A Tidal Wave Of Power ?  

Ocean and tidal power is one of the four pillars of what I see as the clean energy future (along with wind and solar, and the storage systems needed to capture energy from these intermittent sources), however it is still far less mature than wind and solar. CBS has a report on developments in ocean power generation in the US.

In the quest for oil-free power, a handful of small companies are staking claims on the boundless energy of the rising and ebbing sea.

The technology that would draw energy from ocean tides to keep light bulbs and laptops aglow is largely untested, but several newly-minted companies are reserving tracts of water from Alaska's Cook Inlet to Manhattan's East River in the belief that such sites could become profitable sources of electricity.

The trickle of interest began two years ago, said Celeste Miller, spokeswoman for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The agency issues permits that give companies exclusive rights to study the tidal sites. Permit holders usually have first dibs on development licenses.

Past Peak points to an article in New Scientist about the organized efforts to intimidate and discredit scientists who call public attention to global warming. Just one more example of the Republican war on science.

The attacks fit a familiar pattern. Sceptics have also set their sights on scientists who have spoken out about the accelerating meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and the thawing of the planet's permafrost. These concerns will be addressed in the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global organisation created by the UN in 1988 to assess the risks of human-induced climate change. Every time one of these assessments is released, about once every five years, some of the American scientists who have played a part in producing it become the targets of concerted attacks apparently designed to bring down their reputations and careers. At stake is the credibility of scientists who fear our planet is hurtling towards disaster and want to warn the public in the US and beyond.

So when the next IPCC report is released in February 2007, who will be the targets and why? When New Scientist spoke to researchers on both sides of the climate divide it became clear that they are ready for a showdown. If the acrimony were to become so intense that American scientists were forced to stop helping in the preparation of IPCC reports, it could seriously dent the organisation and rob the world of some significant voices in the climate change debate. [...]

Another scientist to suffer the ire of the sceptics was Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He was attacked after the IPCC assessment in 2001, which highlighted his "hockey stick" graph showing that temperatures began a rapid rise in recent decades and are now higher than at any time over the past thousand years. The sceptics accused Mann of cherry-picking his data and criticised him for refusing to disclose his statistical methods which, they claimed, biased the study to show recent warming . Last year, Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, ordered Mann to provide the committee with voluminous details of his working procedures, computer programs and past funding. Barton's demands were widely condemned by fellow scientists and on Capitol Hill. "There are people who believe that if they bring down Mike Mann, they can bring down the IPCC," said Santer at the time. Mann's findings, which will be endorsed in the new IPCC report, have since been replicated by other studies.

Santer says, however, that he expects attacks to continue on other fronts. "There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disrepute," he says. "And Kevin [Trenberth] is a likely target." Mann agrees that the scientists behind the upcoming IPCC report are in for a rough ride. "There is already an orchestrated campaign against the IPCC by climate change contrarians," he says. [...]

Many of the IPCC's authors...claim there is an extensive network of lobby groups and scientists involved in making the case against the IPCC and its reports. Automobile, coal and oil companies have coordinated and funded past attacks on them, the scientists say. Sometimes this has been done through Washington lobby groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose officers include Myron Ebell, a former climate negotiator for George W. Bush's administration. Recently, the CEI made television advertisements arguing against climate change, one of which ended with the words: "Carbon dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life." CEI's past funders include ExxonMobil, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company.

Some sceptical scientists are funded directly by industry. In July, The Washington Post published a leaked letter from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), an energy company based in Colorado, that exhorted power companies to support the work of the prominent sceptic Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Worried about the potential cost of cleaning up coal-fired power plants to reduce their CO2 emissions, IREA's general manager, Stanley Lewandowski, wrote: "We believe that it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists... In February this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr Michaels." [...]

Another sensitive area is the concern that existing models of ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica massively underestimate future melting and consequent sea-level rise. "Our understanding of the dynamics of ice-sheet destruction has completely changed in the last five years," says Richard Alley of Penn State University, a lead author of the chapter on ice sheets who expects to find himself in the firing line over this issue. "We used to think it would take 10,000 years for melting to penetrate to the bottom of the ice sheet. But now we know it can take just 10 seconds," he says.

The rethink has come from the discovery that when surface water from melting ice drains down though crevasses it can lubricate the join between ice and bedrock. This mechanism appears to explain the faster discharge of ice from Greenland into the Atlantic, but it has yet to be incorporated into ice-sheet models, which still assume that the limiting factor is the rate at which heat penetrates through solid ice. [...]

A third focus for debate will be the way the IPCC treats recent reports of climate change disrupting the natural carbon cycle more than anticipated. This has to do with the release of large amounts of CO2 from rainforests and soils, and methane from permafrost and beneath continental shelves, possibly speeding up global warming. "These are factors not included in the current models, which may cause us to underestimate warming," Mann says. [...]

The US Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee under its chairman James Inhofe has begun investigating NCAR, Trenberth's employer. Inhofe has repeatedly written to NCAR and other agencies demanding details about financial and contractual arrangements with their employees and with federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF). In a letter to the NSF in February, Inhofe said he needed the information to help him in "researching, analyzing and understanding the science of global climate change". Inhofe has a record of hostility to the idea of climate change, having asked on the Senate floor in July 2003: "Could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

NCAR is not commenting on Inhofe's investigation, but many climate scientists contacted by New Scientist regard it as a tactic designed to intimidate those working on the IPCC report. "Inhofe's actions appear to be an effort to discourage leading US scientists from being involved in international scientific assessment processes such as the IPCC," Mann says.

This is potentially disastrous for the IPCC.

The CSIRO has an alarming report (one that hasn't been muzzled) on likely rises in temperature for New South Wales (though we did have a little rain this weekend thankfully).

Average temperatures in NSW could soar by up to 6.4 degrees by 2070 unless action is taken to tackle climate change, new research by the CSIRO shows.

The study also warns that annual rainfall in key farming areas could drop by 70 per cent in the next 64 years.

The NSW Government, which commissioned the research, seized on the figures to attack Prime Minister John Howard's refusal to sign up for a national emissions trading scheme.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma said climate change was a real threat to the state's way of life. "The CSIRO research paints a frightening picture; that's why we need a national approach to climate change," he said.

Under the emissions trading scheme proposed by the states, greenhouse gas emissions from Australia's electricity industry would be capped at between 1997 and 2000 levels by 2035. Electricity generators would be required to hold permits to emit greenhouse gases but would be able to purchase extra permits and offset emissions through forestry and capturing or storing carbon.

"To our national shame, John Howard refuses to sign up in the face of overwhelming evidence of the impact of climate change on families and the economy," Mr Iemma said.

The new research also predicts that summer temperatures in inland northern NSW could be up to 7.1 degrees higher by 2070 and that spring rainfall could be up to 60 per cent lower.

Jamais at Open The Future has a look at one engineering option for mitigating global warming. I must say I find the idea of artificially induced global dimming caused by lobbing stuff up into orbit every bit as alarming as global warming itself - isn't reducing carbon emissions a lot easier than installing a dimmer switch for the sun (to be fair, this scenario is one to try and turnaround the oil tanker as its already gone too far) ? Jamais also has a look at the prospects for electoral fraud in the upcoming US elections.

Everyone with a bit of sense knows that the only way to combat global warming-induced climate disruption is through aggressive action to boost energy efficiency, shift to non-carbon energy production, and change our urban systems to increase lifestyle efficiency. Problem is, because of thermal inertia, we may already be too late to avoid catastrophic levels of planetary warming. We could well face a scenario in which our best efforts to cut carbon emissions end up still not happening fast enough to avoid a "tipping point" disaster (choose your apocalypse here: methane clathrates melting; complete collapse of ecosystems; heatwaves, wildfires and droughts killing millions; all of the above). That's why some of us argue that, on top of aggressive action (etc.), we need to look into plans for emergency cooling of the planet -- geoengineering, or as I like to call it, terraforming the Earth.

I've covered this idea before. What's new is the plan from Roger Angel at the University of Arizona. He's taken the tried-and-true solar shade concept -- a big umbrella between the Earth and the Sun blocking a small percentage of sunlight, enough to cool us down by a degree or two -- and given it the 21st century twist: Instead of a single solar shade thousands of miles in diameter, he proposes putting up (literally) trillions of tiny, 2 foot diameter microshades, acting as a distributed array of cooling. Such an approach would be cheaper than the single megashade, more robust (a nasty accident might damage hundreds or more, but have little overall impact on the swarm), and within our current technological capacity. No Moon base or asteroid capture required.

It wouldn't be cheap -- amortized over its lifetime of about 50 years, the system would cost about $100 billion per year... or roughly the cost of the Iraq war. But considering the planetary devastation that would result from a climate tipping point (remember, melting methane clathrates look to be responsible for the worst mass extinction in Earth's history, even bigger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs), it's a bargain.

Jeff Sanford at Canadian Business Online says that peak oil isn't dead yet (and refers to Bill Clinton's excellent address to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies recently) - via Energy Bulletin.

So that's it, then. The Third Great Oil Boom is done. The price of crude has dropped from its recent peak of over $70, and that has a lot of smarty-pants thinking that the oil bubble of the early part of this decade has played itself out.

...Last but not least, the oil industry has come out swinging against Peak Oil theorists, those individuals who think the world is about to hit a peak in terms of fossil fuel production. Apparently all the talk was getting a bit out of hand, so the industry has decided to talk back. Abdallah Jum'aah, the CEO of the big Saudi state-owned firm Aramco, recently stated publicly that the world has 4.5 trillion barrels of fossil fuel reserves, enough to power the globe at current levels of consumption for another 140 years. The CEO of Exxon Mobil Australia told an industry conference in Adelaide that "the end of oil is nowhere in sight," while here in Canada Clive Mather, CEO of Shell Canada, has pointed out that methane hydrates are so abundant on earth as to make the question of fossil fuel depletion moot.

So, it's time to sell those overheated energy stocks then? Well, not quite yet. Sure, there may be lots of hydrocarbons in the ground (or under the sea as is the case with methane hydrate), but the question of who is going to have access to those reserves and at what price is still very much up in the air.

...Sure, industry execs may be talking down Peak Oil, but there's lot of reasons to think the price is still headed higher. It's worth noting that Bill Clinton recently addressed the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and urged editors there to focus more attention on the issue of oil reserve depletion. According to Clinton, stats from the International Energy Agency suggest a peak of "recoverable oil" 35 to 50 years out. That's a long way off, sure, but that's not the point. The very fact a peak of traditional oil is in the picture elevates the risk of "resource-based wars of all kinds," said Clinton. "Everybody I know who knows anything about this business believes it'll be $100 a barrel in five years or less."

Yahoo has a new site focusing on green vehicles (a Green Car Congress for the layman).

Yahoo Autos Green Center promised visitors what they described as comprehensive, unbiased, data about petroleum-shunning cars and trucks as well as the communities that have sprung up around them.

Yahoo Autos also teamed up with the nonprofit Environment Defense organization to give vehicles "green ratings" ranging from one to 100 based on greenhouse gas emissions, polluting exhaust, and fuel economy. "Our Green Center is at the confluence of two large, growing trends -- green going mainstream, and the explosion of social media on the Web," said Yahoo Autos general manager Jennifer Dulski.

The Green Center sought out industry information from the Internet and combined it with content contributed by users of the search engine and its online properties such as Yahoo Answers.

Green Center offerings included information about purchase incentive programs and stations for alternative fuels such as bio-diesel made from vegetable oil.

In an effort to demonstrate the viability of alternative-fuel vehicles, Yahoo and a California custom car group were going to try to set a grease-powered vehicle land speed record on November 12. A six-cylinder twin-turbo car operating on bio-diesel will be piloted at top speed on El Mirage Dry Lake bed in Southern California in a bid for the record, Yahoo said.

Yahoo has converted its employee shuttle buses to bio-diesel.

One of the articles on the new Yahoo site is an interview with Tesla Motors founder Martin Eberhard.

JON: Did you look for any other options [to power the car] when you were building the Tesla? Why electric?

MR. EBERHARD: So the answer is yes. Before I started the company, I wanted to know if electric cars are in fact more efficient than other cars on the road. The answer isn't obvious, especially the way that the proponents of all these different technologies make claims. So I did a very detailed well to wheel energy analysis. You can see it on the website. It's in the white paper section…in there somewhere.

What I looked at actually how much energy is -- the real energy out of the ground, crude oil, natural gas, whatever, it does it take to make a car drive a given number of miles. And maybe a little bit to my surprise, electric cars weren't just a little bit better, they were a lot better than everything else on the road, dramatically better. And the text I'm going to use for that is, cost. How much does it actually cost to drive per mile? At my generic Woodside electric rates, 2.2 cents a mile. If you get a time of use meter and charge it at night, it's a penny a mile. So it all adds up.

JON: Can you explain the well to wheel idea?

MR. EBERHARD: Well to wheel is a way of looking at the consumption of fossil fuels. Whether I'm getting natural gas or oil out of the ground, that fuel has an energy content to it and its very noble. That energy is then converted into something to put into your car. It's either converted to gasoline and trucked to a gas station and pumped into your car, or it's converted into electricity, put on the grid and charged in your car. One way or another it winds up in your car. Then you know how much of that fuel, whatever it is, it takes to drive per mile, so you just do the math and you say, how much energy coming out of the ground does it take to make that car go a certain distance?

JON: And then how efficient is this car compared to something like a fuel cell, hydrogen, diesel or gasoline-driven car?

MR. EBERHARD: More efficient by far than all of them. The worse of the whole bunch of those is actually the hydrogen cars, the fuel cell cars. Fuel cells are terribly inefficient. I mean, people think about hydrogen cars as being these clean things because all they emit is water. But where does the hydrogen come from? There aren't any hydrogen mines. You have to make hydrogen. They make hydrogen by burning some other kind of fuel, natural gas, solar powered, nuclear or whatever. The point is then, you are using one of those fuels we talked about before and you want to use that as efficiently as possible.

JON: So when you originally came in and decided to start Tesla Motors, what's the basis for the environmental aspect of the plan?

MR. EBERHARD: Well, I think even environmental is too much. On the one hand, it's environmental. I care tremendously about global warming and anybody who doesn't is ignorant. The other side of the equation is it's just undeniable that our involvement in the Middle East has a lot to do with oil. And if we weren't so dependent on oil from countries out here, the world would be a lot safer place.

JON: Where do you see the future beside Tesla, the future of the automotive industry?

MR. EBERHARD: Well, I guess I have a maybe irrational idea that in the end the right technology does win. So if I cast my mind out far enough, I think a lot of cars are going to be electric. Electric cars are a great idea, not only because they are more efficient, but they are the ultimate multi-fuel vehicle. We can make electricity-burning natural gas or even coal, or we can use nuclear power which is maybe good, maybe not good, or we can make it out of solar panels, wind or whatever. We can change our mind and we can do it one way one place, another way another place and the cars don't change.

JON: There's a lot of talk about who killed the electric car. What do you think actually killed the electric car?

MR. EBERHARD: I don't know. I don't think there is a great big conspiracy about it. I think that the car companies that were making cars…spent more money lobbying to make the zero emissions mandate go away than they did developing good cars. Better technology has been a problem, but again, partly because of where they are forced to put the cars on the market, they weren't using the best technology available. So it's consumers who need to consider changing their habits.

The Register has an interesting article on how the Amazon rainforest is fertilised with dust from the Sahara.

Scientists have conclusively demonstrated the extent of the link between the Sahara desert and the Amazon rainforests.

It might sound unlikely, but their work has shown that the Amazon rainforest depends on dust from one tiny area of the Sahara desert to restock its soil with nutrients and minerals. Analysis of images from NASA's MODIS satellite have revealed the Bodélé, a region of the Sahara not far from Lake Chad, as the source of more than half the material that fertilises the rainforest.

The Bodélé depression was already known as one of the largest sources of dust in the world, but the scientists involved in the research say no one had any idea of the scale of the region's importance to the Amazon. It transpires that if the Bodélé was not there, the Amazon would be a mere wet desert.

Tom Paine has an article by Joel Makower on the "green marketing challenge".

Consumer behavior, not political behavior, is a more effective route to get buy-in and to change environmentally damaging behaviors, says ecoAmerica. Unlike pure environmental appeals—which often bump up against everything from ignorance to apathy—there is immediate understanding and concern about things that affect our pocketbooks. Sad to say, any product, action, or behavior that can potentially save money is a far bigger motivator than one that can save the planet.

One potential pathway for messagers and marketers is to help consumers understand the hidden costs in products and services that are not environmentally friendly, such as incandescent light bulbs or inefficient cars. This is admittedly tough—it's harder to sell something by pointing out the shortcomings of the competition—but it could help make environmental issues relevant and understandable.

There's more. The ecoAmerica research found that even the most environmentally sympathetic Americans have competing priorities—education, crime, financial woes, tax reform, and all the rest; that many, especially those in lower income groups, are sufficiently indifferent as to be immune to appeals of any kind; and that men and women have very different environmental concerns. That’s three additional challenges for those trying to reach Americans with environmental messages.

The bottom line, says ecoAmerica: "We have an image problem." Environmentalists seem disconnected from most Americans. Indeed, many Americans view the environmental movement as traditional, dated, and somewhat out of touch with current society.

That's ironic perhaps. Many environmentalists believe they have a better understanding of the state of the world than do other people. And they might. But that's of little consequence. The millions of Security Moms and NASCAR Dads who haven't yet tuned into how climate change and fisheries loss might mess with their kids' future aren't about to be beaten into submission by the latest arguments or evidence. They're not about to make purchase decisions based on a maybe-someday rationale for stemming environmental problems. They want to know: “What's in it for me, today?”

It’s not just an image problem, of course. the messages of the environmental crowd have been effectively countered by the deep-pocketed opposition, from oil companies’ proclamations about going “beyond petroleum” to the right-wing YOYOs casting doubt about global warming’s mere existence. No wonder that so many Americans find it more compelling to simply jump into their SUVs and drive to the mall.

So, big news: Americans are shallow, misinformed, self-interested, and unsophisticated. Still, they're our neighbors, our colleagues, and our relatives. And they're likely the constituents of green-minded politicians, activists, and marketers. So, if we intend to move Americans toward greener behavior and actions, we’ll need to deal—carefully and creatively—with all of these sobering realities.

TreeHugger points to an interview in a similar vein by Maxine McKew on Lateline with the editor of the Ecologist magazine, Zac Goldsmith.

The other night I happened to catch Zac Goldsmith interviewed by Maxine McKew, one of Australia’s most respected journalists. Zac is the owner/editor of the UK-based Ecologist magazine. Which is quite remarkable because he is most assuredly to the right of British politics, to the point that the Tory party have signed him as a possible candidate for the next election. He thus had some intriguing things to say. A few I excerpted here. “The market is without doubt the most powerful force we have for social change. There's nothing in history that's remotely comparable. But it does have a blind spot and that's the environment.”. Though he did go on to observe, “We're already seeing [...] the emergence of a half a trillion-dollar sector in environmental goods and services.” And I was particularly enamoured with this gem: “If every light bulb in Britain was replaced with an energy saving light bulb you would save the equivalent of two nuclear power plants and nobody would realise.” Which competed with this one: “I saw yesterday if everybody in the United States had recycled the aluminium cans they threw away last year they would have saved enough aluminium to rebuild the world's air fleet. It is one tiny example but shows we need to find a way of designing waste out of the system. If you do that it's wonderful news for the planet and not bad news for the consumer.”

Also at TreeHugger, posts on recycling in Germany and Jeremy Leggett's response to the Stern report.

We Treehuggers love recycling, but all too often it involves expending energy to break down perfectly good materials, only to reform them into very similar materials or products later. This is something that McDonough & Braungart refer to as downcycling, after the inevitable loss of quality each time a material is broken down and then reformed. It's much better, then, to either reuse a product for as long as possible, or to find another use for it that doesn't involve breaking it down any more than necessary. Of course, once these options are exhausted, the product should still be suitable for more traditional recycling, which certainly beats throwing it in a big hole in the ground. Ultimately, all products should be designed for reuse and/or intelligent upcycling (another McDonough and Braungart term), but in the meantime we sometimes have to get creative with products that already exist.

The picture above was snapped during a recent cycling holiday in Germany. Fields and fields of grapevines could be seen, their stems cradled by what appeared to be juice cartons, rather than traditional plastic crop-protection tubes. When asked whether this was a green initiative, the farmer whose field this was shrugged. "It's cheaper," he replied.

From the SolarCentury post:

Solarcentury's Jeremy Leggett is no stranger to stirring up the government, as can be seen from the interview we conducted here. Now he has joined the debate surrounding the Stern report. Not only has his company released its own provocative vision for the Houses of Parliament clad in solar cells, but they are also calling on government to significantly increase its support for solar and other renewables:

Sir Nicholas Stern's report is a very loud alarm wake up call to government to get serious about solar and other low carbon technologies. As we've been saying for several years, the time for a little policy tinkering here or a small grant programme there is now surely over.

Whether Big Ben gets the Leggett makeover or not, it seems certain that calls for the government to fully support renewables will only get louder from here on in.

I'll close with some tinfoil from the comments at RI by the Iridescent Cuttlefish once again - this one on "chemurgy" - the alternative to the hydrocarbon economy - the carbohydrate economy.

The story of chemurgy is a fascinating and bizarre one indeed. A good primer is the link I gave to Dr. Dave's Low Dishonest Decade essay, although the U of Manchester is working on it as well. It's a weird story because it goes back to the creation of the petroleum dependent world and now that this model is crashing, many people are wondering how it all got started in the first place. The very brief synopsis is that we had a choice, just before WWII, as to which road we would go down: the hydrocarbon (petroleum) highway, with its wars of access & control and subsequent environmental degradation, or the carbohydrate path (chemurgy--George Washington Carver's science of refined agricultural products.)

The weirdness steps in (and I really wish Jeff would look into this, as it's a Rigorous story of the first magnitude, with all its strange connections, deceptions and front- and bagmen) when the bad guys appear to split ranks, some nazi types supporting chemurgy, while other petrol-chemical titans lobbied hard for the adoption of the petrol economy. Read Dr. Dave's essay and you'll see what I mean. It's almost as if (cynicism warning) the nazi types who backed chemurgy did so in order to discredit it. This is what reminded me of Woolsey's unexpected hemp activism--I mean, how weird is that?

To make the story even more deeply weird and inextricably connected to the foundations of the world as we know it and the hijinks of high weirdness, some of the bad guys posing as good guys were the same ones behind the aborted White House Putsch (the Smedly Butler story) and the routing of the Bonus Army, the WWI veterans who camped outside the white House seeking redress from Herbert Hoover, the original compassionate conservative. Hoover sent MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower to demolish the shanty town, and more importantly, the idea that citizens can petition their government for any redress whatsoever.

The following excerpt from a really great, source-heavy page that Chris Floyd and Jules Archer put together describes so many parallels to today that it's as if nothing at all has changed in the intervening 75 years:

The coup de grâce to Hoover's career was delivered in June 1932, by his own hand. A "bonus army" of thousands of tired unemployed veterans and their families arrived that month in Washington demanding a federal bonus promised them by law, but not payable until the 1940s. They had traveled thousands of miles in battered jalopies, trucks, and wagons; many had even walked. And when Hoover wouldn't even receive them, they pitched tents, erected shacks, and slept in the capital's parks to petition Congress. As soon as Congress adjourned after refusing to grant the marchers any relief, Hoover made a show of force. On July 28 a police attempt to evict some of the squatters resulted in the killing of two veterans. Hoover then called in the Army. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur, who described the marchers as "a mob & animated by the essence of revolution," delayed the use of troops only long enough to have his swagger stick and medal covered uniform arrive from a nearby fort.

Aided by Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George Patton, MacArthur ordered tanks, four troops of cavalry with drawn sabers, and a column of steel helmeted infantry with fixed bayonets to enter downtown Washington and advance on the unarmed veterans. From Pennsylvania Avenue, MacArthur's proud army marched across the Anacostia bridge, thousands of veterans and their wives and children fleeing before them, and advanced on their shanty village, lobbing tear gas bombs and setting its shacks and tents afire. An infant died from the tear gas, an 11-year-old boy was blinded for life, and many veterans were wounded. MacArthur responding to a reporter's claim of having seen a cavalryman use his saber to slash off a veteran's ear, explained, somewhat amused, that that was quite impossible. "You don't slash with a saber," he told the press, "you lunge." And striking the correct pose for photographers, he demonstrated the proper thrust.

That night, from the windows of the White House's Lincoln Room, Hoover watched the red glow from the burning camps in the southeast and retired. The next day the press was informed "the President was pleased."

Such crude brutality only spurred desertions already underway in Hoover's ranks, even among leading Republicans." [2]

The reality of the "armed insurrectionists" was far from the manufactured perceptions spread by the interests associated with the wealthy DuPont Empires and the like that Herbert Hoover represented. The newspapers knew it, the average American citizen knew it and the Elite knew it. It would seem everyone knew the reality. The elite whose interests were threatened by any unification of the "consumers", those Americans of the non-working class were painting the propaganda presentation to be made to the gullible however.

Some room for questioning the constitutionality of Hoover sending in the U.S. Army to abuse American Veterans exists. The deployment of U.S. Armed Forces against American Citizens had been made illegal by the Constitution as a result of the abuses of the Crown heads of the British Empire and the redcoats in revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary times. But this guarantee is only a paper prohibition of little effect in determining the actions of the elite at any time. 1932 or 1970 it matters little.

The Washington police had earned Herbert Hoover's anger by feeding the bonus marchers. It is a clear statement as to what the mindset of the elite was concerning hunger and need to be wrathful towards a police force feeding people in need. All this was before the militarization of the police forces of this nation, in the days when a policeman was respected and served as a peace officer. A friend of the citizenry, not an enforcer and protector for the gated communities of the elites and their own selfish interests as the police have become in this century.

Therefore, the U.S. Army was the only force left, Washington D.C. had no National Guard. The supposed armed insurrectionists were quite different than the portrayed caricatures circulating in the boardrooms of the elite firms and banks.

"The bonus marchers were unarmed, had expelled radicals from their ranks, and despite their evident hunger weren't even panhandling openly. They seemed too weak to be a menace. Drew Pearson, a thirty-four year old Baltimore Sun reporter, described them as "ragged, weary and pathetic," with "no hope on their faces." Increasingly the BEF [Bonus Expeditionary Force] vigil had become an exercise in endurance. A health department inspector described the camp's sanitary conditions as "extremely bad." Makeshift commissaries depended largely upon charity. Truckloads of food arrived from friends in Des Moines and Camden, New Jersey; a hundred loaves of bread were being shipped each day from a sympathetic baker; one thousand pies came from another; the Veterans of Foreign Wars sent $500, and the bonus marchers raised another $2500 by staging boxing bouts among themselves in Griffith Stadium. The administration was doing virtually nothing - Washington police had aroused Hoover's wrath by feeding the District's uninvited guests bread, coffee and stew at six cents a day&"[3]

It is clear what six cents a day could do, or what the payment in advance of the $500 bonus could have done. It was not however the money or the hunger that was problematic, it was the open unification of American veterans in a common cause to exercise the guaranteed right to seek the redress of grievance that was seen as the problem. How dare the "rabble" think they could do such a thing? That is a dangerous thing, a very threatening state of affairs to the status quo empowering the wealthy.

So now it's all come full circle--the events of the 1930s have finally caught up with us, and it's high time we revisit all of it, from the institutionalization of American fascism (including all the topics Jeff has covered here concerning Gladio, high-profile assassinations, etc, etc.) to the great wrong turn we made when we adopted the DuPont economy over the Carver economy. Chemurgy is making a comeback, although whether having Woolsey as its spokesman is a good idea or just shades of how it was crushed the first time around is anybody's guess.