the economic integration that is under way is reversing patterns that trace back to the Spanish conquests, with Latin American elites and economies linked to the imperial powers but not to one another. Along with growing south-south interaction on a broader scale, these developments are strongly influenced by popular organisations that are coming together in the unprecedented international global justice movements, ludicrously called "anti-globalisation" because they favour globalisation that privileges the interests of people, not investors and financial institutions. For many reasons, the system of US global dominance is fragile, even apart from the damage inflicted by Bush planners.

One consequence is that the Bush administration's pursuit of the traditional policies of deterring democracy faces new obstacles. It is no longer as easy as before to resort to military coups and international terrorism to overthrow democratically elected governments, as Bush planners learnt ruefully in 2002 in Venezuela. The "strong line of continuity" must be pursued in other ways, for the most part. In Iraq, as we have seen, mass nonviolent resistance compelled Washington and London to permit the elections they had sought to evade. The subsequent effort to subvert the elections by providing substantial advantages to the administration's favourite candidate, and expelling the independent media, also failed. Washington faces further problems. The Iraqi labor movement is making considerable progress despite the opposition of the occupation authorities. The situation is rather like Europe and Japan after World War II, when a primary goal of the United States and United Kingdom was to undermine independent labour movements - as at home, for similar reasons: organised labour contributes in essential ways to functioning democracy with popular engagement. Many of the measures adopted at that time - withholding food, supporting fascist police - are no longer available. Nor is it possible today to rely on the labour bureaucracy of the American Institute for Free Labor Development to help undermine unions. Today, some American unions are supporting Iraqi workers, just as they do in Colombia, where more union activists are murdered than anywhere in the world. At least the unions now receive support from the United Steelworkers of America and others, while Washington continues to provide enormous funding for the government, which bears a large part of the responsibility.

The problem of elections arose in Palestine much in the way it did in Iraq. As already discussed, the Bush administration refused to permit elections until the death of Yasser Arafat, aware that the wrong man would win. After his death, the administration agreed to permit elections, expecting the victory of its favoured Palestinian Authority candidates. To promote this outcome, Washington resorted to much the same modes of subversion as in Iraq, and often before. Washington used the US Agency for International Development as an "invisible conduit" in an effort to "increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority on the eve of crucial elections in which the governing party faces a serious challenge from the radical Islamic group Hamas" (Washington Post), spending almost $2m "on dozens of quick projects before elections this week to bolster the governing Fatah faction's image with voters" (New York Times). In the United States, or any Western country, even a hint of such foreign interference would destroy a candidate, but deeply rooted imperial mentality legitimates such routine measures elsewhere. However, the attempt to subvert the elections again resoundingly failed.

The US and Israeli governments now have to adjust to dealing somehow with a radical Islamic party that approaches their traditional rejectionist stance, though not entirely, at least if Hamas really does mean to agree to an indefinite truce on the international border as its leaders state. The US and Israel, in contrast, insist that Israel must take over substantial parts of the West Bank (and the forgotten Golan Heights). Hamas's refusal to accept Israel's "right to exist" mirrors the refusal of Washington and Jerusalem to accept Palestine's "right to exist" - a concept unknown in international affairs; Mexico accepts the existence of the United States but not its abstract "right to exist" on almost half of Mexico, acquired by conquest. Hamas's formal commitment to "destroy Israel" places it on a par with the United States and Israel, which vowed formally that there could be no "additional Palestinian state" (in addition to Jordan) until they relaxed their extreme rejectionist stand partially in the past few years, in the manner already reviewed. Although Hamas has not said so, it would come as no great surprise if Hamas were to agree that Jews may remain in scattered areas in the present Israel, while Palestine constructs huge settlement and infrastructure projects to take over the valuable land and resources, effectively breaking Israel up into unviable cantons, virtually separated from one another and from some small part of Jerusalem where Jews would also be allowed to remain. And they might agree to call the fragments "a state". If such proposals were made, we would - rightly - regard them as virtually a reversion to Nazism, a fact that might elicit some thoughts. If such proposals were made, Hamas's position would be essentially like that of the United States and Israel for the past five years, after they came to tolerate some impoverished form of "statehood". It is fair to describe Hamas as radical, extremist, and violent, and as a serious threat to peace and a just political settlement. But the organisation is hardly alone in this stance.

Elsewhere traditional means of undermining democracy have succeeded. In Haiti, the Bush administration's favourite "democracy-building group, the International Republican Institute", worked assiduously to promote the opposition to President Aristide, helped by the withholding of desperately needed aid on grounds that were dubious at best. When it seemed that Aristide would probably win any genuine election, Washington and the opposition chose to withdraw, a standard device to discredit elections that are going to come out the wrong way: Nicaragua in 1984 and Venezuela in December 2005 are examples that should be familiar. Then followed a military coup, expulsion of the president, and a reign of terror and violence vastly exceeding anything under the elected government.

The persistence of the strong line of continuity to the present again reveals that the United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population, to the accompaniment of rhetorical flourishes about its dedication to the highest values. That is practically a historical universal, and the reason why sensible people pay scant attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, or accolades by their followers.

One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: "They present solutions, but I don't like them." In addition to the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned: 1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; 2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols; 3) let the UN take the lead in international crises; 4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; 5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; 6) give up the Security Council veto and have "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind," as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree; 7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending. For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are in radical opposition to public policy. To be sure, we cannot be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little known. In a highly atomised society, the public is therefore largely deprived of the opportunity to form considered opinions.

Another conservative suggestion is that facts, logic, and elementary moral principles should matter. Those who take the trouble to adhere to that suggestion will soon be led to abandon a good part of familiar doctrine, though it is surely much easier to repeat self-serving mantras. Such simple truths carry us some distance toward developing more specific and detailed answers. More important, they open the way to implement them, opportun- ities that are readily within our grasp if we can free ourselves from the shackles of doctrine and imposed illusion.

Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to seek to induce pessimism, hopelessness, and despair, reality is different. There has been substantial progress in the unending quest for justice and freedom in recent years, leaving a legacy that can be carried forward from a higher plane than before. Opportunities for education and organising abound. As in the past, rights are not likely to be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions - attending a few demonstrations or pushing a lever in the personalised quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as "democratic politics". As always in the past, the tasks require dedicated day-by-day engagement to create - in part recreate - the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena, from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle. There are many ways to promote democracy at home, carrying it to new dimensions. Opportunities are ample, and failure to grasp them is likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world, and for future generations.

This is an edited extract from Failed States by Noam Chomsky (Hamish Hamilton)

Chomsky & Paxman

2006-06-17T10:30:00.000Z

Video here

There's such a gulf between their perceived realities it's incredible.

Video

2006-06-16T20:12:00.000Z

Unbelievable

Get Out of Jail

2006-06-12T18:53:00.000Z

At tables in the middle of the prison library, men sit reading newspapers. But look closely: some of them aren’t actually reading. They’re thumbing the pages, trying to look absorbed, glancing around the room every few minutes to see if anyone is watching. The truth is they’re not reading the words because they don’t know how.

Will any of them admit it? Not likely, the prisoner helping to run the library thinks to himself. An admission like that takes more trust than most of these guys have experienced in their whole lives. As assistant librarian, he’s an avid reader now, but he remembers how he used to practice when he was in segregation, away from anyone else’s eyes. He’d look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary and make himself use those words in a sentence. He wants these other guys to have a chance at loving books too, but he figures it’s going to take a new kind of thinking to get them there.

“We need to get some easy books,” he says to the prison’s staff librarian. “Books a guy who can’t really read can still figure out. And we need to put them on the low shelves so they’re easy to steal.” The librarian wants to help the guys who can’t read, too. It’s one of the reasons she likes working in a prison library rather than, say, a graduate research center: the chance to help the unlikeliest readers discover new joys and capacities. But the need to make it possible to steal the books – library books, which are free to patrons in prison just as they are to library patrons anywhere – requires a leap of imagination she can’t immediately make.

“Why do they need to steal them?” she asks, “Why can’t they just check them out?”

He tries to explain it to her: how people cling to pride when they have so little else to hold on to. How these guys would rather stare blankly at the newsprint than admit anything to anybody. How stealing is what they know how to do, and how much easier it is than asking for something, than believing they have the right. “Don’t make them strip naked for you,” is what he wants to say to the librarian. “Give them some cover, some way to slip those books back to their cells without letting anyone else see how easy the words are and how much they want to read them. You’ll see. They’ll do it.”

The librarian gets it. She knows this is something he understands better than she can ever hope to. She realizes her best shot at serving these prisoners well is to take advice from someone who is capable of opening the door to their particular reality, allowing her a glimpse inside.

They order easy readers and set them out on the low shelves without making any kind of big announcement about it. Soon enough, the books start to disappear. One day a prisoner comes up to the desk with one of them in his hand. A really easy book, a really big, tough guy.

“Is this the first book you ever read yourself?” the librarian asks, taking a chance.

“Yeah,” the prisoner replies, and neither of them can keep from smiling.

Susannah Sheffer edited Growing Without Schooling magazine for many years and is the co-author of In a Dark Time: A Prisoner’s Struggle for Healing and Change.

Rubbishing Ken Loach

2006-06-06T15:02:00.000Z

by George Monbiot
June 6, 2006 - From Monbiot.com

That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out.

In the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him – unfavourably – to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a “poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence … The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds.” I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening – and last night he refused to discuss the matter.

At least Simon Heffer, writing in the Telegraph, admits he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Loach, he says, “hates this country, yet leeches off it, using public funds to make his repulsive films. And no, I haven’t seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was.” The Sun says it’s “a brutally anti-British film … designed to drag the reputation of our nation through the mud”. Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail pronounced it “old-fashioned propaganda” and “a melange of half-truths”. She hasn’t seen the film either. Nor, it seems, has Michael Gove, who told his readers in the Times that it helps to “legitimise the actions of gangsters”.

Are these people claiming that events of the kind Loach portrays did not happen? Reprisals by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Auxiliary division are documented by historians of all political stripes. During the period the film covers (1920-21), policemen visited homes in places such as Thurles, Cork, Upperchurch and Galway and shot or bayoneted their unarmed inhabitants. Nor does any historian deny that they fired into crowds or threw grenades or beat people up in the streets or set fire to homes and businesses in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Bantry, Kilmallock, Balbriggan, Miltown Malbay, Lahinch, Ennistymon, Trim and other towns. Nor can the fact that the constabulary tortured and killed some of its prisoners be seriously disputed.

It is also clear that some of these attacks were sanctioned by senior officers and politicians. In June 1920, in the presence of the commander of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the force’s divisional commissioner in Munster (Colonel GB Smyth) told his men: “You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent people may be shot but that cannot be helped … The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you no policeman will get in trouble for shooting any man.” He advised that “when civilians are seen approaching, shout “Hands up!” Should the order be not immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets, or are in any way suspicious looking, shoot them down.” Sir Henry Wilson, the director of operations in the War Office, complained that he had warned his minister – Winston Churchill – that “indiscriminate reprisals will play the devil in Ireland, but he won’t listen or agree”. There was even a policy of “official reprisals”: the homes of people who lived close to the scene of an ambush and had failed to warn the authorities could be legally destroyed.

Loach’s hero, Damien, as many Irishmen were, is radicalised by a raid by the Black and Tans, who were members of the constabulary recruited from outside Ireland. As the film shows, they were responsible for much of the police brutality. The historian Robert Kee, who is a fierce critic of the IRA, remarks that while the police were at first slow to retaliate, their vengeance – exercised against innocent people – “further consolidated national feeling in Ireland. It made the Irish people feel more and more in sympathy with fighting men of their own.” The fighter Edward MacLysaght recorded that “what probably drove a peacefully inclined man like myself into rebellion was the British attitude towards us: the assumption that the whole lot of us were a pack of murdering corner boys”.

There is no question that the IRA also killed ruthlessly – not just police and soldiers but also people they deemed to be informers and collaborators. But Loach shows this too. (I have seen the film.) The press hates him because he admits that the people who committed these acts were not evil automata, but human beings capable of grief, anger, love and pity. So too, of course, were the British forces, whose humanity is always emphasised by the newspapers. Ken’s crime is to have told the other side of the story.

The other side – whether it concerns Ireland, India, Kenya or Malaya – is always inadmissable. The torture and killing of the colonised is ignored or excused, while their violent responses to occupation are never forgotten. The only aggressors permitted to exist are those who fight back.

Does it matter what people say about a conflict that took place 85 years ago? It does. For the same one-sided story is being told about the occupation of Iraq. The execution of 24 civilians in Haditha allegedly carried out by US marines in November is being discussed as a disgraceful anomaly: the work of a few “bad apples” or “rogue elements”. Donald Rumsfeld claims “we know that 99.9% of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner”, and most of the press seems to agree. But if it chose to look, it would find evidence of scores of such massacres.

In March Jody Casey, a US veteran of the war in Iraq, told Newsnight that when insurgents have let off a bomb, “you just zap any farmer that is close to you … when we first got down there, you could basically kill whoever you wanted, it was that easy”. On Sunday another veteran told the Observer that cold-blooded killings by US forces “are widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions.” There is powerful evidence to suggest that US soldiers tied up and executed 11 people – again including small children – in Ishaqi in March. Iraqi officers say that US troops executed two women and a mentally handicapped man in a house in Samarra last month. In 2004, US forces are alleged to have bombed a wedding party at Makr al-Deeb and then shot the survivors, killing 42 people. No one has any idea what happened in Falluja, as the destruction of the city and its remaining inhabitants was so thorough.

Even the Iraqi prime minister, who depends on coalition troops for his protection, complained last week that their attacks on civilians are a “regular occurrence … They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion.” But like the Black and Tans the US troops have little fear of investigation or punishment.

Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far away from home, exercising power over people that they don’t understand, knowing that the population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all “micks” or “gooks” or “hajjis”. Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial adventures to take place. If we knew more about Ireland, the invasion of Iraq might never have happened.

Al Gore's Medium is His Message

2006-06-06T09:56:00.000Z

by Cynthia Bogard

Some have said that Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is just what it appears to be - an urgent wake-up call to the world about the dangers of global warming by the man who "used to be the next president of the United States," as Gore himself ruefully puts it. Others have wondered whether it isn't a highly unusual opening salvo in what would be a very interesting addition to the 2008 presidential campaign. But when I saw the film the other day, I came out of the theater (into a global-warming inspired deluge) convinced that An Inconvenient Truth was a stunning, subtle, and perhaps intentional argument for the necessity of reinvigorating American democracy.

The film isn't, after all, "merely" about human-caused global warming and its terrifying potential to transform the world in ways that could mean the end of civilization as we almost knew it. It's also about the man American voters elected to run the world's most powerful nation in the year 2000 who then never became our 43rd president.

This combination of message and messenger is what makes the film such a powerful commentary on the American moral condition.

As Gore pointed out in the film, we used to live rather lightly on the earth. Puny human governments and their forms, however despotic and evil our leaders, however repressive their regimes, however vast the suffering of people living under them at the time, didn't much matter to our planet's well-being. Mother Earth would go on as before.

Now that has changed. As Gore cutely pointed out in his presentation, our "shovels" are now motorized and several stories high and can shear the top off of mountains in no time at all. So now the decisions made by those who control those "shovels" and the other tools of our wonderful and terrible technology can not only make the human lives they rule over horrific or honorable. They can also chart a course to planetary destruction or ensure our world's well-being for future generations.

Of course, we've had this awesome power since the Manhattan Project unleashed its unholy invention on the world. The bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though, in the very intensity of their previously unimagined and unimaginable destruction seared into our collective imagination the price of wielding that power. And we've managed to choose not to do so again for sixty years.

But global warming is not so dramatic. With his animated version of the inundation of Bangladesh, the Netherlands, large parts of China, Manhattan and* Florida, Gore convincingly demonstrates that global warming too brings with it Mutually Assured Destruction. This time though, there is no balance of Cold War powers, missiles armed and pointed, to keep those who lust for power in check. In the Warm War, America alone gets to decide the fate of the Earth for everyone.

If only the neocons who started the Iraq war to demonstrate American worldwide hegemony had gone to Al's slide show instead, we could have saved ourselves so much terribly wasted blood and treasure.

We already have the power to control the future of everywhere on Earth.

For we are the single biggest cause of global warming and our choices alone could bring global warming under control or send the whole world spiraling toward radical climate change.

The inescapable conclusion is that the only thing that stands between us and self-inflicted world-wide destruction is politics, and not anyone else's but ours, America's. It is we who must act for the good of the globe as citizens of Earth, empowered by our greatest gift to our planet, American democracy. We must save the world by deciding to choose a different path. And we must do so soon and together or it will never work.

It is following the logic to this place that makes the messenger so poignant, and so ironic, for he is the very emblem of our imperiled democracy.

We once had a system, however imperfect, as Al also pointed out in his slide show, which allowed us to do great and noble things - forge a Constitution to live by that inspired the world, end slavery, allow citizenship for women, go to the moon and back, start a movement and pass effective legislation to save the environment. American democracy, whatever its flaws, was a living, breathing thing that reminded us that we were all in this together and that we must forge our future as one people.

That all unraveled in the 36 days following the 2000 presidential election when the will of the people was undermined, first by Republican shenanigans, then by our Supreme Court. Now no less a person than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Bobby's son, John's nephew- remember them?) has published a meticulously researched article frighteningly entitled, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" Kennedy's exhaustive review of all available evidence is convincing.

It turned out to be a remarkably fragile thing, this democracy upon which now the whole world's future may well depend. American democracy, after all, is just an idea, one that hinges on citizen participation and respect for our institutions, especially by those who would lead us, to make it work. It's clear with a man in the White House who has little regard for democratic practice and continues to dispute the worldwide scientific consensus on the reality and impact of global warming that America will not act to save the world unless we first act to save American democracy.

But in this new millennium we the people don't seem to play much of a role in what our government does or doesn't do in our name. The American people have become "inactionary" -- a term sociologist C.W. Mills coined during the McCarthy era, another time in our history when domestic repression mingled with international fear.

"Political will," Al said optimistically at the end of his film, "is a renewable resource." But political will is dependent on having feelings of efficacy. And we've become so anxious, afraid and complacent in the years since we failed to make him President Gore. It wasn't just 9-11 that did us in. It was bearing witness to the undermining of our political process by those who lusted for power more than they respected our precious if imperfect political system.

If we're to save the world this time - not from fascism as we did in World War II but from our own excesses - we have got to find our political will again. We must start by making sure our votes count and that we elect the visionary leaders we need at this time of climate crisis. We must act together as a nation in the interest of the Earth and its people to confront the passivity and the gluttony that got us here.

It's an inconvenient truth.

A must read...

2006-06-04T13:46:00.000Z

London Rising Tide writes…

Melting icecaps, flooded communities, heat-waves, hurricanes and general freak weather: yes, climate change is here, and it’s only going to get worse. We are currently on course for a 3C degree rise in temperature, which could mean the deaths of 400 million of the world’s poorest people, and the extinction of 50 million species with which we share the planet. At the moment the richer western countries can use their wealth to compensate for the effects of climate change, by storing food or building sea and flood defences. But our whole civilisation rests on a increasingly fragile web of ecosystems and climate change threatens this life-support system in ways that we as yet cannot understand let alone foresee. European crop failures, the disappearance of the Gulf Stream which warms Western Europe – either of these would have massive consequences for us in the UK alone.

After years of corporate-sponsored scientists creating the illusion that climate change was merely a theory, it is now a fact acknowledged across the board. Government public information is now putting across messages that would have been considered fringe scaremongering a decade ago. Despite this, the government is promising that they do have the solutions: “Action now can help avert the worst effects of climate change – with foresight such action can be taken without disturbing our way of life,” claims Tony Bliar – i.e. keep driving, flying and working for yer pension because we can have ‘sustainable’ economic growth. A capitalism without limits on a planet with finite resources.

Solutions proposed such as nuclear power, a farcical European carbon-trading scheme or a pitiful tax on the heavy polluters will in reality do little to offset the impending disaster.

These market-driven techno-fixes peddled by the corporations and the governments they sponsor are all designed to keep the economy growing, growing, growing. This is to avoid the one thing they can’t face, the one thing that can actually start to deal with climate change – a massive reduction in energy consumption. Ironically the certainty of climate change comes at the same time as the concept of ‘Peak Oil’ becomes mainstream (see SchNEWS 499). The current system simply has no answers. Regardless of whether we put things off for a few years by using nuclear power (see SchNEWS 522), cuts are going to have to come across the board – and that will require a massive restructuring of the way we live our lives and how we organise our society. Our economic systems will have to be transformed beyond recognition. The question is in whose interests will they be remade?

That’s why this desperately needed energy ‘descent’ is going to need a hell of a lot of energy ‘dissent’. It’s time for us to open our eyes to our collective denial, pull our heads out of the sand, stick out our necks, get over our divisions and start working together to build grassroots solutions to climate change. We all bear responsibility for climate change and need to make changes in our own lives. But we also need to act collectively. To undertake the urgent work of energy descent/dissent, we need to work out what needs to be done, what others are already doing, what we should be stopping – and what we should be starting. Reading about how bad things could be is obviously not motivating many of us to change, we need to get together and do it!

Melting Moments

The Camp for Climate Action will bring thousands of people together for 10 days of action, education, and living the alternative world we hope to build. It will be a hub for everything from solar energy workshops and campaign updates to direct action against some of the worst offenders of the fossil fuel economy. It will be a climate-friendly gathering, powered by alternative energy, and will demonstrate practical solutions in action. It will be a chance for the diverse people and projects working on all aspects of climate change to get together and make change happen. Although it’s crucial that existing campaigners and activists take part, we want the camp to be an event that reaches out to the huge web of people who are deeply concerned but have no idea how or where to begin making changes.

There will be debates and info on various parts of the science and politics of climate – we recognise that we are entering new territory and no-one has all the answers. What level of carbon emissions is too high, what future for the hydrogen economy, how are we going to deal with peak oil? There’ll be practical skills to learn and ideas and practice for campaigning – from setting up an allotment to setting up tripods, from how to deal with the press to how to mount a legal challenge against your favourite climate criminal. And we want to do more than disaster-mongering; we’ll have plenty of entertainment and lots of activities for younger people – with an energy-use focus.

The camp will also be a base for direct action against the fossil fuel economy. Dealing with climate change is about more than personal action. Changing light bulbs and stopping flying to Spain for the weekend is one small part of the solution, but so is getting in the way of the juggernaut with our bodies, our minds and our hearts. Some might call this idealism or madness. We say madness lies in the passive grey expansion of the suburbs, the packed motorways rumbling towards oil depletion, the climate horror headlines next to an offer for Christmas-shopping flights to New York. Madness is factories that produce rubbish that people have to be brainwashed into buying – sanity is pulling them down. In these times taking direct action against the climate criminals is as real, as reasonable, as necessary as it gets. Direct action, of all the forms of action to take, gets closest to the heart of the problem as well as closest to the beating heart of a truly sustainable, socially just, fossil fuel-free future.

We only have a short time to act and we’re going to need radical ideas and massive action if we’re to make something good come out of this mess. Climate change will not go away, and we need to understand that the longer we leave the process of starting our ‘energy descent’, the more difficult and painful it will be. Ultimately, our whole “first world” way of life is in question here.The way we travel, the way we eat, the way we farm, the way we work. It all needs to be re-examined and adjusted (or done away with) as required. The notion of infinite industrial growth on a finite planet must be discarded for the greedy fantasy it is and always has been.

Climate change and fossil fuel depletion has and will create savage conflicts over vital resources. If we don’t act now, the dark history of the twentieth century will pale by comparison with the Mad Max horrors of the 21st.
Other relevant events before the camp:

* June 10th – Road Block national conference. Fighting one of the big causes of climate change – cars.Workshops and guest speakers, central Birmingham. For details see http://www.roadblock.org.uk
* June 11 – July 1 – Art Not Oil, London. Exhibition and campaign of political/ecological art, and ending oil sponsorship of the arts – a project of London Rising Tide. For info call 07708 794665 For full list of events see http://www.artnotoil.org.uk http://www.nationalpetroleumgallery.org.uk

Biofuels - Cure or Threat?

2006-06-04T13:39:00.000Z

Almuth Ernsting
April 26, 2006

With oil prices above $70 a barrel, could biofuels help to solve our energy crisis and reduce climate change at the same time? From George Bush to the European Union (EU), governments around the world seem to think so – and are beginning to subsidise the new biofuel revolution.

As millions of acres worldwide are converted to corn, oilseed rape, palm oil, soybean and jatropha, news is coming in that we could be making climate change worse, driving more species into extinction and threatening food supplies in poor countries.

The most competitive of all biofuel crops are palm oil – grown mainly in South East Asia – and sugar cane from Brazil.

They are competitive not just because of low wages and poor workers’ rights, but also because they provide more energy per acre than other biofuel crops.

Yet palm oil plantations, together with illegal logging in Borneo, may already be responsible for as many carbon dioxide emissions as those of the US, at least in a few years.

This astonishing figure was calculated by a group of scientists that found the amount of carbon released by peat fires on Borneo in 1997-8 was the equivalent of up to 40 percent of all global emissions from burning fossil fuel.

In the mid-1990s, Indonesian dictator Suharto ordered the draining of millions of acres of peat swamp forests for his Mega Rice Project.

Protests from environmentalists and the local Dayak population were brutally suppressed.

No rice could ever grow on the acid soils.

Instead, palm oil plantations spread over vast tracts of what had been ancient rainforests. In 1997-8, the worst drought on record struck the region. The drained peat went up in smoke as palm oil plantation owners set fires to clear more of the forest.

Similar fires have burnt every year since.

Many scientists believe that those peat fires are partly responsible for the increased rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past few years, which will mean even faster global warming in future.

Over the next few decades, all of the billions of tons of carbon contained in Borneo’s peat are expected to go up in smoke, putting “climate stabilisation” further out of reach.

Yet it would be perfectly possible to reflood the peat swamps and keep the carbon safely locked up. Such an international effort might have the same effect as four Kyoto agreements – but there is little money and even less political will.

Instead, Indonesia and Malaysia are keen to drain more peat swamps and log much of their remaining forests in order to expand palm oil plantations.

This, then, is likely to become the main source of our future biodiesel.

A similar disaster is looming in the Amazon, with president Lula announcing plans for Brazil to become a major exporter of soy biodiesel. The Amazon contains even more carbon than Indonesia’s forests, and its loss would lead to global warming truly spiralling out of control.

So how can the EU claim that tropical biofuel crops will reduce our emissions? Easy—peat burning emissions are counted as those of Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil, while Europe has to burn less diesel or petrol.

There are some positive examples of biofuels.

Millions of tons of organic waste, from agriculture, forestry and households are wasted every year when they could yield valuable energy.

Poor countries like Malawi could benefit from using their biofuels more efficiently – without having to destroy their own forests while women and girls walk miles every day to gather firewood.

This year the EU biofuel directive will be reviewed and finalised. Right now it sets extremely high targets which will be mainly met by imports, with no control over where or how biofuels are produced. The stakes are high.

What we need is a mandatory certification scheme. It should be based on an objective scientific assessment, which looks at impacts on local communities, climate, food supplies, soils, water and wildlife.

No target should be set until it is known whether it can be met without harming the planet and poor people.

All of us must act now to stop the disaster of an unregulated, free market biofuel revolution.

Almuth Ernsting is a member of Campaign Against Climate Change, but this is her personal view. There is a full discussion of this issue on http://www.campaigncc.org Go to the activists’ portal and read the posts in the biofuel section.

Ridiculing Chavez - Part One

2006-06-04T12:52:00.000Z

Controlling what we think is not solely about controlling what we know – it is also about controlling who we respect and who we find ridiculous.

Thus we find that Western leaders are typically reported without adjectives preceding their names. George Bush is simply “US president George Bush”. Condoleeza Rice is “the American secretary of state Condoleeza Rice”. Tony Blair is just “the British prime minister”.

The leader of Venezuela, by contrast, is “controversial left-wing president Hugo Chavez” for the main BBC TV news. (12:00, May 14, 2006). He is as an “extreme left-winger,” while Bolivian president Evo Morales is “a radical socialist”, according to Jonathan Charles on BBC Radio 4. (6 O’Clock News, May 12, 2006)

Imagine the BBC introducing the US leader as “controversial right-wing president George Bush”, or as an “extreme right-winger”. Is Bush – the man who illegally invaded Iraq on utterly fraudulent pretexts – less controversial than Chavez? Is Bush less far to the right of the political spectrum than Chavez is to the left?

For the Independent on Sunday, Chavez is “Venezuela’s outspoken President”. (Stephen Castle and Raymond Whitaker, ‘Heralding the end of US imperialism,’ May 14, 2006) For the Mirror, he is a “controversial leader” called ”’the Crackers from Caracas’ by his own supporters”. (Rosa Prince, ‘He calls Bush “Hitler” and Blair “the pawn”,’ May 16, 2006) He is an “aggressively populist left-wing leader”, the Times writes. (Richard Owen, ‘Pope tells Chavez to mend his ways,’ May 12, 2006) He is a “left-wing firebrand,” the Independent reports. (Guy Adams, ‘Pandora: ‘Chavez stirs up a degree of controversy at Oxford,’ May 15, 2006) He is a “Left wing firebrand” according to the Evening Standard. (Pippa Crerar, ‘Chavez to meet the Mayor,’ May 12, 2006) He is an “international revolutionary firebrand”, according to the Observer. (Peter Beaumont, ‘The new kid in the barrio,’ May 7, 2006)

A Guardian news report describes Chavez as nothing less than “the scourge of the United States”. (Duncan Campbell and Jonathan Steele,’ The Guardian, May 15, 2006) Although this was a news report, not a comment piece, the title featured the required tone of mockery: “Revolution in the Camden air as Chavez – with amigo Ken – gets a hero’s welcome”.

An Independent report declared of Chavez:

“He has been described as a fearless champion of the oppressed poor against the corrupt rich and their American sponsors. But also as a dangerous demagogue subsidising totalitarian regimes with his country’s oil wells.” (Kim Sengupta, ‘Britain’s left-wing “aristocracy” greet their hero Chavez,’ The Independent, May 15, 2006)

Imagine an Independent news report providing a similarly ‘balanced’ description of Bush or Blair using language of the kind employed in the second sentence. Again, mockery was a central theme: “And yesterday in the People’s Republic of Camden the villains remained very much President George W Bush, his acolyte Tony Blair, big business and the forces of reaction.”

Younger readers may have missed the BBC’s prime time TV series Citizen Smith (1977-80), which lampooned a fictional organisation called The Tooting Popular Front, consisting of six die-hard Marxist losers, and its deluded dreams of achieving radical change. This is a favourite media theme – pouring scorn on popular movements is an absolute must for mainstream journalism. Thus Richard Beeston reported in The Times this week:

“Hugo Chavez’s Latin American bandwagon descended on London yesterday, briefly enlivening a dull Sunday in Camden with the sound of drums, the cries of revolution and the waving of banners.

“At the start of his controversial two-day visit to London, the Venezuelan President succeeded in attracting an eclectic group of supporters ranging from elderly CND activists to young anti-globalisation campaigners, members of the Socialist Workers’ Party and even the odd Palestinian protester.” (Beeston, ‘Chavez fails to paint the town red in Camden,’ The Times, May 15, 2006)

This recalled the Observer’s September 2002 account of what, at the time, had been London’s greatest anti-war march in a generation. Euan Ferguson wrote:

“It was back to the old days, too, in terms of types. All the oldies and goodies were there. The Socialist Workers’ Party, leafleting outside Temple Tube station by 11 am. (‘In this edition: Noam Chomsky in Socialist Worker!’). CND, and ex-Services CND. The Scottish Socialist Party. ‘Scarborough Against War and Globalisation’, which has a lovely ring of optimism to it, recalling the famous Irish provincial leader column in 1939: ‘Let Herr Hitler be warned, the eyes of the Skibereen Eagle are upon him.’ Many, many Muslim groups, and most containing women and children, although some uneasy thoughts pass through your mind when you see a line of pretty six-year-old black-clad Muslim toddlers walking ahead of the megaphone chanting ‘George Bush, we know you/Daddy was a killer too,’ and singing about Sharon and Hitler.” (Ferguson, ‘A big day out in Leftistan,’ The Observer, September 29, 2002)

The emphasis, again, was on the absurdity of a ragtag army of Citizen Smith-style oddballs who imagined they could somehow make a difference to a real world run by ‘serious’ people. The idea is that the public should roll their eyes and shake their heads in embarrassment at such delusions – and turn away.

Hidden far out of sight are the life and death issues motivating such protests – in 2002 the marchers were, after all, attempting to prevent a war that has since killed and mutilated hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It is not inconceivable that if British and American journalists like Ferguson had emphasised the desperate importance and urgency of the anti-war protests, rather than sneering at them, those civilians might still be alive today.

Similarly, the press has barely hinted at the unimaginable horror and desperate hopes buried beneath the mocking of Chavez – namely, the suffering of Latin American people under very real Western economic and military violence. The Independent on Sunday managed this vague mention:

“Mr Morales was, the Venezuelan President said, a direct descendant of an indigenous Latin American people, adding: ‘These are oppressed people who are rising. They are rising with peace, not weapons. Europe should listen to that.’” (Stephen Castle and Raymond Whitaker, ‘Chavez on tour,’ Independent on Sunday, May 14, 2006)

The tragedy out of which these people are arising, and how their hopes of a better life have been systematically crushed by Western force in the past, was of course not explored. The Guardian also managed a tiny reference to the reality:

“His [Chavez’s] unabashed opposition to US foreign policy, and the pressure it has produced from Washington, tap into the deep vein of suspicion and resentment that two centuries of US invasions, coups, and economic domination have aroused in Latin America and the Caribbean.” (Jonathan Steele and Duncan Campbell, ‘The world according to Chavez,’ The Guardian, May 16, 2006)

But that was it. As the Guardian writers know full well, these comments appear in a context of almost complete public ignorance of just what the United States has done to Latin America – a subject to which we will return in Part 2.

In 2004, the American media watch site, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported that a search of major US newspapers turned up the phrase “death squad” just five times in connection with former US president Ronald Reagan in the days following his death in June 2004 – twice in commentaries and twice in letters to the editor. Remarkably, only one news article mentioned death squads as part of Reagan’s legacy. (Media Advisory: ‘Reagan: Media Myth and Reality,’ June 9, 2004, http://www.fair.org) As we have discussed elsewhere, US-backed death squads brought hell to Latin America under Reagan. (see our Media Alerts: ‘Reagan – Visions Of The Damned’: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040610_Reagan_Visions_1.HTM and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040615_Reagan_Visions_2.HTM.)

Quite simply the British and American press do not cover the West’s mass killing of Latin Americans.

Radical, Maverick, Firebrands – The Subliminal Smears

A Daily Telegraph comment piece continued the pan-media smearing of Chavez:

“Now the anticipation is over, and today, flush with six trillion dollars worth of oil reserves, Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, flies in to fill the despot-of-the-month slot at London mayor Ken Livingstone’s lunch table.” (William Langley, ‘Welcome to the El Presidente show,’ The Daily Telegraph, May 14, 2006)

The Independent on Sunday (IoS) wrote:

“An icon of the anti-globalisation movement, Mr Chavez’s brand of aggressive socialism is taken seriously because of his country’s vast oil resources.” (Stephen Castle and Raymond Whitaker, ‘Chavez on tour,’ Independent on Sunday, May 14, 2006)

We wait in vain for an IoS news report referring to Bush and Blair’s “brand” of “aggressive” and in fact “militant” capitalism – this would be biased news reporting, after all. Likewise, the suggestion that Bush and Blair’s aggressive support for “democracy” is taken seriously only because of their economic and military power.

The Observer noted that Chavez has a “growing regional profile”, which is “built on a mix of populist rhetoric and his country’s oil wealth”. The report added that Chavez “has been publicly feuding with Bush, whom he has likened to Adolf Hitler – with Tony Blair dismissed as ‘the main ally of Hitler.’” (‘Chavez offers oil to Europe’s poor,’ The Observer, May 14, 2006)

In responding to similar comments in the Times, Julia Buxton of the University of Bradford has been all but alone in providing some background:

“To place this statement in context, Chavez was compared to Adolf Hitler by the US Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, during a visit to Paraguay. President Chavez rejected the comparison and countered that if any individual were comparable to Hitler, it would be President Bush.” (See Buxton’s excellent analysis here: http://www.vicuk.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=29)

The Times’ ‘Pandora’ diary column wrote:

“Ken Livingstone has invited the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, to lunch at City Hall. Even by the London Mayor’s standards, it’s a provocative gesture – Chavez has a controversial record on human rights – and several guests have refused to attend.” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2171200,00.html)

Channel 4 News asked of Chavez: “Is he a hero of the left or a villain in disguise?”

For the media, of course, a “hero of the left” is a “villian in disguise”, so viewers were in effect being asked if Chavez was a villain or a villain. Like many other media, Channel 4 patronised the Venezuelan president as “a global poster boy for the left”. The same programme later asked if he was “a hero of the left or a scoundrel of all democrats?”

In similar vein, Daniel Howden observed in the Independent:

“Not surprisingly for a man who divides the world, Hugo Chavez is greeted as a saviour or a saboteur wherever he goes. The Venezuelan President seems immune to nuance and perfectly able to reduce the world to Chavistas or to Descualdos, the ‘squalid ones’ as his supporters dismiss those who try to depose him.” (Dowden, ‘Hugo Chavez: Venezualean [sic] leader divides world opinion. But who is he, and what is he up to in Britain?’ The Independent, May 13, 2006)

The reference to a lack of “nuance” is a coded smear with which regular readers will be familiar. Chavez is in good company. Steve Crawshaw wrote in the Independent: “Chomsky knows so much… but seems impervious to any idea of nuance.” (Crawshaw, ‘Furious ideas with no room for nuance,’ The Independent, February 21, 2001)

The BBC’s former director of news, Richard Sambrook, told the Hutton inquiry that BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan had failed to appreciate the “nuances and subtleties” of broadcast journalism. (Matt Wells, Richard Norton-Taylor and Vikram Dodd, ‘Gilligan left out in cold by BBC,’ The Guardian, September 18, 2003)

Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow wrote in the Guardian of John Pilger: “Some argue the ends justify [Pilger’s] means, others that the world is a more subtle place than he allows.” (Snow, ‘Still angry after all these years,’ The Guardian, February 25, 2001)

In 2002, Bill Hayton, a BBC World Service editor, advised us at Media Lens: “If your language was more nuanced it would get a better reception.” (Email to Editors, November 16, 2002)

The Channel 4 programme cited above went on to describe the Iraqi cleric Moqtadr al Sadr by his official media title: “the radical cleric Moqtadr al Sadr”. Likewise, the media invariably refer to “the militant group Hamas”. The media would of course never dream of referring to “radical prime minister Tony Blair” or to “the militant Israeli Defence Force”.

The reason was unconsciously expressed by Channel 4 news presenter Alex Thomson in response to a Media Lens reader who had suggested, reasonably, that “a terrorist is one who brings terror to another person”. Thomson responded:

“Your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits from al Qaeda to the Royal Fusilliers.” (Forwarded to Media Lens, February 25, 2005)

It is inconceivable to the mainstream media that Western armies could be responsible for terrorism, no matter how much terror they actually create. Likewise, it is inconceivable that Western leaders could be described as “militant” or “fundamentalist”. This indicates that these adjectives are smear words – they mean, approximately, ‘bad’. More specifically, they mean ‘a threat to Western interests,’ which is why, by definition, they cannot be used to refer to the West.

The use and non-use of these words shepherd viewers and readers towards the idea that leaders like Bush and Blair are reasonable, rational, respectable figures who must be described with colourless, neutral language.

The deeper implication – all the more powerful because it is unstated, almost subliminal – is that figures like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales do not merit balanced ‘professional’ media treatment – the rules do not apply to them because they are beyond the pale.

Because almost all journalists repeat this bias – and because the public imagine journalists are simply well-informed, independent observers who just happen to reach the same conclusions on who is worthy of respect – the impression given is that the media consensus is the only sane view in town.

Before we know it, we find ourselves accepting the corporate media view as our own. If we see enough journalists smearing “maverick”, “controversial”, “left-wing”, “Gorgeous George” Galloway, we will likely find ourselves responding: ‘I can’t stand that guy!’ But how many of us will really know why, beyond feeling that there is ‘something about him I don’t like’? And how many of us will have reflected that, of all MPs, Galloway has at least been uniquely honest in his opposition to the Iraq war?

As for that other “maverick Chavez” (Sunday Times, February 19, 2006), the Financial Times noted that he was invited to London by Ken Livingstone: “London’s maverick mayor.” (David Lehmann, ‘Why we should bother about Chavez and his politics,’ May 15, 2006)

In Part 2 we will examine the realities of Western political, economic and military violence in Latin America – realities that are consistently ignored by the corporate media.

Life

2006-06-03T15:36:00.000Z

Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor, said “The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.” Tell me about it. Living is tough work. But looking back after all these decades, it was a beautiful, worthwhile struggle. The triumphs were sweet, the injuries were not life-threatening. I’ve lived well and I’m ready to die.

We’ve been conditioned about winning. Even if there’s no oversized cardboard check or gold trophy, then there’s at least a respectable public ceremony or a squinting interview under studio lights. But winning this game – life – is not an ecstatic glory. It’s a peaceful one. Because the prize is unlike anything we’ve won before: it’s contentment in the face of death.

In the last of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson’s stages of identity formation, we look back in old age on the choices we’ve made, either with despair at what we see, or with acceptance that we’ve lived an integrated life. Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer defines this integration as “living on the outside the truth you know on the inside.” Erikson believed that those who pass through this final life stage, those who come to terms with death, gain wisdom. And that wisdom is more valuable than any material inheritance we leave behind, because “healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.”

Helen and Scott Nearing, activists and authors, embodied this integrity. They left their small New York City apartment in the height of the Great Depression to find a lifestyle that brought them health and economic independence, but without exploitation. In Vermont’s Green Mountains (and years later in rural Maine), they built a stone house by hand and began a 60-year experiment in sustainable living. Pacifists, radicals, and vegetarians, they grew their own organic food, chopped their own wood, and bartered with neighbors for what they couldn’t produce themselves. Their gentle-footprint life – one “enriched by aspiration and effort rather than by acquisition and accumulation” – was chronicled in their 1954 book Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World. Life was work, but that’s what gave it purpose. “The man who works and is never bored, is never old,” said Scott. “A person is not old until regrets take the place of hopes and plans.”

But as humble as the Nearings’ living was their dying. Especially Scott’s. In 1983, two weeks after he turned 100, he turned to his wife at the dinner table and said, “I think I won’t eat anymore.” Helen, 20 years his junior, understood. “I think I would do that too. Animals know when to stop. They go off in a corner and leave off food.” He went on a diet of fruit juices for several weeks, then, after ten days and “thin as Gandhi,” cut back to just water. With no doctors or life-saving machines, no strangers at his bedside, Helen watched Scott’s breath slow until his chest was still. His last words were unforced: “All . . . right.” She later recalled, “He was gone out of his body as easily as a leaf drops from the tree in autumn, slowly twisting and falling to the ground.”

“So he returned to his Maker after a long life, well-lived and devoted to the general welfare,” Helen, who lived on the homestead another 12 years, remembered. “He was principled and dedicated all through. He lived at peace with himself and the world because he was in tune: he practiced what he preached. He lived his beliefs. He could die with a good conscience.” A winner.

Paul Schmelzer

The Art of Living

2006-05-31T14:54:00.000Z

Things started out so well. I was born pure, perfect, new. Endless possibility unrolled before me. While so much was unknown, my energy was just short of limitless – childhood’s “winged energy of delight,” in the words of the poet Rilke. But that was so long ago. Now, looking back on a lifetime of choices, mistakes and triumphs, I wonder, “What happened?”

In the last of eight stages of human development outlined by psychologist Erik Erikson, our bodies slow, careers wind down, and parenting duties are essentially complete. We have time to reflect. The “psycho-social crisis” Erikson describes – that is, the developmental task before us – is in achieving ego integrity without falling into despair. Have we achieved wholeness, the integration of inner values with their consistent, outward expression, or have we been fractured by hiding our true beliefs out of fear, self-protection or personal gain?

Modern consumer culture has trained us for dis-integration. Advertisers get rich leveraging our fragmentation: they imply one aspect of our humanity – smelly armpits, asymmetrical breasts, wrinkles, fat – renders the entirety of us unlovable. “Reality TV” rewards the scheming of contestants who view deceit as the necessary means to an end: a modeling contract, a six-figure salary courtesy of Donald Trump, another week on the island. It’s all justified within the benign framework of entertainment – “just doing what it takes to win the game.” And much of corporate life forces us to slap on a grin as we toe the company line, promoting values that are often at odds with those that guide the rest of our lives. Taught that to be “professional” is to keep the personal in check, we sell our values short for the price of a mortgage payment or college tuition. With our identities so divided, how can we live with ourselves?

Or better put, how can we die with ourselves? Because while ego integrity is about coming to terms with life, it’s also about coming to grips with death. If we’ve lived in tune with the self, others and nature, that is, if we’ve connected with something larger than ourselves – a new generation, an understanding of virtues that will outlive us – death becomes meaningless. “Only such integrity can balance the despair of the knowledge that a limited life is coming to a conscious conclusion,” wrote Erikson. “Only such wholeness can transcend the petty disgust of feeling finished and passed by, and the despair of facing the period of relative helplessness which marks the end as it marked the beginning.” But if our deepest relationships have been online instead of in person, if expense-account lunches outnumber family dinners, if the tears we’ve shared have been with CNN’s tragic victims rather than neighbors down the block, death may come with some trepidation: time is running out, and just now we realize we’ve been chasing the wrong carrot.

A Buddhist parable likens the human soul to a mountain spring: it bubbles from the earth pure and clear, but as it trickles down the hillside, it gathers pebbles and dirt. We get muddied by life. But our essence, whether obscured by debris or still sparkling and clean, is still there, only to be filtered. The question, then, becomes: is it already too late?

Paul Schmelzer

What If They Gave a War...?

2006-05-27T14:00:00.000Z

by Tony Long

1968. It was the height of the Vietnam War, the year of My Lai and the Tet offensive. Student riots in Paris nearly brought down the French government. Soviet tanks put a premature end to Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring.

In the United States, the streets were teeming with antiwar protesters and civil rights demonstrators. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated within two months of each other. The Democratic convention in Chicago dissolved into chaos. And by the summer, America's cities were in flames.

The world was seething, and for good reason. There was a lot to be angry about. It was a lousy year, 1968.

I was in high school then. I quit the baseball team because, frankly, sports seemed frivolous. In 1968, there were more important things to worry about than perfecting a curveball. All very high-minded and, in retrospect, more than a little pompous. But nearly 40 years down the road I don't regret having done it. My political consciousness was awakened and I was actively engaged in the world around me.

But as bad as things were then, they seem infinitely worse now.

So why aren't the streets clogged with angry Americans demanding to know why their president lied and deceived them so he could attack a country that had absolutely nothing to do with his so-called war on terror? To an extent, we got suckered into Vietnam. We can't make that claim about Iraq. Iraq was the premeditated, willful invasion of a sovereign nation that was threatening nobody. "Saddam Hussein is a prick who treats the Kurds miserably" is no justification. By the principles established by the Nuremberg Tribunal and international law, our president is a war criminal.

Why aren't we marching to demand an end to the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own government, again under the pretext of waging war on terror? Why do we so blithely surrender our civil liberties -- the very thing that supposedly separates us from other societies -- to the illusion of security? All the high-tech snooping in the world won't stop a determined terrorist from striking. If it could, Israel would be the safest country on earth.

Why aren't irate Americans camping out in the lobby of every newspaper and TV station from coast to coast, demanding that the press reassert the right to perform its single most important function, that of government watchdog? The ghost of Richard Nixon, and a very corporeal Bill Clinton, must be cursing their rotten luck.

Why aren't enraged college students occupying their campus administration buildings, demanding that the United States sign the Kyoto Protocol? Hell, it might already be too late, but is the luxury of driving your mom's SUV really worth the coming dystopian world that you, more than I, will inherit?

Why aren't we storming the battlements of every filthy oil company in America, demanding that their executives be tossed into fetid dungeons for cynically manipulating gas prices while raking in obscene profits?

Why aren't we demanding that religion return to the pulpit, where it belongs, and keep out of the White House and the courts?

In short, where the hell is everybody?

I'll tell you where they are. They're at home, tuning in to root for the next "American idol." They're plugged into their iPods, utterly self-involved and disconnected from what lies just outside their doors. They're spending 25 hours a week playing video games in virtual worlds instead of fighting to save the only world that really matters. They're surfing porn. They're text messaging and e-mailing and scheming to close that next big deal. They're flogging their useless crap on eBay.

All that technology at their fingertips, and they're completely blind. Two terms for George W. Bush? They're deaf and dumb, too.

Bread and circuses. The government and the corporations are giving us bread and circuses to keep us sufficiently distracted so the powers that be can pursue their agendas. Television (flat screens only, please) serves up Donald Trump and Paris Hilton as role models, and gives us the abomination of Fox News, which is more a wolf in sheep's clothing than any Vulpes vulpes you're likely to encounter.

Hollywood only cares about blockbusters, chick flicks and inane buddy movies. Tiresome reality doesn't make for good escapism and, more importantly, it doesn't fill coffers. And George Clooney can't be expected to produce every movie.

Whither the press? Forget it. Britney Spears gets more ink -- and better play -- than global warming does.

Can You Still Hate Wal-Mart?

2006-05-26T09:24:00.000Z

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over?
by Mark Morford

Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe.

Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime.

Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known universe (just ask the fine local town of Hercules), moving upward of $300 billion in cheap mass-produced slurm every year via nearly 5,000 landscape-mauling eyesore stores stretching all the way from Texas to China and Argentina and South Korea and Mexico and your backyard, with U.S. stores accounting for fully 8 percent of all retail sales in our entire nation.

There has been, to date, very little good to say about this most voracious and powerful of low-end, trashy retailers, and certainly nothing from anyone even remotely concerned with the health of the planet and of the attuned consumers who inhabit it. Wal-Mart has always been, quite appropriately, the devil.

Until now. As juicy and warmhearted eco-blog Treehugger mentions in its latest Wal-Mart roundup (and as the New York Times later discussed in its huge "Business of Green" section last week), it seems that back in October, Wal-Mart's president, Lee Scott, delivered a "secret" speech to employees about "21st Century Leadership," in which he outlined a whole slew of what can only be called truly remarkable and potentially world-altering agenda items to help ensure the future health of the world's biggest shopping hell.

And what a speech it was. Packed with all sorts of pledges and goals of such a green and sustainable and forward-thinking nature it might as well have been floating on boats of tofu on waves of Sierra Club blown by winds of Utne Reader. It was, in a word, surreal. And if even half of it is true, more than a little revolutionary.

There was talk of stores eventually being supplied with 100-percent renewable energy. Talk of ultimately creating zero waste, of pledging to reduce packaging materials across the board and create more recyclables and replace PVC packaging in all Wal-Mart branded items with more eco-friendly materials. And when you're talking megatons of plastic, that's saying a lot.

It gets better. Wal-Mart has already committed to selling 100-percent sustainable fish in its food markets. They are already experimenting with green roofs, corn-based plastics and green energy (which is now used to power four Canadian stores, for a total of 39,000 megawatts, amounting to what some estimate is the single biggest purchase of renewable energy in Canadian history). Is this remarkable? Groundbreaking? Utterly confounding? Well, yes and no.

Like any giant company suddenly "embracing" the green initiative (hi, GM and Ford), Wal-Mart's rationale for all of this, of course, has absolutely zero to do with any sort of deep concern for the planet (though it does make for good PR), nothing at all about actual humanitarian beliefs or honest emotion or spiritual reverence, and has absolutely everything to do with the corporation's rabid manifesto: cost-cutting and profit.

The reason Scott promised that Wal-Mart will double the fuel efficiency of their huge truck fleet within a decade? Not to save the air, but to save $300 million in fuel costs per year. The reason they aim to increase store efficiency and reduce greenhouse gasses by 20 percent across all stores worldwide? To save money in heating and electrical bills, and also to help lessen the impact of global warming, which is indirectly causing more violent weather, which in turn endangers production and delivery and Wal-Mart's ability to, well, sell more crap. Ah, capitalism.

Seems Wal-Mart has realized one vital maxim that so many fundamentalist right-wing capitalist GOPers have so far failed to grasp: The apocalypse is just really bad for business.

Consider, furthermore, that Wal-Mart is perhaps one of the most conservative and brutishly arrogant, town-crushingly invasive of red-state companies, donating upward of $2 million to the GOP last year alone. This makes it even more remarkable indeed that Scott "gets" the global-warming crisis in a way not even BushCo is willing to admit. Yet.

"We are looking at innovative ways to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This used to be controversial, but the science is in and it is overwhelming. Climate change doesn't cause hurricanes, but hot ocean water makes them more powerful. Climate change doesn't cause rainfall, but it can increase the frequency and severity of heavy flooding. Climate change doesn't cause droughts, but it makes droughts longer. We believe every company has a responsibility to reduce greenhouse gases as quickly as it can."

That's what he actually said. This might not sound like much, and it's completely obvious to anyone who's been paying any sort of attention for the past, oh, 20 years, but might as well be Greek when spoken by a major Republican corporate exec, and might as well be complete vile hellspawn gibberish to a BushCo politician. It is -- or it has been, for endless years -- a blasphemy of the highest order, given how it was always deemed too expensive, too unfeasible for a company to care about pesky things such as the health of the planet. Not anymore.

All this on top of word that Wal-Mart is readying a huge move into organic foods (as I mentioned in a previous column), which is the mixed blessing to end all mixed blessings, given how it will immediately eliminate antibiotics, chemical fertilizers and hormones in tons of mass-produced foods, but also, given pathetic and diluted USDA regulations, will mean the other two vital parts of the organic movement -- ideas of sustainability and of supporting local producers -- are completely trashed.

So there you go. It's the bizarre and surprising case of the greening of Wal-Mart, and it's far from perfect. But there can be no denying it's a start, and a shockingly significant one. Because here's the kicker: As goes Wal-Mart, so goes an enormous chunk of the retail and manufacturing sectors. Like a whale through a krill swarm, their massive girth paves the way.

I do not shop at Wal-Mart. I may never, ever shop at Wal-Mart, given their notoriously horrible labor practices and their brutal business tactics and their effortless murder of all love and hope and joy from the retail experience. They are the George Bushes of the retail world -- drunk with power, cheaply made and full of crap. Not to mention that vaguely nauseating feeling, when you walk through their (or almost any) big-box store, that your soul is being slowly coated in rat saliva.

No matter. They may not have any more heart, they may be doing it for less than luminous reasons -- but who cares? If evil Wal-Mart can go green, anyone can. Isn't that good news? I mean, sort of?

Global Warming Turns Pristine Coral into Rubble

2006-05-25T09:51:00.000Z

Global Warming Turns Pristine Coral into Rubble

Miles of unblemished coral reefs have been turned to slime-covered rubble because of rising sea temperatures caused by global warming.

A study into the extensive bleaching of the Seychelles corals in 1998 has found that these Indian Ocean reefs failed to recover, with many of them crumbling to broken fragments.

Scientists said the findings showed that rising global sea temperatures could have a more devastating impact on the world's tropical corals than previously thought.

"Some of the reefs have collapsed to almost mobile beds of rubble. They are no longer solid structures and some have been overgrown with fleshy green mats of algae," said Nicholas Graham, a coral ecologist at the University of Newcastle.

"They have basically turned into reefs of rubble and algae, with very little fish life. It's a depressing story and it's very sad to see what's happened to these reefs," said Mr Graham, a member of the survey team.

The Seychelles once boasted mile upon mile of luxuriant coral reefs but in 1998 the local sea temperatures rose dramatically because of the general rise in global temperatures combined with the effects of a strong El Nino - an occasional reversal of the warm ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean.

Reefs around the world were badly affected by the temperature rise. The Great Barrier Reef off Australia suffered its worst bout of bleaching in 700 years - only to be surpassed by even worse bleaching in 2002.

Temperatures in the Indian Ocean in 1998 rose to unprecedented and sustained levels, causing the stressed coral to eject the tiny single-celled algae that feed and clean the coral's animal polyps as well as giving the reefs their vibrant colours.

Without its beneficial algae, the bleached coral animals die within several weeks, leaving behind their empty "skeleton" - the chalky reef which is built by generations of corals over many centuries.

Scientists from Britain, the Seychelles and Australia carried out extensive surveys of 21 coral sites in 1994. They did the same in 2005 to assess the extent of the damage caused by the 1998 bleaching event.

"The coral reef system of the inner Seychelles has undergone a widespread phase shift from a coral-dominated state to a rubble and algal-dominated state," the scientists report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Before 1998, about 50 per cent of the area covered by the survey was covered in growing coral. Today, just 7.5 per cent of the same area is living coral and less than 1 per cent is now covered in vital fast-growing species, Mr Graham said.

The variety and number of fish living in the area have also suffered. Out of 134 fish species known to be living in the region, about half have disappeared from the most heavily-affected areas.

A total of four fish species - a type of butterfly fish, two species of wrasse and a damsel fish - have probably gone extinct locally and six other species have reached critically low numbers.

"We have shown that there has been very little recovery in the reef system of the inner Seychelles islands for seven years after the 1998 coral bleaching event," Mr Graham said.

He added: "Reefs can sometimes recover after disturbances, but we have shown that after severe bleaching events, collapse in the physical structure of the reef results in profound impacts on other organisms in the ecosystem and greatly impedes the likelihood of recovery."

Dead and bleached coral is soon attacked by other marine organisms such as sea snails, worms and clams which bore into the calcium carbonate structure of the reef, causing it to weaken and collapse.

Bleached reefs can sometimes recover with the help of floating coral larvae arriving from distant colonies, but the Seychelles are relatively remote, making this scenario less likely.

Mr Graham said that many coral reefs around the around the world had been damaged by rising sea temperatures caused by global warming.

"Unfortunately it may be too late to save many of these reefs but this research shows the importance of countries tackling greenhouse gas emissions and trying to reduce global warming and its effect on some of the world's finest and most diverse wildlife," he said.

Corals grow around the shallow waters of tropical islands and submerged volcanoes and can form extensive lagoons and atolls if the land subsequently subsides.

Net Neutrality

2006-05-24T22:36:00.000Z

Threat Seen From Antibacterial Soap Chemicals

2006-05-13T12:45:00.000Z

The compounds end up in sewage sludge that is spread on farm fields across the country.
by Marla Cone

Tons of chemicals in antibacterial soaps used in the bathrooms and kitchens of virtually every home are being released into the environment, yet no government agency is monitoring or regulating them in water supplies or food.

About 75% of a potent bacteria-killing chemical that people flush down their drains survives treatment at sewage plants, and most of that ends up in sludge spread on farm fields, according to Johns Hopkins University research. Every year, it says, an estimated 200 tons of two compounds — triclocarban and triclosan — are applied to agricultural lands nationwide.

The findings, in a study published last week in Environmental Science & Technology, add to the growing concerns of many scientists that the Environmental Protection Agency needs to address thousands of pharmaceuticals and consumer product chemicals that wind up in the environment when they are flushed into sewers.

From dishwashing soaps to cutting boards, about 1,500 new antibacterial consumer products containing the two chemicals have been introduced into the marketplace since 2000. Some experts worry that widespread use of such products may be helping turn some dangerous germs into "superbugs" resistant to antibiotics.

Triclocarban, an ingredient of antibacterial bar soaps and toothpaste, is "potentially problematic" because it breaks down slowly, which means it is accumulating in soil and perhaps water, said Rolf Halden, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins' Department of Environmental Health Sciences, who led the study.

"What we are finding is this chemical is building up in the environment," Halden said. "This is an example of an emerging contaminant. It has been in the environment for almost five decades, and we manufacture large volumes of it, but we don't know what happens to it."

The scientists calculated that a large, modern East Coast sewage treatment plant spreads sludge containing more than 1 ton of triclocarban onto farm fields every year. The plant was not identified by the researchers, but data in the study indicated that it was in Baltimore.

Southern California's sludge has not been analyzed for antibacterial chemicals. But households in the Los Angeles region are likely to be a major source, because sewage plants in the area produce hundreds of thousands of tons of sludge every year.

Sludge is the solid waste that is left when sewage is processed in treatment plants. Billions of pounds are produced annually in the United States — 47 pounds per person — and two-thirds is hauled to agricultural fields for disposal. Federal regulations limit metals and pathogens in sludge, but not other chemicals.

Triclocarban is used in bar soaps, deodorants, toothpaste, kitchen supplies such as cutting boards and countertops, and baby toys. Triclosan, which is more abundant because it is used in liquid soaps, has been detected in human breast milk and fish in streams in Europe.

Toxicological tests have shown that the chemicals seem safe for human exposure, even in the high doses applied to skin. However, in water, triclosan can react with chlorine and turn into chloroform and dioxins linked to cancer. The chemicals also might kill microbes beneficial to ecosystems or promote new pathogens that resist antibiotics.

Allison E. Aiello, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health who has studied antibacterial soaps, calls the new report an important finding that "suggests these types of chemicals are persistent and prevalent in the environment."

"From these findings, it seems likely that microorganisms in the environment are often exposed to these chemicals at various concentrations," Aiello said. The next step, she said, is to assess whether these microbes show reduced resistance to antibiotics.

Previous research by Halden suggested that triclocarban was among the top 10 contaminants in waterways, while triclosan was among the most prevalent in a national analysis of streams by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Yet no one knows whether the chemicals are contaminating crops or groundwater. Drinking water also is not monitored for them. The EPA is exploring the prevalence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the environment, but it has nowhere near enough data to consider regulations for sludge.

Rick Stevens, national biosolids coordinator at the EPA's Office of Science and Technology, said the discovery of triclocarban in the plant's sludge was "of interest" to the EPA, but "at this time, the agency cannot determine what significance [the concentrations found] may represent to humans or the environment due to the limitations in the database."

Stevens said there were no national data — not even an accepted, standardized technique for measuring the chemicals. "One facility is not a nationally representative sample," he said.

Triclocarban in the plant's sludge averaged 51 parts per million, considered a high concentration for an environmental contaminant. But Stevens said people regularly rubbed triclocarban into their hands at levels 100 times higher. Also, the chemicals would be degraded and diluted on farm fields, he said.

Hans Sanderson, director of environmental safety at the Soap and Detergent Assn., which represents manufacturers, said the new research was "important and analytically sound" and was helping address what happens to the chemicals in soaps and other household products.

But Sanderson said it was wrong to assume that the presence of them in the sludge meant that they were posing risks. Most sludge is applied to fields and forests that do not produce food crops, he said.

"It is clear that the majority of exposure to triclocarban is direct exposure, when you actually use these materials in hand soap or toothpaste or whatever," Sanderson said. But, he said, laboratory tests have shown that even those exposures have no effects on animals, are not toxic to aquatic life and pose no known threat to people.

Ann Heil, a senior engineer at the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, said many environmental precautions were required on lands where sludge was applied. The material is plowed into soil within 24 hours and no runoff is allowed.

Heil said it probably was better that treatment plants removed the antibacterial chemicals from wastewater and concentrated them in the sludge, because otherwise the chemicals would be discharged into streams where they could harm wildlife.

Farm disposal of sludge is controversial in California. On June 6, residents of Kern County, which takes in one-third of the state's sludge, will vote on whether to ban its use on farms. If the measure passes, as expected, Southern California will have to ship more sludge to Arizona at an extra cost of millions of dollars a year in Los Angeles alone.

About 37% of the 160,000 tons produced last year by the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County was applied on land. The county's sludge is subjected to an extra process called thermal treatment, which Heil said probably removed more antibacterial chemicals than the East Coast plant studied in the report.

But, Halden said, even newer tests, yet to be published, showed that the heat treatment was "not very effective" in eliminating antibacterial chemicals. So this "Type A" sludge, the type used on food crops, still could contain high amounts.

In October, an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration reported that there was no evidence that the household products protected people any better than regular soap. The panel urged the agency to study their risks and benefits. The American Medical Assn. has opposed routine use of antibacterial soaps since 2002.

"The bottom line," Halden said, "is [that] we are mass-producing chemicals in the environment that are not helpful and potentially are harmful."

But Sanderson of the Soap and Detergent Assn. said it would be foolish to eliminate products that could stem the spread of diseases when there was no evidence they posed a threat.

'Robin Hood' Gang Rob Gourmet Stores in Bid to Feed Hamburg's Poor

2006-05-13T07:42:00.000Z

by Tony Paterson

They dress up in pink catsuits, have names like "Spider Mum" and feel a social obligation to plunder the most expensive restaurants and gourmet delicatessens in town as part of a campaign to help the poor. Last week the well-heeled citizens of Hamburg's Altona district got a taste of their antics when 30 of them marched into the city's luxury "Fresh Paradise Goedeken" supermarket and walked out five minutes later with €15,000 (£10,000) worth of stolen goods.

The gang's booty included magnums of Champagne at €99 a bottle, filets of Japanese Kobe beef at €108 a kilogram, legs of venison, a salmon and several boxes of Valrhona chocolate.

Before leaving, gang members thrust a bouquet of flowers into the hands of a shop assistant. Attached was a handwritten note which proclaimed: "Survival in the city of millionaires would be impossible without us!" It was signed by "Spider Mum", "Santa Guevara" and "Multiflex".

Another note later released by the gang insisted that the haul had been distributed to Hamburg's needy, to the "social workers, cleaning ladies and minimum-wage earners". It added: "The places of wealth in this town are as numerous as the opportunities to take it."

"It was a well-planned robbery," Carsten Sievers, the store's manager, said on Friday last week. "Somebody had obviously been in the shop before the main contingent arrived and had already filled up several shopping trolleys."

Fourteen squad cars and a police helicopter scoured the Altona district for more than an hour after the robbery, but failed to find the perpetrators.

"The gang covered its tracks completely. They act like professionals," Bodo Franz, the head of a Hamburg police unit investigating the robbery, said.

As they left the scene of the robbery, the gang, clad in masks, catsuits, dark glasses and rubber masks, posed for a group photo outside the supermarket and brandished their booty in front of the camera.

The incident was the latest attack perpetrated by this Robin Hood-style gang of so-called "Spontis", whose activities have alarmed and baffledthe Hamburg police and the city's well-to-do. Yet the gang, which refers to itself as "Hamburg for Free", does not strike often. Its last attack took place almost exactly a year ago, when 40 masked men and women stormed the Süllberg restaurant in the city's wealthy Blankenese district overlooking the river Elbe.

Diners were appalled as the gang snatched titbits from the plates in front of them and started stuffing the stolen food into their mouths. Other gang members brandished a huge knife and fork made out of silver foil and cardboard above the diners' heads. A placard declaring "The fat years are over" was strung between pillars in the restaurant.

Mr Franz, who has been trying to track down the "Hamburg for Free" gang since the incident a year ago, said that investigators had merely established that the group was probably made up of a mixture of students and anarchists.

"We don't know much about them. They are very political yet one of their main motives is fun," he said. "The problem is that they strike so rarely and so professionally that they are a major job to catch."

China's "Cancer Villages" Pay Heavy Price for Economic Progress

2006-05-13T07:32:00.000Z

Sitting on his bed in his spartan house in one of China's so-called cancer villages, a 77-year-old retired cadre sheds tears as he speaks of the pollution he believes is killing him.

"I just hope I can die sooner. I gave my life to the Communist Party yet I have nothing now, I have nothing to leave to my own children," the man said, tears rolling down his cheeks.

The man, who requested anonymity out of fear of government reprisals, was diagnosed with lung cancer several years ago, which he believes was caused by years of breathing in the local chemical-filled air and drinking contaminated water.

The man lives in Liukuaizhuang village which, along with neighboring Xiditou village in Tianjin municipality 120 kilometers (75 miles) southeast of Beijing, rose from poor areas into economic "successes" after scores of chemical factories moved in two decades ago.

But the industry that brought the villages wealth and employment also ended up destroying the environment and is widely believed to have ultimately cost the health and lives of many residents.

Locals say over 200 residents in the two villages have been diagnosed with diseases including bone, lung, liver and breast cancers, while a handful of children are suffering from leukemia.

A report on the People's Daily website, quoting Tianjin health authorities, said the rates of cancer in Liukuaizhuang and Xiditou were 1,313 and 2,032 per 100,000 people, way above the national average of 70 per 100,000 people.

According to the report, high levels of bacteria, fluoride and cancer-causing hydroxybenzene that exceeded government limits have been found in Liukuaizhuang's water.

Even after the government ordered scores of polluting factories to close and declared the local water safe enough to drink, smaller factories continue to operate secretly as local officials turn a blind eye, villagers say.

Residents say they are simply helpless to fight the factories or seek compensation as they have no legal recourse.

Xu Kezhu, from the China Politics and Law University's Environmental Pollution Victim Support Center, said the group had been trying to help residents sue factories but none of the cases had been accepted by the courts.

Despite receiving national media attention, the lack of evidence remains a problem as local government officials pressure doctors into staying silent over the link between pollution and the high cancer rate, villagers say.

Factory owners and wealthier residents have mostly moved out of the area, yet for those who are too poor to move, every day is just another depressing reminder that pain and death are never far away.

Liang Shuli, a Xiditou resident whose five-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia, said villagers had no choice but to suffer.

"There is no way out for us, we are still drinking that water," Liang said. "Where do we get the money to buy mineral water?"

Another resident from Xiditou, Li Baoqi, whose wife had recently been diagnosed with liver cancer, agreed.

"If you get the disease, you are just waiting to die," he said.

Another villager who only wanted to be identified by his surname of Lui was one of the luckier ones as he could afford to move his family to escape the chronic pollution and only comes home occasionally.

"This is the river where we used to swim as boys," sighed Lui, looking behind his backyard to the waterway that is now clogged up with industrial waste.

"Our village used to be known as the home to fish and rice -- now look at it."

Reports of "cancer villages" have become increasingly frequent across China, a brutal legacy of the environmental and health woes that have accompanied the nation's past 25 years of economic growth.

Xu said her center alone was dealing with 70 such cases, although she was unable to provide statistics on how many villages across China had been similarly affected.

In Liukuaizhuang, with unemployment high amid economy stagnation following the closures of the chemical factories, locals are left to lament on the false dawn that China's industrial reforms brought them.

"Before, you were poor but you had health. And health surely is the most precious thing," Lui said.

The Innocence Project: Guilty until Proven Innocent

2006-05-05T16:25:00.000Z

Capital punishment in the US is under the microscope and lawyers using the latest forensic science techniques have found justice wanting.

by Andrew Gumbel

Cameron Todd Willingham is the first and only man executed in the United States for suspected arson after his three children, all under the age of three, burned to death at their home in Corsicana, about an hour's drive south-east of Dallas, Texas, in December 1991.

Willingham testified at his trial that he narrowly escaped the fire himself, that he tried and failed to rescue his children, that he then made repeated attempts to call for help and re-enter the building, at one point smashing a window with a pool cue in the hope of reaching the children's bedrooms.

Not everyone, though, believed him. One of his neighbours, who knew he was a drifter, knew he had trouble holding down a job and knew about his fondness for going out to drink beer and play darts, thought he hadn't done nearly enough to save his family.

When the fire marshals examined the aftermath of the fire, they too found some anomalies and began to wonder if Willingham hadn't set it deliberately. Particularly damning at his trial was the testimony of the deputy state fire marshal, Manuel Vasquez, who examined the burn patterns on the wood floor and the melted aluminium threshold piece, as well as the way certain pieces of glass has cracked into crazy patterns in the heat, and told the jury there was no way this was the result of an accident. Someone, presumably Willingham, had sprinkled fuel and set light to the building.

"The fire tells a story," Mr Vasquez said on the stand at Willingham's trial. "I am just the interpreter. I am looking at the fire, and I am interpreting the fire. That is what I know. That is what I do best. And the fire does not lie. It tells the truth."

Willingham was duly convicted of murder and, after 12 years on death row, was executed by lethal injection in February 2004.

Now, though, compelling evidence has emerged that Mr Vasquez did not in fact know what he was talking about. None of his testimony has passed muster with a panel of acknowledged arson experts, which has gone over it in detail. And without his testimony, the case against Willingham is left essentially baseless. Unlike most capital convictions, where a defendant's protestations of innocence raise the question of who else might have committed the crime, this case may well have constituted no criminal behaviour whatsoever, just one more ghastly element in an unspeakable family tragedy. That is certainly what Willingham asserted as he went to his death. "The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man, convicted of a crime I did not committed," he said. "I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do."

Thanks to the work of the New York-based Innocence Project - a team of defence lawyers who put dubious capital convictions under the microscope of modern technology - his protest is looking increasingly believable.

The group commissioned a real expert's report using advances in the understanding of arson evidence which will make uncomfortable reading for the prosecution in the Willingham case. Their findings will this week be handed to the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which is constitutionally bound to launch its own investigation and report back to Governor Rick Perry, the man who gave the green light to Willingham's execution.

The Innocence Project's report will be hard to argue with. It was compiled by four of the country's leading arson experts who have testified on behalf of defence and prosecution in previous cases. Their conclusion: Willingham's conviction was based on bad science, and none of the evidence should have ever led investigators to believe the fire was set deliberately. "While we have no doubt that ... witnesses believed what they were saying, each and every one of the indicators relied upon have since been scientifically proven to be invalid," the report says.

And so the stage is set for the next big showdown over the death penalty in the US. Already, the pace of executions in most states has slowed because of doubts in recent years about the safety of capital convictions. The release of death row inmates shown by DNA evidence and other methods to have been innocent of the crimes of which they were accused is steadily increasing.

And a host of other doubts are being introduced. California's execution machine is at a standstill because of evidence that the lethal drugs administered during executions merely mask the pain felt by the dying prisoner instead of eliminating it. Reports emerged from Ohio on Tuesday of convicted murderer Joseph Lewis Clark taking 90 minutes to die after the team trying to deliver a lethal injection had problems finding a suitable vein.

The Project's lawyers have been instrumental in forcing courts to take new DNA-testing technology into account when reviewing convictions. Since 1992, when the Innocence Project first began, 175 prisoners have been exonerated, including 14 who spent time on death row.

It was the Project's lawyers who first questioned the arson evidence. They assembled the panel of experts and commissioned the report. More strikingly, they were also responsible for lobbying the Texas authorities and bringing about the existence of the Forensic Science Commission in the first place.

As the Innocence Project itself put it in a statement, the release of its report "marks the first time in the nation that scientific evidence showing an innocent person was executed has been submitted to a government entity that is legally obligated to investigate cases, reach conclusions and direct system-wide reviews to determine the extent of the problem". In other words, it could conceivably be the beginning of the end of the death penalty in Texas.

It also spells political trouble for Governor Perry as he faces an election race this November. Many of the arson panel's conclusions had been reached even before Willingham's execution, by a Cambridge-educated arson expert called Gerald Hurst, who passed on his findings to the Governor's office. As he told an investigative team from the Chicago Tribune at the time: "There's nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire." It does not appear, however, that Dr Hurst's findings were taken seriously by either the Governor's office or the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Barry Scheck, one of the two principles of the Innocence Project, who remains perhaps most famous for his role in defending O J Simpson, said he had established through open records requests that the Hurst report had indeed been properly filed before the execution.

"Neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it or calling any attention to it within the government," he said. "The only reasonable conclusion is that the Governor's office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence and went through with the execution."

The prosecution, meanwhile, presented last-minute, second-hand evidence that Willingham had confessed to his estranged wife, something she later said was untrue.

Perhaps most poignant for Willingham's surviving relatives is that, at the time of execution, a similar case was going through the Texas legal system, that of Ernest Willis, who had been sentenced to death for his alleged role in setting a fatal fire in west Texas in 1987. Dr Hurst examined his case, too, found the forensic evidence similarly flawed and said he saw no evidence of arson. Willis was able to have his case reopened and dismissed. He walked out of death row a free man seven months after Willingham's execution.

All this adds up to a potentially explosive cocktail of political and social issues. Texans may be more attached than most Americans to the death penalty, but even they tend to draw the line at putting innocent people to death. One candidate in the governor's race, the humourist and former singer Kinky Friedman, does not appear to have been harmed by his record of campaigning on behalf of death row prisoners. One of Friedman's campaign lines is: "Texas: 50th in education, first in executions... how's that working for you?"

If the political tide is turning slowly, the sense of discomfort in the professional world of forensics and legal analysis is starting to be overwhelming. Copycat Innocence Projects have been set up. The original one, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of denouncing errors and unprofessional behaviour at forensic crime labs around the country, most notably in Virginia, Texas and Ohio.

The group has also made disturbing findings about the functioning of the criminal justice system more generally. The Innocence Project has found that the single biggest cause of wrongful convictions is mistaken eyewitness identification testimony. In more than a third of cases, forensic science has also been misapplied in some way, with experts presenting "fraudulent, exaggerated, or otherwise tainted evidence to the judge or jury".

Six years ago, the state of Illinois issued a blanket commutation of all its death sentences after it was established that 13 people on death row were in fact innocent of the crimes of which they were committed. (In that case, it was journalism students at Northwestern University who did the legwork.) Much more recently, New York state chose not to reinstate its death penalty law.

The backlash against capital punishment may be coming too late for Willingham, but his case remains a potent weapon in the hands of the Innocence Project and other campaigners. If Texas, of all states, is forced to acknowledge it killed an innocent man, then the death penalty may be on its way to extinction.

Feeding Crime

2006-05-03T09:11:00.000Z

If governments really want to improve law and order, they should ban adverts for junk food

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 2nd May 2006

Does television cause crime? The idea that people copy the violence they watch is debated endlessly by criminologists. But this column concerns an odder and perhaps more interesting notion: if crime leaps out of the box, it is not the programmes that are responsible as much as the material in between. It proposes that violence emerges from those blissful images of family life, purged of all darkness, that we see in the advertisements.

Let me begin, in constructing this strange argument, with a paper published in the latest edition of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It provides empirical support for the contention that children who watch more television eat more of the foods it advertises. “Each hour increase in television viewing”, it found, “was associated with an additional 167 kilocalories per day”(1). Most of these extra calories were contained in junk foods: fizzy drinks, crisps, biscuits, sweets, burgers and chicken nuggets. Watching television, the paper reported, “is also inversely associated with intake of fruit and vegetables”.

There is no longer any serious debate about what a TV diet does to your body. A government survey published last month shows that the proportion of children in English secondary schools who are clinically obese has almost doubled in ten years. Today, 27% of girls and 24% of boys between 11 and 15 years old suffer from this condition, which means they are far more likely to contract diabetes and to die before the age of 50(2). But the more interesting question is what this diet might do to your mind. There are now scores of studies suggesting that it hurts the brain as much as it hurts the heart and the pancreas. Among the many proposed associations is a link between bad food and violent or anti-social behaviour.

The most spectacular results were those reported in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in 1997(3). The researchers had conducted a double-blind, controlled experiment in a jail for chronic offenders aged between 13 and 17. Many of the boys there were deficient in certain nutrients. They consumed, on average, only 63% of the iron, 42% of the magnesium, 39% of the zinc, 39% of the vitamin B12 and 34% of the folate in the US government’s recommended daily allowance. The researchers treated half the inmates with capsules containing the missing nutrients, and half with placebos. They also counselled all the prisoners in the trial about improving their diets. The number of violent incidents caused by inmates in the control group (those taking the placebos) fell by 56%, and in the experimental group by 80%. But among the inmates in the placebo group who refused to improve their diets, there was no reduction. The researchers also wired their subjects up to an electroencephalogram (which records brainwave patterns), and found a major decrease in abnormalities after 13 weeks on supplements(4).

A similar paper, published in 2002 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found that among young adult prisoners given supplements of the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids in which they were deficient, disciplinary offences fell by 26% in the experimental group, and not at all in the control group(5). Researchers in Finland found that all 68 of the violent offenders they tested during another study suffered from reactive hypoglycaemia: an abnormal tolerance of glucose caused by an excessive consumption of sugar, carbohydrates and stimulants such as caffeine(6). In March this year the lead author of the 2002 report, Bernard Gesch, told the Ecologist magazine that “having a bad diet is now a better predictor of future violence than past violent behaviour. ... Likewise, a diagnosis of psychopathy, generally perceived as being a better predictor than a criminal past, is still miles behind what you can predict just from looking at what a person eats.”(7)

Why should a link between diet and behaviour be surprising? Quite aside from the physiological effects of eating too much sugar (apparent to anyone who has attended a children’s party), the brain, whose function depends on precise biochemical processes, can’t work properly with insufficient raw materials. The most important of these appear to be unsaturated fatty acids (especially the omega 3 types), zinc, magnesium, iron, folate and the B vitamins(8), which happen to be those in which the prisoners in the 1997 study were most deficient. A report published at the end of last year by the pressure group Sustain explained what appear to be clear links between deteriorating diets and the growth of depression, behavioural problems, Alzheimer’s and other forms of mental illness. Sixty per cent of the dry weight of the brain is fat, which is “unique in the body for being predominantly composed of highly unsaturated fatty acids”(9). Zinc and magnesium affect both its metabolism of lipids and its production of neurotransmitters – the chemicals which permit the nerve cells to communicate with each other.

The more junk you eat, the less room you have for foods which contain the chemicals the brain needs. This is not to suggest that the food advertisers are solely responsible for the decline in the nutrients we consume. As Graham Harvey’s new book We Want Real Food shows, industrial farming, dependent on artificial fertilisers, has greatly reduced the mineral content of vegetables, while the quality of meat and milk has also declined(10). Nor do these findings suggest that a poor diet is the sole cause of crime and anti-social behaviour. But the studies I have read suggest that any government which claims to take crime seriously should start hitting the advertisers.

Instead, our government sits back while the television regulator, Ofcom, canoodles with the food industry. While drawing up its plans to control junk food adverts, Ofcom held 29 meetings with food producers and advertisers and just four meetings with health and consumer groups(11). The results can be seen in the consultation document it has published(12). It proposes to do nothing about adverts among programmes made for children over 9 and nothing about the adverts the younger children watch most often. Which? reports that the most popular ITV programmes among 2-9 year olds are Dancing on Ice, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, but Ofcom plans to regulate only the programmes made specifically for the under-9s. It claims that tougher rules would cost the industry too much(13). To sustain the share values of the commercial broadcasters, Ofcom is prepared to sacrifice the physical and psychological well-being of our children.

At the European level, the collusion is even more obvious. Last week, Viviane Reding, the European media commissioner, spoke to a group of broadcasters about her plans to allow product placement in European TV programmes (this means that the advertisers would be allowed to promote their wares during, rather just between, the programmes). She complained that her proposal had been attacked by the European parliament. “You have to fight if you want to keep it,” she told the TV executives. “I would like to make it very clear that I need your support in this”(14).

I spent much of last week trying to discover whether the Home Office is taking the research into the links between diet and crime seriously. In the past, it has insisted that further studies are needed, while failing to fund them(15). First my request was met with incredulity, then I was stonewalled. Tough on crime. To hell with the causes of crime.

www.monbiot.com

Your tax dollars at war...

2006-05-01T18:25:00.000Z