Do You Really Believe It’s About Oil?  

Technology Review has an article on improving the efficiency of cellulosic ethanol production processes, by creating new strains of yeast. maybe one day Bob Shaw will start asking "are humans as adapatable as yeast".

Researchers at MIT have created a new strain of yeast that tolerates high levels of ethanol and ferments sugars more efficiently, making more ethanol and doing it faster. The advance could lead to smaller, cheaper ethanol manufacturing plants, as well as reduce the notoriously high amounts of energy needed to make ethanol.

The result, described in the current issue of Science, is also an important advance in the wider effort to make organisms that can convert cheap biomass, such as corn leaves and stalks, agricultural waste, and fast-growing plants including willow and switchgrass, into ethanol. Ethanol from such sources is widely agreed to be the key to making this biofuel economically competitive with fossil fuels.

Researchers hope to engineer a single organism that will both break down the cellulose in these sources into sugars and ferment them to produce ethanol. The work by MIT chemical-engineering professor Gregory Stephanopoulos and his colleagues focuses on the second part of this process: fermenting sugars to make ethanol. The yeast strain they made can tolerate ethanol concentrations as high as 18 percent--almost double the concentration that regular yeast can handle without quickly dying. In addition, the new strain makes about 20 percent more ethanol by processing more of the glucose, and it speeds up fermentation by 70 percent.

Higher ethanol tolerance could lead to smaller, cheaper equipment for ethanol plants. Michael Ladisch, director of the laboratory of renewable-resources engineering at Purdue University, says ethanol fermentation is primarily carried out in tanks that have to be emptied and cleaned between batches. "The same volume of tank will make double the amount of ethanol in the same time period for a 10 percent final solution than for 5 percent, or the same amount of ethanol if the tank volume is halved," he says. "If the fermentation proceeds 10 percent faster for the same final concentration, the reduction in tank volume would be 10 percent." The higher concentrations also reduce the amount of water that must be removed in a final distillation step, thereby saving energy. ...

Stephanopoulos believes that cellulosic-ethanol yields could be improved by tailoring certain traits in microbes using his technique. It might be possible to make microbes that are tolerant of compounds other than ethanol that are created in the fermentation process and toxic to the microbes. He also hopes to produce strains that eat sugars with five carbon atoms, such as xylose, that are produced when cellulose is broken down. The microbes used in today's processes only ferment sugars like glucose that have six carbon atoms.

Much work remains to be done to develop a single organism that can first break down cellulose into sugars before fermenting these sugars. Breaking down cellulose is a key constraint to the viability of making ethanol from biomass, says Lee Lynd, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College. "The research and development-driven advances with the greatest impact on producing cellulosic ethanol at low cost and high efficiency have to do with converting biomass into sugars," he says.

Grist's ongoing biofuels feature has a look at the big three biofuels - corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, and biodiesel.

America devours oil like no other country in the world. Representing 5 percent of the global population, the country consumes fully a quarter of the world's oil. Every year, to move ourselves and our goods around, we burn 140 billion gallons of gasoline and 40 billion gallons of diesel -- enough to propel the average U.S. car around the world 1.6 billion times. But rising prices, climate change, and seemingly endless crises in the Middle East have sparked a reckoning.

While there is plenty of disagreement about how best to end what President Bush has called our "addiction to oil," a rough consensus has formed in support of biofuel as an alternative to crude oil. But biofuel -- energy gained from plant or animal matter -- is a broad category. The term lumps together a number of energy sources that are, in fact, quite different, from turkey innards to corn stalks. (Mmm, sounds like Thanksgiving dinner.)

So far, three fuels have emerged to lead the U.S. biofuels pack, whether in practice or in our collective imagination: corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, and biodiesel.

They are hailed as carbon-neutral solutions for an emissions-happy era. And in one sense, all biofuels can indeed be thought of as CO2 neutral, since any carbon released at the tailpipe was recently captured by the plants for photosynthesis. But plant-derived fuel doesn't emerge from a vacuum. Crops must be cultivated, harvested, moved, and transformed -- processes that are hardly carbon neutral. And here is where the vast discrepancies cloaked by the term "biofuels" emerge. ...

With the Middle East embroiled in conflict and evidence of climate change mounting, finding a viable source of renewable energy has never been so critical ... or so in vogue. It is tempting, almost instinctive, to jump toward the most visible and abundant source for that energy -- in this case, corn. Some say that corn ethanol could be a "stepping stone" to cleaner fuels like cellulosic ethanol. Perhaps. The danger is that the stepping stone becomes the destination -- a substitute for meaningful change, squandering precious time and public faith when it doesn't pan out.

When it comes to biodiesel, limitations on the scale of production may be the greatest weakness. According to the Minnesota research teams, if the entire American corn and soybean crop were diverted to biodiesel, that fuel would still satisfy only about 6 percent of diesel demand. To put that into perspective, in even the most optimistic 2006 production estimates, biodiesel will replace less than half of one percent of all diesel consumed. Ramping up worldwide cultivation of biodiesel crops is a possibility, but that will mean deforestation and the concomitant loss of biodiversity. If Brazil razes more of its jungle and Malaysia and Thailand theirs, little will be left of rainforests anywhere in the world.

Experts say that cellulosic ethanol stands a real chance to displace significant amounts of oil. But they also say this won't happen without great financial support from both the public and private sectors. It won't happen unless our political leadership implements greater efficiency standards and other incentives for companies to "go green." It won't happen unless we as individuals are willing to cut back on how much energy we consume, bottom line. And most important, it won't happen unless we call for a change. Which, of course, is why it's so important to understand why some changes are better than others.

Next up from Grist, a look at the impact of biofuel production on the land.

Great news! We can finally scratch "driving less" off our list of ways to curb global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil! Biofuels will soon not only replace much of our petroleum, but improve soil fertility and save the American farmer as well!

Sound too good to be true? Well, yes. But you could be excused for buying the hype.

Ethanol and biodiesel are being promoted as cures for our energy and environmental woes not just by flacks for corporations like Archer Daniels Midland, BP, and DuPont, but by many eco-minded activists and some prominent environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council as well.

As intuitive as it may seem that fuel from plants would be more benign than petroleum-based fuels, the ecological impacts of biofuel production are more complicated, and wider-reaching, than an environmentalist might first imagine.

For years, some critics have claimed that corn-based ethanol has a negative "net energy balance" -- that is, that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it delivers as fuel. But as biofuel production efficiencies have improved, critics have turned their focus to broader sustainability issues.

"Even if corn and soy biodiesel have positive energy balances, that's not enough," says Andy Heggenstaller, a graduate student at Iowa State University researching biofuel crop production. "Large-scale production of corn and soybeans has negative ecological consequences. If biofuels are based on systems that exacerbate soil erosion and water contamination, they're ultimately not sustainable."

Corn is one of the planet's most energy-intensive crops. Industrial corn production requires huge quantities of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (derived primarily from natural gas) and petroleum-based pesticides like atrazine, a known endocrine disrupter. Soybeans need less nitrogen, but farmers douse bean fields with other nutrients and with chemicals like Roundup to keep them pest-free.

The effects of corn and soybean production in the Midwest include massive topsoil erosion, pollution of surface and groundwater with pesticides, and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen from a portion of the Gulf of Mexico called the dead zone that has, in the last few years, been the size of New Jersey.

As ethanol use pushes corn prices higher, farmers are increasingly abandoning the traditional corn-soybean rotation to what's known in farm country as corn-on-corn. High prices have encouraged farmers to plant corn year after year, an intensification that boosts fertilizer and pesticide requirements.

Water use has also become a concern as corn production expands into drier areas like Kansas, where the crop requires irrigation. The ethanol boom has sent water demands skyrocketing, putting pressure on already suffering sources like the Ogallala aquifer. ...

The hype over biofuels in the U.S. and Europe has had wide-ranging effects perhaps not envisioned by the environmental advocates who promote their use. Throughout tropical countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Colombia, rainforests and grasslands are being cleared for soybean and oil-palm plantations to make biodiesel, a product that is then marketed halfway across the world as a "green" fuel.

In Southeast Asia, and increasingly in the Amazon, plantations of the African oil palm have become wildly lucrative. After monocropping the palms on recently cleared rainforest land, growers press the palm fruit and kernel for oil that can be used in both food and industrial applications, including -- and increasingly -- as biodiesel.

The palm oil industry is booming: global exports increased more than 50 percent from 1999 to 2004. To meet the growing demand, producers in Malaysia and Indonesia have ramped up production by clearing thousands of square miles of rainforest for new plantations.

In Indonesia, rainforest loss for oil palms has contributed to the endangerment of 140 species of land animals, while in Malaysia animals like the Sumatran tiger and Bornean orangutan have been pushed to the brink of extinction. Fish kills have become common in waterways surrounding plantations and palm-oil mills, as soil erosion from the cleared land and mill effluents have left waterways clogged with sediment and unviable.

The boom hasn't been limited to Southeast Asia. In one of the most disturbing examples of the biofuel hype's hidden effects, right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia -- a country mired in a four-decade-old civil war -- have in recent years begun planting oil palm plantations over wide swaths of the territory they control. These areas of tropical forest, which lie in the northwestern coastal region known as the Chocó and rank among the planet's key storehouses of biodiversity, have been almost entirely expropriated through violence, including massacres of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities that have forced those populations out of the region. ...

Tad Patzek, a professor in UC-Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who's known primarily as a critic of corn ethanol, says what's happening in tropical ecosystems is much more serious than the biofuel situation in the U.S. "We've already destroyed the prairie, and the topsoil in the Midwest is going, going, gone," Patzek says. "But the expensive noise we're making here is being translated there into the total obliteration of the most precious ecosystems on earth."

Grist also has a post on the uranium mining boom - "We Mine the World".

Nuclear-hungry nations eye Africa's uranium deposits

In the 1980s, western nations tried to help Africa by assembling celebs to croon about its woes. Today we see how silly that is, so we're back to extracting resources instead. It's so much more direct, and with energy consumption rising, it will help for a long time! As whispers of a nuclear renaissance grow into a dull roar, for instance, uranium-rich areas are bracing for a boom.

Namibia's Roessing Uranium Mine, which opened in 1976 but fell on hard times, is back in full swing. The two-mile-long, nearly-one-mile-wide, over-1,000-foot-deep mine, owned in part by Iran, recently made its first delivery to China. A second mine will open nearby soon, and three others are in the works, pleasing local leaders. But concerned observers aren't convinced. "They cannot tell us that they are safer than before," says Bertchen Kohrs of Earthlife Namibia. "Who says that some day we won't have to take back the nuclear waste here in Namibia?" Oh, Bertchen, relax. Angelina would never let that happen.

Continuing the Grist links, an excellent post on global warming and the insurance industry.

When it comes to global warming, Andrew Revkin of The New York Times is without peer at clarifying the science and Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker is the scariest writer in the land.

But this year, The Washington Post established itself as the newspaper best at showing us how global warming is happening right now, with superb articles on the alarming spread of the mountain pine beetle, on changes in the movements of butterflies, polar bears, and mountain water sources, on energy producers ready for regulation of carbon emissions, and this past weekend a major story on how the insurance industry has changed its attitude about homeowner policies in Florida and along the East Coast, thanks to global warming.

Joel Garreau is not the first reporter to cover the story, but his story -- "A Dream Blown Away" -- brings it home with more clarity and verve than any in memory.

To wit:

A place near the water has been an American dream for a very long time. Fifty-four percent of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast.

This is the year, however, in which the big boys in global finance got religion about climate change. As a result, this American dream -- as far north as the Washington area, and even New York and New England -- is under attack.

Follow the money. Insurance doesn't sound like a world-changer. It seems so banal and prosaic, like reliable electricity or clean water.

Yet without it -- you want a place to live? You cannot get a mortgage without insurance. You want a job? A commercial enterprise cannot run without insurance.

He even gets some decent quotes out of insurance industry experts, who usually are about as eager to talk to the press as CIA analysts:

"Two effects are going on," says [Peter] Nakada, of the risk modeling firm RMS. "Hurricane activity rates have gone up." But also, "Hurricanes are perceived to be longer-lived. These longer-lived hurricanes have a better chance of sneaking up the coast. The view of vulnerability has changed."

The specter looms of the big hurricanes of 1938 and 1954. Those Category 3 hurricanes devastated New England. Storm surges of 13 and 12 feet, respectively, swept through Providence, R.I. Historic markers demonstrate how high the water rose downtown. They are over your head. Photos show seas crashing over the top of a harbor lighthouse. It is 70 feet tall. Beach homes were swept out to sea.

"Our view is that there are some events that have the potential to be so large as to exceed the capabilities of the insurance industry, as well as the funding and financing capability of individual states," says Michael Trevino, the spokesman for Allstate, one of the nation's largest home insurance companies. "Those are events that have the potential to be $100 billion. These events are so enormous, no entity has the ability to manage it."

Garreau translates that idea into a visual, to explain why Allstate is no longer writing new homeowner policies for New York City and Long Island:

But the [risk] Allstate is focused on is a Category 3 funneling straight north up New York Harbor. Pushing a wall of water perhaps 15 feet tall up Broadway toward the second-story windows of Wall Street.

If you're interested in climate change issues, you really should read the whole story.

Nicholas Stern has apparently quit after apparently being frozen out by Gordon Brown (which doesn't bode well for UK policy if Brown takes over from Blair)

THE author of the world's most influential recent report on climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern, is to quit the British Treasury amid rumours of constant clashes with the Chancellor, Gordon Brown.

The news came a day after Mr Brown made a pre-budget statement that embraced virtually none of the recommendations of the Stern report, and dashed hopes the Blair Government would move swiftly to a new environmental agenda.

Friends of Sir Nicholas told The Times that he was frozen out of Mr Brown's inner circle, and a senior government source said the Chancellor was so reluctant to impose green taxes that Treasury bureaucrats had difficulty persuading him to take the steps that he did.

Green campaigners saw Mr Brown's decision to double the tax on short flights - merely restoring it to the level of five years ago - and to introduce a 1.25 per cent increase in car fuel as minimal concessions to growing alarm about climate change.

Al Gore has appointed a head for his new Alliance for Climate Protection organisation.

AL GORE is putting his earnings from the global warming movie into a new institute to make the issue a top political priority for the US, and he has recruited a woman from Sydney to run it.

The historic scale of the challenge has persuaded Cathy Zoi, an American who has lived in Australia for the past 12 years, to move to San Francisco for the chance of "doing a really important job in the world's second-best city".

The former US vice-president has spent much of his time since he left office on his climate change presentations and on An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary charting his lifelong interest in global warming.

The Alliance for Climate Protection will be based in San Francisco and run by Ms Zoi, a former assistant director-general of the NSW Environment Protection Authority and the founding chief executive of the Sustainable Energy Development Authority.

Ms Zoi, who lives in Mosman with her husband, Robin, and two teenage children, said her job would be "to make climate change a national political imperative" for Americans.

Australia, the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the developed world, and the United States, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, have steadfastly refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Ms Zoi, the group executive director at the Bayard Group, called the film a watershed. It was the start of "a heavy investment in shifting American public opinion in three years". She met Mr Gore, who is now advising the British Government on climate change, when he was a senator and she worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency.

To counter claims that global warming is an issue of the left, the institute's board will include the Republican heavyweights Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to two republican presidents, and Lee Thomas, who headed the agency while Ronald Reagan was president.

The alliance will have tens of millions of dollars from private contributions and some of the proceeds of An Inconvenient Truth.

Al Gore himself has appeared at a seminar organised by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers arguing that we need to freeze carbon emissions this year. Maybe Silicon Valley's war on big oil is about to open another front against King Coal - mammals vs dinosaurs round 2...

Former US Vice President Al Gore says he will start a grassroots political movement next month to seek a "freeze" on carbon emissions that scientists say are to blame for global warming.

Modelled after the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, Gore said he planned to enlist groups ranging from entrepreneurs and activists to political leaders to push for stronger policies to limit the growth of greenhouse gases.

"I think we need a carbon freeze," Gore told policy and business leaders at a conference organised by a venture capital firm. I intend to launch an ongoing campaign of mass persuasion at the beginning of 2007."

Gore said the grass-roots campaign would put heat on leaders in Washington to come up with more sophisticated policies to address global climate change. "I think we need a mass movement in the United States. I think it ought to start at the grass roots," said Gore, author of the book, An Inconvenient Truth, which was made into a hit documentary film on global warming.

Gore said the power of the freeze demand is that it can operate at every level of society - individuals can take steps to cut their use of nonrenewable energies, and so can businesses and local and state governments.

As a US senator and arms control expert, Gore had opposed the nuclear freeze movement two decades ago because he thought it was "naive and simplistic." He said he has since come around to recognise its impact on political leaders.

Gore was appearing at a two-day closed-door meeting of a group called the Greentech Innovation Network organised by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Silicon Valley's most powerful venture capital firm.

The group, credited with helping convince California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign into law a model carbon emissions cap in September, is made up of environmental entrepreneurs, policymakers and academics.

Sydney water supplies continue to shrink while the Rodent avoids action on global warming.

SYDNEY dam levels dropped to a record low of 37.5 per cent yesterday and could be as low as 30 per cent by next year's election, when the State Government is expected to begin building its controversial desalination plant.

Until recently, dam levels had remained steady around 40 per cent because of massive transfers of water from the Shoalhaven River to Warragamba Dam. Without it, Sydney's dams would be less than 20 per cent full.

Transfers have reduced recently because water in the Shoalhaven's Tallowa Dam is below acceptable levels and because it is platypus breeding season. An agreement between the State Government and the Shoalhaven requires the Sydney Catchment Authority to stop taking water from Tallowa when it falls below three metres from the top of the dam.

Sydney dam levels have fallen about half a percentage point a week thanks to low rainfall, high winds and low humidity. At this rate, the dam will have fallen another 7.5 percentage points, to 30 per cent, by March 24.

The Opposition has accused the Government of keeping Sydney's dam levels artificially high with the transfers, the use of water from bottom of Warragamba Dam, and by cutting the amount of water released to the Hawkesbury-Nepean system.

Environment groups are angry the Government seems determined to build a desalination plant rather than reduce demand for dam water by supporting residential water tanks, storm water harvesting, tougher water restrictions and more water recycling.

The Government initially shelved its plans for an energy-intensive desalination plant in favour of greater use of groundwater. However, questions have been raised about how much water can be pumped from aquifers and for how long, and at what environmental cost.

Fringe conservative political commentator Miranda Devine is peddling a number of conspiracy theories about our water supplies and says the way to cope with less rainfall and more demand is simple - build more dams. What happens when we run out of rivers to dam and the continent continues to dry out remains a mystery.

Now that John Howard has assigned his one-time political guru Scott Morrison to the office of the struggling NSW Opposition Leader, Peter Debnam, you can assume the Liberal Party is taking next year's state election seriously.

If he had been enlisted earlier, the former NSW director of the Liberal Party would probably have advised Debnam not to become ensnared in pedophilia conspiracy theories.

Instead, a bold adviser would have encouraged Debnam to get serious about the State Government's real Achilles heel - its lack of investment in infrastructure, particularly water storage.

And, as any engineer will tell you, when it comes to water infrastructure, Sydney cannot avoid building a new dam indefinitely.

Everything else - desalination, recycling, stormwater retention, rainwater tanks, reducing demand, water trading, ruining irrigators - is tinkering at the edges, buying time until the inevitability of a new dam sinks in, as a growing population outstrips supply.

Yet for 30 years politicians of all stripes have been loath to utter the "D" word, for fear of antagonising the green vote. Debnam is no exception, refusing to mention dam building as part of any water strategy.

Morrison confirmed yesterday that Debnam's shadow cabinet this week ruled out building a dam at Welcome Reef, the Shoalhaven River location identified by water planners of a previous generation. "It is definitely not on the Liberal agenda."

By deleting Welcome Reef as an option, Debnam has endorsed a ploy of the former premier Bob Carr to lock up 6000 hectares of land that had been set aside for the dam by our more foresighted forebears. Rather than promising to reverse that shameful decision, Debnam has legitimised easily contested green propaganda which claims Welcome Reef is in a hopeless rain shadow and would destroy endangered species.

Even the NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, bowed to the inevitable last month when he announced the first big dam in 20 years would be built at Tillegra, north of Dungog. Existing dams serving the rapidly growing Central Coast are down to a critical 15 per cent. Debnam's response was to dismiss the dam as a diversionary bluff.

The Australian Financial Review has an interesting article on Vladimir Putin which outlines one plausible theory about the man and his motives (in this case taking a reasonably sympathetic view based on the circumstances facing Russia when he came to power) called "Agent of change leads Russia from anarchy and chaos" (behind the paywall unfortunately). Its hard to know exactly what is going on in the new Russia, but I tend to suspect the worst - however I suspect we're not always getting an accurate feed which makes the uncertainty level high.

The difficulty in assessing Putin is that it is perhaps too easy to let your imagination take flight.

His background with the once notorious and still powerful KGB, his campaign to weaken independent political voices through creeping strangulation of the private media, his ambition to see Russia regain its global clout and Russia's growing importance as a major source of dwindling global fossil fuel reserves can be seen as a dangerous mix.

But to take the leap, as some of his foreign critics have, and conclude he is on a path of returning Russia to a murderous, anti-Western, authoritarian state is also dangerous.

It fails to take account of the task that Putin faced when he came to power.

The Russia he inherited from Yeltsin, a laughing-stock leader at the end, was verging on anarchy. Its economy was in chaotic decline, and the only wealth left by the collapse of the Soviet Union - state-owned assets and resources - was being plundered by a handful of greedy former Communist Party insiders and their cronies.

Putin's task was no less than saving Russia from implosion and the likely violent break-up of the federation. His tasks, apart from restoring order, included taking on the powerful "oligarchs" who had pocketed the nation's wealth. He did this, creating some vicious enemies in the process.

Tom Paine has an interesting address by Bill Moyers to the US Military Academy at West Point.

People in power should be required to take classes in the poetry of war. As a presidential assistant during the early escalation of the war in Vietnam, I remember how the President blanched when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it would take one million fighting men and 10 years really to win in Vietnam, but even then the talk of war was about policy, strategy, numbers and budgets, not severed limbs and eviscerated bodies.

That experience, and the experience 40 years later of watching another White House go to war, also relying on inadequate intelligence, exaggerated claims and premature judgments, keeping Congress in the dark while wooing a gullible press, cheered on by partisans, pundits, and editorial writers safely divorced from realities on the ground, ended any tolerance I might have had for those who advocate war from the loftiness of the pulpit, the safety of a laptop, the comfort of a think tank, or the glamour of a television studio. Watching one day on C-Span as one member of Congress after another took to the floor to praise our troops in Iraq, I was reminded that I could only name three members of Congress who have a son or daughter in the military. How often we hear the most vigorous argument for war from those who count on others of valor to fight it. As General William Tecumseh Sherman said after the Civil War: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

Rupert Murdoch comes to mind—only because he was in the news last week talking about Iraq. In the months leading up to the invasion Murdoch turned the dogs of war loose in the corridors of his media empire, and they howled for blood, although not their own. Murdoch himself said, just weeks before the invasion, that: “The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you could put it that way [as you can, if you are a media mogul], would be $20 a barrel for oil.” Once the war is behind us, Rupert Murdoch said: “The whole world will benefit from cheaper oil which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else.”

Today Murdoch says he has no regrets, that he still believes it was right “to go in there,” and that “from a historical perspective” the U.S. death toll in Iraq was “minute.”

“Minute.”

The word richoted in my head when I heard it. I had just been reading about Emily Perez. Your Emily Perez: Second Lieutenant Perez, the first woman of color to become a command sergeant major in the history of the Academy, and the first woman graduate to die in Iraq. I had been in Washington when word of her death made the news, and because she had lived there before coming to West Point, the Washington press told us a lot about her. People remembered her as “a little superwoman”—straight A’s, choir member, charismatic, optimistic, a friend to so many; she had joined the medical service because she wanted to help people. The obituary in the Washington Post said she had been a ball of fire at the Peace Baptist Church, where she helped start an HIV-AIDS ministry after some of her own family members contracted the virus. Now accounts of her funeral here at West Point were reporting that some of you wept as you contemplated the loss of so vibrant an officer.

“Minute?” I don’t think so. Historical perspective or no. So when I arrived today I asked the Academy’s historian, Steve Grove, to take me where Emily Perez is buried, in Section 36 of your cemetery, below Storm King Mountain, overlooking the Hudson River. Standing there, on sacred American soil hallowed all the more by the likes of Lieutenant Perez so recently returned, I thought that to describe their loss as “minute”—even from a historical perspective—is to underscore the great divide that has opened in America between those who advocate war while avoiding it and those who have the courage to fight it without ever knowing what it’s all about.

We were warned of this by our founders. They had put themselves in jeopardy by signing the Declaration of Independence; if they had lost, that parchment could have been their death warrant, for they were traitors to the Crown and likely to be hanged. In the fight for freedom they had put themselves on the line—not just their fortunes and sacred honor but their very persons, their lives. After the war, forming a government and understanding both the nature of war and human nature, they determined to make it hard to go to war except to defend freedom; war for reasons save preserving the lives and liberty of your citizens should be made difficult to achieve, they argued. Here is John Jay’s passage in Federalist No. 4:

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.

And here, a few years later, is James Madison, perhaps the most deliberative mind of that generation in assaying the dangers of an unfettered executive prone to war:

In war, a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

I want to be clear on this: Vietnam did not make me a dove. Nor has Iraq; I am no pacifist. But they have made me study the Constitution more rigorously, both as journalist and citizen. Again, James Madison:

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.

Twice in 40 years we have now gone to war paying only lip service to those warnings; the first war we lost, the second is a bloody debacle, and both rank among the great blunders in our history. It is impossible for soldiers to sustain in the field what cannot be justified in the Constitution; asking them to do so puts America at war with itself. So when the Vice President of the United States says it doesn’t matter what the people think, he and the President intend to prosecute the war anyway, he is committing heresy against the fundamental tenets of the American political order.

This is a tough subject to address when so many of you may be heading for Iraq. I would prefer to speak of sweeter things. But I also know that 20 or 30 years from now any one of you may be the Chief of Staff or the National Security Adviser or even the President—after all, two of your boys, Grant and Eisenhower, did make it from West Point to the White House. And that being the case, it’s more important than ever that citizens and soldiers—and citizen-soldiers—honestly discuss and frankly consider the kind of country you are serving and the kind of organization to which you are dedicating your lives. You are, after all, the heirs of an army born in the American Revolution, whose radicalism we consistently underestimate.

No one understood this radicalism—no one in uniform did more to help us define freedom in a profoundly American way—than the man whose monument here at West Point I also asked to visit today—Thaddeus Kosciuszko. I first became intrigued by him over 40 years ago when I arrived in Washington. Lafayette Park, on Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the White House, hosts several statues of military heroes who came to fight for our independence in the American Revolution. For seven years, either looking down on these figures from my office at the Peace Corps, or walking across Lafayette Park to my office in the White House, I was reminded of these men who came voluntarily to fight for American independence from the monarchy. The most compelling, for me, was the depiction of Kosciuszko. On one side of the statue he is directing a soldier back to the battlefield, and on the other side, wearing an American uniform, he is freeing a bound soldier, representing America’s revolutionaries.

Kosciuszko had been born in Lithuania-Poland, where he was trained as an engineer and artillery officer. Arriving in the 13 colonies in 1776, he broke down in tears when he read the Declaration of Independence. The next year, he helped engineer the Battle of Saratoga, organizing the river and land fortifications that put Americans in the stronger position. George Washington then commissioned him to build the original fortifications for West Point. Since his monument dominates the point here at the Academy, this part of the story you must know well.

But what many don’t realize about Kosciuszko is the depth of his commitment to republican ideals and human equality. One historian called him “a mystical visionary of human rights.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that Kosciuszko was “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” That phrase of Jefferson’s is often quoted, but if you read the actual letter, Jefferson goes on to say: “And of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few and the rich alone.” ...

Not until World War II did the Army again take part in such a long, bloody, and fateful conflict as the Civil War had been, and like the Civil War it opened an entirely new period in American history. The incredibly gigantic mobilization of the entire nation, the victory it produced, and the ensuing 60 years of wars, quasi-wars, mini-wars, secret wars, and a virtually permanent crisis created a superpower and forever changed the nation’s relationship to its armed forces, confronting us with problems we have to address, no matter how unsettling it may be to do so in the midst of yet another war.

The Armed Services are no longer stepchildren in budgetary terms. Appropriations for defense and defense-related activities (like veterans’ care, pensions, and debt service) remind us that the costs of war continue long after the fighting ends. Objections to ever-swelling defensive expenditures are, except in rare cases, a greased slide to political suicide. It should be troublesome to you as professional soldiers that elevation to the pantheon of untouchable icons —right there alongside motherhood, apple pie and the flag—permits a great deal of political lip service to replace genuine efforts to improve the lives and working conditions—in combat and out—of those who serve.

Let me cut closer to the bone. The chickenhawks in Washington, who at this very moment are busily defending you against supposed “insults” or betrayals by the opponents of the war in Iraq, are likewise those who have cut budgets for medical and psychiatric care; who have been so skimpy and late with pay and with provision of necessities that military families in the United States have had to apply for food stamps; who sent the men and women whom you may soon be commanding into Iraq understrength, underequipped, and unprepared for dealing with a kind of war fought in streets and homes full of civilians against enemies undistinguishable from non-combatants; who have time and again broken promises to the civilian National Guardsmen bearing much of the burden by canceling their redeployment orders and extending their tours.

You may or may not agree on the justice and necessity of the war itself, but I hope that you will agree that flattery and adulation are no substitute for genuine support. Much of the money that could be directed to that support has gone into high-tech weapons systems that were supposed to produce a new, mobile, compact “professional” army that could easily defeat the armies of any other two nations combined, but is useless in a war against nationalist or religious guerrilla uprisings that, like it or not, have some support, coerced or otherwise, among the local population. We learned this lesson in Vietnam, only to see it forgotten or ignored by the time this administration invaded Iraq, creating the conditions for a savage sectarian and civil war with our soldiers trapped in the middle, unable to discern civilian from combatant, where it is impossible to kill your enemy faster than rage makes new ones.

And who has been the real beneficiary of creating this high-tech army called to fight a war conceived and commissioned and cheered on by politicians and pundits not one of whom ever entered a combat zone? One of your boys answered that: Dwight Eisenhower, class of 1915, who told us that the real winners of the anything at any price philosophy would be “the military-industrial complex.” ...

Finally, and this above all—a lesson I wish I had learned earlier. If you rise in the ranks to important positions—or even if you don’t—speak the truth as you see it, even if the questioner is a higher authority with a clear preference for one and only one answer. It may not be the way to promote your career; it can in fact harm it. Among my military heroes of this war are the generals who frankly told the President and his advisers that their information and their plans were both incomplete and misleading—and who paid the price of being ignored and bypassed and possibly frozen forever in their existing ranks: men like General Eric K. Shinseki, another son of West Point. It is not easy to be honest—and fair—in a bureaucratic system. But it is what free men and women have to do. Be true to your principles, General Kosciuszko reminded Thomas Jefferson. If doing so exposes the ignorance and arrogance of power, you may be doing more to save the nation than exploits in combat can achieve.

One time Talking Heads singer David Byrne ponders the Iraq war and asks "Do You Really Believe It’s About Oil? "

Yeah, I think I do. The obvious question, however, is “But what if the actors in this drama (Iraq) don’t believe it’s about oil?”

My response is, just like in our personal lives, we often deny and suppress our true desires and intentions — from others, and from ourselves. Sure, it’s a Freudian interpretation of politics and world events, but is that possible? I think it is. Increasingly I think one can easily and clearly see what motivates nations if one ignores what their leaders say. Just look at what they are doing and it’s clear as day.

The president’s speechwriters may go on about promoting democracy and ridding the world of evil, and Simple George may come to believe his own pronouncements (not uncommon at all for that to happen in a powerful person) but his court and ministers agree that the invasion was “to make an example of Hussein….so that no one would have the temerity to acquire destructive weapons …or to flout the authority of the United States.” [Quote from Ron Suskind via NYRB.]

The American Century doctrine, to which all those guys signed on, in a nutshell.

What’s left out of this doctrine is any emphasis on nation building, promoting democracy or self rule for nations. It’s about knowing who’s boss.

Though oil is never mentioned it seems obvious to me that the biggest practical advantage to being boss in that part of the world is to control the resources that lie underground. The continuation of the U.S. as a power depends on it — our dependence on foreign oil makes a certainty of that. So of course the Alpha dog looks after its own best interests, that’s its nature, and a dog can’t be faulted for being a dog. But we can at least see it for what it is, without all the nice wrapping, and ask if it really is in all of our best interests, of if in this case the dog claims it’s acting for all the pack, in all our interests, but it has in fact been swept away by a fever of self-importance and self-righteousness.