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