Scorcher: the dirty politics of climate change  

The SMH has a review of Clive Hamilton's new book "Scorcher: the dirty politics of climate change". The first paragraph gives me the heebie jeebies about the "carbon dictatorship" scenario, but Hamilton himself makes a lot of good points.

Individual carbon rationing is one of the most radical ideas to emerge in the climate change arena. In Britain, both the Government and the Tory Opposition are considering a future in which citizens would need a carbon currency to pay for the greenhouse gas pollution that comes with the electricity and petrol they use.

However, despite a flood of scientific evidence, John Howard is only now accepting that climate change represents any kind of threat to Australia and believes nothing should be done at the expense of the economy. The Federal Opposition is tiptoeing around the subject, wary of being labelled economically irresponsible. How it came to be that a country as wealthy and educated as Australia is so far behind other nations when it comes to the challenge of climate change is now explained in a new book by Clive Hamilton, director of the Australia Institute. As Hamilton himself sums it up, Scorcher: the dirty politics of climate change is about greedy corporations, craven politicians and public disengagement.

Hamilton, a long-term critic of the Federal Government, argues that it is partly Howard's heavy reliance on bureaucrats closely aligned to fossil fuel industries and his close personal relationships with coal, oil and aluminium smelting chief executives that has led him to protect them.

That protection, Hamilton says, has come at the expense of renewable industries, the gagging of government scientists, and confusion in the public mind about the seriousness of the threat posed by climate change. "In the tight little world of greenhouse lobbying, the Prime Minister saw nothing improper in going to the country's biggest greenhouse polluters to ask them what the Government should do about greenhouse policy, without extending the same opportunity to other industries, not to mention environment groups and independent experts," he writes. ...

Hamilton demolishes Howard's claim that Australia should be given special consideration because of it being a net exporter of energy. "Our energy exports have no bearing on Australia's emission reduction obligations at all," he says. "The emissions from our exports of coal, gas and oil are counted in the country where they are burnt."

Hamilton also pinpoints some of the sophism in the Government's position. For example, Australia argued that developing countries should be brought into any agreement to reduce emissions because they would be responsible for most of the world's future emissions due to their high rates of population and economic growth. "But when it came to Australia, the same high rates of population and economic growth were seen as a reason for assigning easier targets," he says.

The Government's position has relied heavily on spin: ignore the scientific evidence proving climate change is real; deny economic modelling that shows it will cost more to ignore the problem than to tackle it; dismiss environmentalists as hysterical; and persuade people there is nothing to worry about. ...

The Huffington Post notes that Al Gore's new book is out next week, called "The Assault On Reason".

On Monday, Al Gore has a new book coming out next week, titled, "The Assault On Reason". ... Over at Amazon you'll find this description of Gore's upcoming book:

A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degradation of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason

... We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions.

How did we get here? How much damage has been done to the functioning of our democracy and its role as steward of our security? Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason shows us, we have precious little time to waste.

In another sign of the feedback loops created by global warming, Rio Tinto is cutting back on coal production at one Queensland mine as the power stations it feeds have been forced to reduce power generation due to low water supplies. I guess this is one of those rare cases where the feedback effect is a dampener rather than an accelerator (as per desalination plants, burning forests and melting tundra).

SOUTHEAST Queensland's worsening drought has forced minerals giant Rio Tinto to sack 160 workers at its Tarong Mine.
Tarong Mine general manager operations, Cam Halfpenny, today said the job losses were unavoidable and followed measures taken at the Tarong and Tarong North power stations to save water during the drought.

"Tarong Energy Corporation has announced an electricity generation reduction by 70 per cent from full load this year in order to conserve water," he said. "That means they will need less coal and so we have to reduce our own production levels at the mine. ... Tarong Mine is an open-cut thermal operation, located 180 km north-west of Brisbane. It's the sole supplier of coal to nearby Tarong power station, which generates about 30 per cent of the state's electricity needs.

The Boston Herald has an article with the alarming title "Union: Overloaded grid ready to ‘pop’: Warns of blackouts, explosions".

With temperatures already surging into the 80s and a scorching summer on tap, many Massachusetts communities could face a spike in blackouts - and possibly even explosions - from thousands of potentially dangerous overloaded electrical transformers.

Documents obtained by the Herald show more than 12,000 transformers from Attleboro to Ayer are operating at above 200 percent capacity, with some as high as 900 percent over design standards. Union officials, who last night reached an agreement in contract talks with National Grid, say the overloads are pushing the state’s electrical system to the brink and could lead to widespread blackouts this summer.

The Age has an article on the alarming effects of climate change on Victoria

AN ALARMING new report on the impact of climate change in Victoria has warned of risks to some of our most basic services and necessities — including water, electricity, transport, telecommunications and buildings. The report, obtained by The Age ahead of its release, says water supplies and major infrastructure will be "acutely vulnerable" to climate change in coming decades, even if greenhouse emissions are cut steeply.

And if the world continues polluting at today's rapidly growing rate, the impacts on Victoria will be far worse, says the report. Under that scenario, the report found that by 2030 power, telecommunications, transport and building infrastructure would also be at much higher risk of damage from hotter days, bushfires, storms and floods.

Commissioned by the Bracks Government, the report is the first comprehensive risk assessment of its kind prepared for an Australian government. Key risks highlighted include:

■ Higher water, energy and telecommunications bills to cover the growing damage to infrastructure across the state.
■ Worsening water shortages, as temperatures climb and rainfall is reduced.
■ Power blackouts and potential fatalities during heatwaves.
■ Coastal buildings and infrastructure, including ports, being hit by storm surges.
■ Less water for hydro and coal-fired power plants, and more erratic wind generation.
■ Longer and more frequent telecommunications outages from stormier weather, potentially hampering emergency rescue and clean-up efforts.

The report cites scientists' predictions that by 2030, average daily temperatures across Victoria will rise by between 0.5 to 1.5 degrees, compared to 1990 temperatures, and by up to 5 degrees by 2070.

Inhabitat has an article on a very Viridian water purification plant. Lots of photos at the link.

One of our favorite projects mentioned in the AIA/COTE 2007 list of Top Ten Green Projects was perennial Inhabitat favorite Stephen Holl’s Whitney Water Treatment Plant located in New Haven, CT. This project is fantastic in many ways, but the real beauty of it lies in the fact that the 30,000 square feet water treatment facility is sitting under the largest green roof in the state of Connecticut.

The long stainless steel building shown on the images house the extensive operational facilities required for the plant as well as an exhibition lobby, laboratories, a lecture hall, and conference spaces which are used for the multiple education programs that run on the facility. The roof garden design, the largest in Connecticut, expanded the existing wetland area where the site was located.

The shape of the building serves multiple functions. Architecturally the building has been cladded in thin steel shingles. The shingles, due to the shape in which they have been warped, absorb and reflect the heat of the sun preventing the exposed facility from gaining too much heat. Furthermore, the inverse-raindrop shape of the building, as well as reminding us of, well, rain droplets, also helps in reducing the area exposed to the sun reducing the heat gain even further.

The thin profile for the building allows all regularly occupied areas to have easy access to daylight. Furthermore, domed skylights in the green roofs allow daylight to enter the water treatment plant. These domed skylights serve a secondary function, which is that of allowing the visitors to the public parklands to see the water treatment process occurring within in the facility. On the materials side, the stainless steel shingles of the facade are recyclable and reusable. The building also features recycled terrazzo tiles, cork tile flooring, low VOC paints and sealants.

And of course, the most important feature of this facility lies in the way that it handles water for the project as well as how it interprets the processes of the water treatment in the facility below. The project is divided into six areas analogous to what is happening below the surface in the treatment plant. Those domed skylights mentioned above? They sit right above the ozonation bubbling area of the plant. On an area where there is rapid mixing and high turbulence, little streams move along the grass above. Furthermore the facility’s landscape manages the storm water drainage system for the facility, preventing storm water runoff as much as possible.

The integration of education, architecture, and landscaping in the project for a facility, which in most cases, would be hidden, or worse, badly designed, is what makes this one of the top ten green projects of 2007, and one worthy of the attention that it is getting.

While well-grounded fears of externalities and the huge costs associated with nuclear power make it a non-starter as a means of supplying Australia's energy, there seems to be a media groundswell lately in favour of ramping up uranium exports. I've got no doubt greed will win the day here and we'll make a lot of money selling other people the raw material to turn into radioactive waste.

Australia has the potential to export $10 billion worth of uranium a year within the next decade, a federal Labor MP has told a conference in Darwin.

Opposition Transport, Roads and Tourism spokesman Martin Ferguson on Wednesday urged 300 delegates attending the Australia's Uranium Conference to "turn that huge challenge into a reality". "With uranium prices at US$113 a pound and global uranium demand growing rapidly to meet power generation needs in a carbon constrained world we have the potential to export $10 billion a year within the next decade," Mr Ferguson said.

Safeguarding the use of Australia's uranium deposits overseas was a debate the nation needed "front and centre", with the country only selling it where it would be "treated with safe hands".

In addition, Mr Ferguson said Australian should never be in a position where it was forced to take back the world's waste or to develop nuclear power at home. "Each country will chose the energy source that suits its needs ... (for Australia) it just does not stack up financially."

He also urged stakeholders to enter into proper negotiations with indigenous communities "to ensure that in solving our social problems in Australia we create long term employment opportunities for Aboriginal people". "We need to front up to our social requirements in rural, remote and regional Australia, to give a social dividend to indigenous communities as a result of this change in policy," he said.

Mr Ferguson also said it was a very difficult decision for many Labor Party members to vote against a 25 year ban on uranium mining at this year's federal conference. "I support uranium mining, but not at any cost," he said.

The Australian has an excellent report on Lord Downer of Baghdad's reception when trying to spin government inaction on climate change. It sounds like the crowd didn't think much of Downer's dream to make Australia the "Saudi Arabia of nuclear power" either.

QUESTION: What do you get when you put 400 future leaders of Australia in a room for two days and get them to talk and think about the future?

Answer: Climate change. The issue wasn't just prominent over the two days of the Australian Davos Connection's Future Summit; it dominated proceedings for the cross-section of aspiring corporate, government, university and community leaders.

Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo set the tempo from his opening address when he spoke about the company's looming climate change report and screened a short film signalling where the telecommunications giant might head in a carbon-constrained future.

The issue was so contagious, it managed to find its way into almost every part of the program. The evening keynote address was by US sustainability consultant Frank Dixon on the rollout of greenhouse strategies in retail giant Wal-Mart.

Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd used his first-day lunch speech to position Labor as the architect of the new clean energy boom.

Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer responded with his second-day lunch speech, which he used to proudly showcase the greatest hits of the Howard Government policy on climate change. These ranged from the launch of the Greenhouse Office in 1997 to the latest $150million solar cells subsidy for those one-in-500 Australian households rich enough to afford this top-shelf technology.

By this stage, some senior corporate delegates had departed, leaving a less receptive audience than Mr Downer might have expected. Many of them were rowdily underwhelmed. Every time Downer mentioned the word nuclear, he was hissed. The first question he faced was whether he agreed with the proposal that politicians who told lies should be imprisoned. The second was a belligerent challenge on the true greenhouse cost of nuclear energy by anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott.

Next he was asked how he could claim to be helping to save rainforests in Asia when he handed out a brochure on the Government's climate change record. It was a tough room.

What was surprising was how flustered Downer became. He heckled questioners from the podium and looked uneasy trying to explain to what extent he accepted the mainstream science of climate change, which had been so openly challenged by senior government ministers only a year ago. ...

Alexander might find some like minded folk in Myanmar when he next goes globetrotting.

Russia's atomic energy agency says it has signed a deal to build a nuclear research reactor in Myanmar, a country criticised by the West for repressive and undemocratic practices. ... The centre will include a 10 megawatt nuclear reactor with low enriched uranium consisting of less than 20 per cent uranium-235, the atomic energy agency, known as Rosatom, said.

Syndey's Lord Mayor has joined a large number of other urban leaders at an international climate summit (Tyler at Clean Break also has a post on this conference). Meanwhile the ACF is saying the Rodent should make climate change an issue at the upcoming APEC summit in Sydney. There are also plans to launch a stock index tracking the effects of climate change on Australian companies next month.

Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore is meeting mayors from the world's largest cities this week at an international climate summit in New York. Mayors and other city leaders have met to collaborate on energy-saving initiatives that reduce carbon emissions and encourage cities to work with government and business on addressing climate change. The representatives from 45 cities are spending four days at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit. It is the second meeting of the summit - the first was in London in 2005.

"Cities are responsible for most of the world's pollution and emissions," Ms Moore said in a statement. "The biggest impediment we face is not the lack of new technologies to tackle climate change, it's a lack of political will."

The Economist has a look at "Africa's Challenge".

Climate change may have a graver effect on Africa than any other continent, if the predictions of the most recent report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hold true. It predicts a minumum increase in temperature of 2.5ºC by 2030, and dry areas will expand. Around 600,000 square kilometres of cultivable land may be ruined. Rising sea levels would threaten coastal infrastructure in Egypt, Senegal and the Gulf of Guinea, an important oil-producing region. Another study by the University of Pretoria estimates that $25 billion may be lost in crop failure because of rising temperatures.

There are yet more disruptions to the oil flow from Nigeria, causing oil prices to spike.

Protesters have occupied an oil facility in Nigeria's south, causing oil production cuts of 170,000 barrels a day, the latest disruption to hit Africa's biggest producer. A spokesman for Royal Dutch Shell, Precious Omuku, said the company had started negotiations with the youths inside the facility in Ogoniland. He did not give details on when the occupation began. "We don't know what their grievances are," he said.

The attack is the latest incident in a series of bombings, kidnappings and protests that have slashed production by nearly one million barrels a day in Africa's largest oil exporter, representing around one-third of its total capacity. Omuku said 137,000 barrels of the shutdown production belonged to a Shell subsidiary and the remaining 33,000 belonged to other parties that used Shell infrastructure. Omuku said the protesters had taken over a manifold, which is an oil pipeline intersection.

No oil has been pumped in Ogoniland since the region was gripped by widespread protests over exploitation and environmental degradation, leading to the execution of nine community leaders by Nigeria's then-military government in 1995.

US petrol prices are also at record highs in the lead up to driving season.

US motor fuel prices have hit a record, breaking highs set in 2005 following devastation from Hurricane Katrina, the American Automobile Association said today. ... "This is the worst possible news at the worst possible time," said AAA spokesman John Townsend. "The Memorial Day Holiday weekend, which signals the start of the (northern) summer driving season and summer vacation season, is less than two weeks away. Across the nation, Americans are suddenly finding themselves grappling with record and historically high prices."

Petrol prices have been rising sharply even though crude oil prices are well below record highs set last year. Analysts said one reason is a backlog at refineries, unable to keep up with demand for motor fuel.

But Mr Townsend said consumers are skeptical about the reasons for the high petrol costs. "When the hurricanes hit two years ago, most consumers saw the images of the widespread damage to the refineries along the Gulf Coast, and somehow they understood the impact on the delivery pipeline," said Mr Townsend. "This time around, however, they can see no real justification in the rapid and steep increase in gasoline prices and they are clearly vexed about this. In the absence of a similar cataclysmic natural disaster, or a catastrophic war in the Middle East like the one last year, they are pointing the finger of blame at Big Oil."

Energy Bulletin has some good pieces in their biofuels summary today - first the SF Chronicle on Tough bacteria may hold promise in making biofuel.

Bacteria that thrive in the weirdest places on Earth hold new promise for fueling the world's cars and factories, and scientists in the Bay Area and Southern California have found some of the most promising ones inside a volcanic crater in Italy and the La Brea tar pits of Los Angeles.

Reports from the Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore and UC Riverside describe the possibility of using bacteria known as "extremophiles" to break down wood into sugars that could easily be converted into ethanol as a major biofuel to replace costly and diminishing petroleum resources.

Countless species of living bacteria have long been known to exist in the most extraordinary environments: in mines without air, light or water 5 miles underground; in the intense radioactivity of nuclear wastes; in the geysers and fumaroles of Yellowstone National Park; and far beneath Antarctica's ice.

The Sandia lab chemists are working with a class of extremely ancient microbes known as archaea and with one unique species named Sulfolobus solfataricus that was first isolated from a dormant volcano near Naples and carries enzymes that could be crucial to producing ethanol more quickly and cheaply than it is today.

Next Robert Rapier and John R. Benemann on " Algal Biodiesel: Fact or Fiction ?".

I originally wrote an article over a year ago in which I mentioned the potential of algal biodiesel. I still believe, as I did then, that biodiesel (or more broadly, renewable diesel) is a far superior fuel to ethanol for reasons I outlined in that essay. However, over the past year, the more I learned about the prospects of biodiesel from algae, the more it started to look to me like cellulosic ethanol: Technically feasible? Yes. Commercially feasible? Nowhere close, and the prospects don't look good any time soon. ...

And finally Noam Chomsky on "Starving the poor".

THE chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.

In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.

In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.

In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect - a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.

In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.

The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities.

"Great Subjects" has a set of photos of "The World's Dirtiest Cities".




TreeHugger is looking for 1000 Places To Make Better Before You Die. Presumably the list earlier would be one (very difficult) starting point.

At times we humans excel at creating nasty places to live. Some of the results, like Mike's post on the color of water from rivers and lakes in China, are almost unbelievable. There has been a rush of pictures in the past few months of the cleanest and dirtiest cities on Earth. The dirtiest cities list is based on the list generated by the Blacksmith Institute, you can find out more by reading website, or just listen to their director on treehugger radio. The cleanest cities were compiled by Mercer Human Resources Consulting. But, beyond looking at the extremes, most of us live somewhere in the middle. Inspired by the 1000 places to see before you die travel book, maybe we can compile a list dirty places that are now clean - and how they got that way.

Celsias has a Lester Brown article on Designing Cities for People, Rather than Cars.

As I was being driven through Tel Aviv from my hotel to a conference center a few years ago, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement a half-century ago to a city of some 3 million today, evolved during the automobile era. It occurred to me that the ratio of parks to parking lots may be the best single indicator of the livability of a city–whether a city is designed for people or for cars.

The world’s cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic going nowhere climbs higher each year.

In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism. One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as Mayor for three years, beginning in 1998. When he took office he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars; he wanted to know what could be done for the 70 percent–the majority–who did not own cars.

Peñalosa realized that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life with his vision of a city designed for people. Under his leadership, the city banned the parking of cars on sidewalks, created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city’s 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in strife-torn Colombia safer than those in Washington, D.C.

Enrique Peñalosa observes that “high quality public pedestrian space in general and parks in particular are evidence of a true democracy at work.” He further observes: “Parks and public space are also important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals..In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply.” He notes this is not obvious from most city budgets, where parks are deemed a luxury. By contrast, “roads, the public space for cars, receive infinitely more resources and less budget cuts than parks, the public space for children. Why,” he asks, “are the public spaces for cars deemed more important than the public spaces for children?”

Now government planners everywhere are experimenting, seeking ways to design cities for people not cars. Cars promise mobility, and they provide it in a largely rural setting. But in an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility. Congestion also takes a direct economic toll in rising costs in time and gasoline. And urban air pollution, often from automobiles, claims millions of lives.

Another cost of cities that are devoted to cars is a psychological one, a deprivation of contact with the natural world–an “asphalt complex.” There is a growing body of evidence that there is an innate human need for contact with nature. Both ecologists and psychologists have been aware of this for some time. Ecologists, led by Harvard University biologist E.O. Wilson, have formulated the “biophilia hypothesis,” which argues that those who are deprived of contact with nature suffer psychologically and that this deprivation leads to a measurable decline in well-being....

Dave Roberts will be interviewing Paul Hawken tomorrow and is asking if anyone would like to have a question answered. He also includes a huge quote from the book which even I'm not going to include all of - go to the link for more...

Tomorrow, I'm sitting down for a chat with Paul Hawken, author, entrepreneur, and environmental legend. We'll be discussing, among other things, his new book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. (If you're in Seattle tomorrow, you can see Hawken at a Grist-sponsored event at Town Hall.)

If you've got questions you'd like me to ask Hawken, let me know in comments.

In the meantime, here's the introduction from Blessed Unrest:

Over the past fifteen years I have given nearly one thousand talks about the environment, and every time I have done so I have felt like a tightrope performer struggling to maintain perfect balance. To be sure, people are curious to know what is happening to their world, but no speaker wants to leave an auditorium depressed, however dark and frightening a tomorrow is predicted by the science that studies the rate of environmental loss. To be sanguine about the future, however, requires a plausible basis for constructive action: you cannot describe possibilities for that future unless the present problem is accurately defined. Bridging the chasm between the two was always a challenge, but audiences kindly ignored my intellectual vertigo and over time provided a rare perspective instead. After every speech a smaller crowd would gather to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. These people were typically working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights. They came from the nonprofit and nongovernmental world, also known as civil society; they looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted trade policies, worked to green inner cities, and taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they had dedicated themselves to trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice. Although this was the 1990s, and the media largely ignored them, in those small meetings I had a chance to listen to their concerns. They were students, grandmothers, teenagers, tribe members, businesspeople, architects, teachers, retired professors, and worried mothers and fathers. Because I was itinerant, and the organizations they represented were rooted in their communities, over the years I began to grasp the diversity of these groups and their cumulative number. My interlocutors had a lot to say. They were informed, imaginative, and vital, and offered ideas, information, and insight. To a great extent Blessed Unrest is their gift to me. ...

This is the story without apologies of what is going right on this planet, narratives of imagination and conviction, not defeatist accounts about the limits. Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is. There is a rabbinical teaching that holds that if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, you first plant a tree and then see if the story is true. Islam has a similar teaching that tells adherents that if they have a palm cutting in their hand on Judgment Day, plant the cutting. Inspiration is not garnered from the recitation of what is flawed; it resides, rather, in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. "Consider" (con sidere) means "with the stars"; reconsider means to rejoin the movement and cycle of heaven and life. The emphasis here is on humanity's intention, because humans are frail and imperfect. People are not always literate or educated. Most families in the world are impoverished and may suffer from chronic illnesses. The poor cannot always get the right foods for proper nutrition, and must struggle to feed and educate their young. If citizens with such burdens can rise above their quotidian difficulties and act with the clear intent to confront exploitation and bring about restoration, then something powerful is afoot. And it is not just the poor, but people of all races and classes everywhere in the world. "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice" is Mary Oliver's description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world. ...

The final two chapters look at the entire movement from two perspectives. "Immunity" uses the cellular metaphor of how an organism defends itself as a plausible way to describe the collective activity of the movement. The immune system is the most complex system in the body and provides a useful model for examining the properties of these groups. The terms environment and social justice encompass innovative organizations that are redolent with ideas and inventive techniques, and a few are explored here. I also consider the weakness of the movement, how its multiplicity and diversity may hobble it as the world descends into violence and disorder. "Restoration" describes the biological principles that inform all forms of life, including human beings, and uses the principles as a framework to bring a different vocabulary to the movement. In biologist Janine Benyus's quintessential summation, "life creates the conditions that are conducive to life." It is fair to ask whether that might not be a suitable organizing principle for all human activity, from economics to trade to how we build our cities. While it is risky to rely on life sciences to explain social phenomena, it is equally risky to assume that the standard language that has served to chronicle past social movements is sufficient to describe this one. The individuals featured in this book all try to do good, but this book is not only about doing good. It is about people who want to save the entire sacred, cellular basis of existence -- the entire planet and all its inconceivable diversity. In total, the book is inadvertently optimistic, an odd thing in these bleak times. I didn't intend it; optimism discovered me.

Matt Perry has a post on one of Paul Hawken's recent talks.

I got the chance to see Paul Hawken speak tonight in Santa Barbara. I knew him best as the author of Natural Capitalism which provided a great roadmap for integrating ecologically sustainable practices with the business world. This talk was based on his recent book - Blessed Unrest - How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

The basis of this book is simple: that organically-developed, bottom-up, non-hierarchical organizations (which number in the millions according to his research) are now leading the world in many diverse areas of service. He describes these environmental and social justice organizations as the “immune system” of our societies; our response to destructive and corrupt habits perpetrated by those in power who are willing to compromise our future for short-term gain.

One thing that struck me about the subject was the importance of sharing information and ideas (as opposed to spreading an ideology). I thought one of the most interesting stories of the night was his description of how the meme of non-violent civil disobedience evolved… from Emerson, to Thoreau, to Ghandi, to Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, Jr. At each turn of the story, there was someone (often unnamed but vitally important) who turned on each of these people to the ideas of those who came before.

Paul was eager to point out the role of technology in this inter-connected mesh of grassroots community organizations. He mentioned open-source software a few times and even gave a shout out to Ruby on Rails (which I gather was the backbone for his WiserEarth.org site focussed on connecting these diverse organizations).

It was a careful mix of optimism and pessimism; Paul was careful in noting the many severe challenges we’ve been handed but was confident that this bottom-up mesh of interconnected citizens can form a community strong enough to withstand anything that comes it’s way. In the end, his message was about doing what you love, connecting with others and standing up for your values. Sounds like good advice to me.

Clean Break has a post on Geothermal power generation growing worldwide.

Wind expert and overall renewables guru Paul Gipe pointed out to me this weekend a new report from the Geothermal Energy Association, which has assessed worldwide growth of geothermal development since 2000 and expected growth to 2010. It found a significant increase in the number of megawatts expected to be produced and the number of countries producing them from geothermal heat resources. "The number of countries producing geothermal power and total worldwide geothermal capacity under development appear to be increasing significantly in the first decade of the 21st century," according to the report. "The number of countries producing power from geothermal resources could increase 120 per cent, from 21 in 2000 to as many as 46 in 2010. Total geothermal capacity online could increase over 55 per cent, from 8,661 megawatts in 2000 to 13,500 megawatts or more."

The report, which provides a snapshot of geothermal activities on a country-by-country basis, concludes that overall geothermal development appears to be accelerating, and that this is a reversal compared to the slowdowns that were seen in international markets in the late 1990s. No doubt, more countries are seriously exploring geothermal as a clean alternative to power generation as concern about climate change grows. As mentioned previously, this resource is a prime candidate for replacing natural gas in the Alberta oil sands, and perhaps down the road in providing power in other provinces (I know at least one serious developer who has scouted a couple of potential sights in Ontario). "It is worth noting," the report continues, "that in numerous cases discussed in this report, the success of development in a country is linked to government policies and initiatives. The extent of future geothermal project development would appear to depend more upon adequate funding and sustained policy support than geologic factors."

Clean Break also has a post on a new wind turbine design using a biomimicry based approach.

My Clean Break feature this week is a story about a Toronto company called WhalePower Corp. that has designed a new type of wind-turbine blade that dramatically improves turbine efficiency. What's unique about the design is that it mimics the aerodynamic feature of a humpback whale's flipper, which has bumps or "tubercles" along its leading edge. Scientists have found that the tubercles reduce the drag and increase the lift on the flipper, having the effect of delaying stall. Earlier studies have attempted to apply this principle to airplane wings and rudders on boats, but WhalePower is adapting it to blades for wind turbines, fans -- essentially anything with a rotating blade that moves through air or fluid. The co-founders of WhalePower claim their blade captures more of the wind's energy at lower speeds where conventional turbines tend to stall. For example, a turbine equipped with WhalePower blades could produce the same amount of electricity from 5 metre-per-second winds as a conventional turbine tends to produce with winds blowing at 8 metres per second. This means the humpback-designed turbines could allow wind farms to produce more kilowatt-hours a year, improving the business case for wind farms.

The big question is: Even if this is a superior blade design, would the industry be willing to change? Given turbine manufacturers are already having a tough time keeping up with demand, there's not much incentive in radically changing the design of their product for the benefit of customers. And while WhalePower says it has a way to retrofit existing turbine blades, there's the question of voiding the warranty -- something most wind-farm operators are reluctant to do.

The latest episode of TomDispatch features Chalmers Johnson on "Ending the Empire"

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."

George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution," and the opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.

Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nonetheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush had signed a secret executive order authorizing a new policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries like Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing.

On the home front, despite the post-9/11 congressional authorization of new surveillance powers to the administration, its officials chose to ignore these and, on its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on this program. These actions are prima-facie violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution.

These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface. And yet, on the eve of the national elections of November 2006, then House Minority Leader, now Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pledged on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that "impeachment is off the table." She called it "a waste of time." And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.

Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy

Without question, the administration's catastrophic war in Iraq is the single overarching issue that has convinced a large majority of Americans that the country is "heading in the wrong direction." But the war itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency and the abject failure of Congress to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight. Had the government been working as the authors of the Constitution intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the Democratic majority remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the American occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the ever-growing power of the military-industrial complex.

One major problem of the American social and political system is the failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, observe, "For the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names."

Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.

Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way:

"All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed… So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."

Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded: "The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with 'plagiarism.'" ...

Cryptogon reports that the old school US establishment seems to have averted an attack on Iran by the crazies.

Brzezinski’s testimony indicates to me that the expansion of the conflict into Iran might not be allowed to happen. Don’t ask me how it will be stopped, but he is the mouthpiece of the people who run this show, not in appearance, but in fact.

—Zbigniew Brzezinski Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

The war with Iran must be stopped by any means necessary… The full weight of this burden now rests squarely on the shoulders of the men and women of the U.S. military. Attempt to save America and the world from the diabolical lunatics who have subverted power, or parish in oblivion with the rest of us: Those are the options that every member of the U.S. armed forces must now consider.

—Bush Violation of FISA Law a Felony

Well, we’re still here.

Via: ipsnews:

At a mid-February meeting of top civilian officials over which Secretary of Defence Gates presided, there was an extensive discussion of a strategy of intimidating Tehran’s leaders, according to an account by a Pentagon official who attended the meeting given to a source outside the Pentagon. The plan involved a series of steps that would appear to Tehran to be preparations for war, in a manner similar to the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But Fallon, who was scheduled to become the CENTCOM chief Mar. 16, responded to the proposed plan by sending a strongly-worded message to the Defence Department in mid-February opposing any further U.S. naval buildup in the Persian Gulf as unwarranted.

“He asked why another aircraft carrier was needed in the Gulf and insisted there was no military requirement for it,” says the source, who obtained the gist of Fallon’s message from a Pentagon official who had read it.

Fallon’s refusal to support a further naval buildup in the Gulf reflected his firm opposition to an attack on Iran and an apparent readiness to put his career on the line to prevent it. A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch”.

Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, “You know what choices I have. I’m a professional.” Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, “There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box.”

And to close, the new trend in surfing (at least amongst creaky old fogies) is apparently stand up paddle surfing (here as well as up north).