Protecting Country

SUBHEAD: Organization Seed explained to banks impact to Aboriginal communities if mining projects went ahead.

By Staff on 2 September 2016 for Future Perfect -
(http://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/prj/fup/en15848645.htm)


Image above: Seed co-founder Larissa Baldwin at center. From original article.

Climate change affects everyone — but not everyone evenly. If nothing is done to stop the impact of climate change, some of the oldest living cultures in the world could die out. An all-Indigenous youth activist group in Australia has risen to the challenge. 

When Larissa Baldwin first heard about Australia’s first youth summit for climate change activists, she thought she had found her people. She bought a ticket, planned which talks and workshops to attend, then travelled down to Brisbane for PowerShift 2011.

“When I walked through the doors and looked around the foyer, I nearly just walked straight back out again. I couldn’t see anyone like me. It was a sea of white.”

Larissa is an Aboriginal woman of the Bundjalung nation, one of over 500 nations that make up present day Australia. “I took a seat at the back of the room. But before the opening speech had finished, I was out of there.”

But Larissa’s mark on climate activism didn’t end that day. Rather than turn her back on the group that organised the summit, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), she joined them.

Larissa volunteered with the AYCC to help coordinate PowerShift 2013 and make sure there were more ‘black fellas’ like her in the room. It was at PowerShift2013 that AYCC agreed it needed more than a handful of Aboriginal voices: it needed an exclusive sister organisation run for and by young Aboriginal activists.

And so, Seed, Australia’s first all-Indigenous youth climate network, was founded and Larissa was appointed National Co-Director.

Planting the seed for a movement
Larissa, now 29, studied a combined degree in Media Communications and Health Science at Queensland University of Technology, and after graduating was appointed Communications Relations Officer at the Stronger, Smarter Institute, an organisation that promoted Indigenous leadership in schools around Australia.

Larissa’s Co-Director is 22-year-old Amelia Telford who is also a Bundjalung woman. Amelia turned down a placement to study at UNSW Medical School to take up the reigns at Seed. “When I learnt that climate change was not only affecting the places I loved, but also people and our cultural heritage, I knew I had something to do about it,” says Amelia.

When the pair founded Seed, they made clear, “We want Aboriginal people to be able to continue to live on country.” Aboriginal people use ‘country’ to refer to the traditions of the region where an Aboriginal person lives or where their ancestors came from. Climate change is threatening the ancient way of life for Aboriginal people.

Bush fires now flare nearly all year round, draughts are more frequent, and floods are more catastrophic. And the 7,000 people who live in the Torres Strait Islands – between Australia’s north coast and the South of Papua New Guina – already have to reckon with rising sea levels.

“It's not a new concept that our people are the first environmentalists or the first conservationists," says Amelia. “It's always been a part of our culture and a part of who we are.”

How does Seed sprout change?
More than half of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are under 25. And with young Aboriginal activists right across Australia joining the network, Seed is continuing to grow.

Today, Seed employs a staff of 15 across fundraising, campaigning and an education team that tours high schools. But the network’s real power are thousands of volunteers across Australia, including in remote Indigenous communities. Among them are around 100 core volunteers who commit regular hours.

Seed teaches young Aboriginal people how to organize a demonstration, run a campaign, stage a media stunt, and start conversations about the need to act on the climate crisis. The organization’s effect branches out much further than climate activism, however.

“Seed doesn’t have the capacity to work on every issue facing young Aboriginal people,” says Larissa. “That’s why we make sure the training we deliver is transferable. If they can learn the skills to make change, they can use these skills to tackle: aboriginal youth suicide, housing issues, Aboriginal health, land rights, you name it.”


With so many abstract numbers and with its distant consequences, climate change can be hard to grasp and easy to dismiss. “Talking about the science of climate change is a really ‘white’ way of tackling climate change,” says Larissa Baldwin. “It doesn’t really work in Aboriginal communities where there’s a lower level education base and English might be someone’s fourth or fifth language.”

Larissa has a grasp of her native language, Widjabul, but there are around 150 Indigenous languages spoken throughout Australia.

“So we don’t talk about ‘climate change’, we talk about ‘protecting country’. And when you talk to Aboriginal people about it, they start listing off all these things that are impacts of climate change. We don’t have to convince them that climate change is real. They live on country. They see what most Australians don’t.”

Going out on a limb
Larissa says Seed learns a lot from AYCC, but many of the tactics the Australian Youth Climate Coalition use don’t work in Aboriginal communities. Just last year, for instance, AYCC’s campaign Dump Your Bank tried to persuade people to change banks if their bank was funding the expansion of fossil fuel mining. However, a lot of people in Aboriginal communities are on basics cards (social welfare) so they can’t move their money.

So Seed took a different approach. “We sent an email to 5,000 employees at all the major banks. We explained what it would mean to Aboriginal communities if mining projects went ahead on our land – mining projects funded by their employer.

We included a survey so we could gauge what bank employees cared about and the responses were incredible: there were people willing to quit their jobs if their banks didn’t stop funding the mines.

The banks couldn’t ignore their own employees, so they issued statements saying they would not fund the mines. That was a really successful campaign.”

 Seed is funded entirely by donations, including small cash donations, monthly donors, and major private donations. It is a founding principal of the organization to not accept any corporate or government sponsorship. This way they are free to put pressure wherever it’s needed.

Ancient roots, not holes in the ground
Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels. Larissa argues that Australia’s mining industry is not just the source of carbon emissions, but it is also a site of structural racism. “We reject that the only way for Aboriginal communities to gain economic advantage is to sell off our land to these companies.

And the only government investment that goes into our communities is earmarked for mining. We think that’s wrong. Mining is what people end up doing when they don’t have options.” To Seed, the climate crisis is also an opportunity to create a more just and sustainable world.

Larissa spoke in Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria recently. “We ran some workshops around employment options with the local people. Education and eco-tourism were the biggest interest areas we identified.” She went on, “The reason we are so well received in Aboriginal communities like Borroloola is because we never go in there trying to get something out of people.

We don’t actively discourage Aboriginal people from working in the mines or signing land use agreements.

We just try to make sure they have the knowledge to make the best choice. We go there to inform, to empower people to make their own choices.”


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Unpaving Some Roads

SUBHEAD: In the future we will not be able to afford the maintenance cost and material for asphalt roads.

By Staff on 12 April 2016 for Energy Skeptic -
(http://energyskeptic.com/2016/unpave-low-volume-roads-to-save-energy/)


Image above: A badly paved Meadow Lake Road, right before the entrance to the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, New York in 2009. This road should be repaved or abandoned. From (http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html).

The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.

Many of these roads should have never been paved to begin with, but the costs of construction, asphalt, and energy were so cheap it was done anyway.  Now many rural roads are past their design life and rapidly deteriorating.  It is both difficult and expensive to maintain them, and dangerous to let these roads fall apart and degrade into gravel on their own.

Unpaving low-volume roads saves energy and money. According to Karim Ahmed Abdel-Warith at Purdue University, preserving low-volume roads costs several hundred million dollars a year, more than half of the annual investment in roads.

Unpaving would also slow vehicle speeds down, further increasing miles per gallon from less aerodynamic drag.

Since roads harm biodiversity, getting rid of a road entirely should be done when possible.
The NRC paper I’ve taken excerpts from below requested feedback from the 27 states that have already depaved roads. This report provides many helpful guidance documents on depaving roads for communities interested in pursuing this.


The historic trend has been to pave roads, not unpave them.   These policies arose in the last century when the costs of asphalt, fuel, and all construction expenditures were low compared with current costs and the axle loads carried on rural low-volume roads were significantly lighter than current loads.

The rising cost of asphalt and fuel and a significant increase in traffic and traffic loads on low-volume rural roads due to commercial, agricultural, and energy trucks, combined with stagnant or decreasing budgets, are causing a situation in which the cost of rehabilitating and maintaining very low-volume paved roads on the existing road network often is no longer feasible.

This study found that the practice of converting paved roads to unpaved is relatively widespread; recent road conversion projects were identified in 27 states on mainly rural, low-volume roads that were paved when asphalt and construction prices were low.

Those asphalt roads have now aged well beyond their design service life, are rapidly deteriorating, and are both difficult and expensive to maintain. Instead, many local road agencies are converting these deteriorated paved roads to unpaved as a more sustainable solution.

Many local road agencies reported cost savings after converting, compared with the costs of continuing maintenance of the deteriorating paved road, or repaving.

Low-volume, rural roads serve as main routes for numerous industries, farmers, and ranchers to get raw material from source to distribution or processing centers, provide ingress to remote public lands, and act as transportation arteries for millions of rural residents. Most of these rural roads have low or very low traffic volumes and have unpaved, aggregate surfaces. Historically, unpaved roads have been considered the lowest level of service provided.

In a demonstration of progress and an effort to improve road conditions for rural residents, many agencies paved low-volume roads with little or no base preparation when asphalt and construction prices were low. Those asphalt roads have now aged well beyond their design service life, are rapidly deteriorating, and are difficult and expensive to maintain.

The increasing sizes of agricultural and commercial equipment, including that used by the energy sector, are compounding road deterioration in many areas.

Traditionally, these roads were maintained or repaved at regular intervals, but with the increasing traffic loads, increasing cost of materials, and stagnant or declining road maintenance budgets, many agencies do not have the funding to support these activities.

Instead, many local road agencies are looking to convert deteriorated paved roads to unpaved ones as a more sustainable solution.

The state of the practice for converting roads from paved to unpaved involves reclaiming or recycling the deteriorated pavement surface, supplementing existing materials as needed, compacting, and for some applying or incorporating a surface treatment, such as a soil stabilizer or dust-abatement product.

In a few cases, no recycling of the old pavement was done, and new surface aggregate was simply placed over the deteriorated road surface.

However, most agencies that have done conversions recycle the old surface in-place and reshape and compact it as a base for a new aggregate surfacing. Thereafter, the new surfacing ranges from locally available gravel to high-quality surface aggregate that can be maintained with motor graders to sustain adequate crown and a smooth surface.

Many of the roads that have been converted from paved to unpaved had annual average daily traffic (AADT) of between 21 and 100 vehicles, suggesting that many of the roads that are being converted should not have been paved initially or that road usage patterns have changed significantly since paving.

Local road agencies are converting roads primarily as a result of a lack of funding for maintenance and construction, safety issues, and/or complaints from the public. Road budgets have remained stagnant or declined in recent decades, but the costs of labor, materials, and equipment have continued to increase. Consequently, local road agencies have been left underfunded and are struggling to maintain their existing road network. Limited maintenance of deteriorating roads (e.g., pothole patching) often is all that can be done with existing resources, with repaving often being cost-prohibitive.

The reported cost of converting ranged from $1,000 to $100,000 per road segment or mile within the United States and Canada. The variation in costs is attributed to how costs are tracked by agencies, how the conversion was done, equipment requirements, supplemental materials, surface stabilization and dust abatement, and addressing drainage and road base issues.

NEEDED: Unpaving guides
A significant lack of available resources, such as a handbook or design guide, for practitioners who are considering or performing road conversions was noted. Numerous survey respondents indicated that they did not use any documented resources when planning and performing the conversion and often used a trial-and-error approach.

In addition, road agencies rarely document procedures and outcomes of road conversions, such as construction problems, crash rates, public concerns and reaction, and comparative maintenance costs of the new surface.

Completing successful conversions is possible with appropriate investigation and design, selection of quality granular surfacing materials, and good construction, and by involving and educating the public as part of the process. However, limited information has been published to guide practitioners in these processes.

LOW-VOLUME ROADS
There are more than 4.1 million mi of roadways in the United States. There is no uniform agreement on how many of these are low-volume roads. About 53% are unpaved and are maintained by local and state transportation departments.

Unpaved roads are nearly always considered low volume.
For the purpose of this project, low-volume or very low-volume roads are defined as roads with AADT of less than 250 vehicles, based on research that determined that converting paved roads to unpaved was cost-effective at this threshold.

The spectrum of options of surface types for low-volume roads ranges from gravel with no treatment to stabilized gravel to bituminous sealed bases to asphalt and concrete pavements. Each road surface type has its own merits and represents one tool in the road management toolbox.

Unpaved roads can be defined as those with a surface course of unbound aggregate (gravel) where no binder, such as tar, bitumen, cement, lime, or other chemical additive, is used. An unpaved road often requires blading at least once annually to maintain the road surface in a drivable and safe condition.

Paved roads are defined as those with an asphalt concrete or portland cement concrete surface, or roads that possess any combination of asphalt binder and aggregate intended to provide waterproofing, adhesion, structural strength, and frictional resistance.

CONVERTING ROADS FROM PAVED TO UNPAVED

Active versus Passive Conversion
Many transportation agencies facing budget shortfalls and deteriorating paved roads are converting their paved roads to gravel (active conversion), whereas other agencies are allowing roads to deteriorate to unpaved conditions owing to a lack of funding for maintenance (passive conversion).

Active conversion is the process of converting a paved road to an unpaved road using equipment and personnel to recycle the old pavement into a pulverized material that can be used as a base for a new aggregate surfacing or as part of the new surface. Passive conversion of a road from paved to unpaved is the natural process of the paved road breaking down and deteriorating to an unpaved surface as a result of exposure to the elements and wear and tear from vehicle traffic.

Based on survey and interview responses, active conversion is a far more common practice, however some local road agencies find that passive conversion occurs simply as a result of a lack of funding for properly maintaining roads.

Factors to Consider for Unpaving

• Road condition: This dictates whether a deteriorated paved surface can be economically repaired to restore it to an acceptable condition or whether there is a need for complete rehabilitation or reconstruction, which may not be affordable. In the latter instance, conversion to gravel can be considered.
• Safety: The deterioration of a paved road surface may be such that it may be safer to convert to a gravel surface either permanently or for an interim period until the road can be rehabilitated or reconstructed.
• Presence of heavy and overweight vehicles: A high volume of heavy vehicles has a significant impact on the standard required for pavement maintenance and rehabilitation. Initial costs to repave or repair a road to an appropriate standard for these vehicles may be unaffordable for achieving an acceptable life cycle. Gravel roads can be much cheaper to repair when damaged, but the frequency of repair may be greater.
• Maintenance capability: Specific equipment and skills are required for paved and unpaved road construction and maintenance. The availability and affordability of either contracted or in-house equipment or skill need to be assessed to compare the ability to maintain each surface type effectively. Dust and erosion control may be a significant factor and could be considered for unpaved surfaces.
• Environmental issues: Air and water quality impacts from dust and erosion can affect human, plant, animal, and aquatic health and create a safety hazard to drivers. Products used to stabilize the road surface and reduce dust can also affect the adjacent environment if incorrectly selected or applied.
• Dust and erosion control: These issues may or may not be a significant factor, but it is essential that they be considered for all surfaces.
• Availability and quality of suitable unpaved road–wearing coarse aggregate sources: The quality and properties of the aggregate have a significant impact on the surface condition and frequency of maintenance required on unpaved road surfaces. Appropriate unpaved road surfacing aggregates are not offered by many commercial aggregate suppliers and can be expensive or difficult to obtain. This issue is more important than many managers recognize.
• Network significance of the road: Primary routes that are frequently used by public transport (including school buses) or emergency vehicles or are priority snowplow routes generally are not recommended for conversion from paved to unpaved surfaces. Local roads serving limited access to residences or businesses are better candidates.

Changes in Traffic Patterns and Vehicle Type
Modern agricultural equipment (i.e., tractors, combines, farm trucks) have greatly increased in size and carrying capacity, along with greater crop yields, creating increased maintenance issues on paved and unpaved rural roads (Anderson 2011), with accelerated degradation of low-volume roads (Figure 6). Multiaxle semis, concrete haulers, large-load log trucks, and rising traffic volume can be equally destructive (Etter 2010; Taylor 2010) (Figure 7).

In some areas of the country where oil drilling and extraction have increased, such as North Dakota, Texas, and Pennsylvania, significant damage to roads from oil field traffic has occurred (Floyd 2013). Many of these rural paved roads have passed the end of their design life (Anderson 2011).

ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS—COST OF CONVERTING VERSUS REPAVING
The 2010 Wall Street Journal article “Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement” highlighted the economic strain many counties face when trying to maintain paved roads in rural areas (Etter 2010).

A recent study found that the state of Iowa would need to increase road funding by $220 million annually just to maintain the current road network (Anderson 2011).

Similar funding shortfalls for local road maintenance budgets are occurring across the country (Canfield 2009; Taylor 2010; Landers 2011). Cold-weather states in particular have high maintenance costs resulting from the repair of damage caused by freeze-thaw cycles but little available funding because of essential winter maintenance operations (Canfield 2009).

Coupled with declining budgets, agencies have seen raw material prices increase. Costs for gasoline, diesel, and asphalt binder, all petroleum-based products, are tied to fluctuating oil prices (Taylor 2010). However, fuel taxes, which are a primary source of funding for road maintenance, have remained constant in this time period. Improved fuel consumption technologies have further reduced this source of income.

The recent economic downturn has made governments reluctant to increase other taxes and has resulted in people driving less.


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Madness engulfs Japan

SUBHEAD: The tragedy of 3/11/11 and the horrors of Fukushima Daiichi has unhinged the Japanese mind.

By Juan Wilson on 4 December 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/12/madness-engulfs-japan.html)


Image above: Zaha Hadid Architects' proposal for Japan's new national stadium to be built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. From (http://damoncoulter.photoshelter.com/image/I0000qQkANyZU7NU).

It has been my opinion that the terrorist attacks on America on 9/11/01 that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and seriously damaged the Pentagon drove the United Stated to madness.

The ramifications are still roiling through our bloodstream - an endless war against the Middle East and Fascist security measures at home that include spying on every communication Americans make and a militarization of our police and transportation systems.

Well we are not alone. The tragic events in Japan two-and-one-half years ago have driven Japan into a madness that leads straight to Fascism. Officials will often argue that they are only trying to keep the public calm and avoid panic, but it is more likely officials want to protect themselves (or their handlers) by "saving face".

In Asia the cultural attribute of "saving face" still has a powerful hold. Japan is no exception. With regards to the government and industry handling of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster this is proving to compound the problems.

The Daily Beast: Jake Adelstein, Nov. 29, 2013: [...] even politicians inside the ruling bloc are saying, “It can’t be denied that another purpose is to muzzle the press, shut up whistleblowers, and ensure that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima ceases to be an embarrassment before the Olympics.” [...] And most tellingly, Masako Mori, the Minister of Justice, has declared that nuclear related information will most likely be a designated secret. For the Abe administration this would be fantastic way to deal with the issue of tons of radiated water leaking  [...] There seems to be no end to stopping the toxic waste leaks there but the new legislation would allow the administration to plug the information leaks permanently. As [it] continues to pour into the ocean and our food supply, it is an ominous sign that the Japanese government refuses to disclose information about the levels of pollution [...]  

Bloomberg’s William Pesek, Dec. 2, 2013: The entire process has echoes of George Orwell. [...] if I grab a beer with a bureaucrat and ask the wrong question, could I end up in handcuffs? Ambiguity reigns. Last week, the No. 2 official in [Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, Shigeru Ishiba, issued a dark warning to anyone like me who might dare to question the bill. In a Nov. 29 blog post, the LDP secretary-general likened any such challenge to “an act of terrorism.” He’s since stood by his ominous statement. [Update: Read Ishiba's apology here] [...] “How can the government respond to growing demands for transparency from a public outraged by the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear accident if it enacts a law that gives it a free hand to classify any information considered too sensitive as a ‘state secret’?” Reporters Without Borders asked in a Nov. 27 statement. Essentially, the group argued, Japan “is making investigative journalism illegal [...]

Japan Times, Dec. 3, 2013: With the contentious state secrets bill slated to clear the Upper House this week, citizens have been holding daily protests in front of the Diet building, denouncing the law as emblematic of the “rise of fascism.” [...] Atsuko Ikegami, 45, also decried what she viewed as the state tightening its grip on citizen access to critical information, including about nuclear crises. [...] “When those (anti-nuclear) rallies happened, I thought, ‘Well, the Japanese people finally learned to stand up and make their voice heard,’ ” Ikegami said. “But the bill could subject these activists to constant spying by the state [...]”

Control of information and spying are only one aspect of the problem. Coverups and denial of the dangers have lead directly harming the public. Reassurances on the safety of food grown and fish caught in areas impacted by radioactive plumes are one aspect. Another are the faked reports of low radiation distribution where topsoil has been removed before testing for radiation. See (http://enenews.com/concerns-japanese-govt-is-manipulating-radiation-readings-levels-much-higher-than-monitoring-stations-indicate). Self-delusion and xenophobia, and paranoia are rampant as well: 

PNAS scientific journal published by Japanese scholars, Oct. 5, 2011: about 20 percent of Japanese land, including Tokyo, is contaminated with highly toxic radiation. It is obvious that agricultural products are also contaminated as the land is polluted with radioactive materials. The contamination on land will last approximately 300 years.

EXSKF, Nov. 28, 2013: The 33rd Ministry of Justice human rights essay contest for junior high school students has been won by a student in Miyagi Prefecture who wrote not buying Fukushima’s peaches because of radiation fear was the same as him being “discriminated” against by his classmate for being a Chinese national. Refusing the Fukushima produce because of radiation fear is tantamount to racial discrimination, according to the student and the Ministry of Justice who selected his essay as the best of the best this year. [...] Not buying Fukushima produce, as the government tells you to? You’re racist [...]

Korea Times, Dec. 2, 2013: More than two and a half years have passed since the “meltdown” at Fukushima nuclear power plant but the exact extent of the damage remains uncertain. Worse, it has been left unrepaired. Thus, experts and citizens worry about the catastrophic impacts on health and safety. [...] Kim Ik-joong, a biology professor from Dongguk University, said that radiation at Fukushima nuclear power plant was at least seven times as much as that at Chernobyl [...]

The Japanese government effort made to presented Tokyo as the best venue in the world to host the 2020 Olympics is one sign of the self-delusion of the country. There is little doubt now that Japan will never return to business as usual. Fuskushima Daiichi is a festering wound that cannot be "healed". It is merely a question of how bad will it be... and that won't be known even by our great-grand-children.

Japan is not alone in its madness. The US government is in denial and obscuring the risks to health of the Pacific Ocean and the West Coast. So is Canada.

Even the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cannot be trusted. According to itself, the IAEA "serves as the world's central intergovernmental forum for scientific and technical co-operation in the nuclear field." As a referee to protect the public and the environment one has to wonder when it has spent over half a century encouraging the development of the peaceful applications of nuclear technology.

If you want to know how intense the madness can be in Japan see The Cove. It was the winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, The Cove follows a high-tech dive team on a mission to discover the truth about the dolphin trade as practiced in Taiji, Japan. This movie uncovers how this small seaside village serves as a horrifying microcosm of massive ecological crimes happening worldwide.


Video above: Trailer for "The Cove", 2009. Horrific secret slaughter of dolphins uncovered in Japan. From (http://youtu.be/4KRD8e20fBo).

See also:
Mission Impossible: What future Fukushima? 8/30/13

Japan government engaged in a vast, duplicitous and fruitless campaign to decontaminate Fukushima Prefecture..

Obama G-20 Summit priorities

SUBHEAD: We might try to keep 300 tons of radioactive water from entering the Pacific everyday - for eternity? Nahhh.

By Juan Wilson on 5 September 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/09/obama-g-20-summit-priorities.html)


Image above: Abe and Obama shake at photo-op before meeting at G-20 in Russia today. From ().

No this is not a joke. At the opening of the G-20 economic summit, in Russia, President Obama was able to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Abe.

What did they talk about. The ongoing worldwide recession that has affected Japan for 20 years and America for 5 years?

No.

How about developing a joint plan for the destroyed Fukushims Daiichi nuclear power plant site. We might try to keep 300 tons of highly radioactive waste water from entering the Pacific Ocean everyday - for eternity?

No.

USA Today reports:

"Attending a G-20 summit in Russia otherwise devoted to the global economy, Obama said before a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that he looked forward to "an extensive conversation" about Syria.

That includes "our joint recognition that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is not only a tragedy but also a violation of international law that must be addressed," Obama said."

WTF! All Obama wanted to talk about was getting Japan's approval to punish Syria's president Bashar al Assad for allegedly using poison gas on his enemies.

I guess the problem with gassing people is that it kills masses of people without discrimination - kind of like a Predator drone at a wedding party.

In the past to get Japan to yield to our wishes we used the technique of carpet bombing Japanese cities with explosives and incendiary devices until we got a firestorm started.

Even though the America killed over a million Japanese this way they refused to see things our way. Then we got smart and started dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities.

That did the trick. Needless to say, America argues to this day that we only did it to save lives.

After his meeting with Abe U.S. President Barack Obama said on Thursday;

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shared the view that chemical weapons use in Syria was a violation of international law that must be addressed.

Obama and Abe met on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in St. Petersburg as Washington sought to rally international support for a U.S. military strike on Syrian targets.

"I ... look forward to an extensive conversation about the situation in Syria and ... our joint recognition that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is not only a tragedy but also a violation of international law that must be addressed," Obama told reporters.

Abe, who has refrained from speaking publicly about Japan's stance on Obama's push for military action against Damascus, said he looked forward to discussing with the U.S. president ways to improve the situation in Syria.

What it's really about
Why the obsession with Syria?

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: G-20 Agenda Item #1 - Fix Fukushima 8/7/13

  .

G20 Agenda Item #1 - Fix Fukushima

SUBHEAD: Given the threat to life in the largest body of liquid water in the known universe.

By Juan Wilson on 7 August 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/08/g20-agenda-item-1-fix-fukushina.html)


Image above: Earth to spaceship G-20 "Wake up you fools!". From (http://www.g20.org/photo/20130605/781388962.html).

The G20 Summit, to be held in St. Petersburg on September 5-6, 2013, will be the main G20 event of 2013. The meetings will be between the political and financial leaders of the G20 nations that include Argentina, Australia, Brazil,  Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy,  Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States and the European Union.

Looking over this list of nations one can see it includes the vast majority of the people of the world, as well the bulk of money, resources, energy, industrialization, technology and military hardware on this planet. According to Wikipedia:

 "Collectively, the G-20 economies account for approximately 80 percent of the gross world product (GWP), 80 percent of world trade, and two-thirds of the world population"

It is understood that the purpose of the G20 is world finance, but it has evolved into the most significant meeting of world leaders that regularly occurs. Obviously, they can talk about anything they think is important. So what is their publicly announced agenda for their upcoming meeting:

1. Framework for strong, sustainable and balanced growth;
2. Jobs and employment;
3. International financial architecture reform;
4. Strengthening financial regulation;
5. Energy sustainability;
6. Development for all;
7. Enhancing multilateral trade;
8. Fighting corruption.

We can only pray that this is a fake agenda, or even a joke, and that the real agenda will include some of the real problems facing life on this planet.

The Worst Nuclear Disaster in History
Chernobyl was bad, but it was one nuclear reactor and was dealt with quickly. Given the threat to life in the largest body of liquid water in the known universe, the number one item on my agenda would be a commitment by the G20 to fix Fukushima - whatever the cost.

That means immediately coordinating a worldwide effort to mitigate the ongoing disaster that has been created by TEPCO and the government of Japan by building six nuclear reactors on one site at the shore of the Pacific Ocean in a highly dangerous earthquake zone.

This effort may cost a few trillions of dollars. But that's nothing compared to what the central banks of the G20 have stolen from the world's people to keep afloat after their international Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008. Think on the scale of building the pyramids Egypt, The Great Wall of China, or the US NASA Moon program - whatever it costs. It's not like the Pacific Ocean isn't stressed already. The ocean is dying.

• The reefs are dying -  from acidification (from CO2 absorbion), global warming (CO2 and methane releases). 
• The fish are dying - from over fishing (over 90% of megafauna are gone). 
• The plastic gyres are killing - birds, sea creatures and interfering with the organic chemistry of the ocean. 

Now, to add insult to injury, Japanese nuclear plant is spewing 400 tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean everyday. And that's the situation "under control".  As far back as August 2011 small amounts of cesium-137 and cesium-134 were detected in 15 tuna caught near San Diego. 

Moreover, since 2011 University California Berkeley School of Nuclear Engineers (UCBSNE) have been reporting on their website findings of cesium 134, 137, strontium-90 and more in topsoil, rain and groundwater, milk, and produce. Cal State Long Beach researchers have found iodine-131 in kelp beds along the California coast, as well.

Worst and Getting Worster
But these are only the current problems at Fukushima. Others abound.  Just remember that there are three reactors that have melted down and likely experienced the China Syndrome - that is. they have burned their way through the bottom of the reactor core, through the vessel around it, then the containment building and finally through its foundation they rest on.

Each reactor melted core is about a 150 tons of uranium, plutonium and zirconium in hot blob of what's called "corium".  No one knows, or has stated, what the location or condition of that corium is. Re-criticallity (chain reactions) and other bad things can happen.

The nuclear fuel rods in Reactor #4 sit in the structurally damaged concrete pool of water 80 feet above the ground. Those rods have more fissile material in them than reactor below could possibly hold. Since 2012 the wall of the pool has been bulging and the reactor building seems to be sinking into the earth.

If ground water entering the site were not able to escape into the ocean, or be diverted, it could liquify the earth under the foundation of the reactor and topple the fuel rods to the ground. Such an event could make the Fukushima Daiichi site uninhabitable.

A Plea to the G20
Convince the Japanese representatives to admit that the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi site is out of their control and that it must be handled by the world at large. Have all G20 members commit what ever resources are necessary to mitigate the pressing dangers and long range dangers presented by this disaster. Get on this pronto.

It is not acceptable to twiddle your fingers and call for industrial growth and more jobs. Industry and manpower need to be put in service to saving the world from Fukushima.

And while w'ere at it!
Beyond item #1 on my agenda for the G20 would be:

#2) A carefully accelerated schedule for safely closing down all nuclear facilities in the world. This effort should include the decommissioning of all nuclear weapons and their components.

#3) The re-localization of food production with as little need  as possible for mechanization, petroleum products and chemicals.

#4) A rejection of centralized power grids and the adoption of small-scale off-grid alternative power sources with greatly reduced overall consumption.

#5) The abandonment of international corporations and capitalism as the means of operating the economies of the world to achieve jobs and growth (a.k.a. slavery and death).

 There's plenty more but we should start with a doable list. Let's get on this people.


 .

Climate 911

SUBHEAD: With Frankenstorm Sandy has that moment arrived when we finally "get" Climate Change? We can only hope so.

By Ugo Bardi on 31 October 2012 for Cassandra's Legacy -
(http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2012/10/climate-911-moment-has-arrived.html)


Image above: Intersection of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York City.  From cell phone photo supplied by Laura Wilson.

A few weeks ago, I published a post titled "Climate, a 9/11 moment?  (see below) on Cassandra's legacy. In it, I said that we could experience a "9/11 moment" when:

"Something will happen; something so big, so horrible, so terrifying that people will watch the news in TV while telling themselves: 

"It is happening now, it is happening to us!" 

Does Hurricane Sandy fit the description? For sure it has caused the return of climate change in the mainstream news. Enough to qualify as a "9/11 moment?" Perhaps not, but surely we'll have more of these moments in the future. It is going to happen.

---

By Ugo Bardi on 30 September 2012 for Cassandra's Legacy -

(http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.it/2012/09/climate-911-moment.html)
 
Maybe the moment will come when everyone will wake up to the climate situation. Something will happen; something so big, so horrible, so terrifying that people will watch the news in TV while telling themselves: "it is happening now, it is happening to us!" That could be a "9/11 moment" or, perhaps, a "Pearl Harbor" moment. Then, we may finally start doing something against climate change.

On the other hand, a general "aha" climate moment may never come. Already plenty of big, horrible, and terrifying things have happened, with most people barely noticing. Think of the melting of the North Pole of this year. It had never happened on this planet for the past 3 million years, possibly as many as 13 million years. Isn't that dramatic enough? Apparently not, because the mainstream press barely mentioned it.

Most people just don't seem to be able to connect the dots, to see the relation of climate change to all what is happening around us. Will we boil a little more every summer, always expecting next summer to be better? Will we run out of oil and blame speculation? Will we starve and blame the financial crisis? We have already seen environmental concerns being swept away from the political agenda by concerns about the financial crisis, the cost of gasoline, jobs, security, and all the rest. So, how are we going to react to the next climate crisis? Maybe retreating even deeper into denial.

Back to many centuries ago, Rutilius Namatianus left us a report from the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He saw disaster all around him: Rome sacked, the roads destroyed, the legions defeated, people dying. And yet, he couldn't understand the reasons for what he was seeing. He saw all these events just as temporary reverse of fortunes. Rome has been in trouble before, Rome will be great again, he says.

But none of those in charge during the last decades of the Empire could understand what was happening (with perhaps one exception). They could only keep doing what they had been doing before, always hoping that the following year would be better than the past one. Perhaps that will be our destiny, too. There is a difference, though. If the Romans were blind to what was happening to them, we were warned in advance but we chose to close our eyes.

Climate Change? Who Cares?

SUBHEAD: New poll indicates Americans don't care as much about climate change as before. By Brian Merchant on 5 July 2012 for TreeHugger - (http://www.treehugger.com/climate-change/americans-dont-care-much-about-climate-change-new-poll.html) Image above: Twenty some-somethings posing for website promoting Spring Break in Daytona Beach, Florida. From (http://www.daytonabreak.com/).

Stop if you've heard this one before: Americans don't care as much about global warming as they used to, a new poll says. The poll, known colloquially as "every single climate poll done since that Al Gore movie came out," finds that, in fact, climate change is no longer our top environmental concern at all. It now ranks a distant second to air and water pollution as the planet's most problematic environmental woe.

Here's the Washington Post, in a story about their own poll:

Climate change no longer ranks first on the list of what Americans see as the world’s biggest environmental problem, according to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll.

Just 18 percent of those polled name it as their top environmental concern. That compares with 33 percent who said so in 2007, amid publicity about a major U.N. climate report and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary about global warming. Today, 29 percent identify water and air pollution as the world’s most pressing environmental issue.

The story then goes on to quote a bunch of people who no longer care about climate change. Here are some of the apathetic:

"I really don’t give it a thought,” said Wendy Stewart, a 46-year-old bookkeeper in New York. Although she thinks warmer winters and summers are signs of climate change, she has noticed that political leaders don’t bring up the subject. “I’ve never heard them speak on global warming,” she said. “I’ve never heard them elaborate on it.”

Michael Joseph, 20, a student at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, said he sees extreme weather-related events such as the Colorado wildfires and the derecho storm that struck Washington on Friday as “having something to do with climate change.” But, like Stewart, he added, “I don’t really hear about it that much.”

Refreshingly, the Post also interviews some everymen (not just climate wonks, I swear!) who wish Obama would lead on the issue. The poll also reveals that most people still support government action on climate change. So there's that.

Hmm, so why the precipitous decline in perceptions about the urgency of the climate problem? It couldn't be that few public figures are really willing to discuss it much, could it? Or that our media is terrified of even mentioning it in a news story? Nah, it's probably because it's a hoax, and people are wising up!

.

The Tyranny of the Temporary

SUBHEAD: About a technology that could power radio communication and the like for as long as our species endures.

 By John Michael Greer on 20 May 2011 for the Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/05/tyranny-of-temporary.html)

 
Image above: A Soviet kerosene lamp powered thermoelectric generator with thirty cooling fins. The terminal plate has 5 terminals with two isolated generator banks and an earth terminal. From (http://www.aqpl43.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/POWER/thermoelectric/thermoelectric.htm#th).

For just short of a year now, my posts here have focused on exploring one extensive set of options for dealing with the crisis of industrial civilization – the toolkit that came to maturity in the organic gardening and appropriate technology movements of the Seventies, and has been more or less sitting on a shelf since that time, being roundly ignored even by those people who thought they were pursuing every available response to peak oil.

The process of hauling those tools down off the shelf and handing them out isn’t quite finished yet, but before we go on to the last round of unpacking, I want to talk about another side of the social process that put them on the shelf in the first place. That dimension of our predicament was pointed up by a commenter who responded to part of last week’s post by suggesting, among other things, that people would still be getting their food from supermarkets for long enough that anyone alive today doesn’t need to worry about other options.

It’s not an example that gets brought up often; still, the same assumption that current ways of doing things will remain in place indefinitely is an important reason why so many otherwise prudent and intelligent people ignore the signs that their lifestyle is getting ready to terminate itself with extreme prejudice. A hard look at the logic behind it is certainly in order. Supermarkets, as it happens, make a good example. The first supermarket in America, Ralphs Grocery Store, opened for business in 1929 in Los Angeles, California.

Until the boomtime that followed the Second World War, supermarkets were found only in a very few urban centers; most Americans bought meat from a nearby butcher shop, had milk delivered by a neighborhood dairy, and parceled out the rest of their food and sundries budget among other local shops, most of them independently owned and nearly all of them getting the bulk of their supplies from local and regional producers.

It took billions of barrels of cheap petroleum, the massive suburbanization of postwar America, the building of the National Defense Highway System, federal policies that tilted the playing field in favor of big producers and long-haul trucking firms, and decades of highly aggressive and dubiously legal monopolistic practices on the part of national chains, among other things, to steamroller the once diverse landscape of American food production and turn supermarkets selling national brands into the only option that’s still available to most Americans on grocery day.

Only if those factors are ignored is it possible to think of supermarkets as the natural and inevitable form of a modern food distribution system, or to assume that it will remain frozen in place as all the factors that made it possible dissolve beneath incoming waves of change.

The same thing is true, doubled, quadrupled, and in spades, of the “global economy” that was so widely ballyhooed a decade or two ago. Its proponents liked to portray it as the unstoppable wave of a new and prosperous future, but it’s become increasingly clear that it was nothing of the kind. It was only economically feasible in the first place because the final blowoff of the age of cheap oil dropped fuel prices so low that transportation costs basically no longer mattered, and it was only politically feasible because the American middle class was quite willing to see the working class here and abroad sold down the river to force down the price of consumer goods, one of several short term gimmicks meant to prop up a facade of prosperity that was already visibly cracking. It was inevitably temporary, too. The handful of Third World nations that figured out how to cash in on the process proceeded to use the influx of dollars to build their own industrial economies behind trade barriers identical to the ones America used a century earlier to do the same thing at Great Britain’s expense.

Today they are busily out-competing the United States for the fossil fuels and resources that made our lifestyles of the recent past possible in the first place. The countries that have prospered most from globalized free trade, in other words, are those that never allowed their own markets to be held hostage to foreign producers, and treated globalization as the temporary blip it was. Meanwhile the American middle class is discovering, to its considerable chagrin, that the same strategies of offshoring and disinvestment that gutted the working class in the 1970s and 1980s are now being turned on them, in an attempt to prop up the lifestyles of a far narrower circle that we may as well call the investor class.

While globalism remains firmly in place in the investment world, as a result, the ability of American consumers to make themselves feel rich by profiting off the low cost of sweatshop labor overseas is going away as incomes evaporate and prices creep implacably upwards. A third example of the same phenomenon is very much a live issue in the peak oil scene just now, and since the aftermath hasn’t shown up yet, it’s worth tracking.

The figures for total liquid fuel production worldwide, which dropped after the housing crash, have risen with the recovery in oil prices and topped their 2008 record this year; a number of peak oil observers – here’s one example – have argued on that basis that we may be able to count on a long-term plateau or even a successful transition to alternatives. Still, there’s a fly in the ointment, and it’s the way that total fuel production figures permit the double-counting of fuel.

Unlike conventional crude oil, after all, much alternative fuel production requires very large energy inputs, and nearly all of this comes from existing fossil fuels. It takes a great deal of diesel fuel to grow corn for ethanol production, for example, and a fair amount of natural gas or electricity (the latter mostly generated by coal or natural gas) to run the plants that turn the corn into ethanol. Oilseed production and refining for biodiesel is subject to similar constraints, while the Canadian tar sands that have received so much attention in recent years yield a usable crude substitute only with the help of prodigious amounts of natural gas.

A meaningful measure of liquid fuels production should at least subtract the total amount of liquid fuels that has to be cycled back in to the process of producing more liquid fuels, and might reasonably subtract the value of nonliquid fuel energy consumed in the process of production, for much the same reason that a company’s balance sheet has to subtract expenses from income when it comes time to figure profits. Does the current statistic for total fuel production do so? Surely you jest. Thus the energy content of a growing fraction of our available liquid fuel supply is being counted twice.

 Furthermore, the diversion of increasing amounts of natural gas and food crops into liquid fuel production functions as a way of pushing costs off the books of the fuel industry and onto other economic sectors; fuel prices in the industrial world, in effect, are among other things being subsidized at the expense of poor families in the Third World who have seen the price of grain and oil jump in recent months. The political and economic consequences of this sort of malign offshoring of costs are considerable, and have already begun to circle back around to the industrial world.

Here again, a temporary process – the desperate attempt to pad out dwindling oil reserves with anything and everything that comes to hand, no matter what the energy cost or wider impact – is being mistaken for an enduring support for business as usual. This habit of treating temporary phenomena as permanent conditions has many roots, to be sure. America’s bizarre relationship with its own history, compounded of equal parts popular mythology, nostalgic fascination, and a conviction that the past has nothing to teach the present, has a very large role in it.

The contemporary religion of progress, with its dogmatic insistence that history is a one-way street and that what we have now is better than anything the past had to offer even when the evidence points the other way, also plays a substantial role. Equally, the deeply troubled national conscience I’ve discussed in past posts had a lot to do with it; if you’ve sold your soul to the devil, in effect, it’s profoundly human to talk yourself into believing that what you got in exchange was worth the price.

Whatever the sources of the tyranny of the temporary that dominates so much of contemporary thinking, though, it’s a luxury we can’t afford at this point, and we’ll be able to afford it even less as the crisis of industrial civilization unfolds and the available options narrow. An example from a different corner of the deindustrial landscape may help clarify the possibilities that open up once temporary conditions are recognized as such, and those of us who are minded to think about the future start making plans and launching projects on a more sturdy basis. The example I have in mind showed up the other day while I was rereading Farrington Daniels’ classic Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy [see preview here].

 Published in 1964, it’s still among the best surveys of potential ways to use solar energy, and though the technology is a little dated by modern standards, that’s not necessarily a disadvantage – most of the methods Daniels discusses, unlike most current equivalents, are well within the reach of the sort of basement-workshop mad scientists I’ve suggested we need in droves just now.

Notably, too, Daniels covers a range of technologies that seem to have dropped out of the conversation concerning solar energy these days, and one of them is solar thermoelectric power. No doubt the retired engineers among my readers know all about the Seebeck effect and can skip the next paragraph. For the rest, thermoelectric power is an interesting bit of physics. Imagine a zigzag of metal in which, so to speak, all the zigs are all of one kind of metal (say, copper), all the zags are another (say, zinc), and the two metals join at the angles. If you apply heat to the angles on one side of the zigzag and cool the angles on the other side, electric current starts flowing through the zigzag, and if you solder wires to the two ends and connect them to something that uses electricity, you’re good to go.

On a small scale, it’s a surprisingly robust effect; back in the 1940s and 1950s, Russia used to manufacture sturdy little thermoelectric generators that put the heat from a kerosene lamp on one side of the zigzag and the Siberian climate on the other. Those proved quite adequate to power the tube-based radio receivers standard at the time, which weren’t exactly abstemious in their power needs. In Daniels’ time, a certain amount of tinkering had been done on solar thermoelectric power – plate 8 of his book shows a modestly sized parabolic reflector heating a thermoelectric rig and charging a car battery – and it turned out to be very useful for satellites, since the heat differential between a lump of hot radioactive metal and the chill of interplanetary space produces a nice steady current suitable for deep space probes.

Its possibilities on an industrial scale never amounted to much, though, as it proved to be difficult to scale up to any significant degree, and of course as long as we can count on a steady supply of cheap abundant fossil fuels, solar thermoelectric power is a non-starter. Look past the tyranny of the temporary, though, and the possibilities are fascinating.

To say that a solar thermoelectric generator is a simple device understates the case considerably. Benjamin Franklin could have knocked one together in a spare afternoon while waiting for the next thunderstorm to blow in; for that matter, it would not have posed a significant challenge to a skilled craftsperson in ancient Egypt.

All you need is the ability to work nonferrous metals and the very basic geometry skills needed to shape a parabolic dish reflector. Strictly speaking, the efficiency of heat-to-electricity conversion isn’t that high, but given a more meaningful definition of efficiency – for example, labor and resources input to electricity output – it leaves many other options in the dust, and its sustainability is hard to match; we’re talking, ultimately, about a technology that could conceivably power radio communication and the like for as long as our species endures. There are other technologies that are equally obscured by the tyranny of the temporary, and equally worth developing and preserving once a wider view of the situation is taken into account.

Some of those may come within reach surprisingly soon; a recent study from India, for example, has shown that solar water heating systems can pay for themselves in two years via savings on fuel costs and yield a substantial net gain thereafter; as energy prices begin their next major upward movement – something that’s likely to happen in a big way once the market starts to pay attention to the tremendous depletion rates of shale gas – that figure is likely to turn even more sharply in a favorable direction. Get over the habit of assuming that today’s temporary abundance of fossil fuel energy is a permanent condition, and it becomes much easier to spot the opportunities for constructive action that remain open, even this late in the game.

 .

The Leading Edge

SUBHEAD: We simply dug the coal, pumped the oil, and contaminated the atmosphere as fast as economically feasible.

 By Tom Whipple on 3 November 2010 in Fall Church News-Press - (http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/7696-the-peak-oil-crisis-the-leading-edge.html)
 

Image above: Actual photo of oil derricks along seawall in Huntington Beach,CA, in 1935. Tinted and labeled by Juan Wilson.

Do you remember the furor over drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge a few years back? The whole country was up in arms. At various times some 50 to 60 percent of Americans favored drilling in the area as they were told this would result in lower gas prices.

Last week the USGS lowered its estimate of the amount of oil that could be extracted from the region all the way from 10 billion barrels down to less than one billion, making drilling in the area uneconomical. By the way, the amount of crude being pumped down the Alaskan pipeline now has fallen from 2 million barrels a day (b/d) when the pipeline first opened back in the 1970's to about 600,000 b/d in recent weeks.

The trouble is that when the flow of oil falls below a quantity estimated to be 200-300,000 b/d (some say 500,000) the line will have to be closed as there will simply not be enough hot oil being sent down the pipeline to keep it from freezing in winter.

Last week an organization in California, The Post Carbon Institute, released a new book, "The Post Carbon Reader," which draws a much broader picture of the serious issues facing mankind. With 30 authors, each specializing in some aspect of the multiple troubles we face, the scope of the book touches on nearly every aspect of our civilization that is out of balance, unsustainable, and headed for a fall.

The basic proposition of the book is that the world has reached the limits of growth in terms of its population, economic activity, and the ability of the atmosphere to absorb more carbon emissions. Either the world's peoples must transform themselves into a sustainable number living in a sustainable manner or there will be many dire consequences right up to the possibility that the human race itself could become extinct. Clearly, this is serious stuff.

Some hold that our sustainability problem started when we first started planting crops and domesticating animals 10,000 years ago. This thesis says if we had stuck with hunting and gathering as a race we would have been able to sustain our act indefinitely, but then we would never have had enough surplus energy to learn reading & writing, and to build cities, the Internet and space ships.

Our immediate problem, however, started in earnest with the industrial revolution about 200 years ago when we first started digging up prodigious quantities of coal and feeding it into steam engines. It wasn't long before we struck oil and the rest is history. The world's population went from an estimated 5 or 10 million when we first started farming, to a billion when we started serious coal digging, to about 7 billion today. We also got incredibly richer in terms of material goods and could sure get around much faster.

In retrospect it was an incredible couple of centuries, with some, but not all, aspects of civilization reaching new highs. Mankind's greatest omission during this period was the failure to use our newfound sources of energy and knowledge to make all these wonderful benefits sustainable. We simply dug the coal, pumped the oil, and contaminated the atmosphere as fast as economically feasible. Now these golden centuries are drawing to a close.

In surveying the detritus from our 200-year binge, the Post Carbon's authors identify at least a dozen of what it is fair to term "civilization threatening" mega-problems facing us - too many people; screwed up atmosphere, climate, and oceans; too little water; too little food; declining supplies of fossil fuels; over extension of credit and massive national debts; tottering global financial systems; and the list goes on. One of the book's major points is that all these problems are interconnected so that developments in one of them affects many others.

Now there is little new in all this. Any alert citizen is aware of at least some of the mega-problems facing us. What is lacking for many, however, is a sense of timing. We all know that someday the sun will explode and engulf the earth, but this unhappy day is said to be billions of years away. A good solid meteor hit would not do us any good either (remember the dinosaurs), but as these things seem to come millions of years apart few worry. As long as a problem is perceived as being decades, or for some even a few years away, it is not a concern.

Unfortunately the attitude that serious adverse events while coming are still beyond the horizon of concern has led to nearly universal complacency and denial. In recent years it has become obvious that we are already in the throes of at least two of our mega-problems, peaking world oil supplies and an unstable economic system.

These two problems are of course closely interconnected to the point where it now is difficult to sort out cause and effect. Some believe that the four fold increases in oil prices in the last decade was a major cause of the at least some of the world's current economic problems. Others believe that continued growth of world oil production is being hampered by our recessionary times.

In any case it seems clear that the first ripples of the tsunami that will come with the winding down of the industrial age are already upon us. Universal recognition of this fact cannot be far away.

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Real Security for Kauai

SUBHEAD: What are our priorities to be in the face of gathering social and environmental problems? Image above: Rep. Mazie Hirono speaking at the rally for the Equal Rights Amendment in Wahington DC in 2007. From (http://www.flickr.com/photos/now_photos/3743787206).  

By Staff of the Kauai Alliance on 28 July 2010 -  
(islandbreath.blogspot.com/2010/07/real-security-for-kauai.html)

Are you feeling secure? Has someone you know lost his or her job? Or home? Or gone hungry? Does she or he have the assurance of health care in a medical emergency?

Our 2nd congressional district Representative Mazie Hirono will share her Washington perspective on these and other manifestations of SECURITY at a public forum in Kapaa on Saturday, Aug 7.

 In times of high budget deficits, where should tax dollars be spent, or not spent, to provide security for Kauai's and America's citizens? Are the two wars and the military industry worth the cost?

Or should funds be reapplied to local sustainability? The Congresswoman will share the stage with a panel of four outspoken community leaders; Koohan Paik, writer and filmmaker, co-author of Superferry Chronicles and Kipukai Kuali`i, community and labor organizer.

Also Andrea Brower, Deputy Director at Malama Kauai, and Kyle Kajihiro, who is Program Director at American Friends Service Committee in Honolulu and who is outspoken in his views on the US military presence in the Pacific basin and in Hawaii.  

WHAT:
A conference on what strategy will lead to real security in this time of high unemployment and budget deficits. It is a free event.  

FEATURING:
Mazie Hirono - U.S. Congressional Representative Kyle Kajihiro - Director American Friends Service Committee, Honolulu Koohan Paik - Filmmaker, author of "The Superferry Chronicles", Kipukai Kualii - Community and labor organizer Andrea Brower - Deputy Director of Malama Kauai  
WHEN:
Saturday, August 7th at 5:00 pm  

WHERE:
"Na Keiki O Ka Aina" Center for Polynesian Culture (North end of Safeway Shopping Center next to Papaya's Natural Foods) Waipouli, Kauai  

INFO:
Kip at (808) 822-7646 or email Ray at: may11nineteen71@gmail.com  

SPONSOR:
Presented by Kauai Alliance for Peace and Social Justice

  .

Edwin Black's book "The Plan"

SUBHEAD: The question is not if, but when a collapse of the oil supply (of some kind) takes place. Image above: Fuel rationing induced riot in Tehran, Iran, in June 2007. From (http://payvand.com/news/07/jun/1263.html) By Daniel Pargman on 17 February 2010 in Life after oil - (http://life-after-oil.blogspot.com/2010/02/plan-by-black-2008.html) Author Edwin Black's niche is to (assisted by dozens of volunteers) sieve through libraries and archives and write extremely well-researched books. He usually spends a couple of years doing research before he cranks out a new book, but he made an exception for the sleek, no more than 130 pages long "The Plan: How to rescue society when the oil stops - or the day before" (2008). A little more than a year ago, I wrote [in Swedish - not yet translated to English] about his first oil-related book, "Internal Combustion: How corporations and governments addicted the world to oil and derailed the alternatives" (2006). Here I review the 2008 "sequel. The book's starting point is America's (in)ability to cope with an acute fuel crisis. It does thus not start off with the “ordinary” Peak Oil scenario based on a relatively slow decline in global production but rather takes as its starting point a rather sudden change for the worse.

"Oil will ’peak‘ [...] the very hour a person cannot pump a gallon of gas or buy bread on an unstocked supermarket shelf because someone thousands of miles away has cut the lines of supply".

Although the book does not primarily deal with what exactly caused this sudden decline, it starts by giving an overview of how dependent and vulnerable the U.S. is if the daily supply of oil from neighboring and more distant countries would suddenly decline (the three largest exporters of oil to the United States are Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia). When it comes to Saudi Arabia, Black points out that the oil from the world's largest oil field, Ghawar, must pass through three vulnerable choke points on its journey to the U.S. and other export markets. At Abqaiq, two thirds of Saudi Arabia's oil is processed and prepared for shipment by tankers before the oil is sent to the port of Ras Tanura. Subsequently, all oil tankers have to travel through the 50 kilometers narrow Strait of Hormuz in order to reach the oceans. Of all the oil in the world that is transported by sea, approximately 40% has to traverse the narrow Strait of Hormuz, and Black calls these three choke points "the solar plexus of the planet." If any of these three sites were to be knocked out, the world would immediately go down for the count. In 2006, an attack by al-Qaeda against Abqaiq was averted, and Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz if the country is invaded by the United States or Israel. For Black, the question is not if, but when a collapse of the oil supply (of some kind) takes place. What then constitutes an acute oil crisis? At a 5% decrease in the oil volumes that are accessible to the Western world, the U.S. President may give permission to release oil from the strategic oil reserve. A decrease of 7% would trigger an "international crisis under emergency treaties", and a decrease of 10% would be a disaster which, according to an energy expert, would be "so off the chart that we cannot even model it". That does not sound very reassuring, does it? “The Plan” is Black's answer to what the U.S. needs to do to cope with a prolonged (more than 30 days long) reduction in the availability of oil by 5-10%. After stating that some (few) Western countries have plans for how to handle such a situation, Black makes a point of the fact that the United States Does Not Have a Plan - beyond letting the (marvelous, magical, miraculous) market handle such a never-occurred-before situation. To Black, his own book is right now the plan - the manual - for how to face such a crisis. In fact, the book is partly written as a manual, and therefore in places tends to become a rather dry read. The book's longest chapter is structured in the form of 18 regulations, and each regulation is followed by a discussion of the necessity and consequences of the regulation in question. Some of the regulations are quite formally written - ready to be immediately implemented in a real crisis:

"Regulation 15: Marine Restrictions on yachts, speed boats and non-commercial pleasure craft. Within one week of an oil supply emergency declaration, all non-commercial marine craft, including but not limited to private yachts, speed boats, recreational vessels and personal watercraft, shall be unable to refuel in the Continental United States, except in an emergency, until retrofitted to accept alternative fuel or propulsion system."

These 18 regulations govern everything from prices and rules about the sales of refined petroleum products, to how to deal with the strategic oil reserve, carpooling, speed limits (55 mph or 90 km/h, except "in the countryside"), idling, public transportation (very cheap or free), trailers, the black market and so on. Petrol price are set to a predetermined level that does not price the poor out of the market - since everyone must have the chance to get to a hospital or to work (for example as a cleaner in a hospital). The price of petrol will thus remain "reasonable", but the amount you will be able to buy will be rationed. One of the regulations states that a car’s fuel economy will determine how often the car may be driven; if a car cannot be driven at least 15 miles per gallon (mpg) - 6.3 kilometers per liter of gasoline – it may not be driven at all before it has been rebuilt/retrofitted. Cars with a fuel economy of up to 25 mpg may be driven one day per week, up to 35 mpg may be driven every second day, and for cars that have a fuel economy of 36 mpg or better (15 kilometers/liter) there will be no restrictions. All these regulations are short term measures which are to be implemented during the very first week. Eventually, all cars and other vehicles must be rebuilt so that they may be driven on fuel other than petrol. Regarding alternative fuels Black is agnostic – he thinks that people should use whatever works best in different parts of the United States and lists the available options: hydrogen, ammonia, alcohol (e.g. ethanol), biofuels, compressed natural gas (CNG) or electricity. Unfortunately, in the U.S. today it is very difficult to get around the rules and "upgrade" a car to drink other beverages than gasoline, so the starting position for the future growth industry if retrofitting cars is poor. The rigid rules of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have prevented the commercialization of alternatives to gasoline, thus nurturing a small (illegal) underground culture where people upgrade their cars at their own risk and using equipment from abroad. Who is to blame for the vulnerable situation that the United States and the rest of the Western world now finds itself in? Black identifies four main culprits: - OPEC bears some responsibility but gets off lightly; it was the West who invaded their territories after the First World War and created vassal states which supplied cheap oil, and, it was also the West who voluntarily made themselves dependent on OPEC’s oil. - The second scapegoat is the public and their (spineless) representatives among politicians. - Oil companies (Big Oil) are according to Black more blameworthy than OPEC and the general public. They have enriched themselves while they have made society more dependent on oil, and have at the same time delayed and discouraged all possible alternatives. In the second quarter of 2008, America's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, made an astronomical profit of 11 680 million dollars. If you remove all oil companies from the list of America's 500 largest companies (Fortune 500), Exxon earned more money than all the other companies combined during that period. - Black though reserves the greatest blame for Detroit and the American car companies. Already in the childhood of the automobile, the nascent automotive industry sabotaged and manipulated the alternative, better solution - the electric car. From a long history of "subversive activities", Detroit becomes the main scapegoat for its recent 35 year long campaign of obstruction and foolish decisions. The automotive industry has repeatedly made the wrong turn ever since the first oil crisis in 1973 made it clear that the U.S. was vulnerable due to its dependence on oil. Despite this obvious vulnerability, Detroit has since then built, sold and exported many millions of gas-thirsty cars which have exacerbated and already-bad situation. Actor Alex Baldwin (no kidding) reflects on Detroit's burden of debt:

"The heads of [US automakers] did not spend the last thirty years lying in bed each night, sleepless. They did not turn their spouses in the wee hours and say, "How do I serve the automotive needs of the American public and better protect their health and safety AND help them conserve energy?" [...] Instead, they spent billions of dollars attempting to bribe the Congress to avoid putting in seat belts and air bags, installing catalytic converters and reaching more ambitious fuel efficiency standards. For the most part, they succeeded."

Based on all of this, Black concludes in his 18th and final regulation that the oil and automotive industries must absolutely not be involved in any discussions about how to solve the oil crisis:

”Iowa corn producers, Detroit carmakers, oil companies and other forces of petroaddiction must be kept out of the fix. They will destroy it, dilute it, distract it, dismantle it, or divert it. […] if lobbyists are not excluded from the rescue plan, then any plan will be doomed.”

Right now, two out of the three major American car companies are down for the count (General Motors and Chrysler). In a way, they have thus been "punished" for their sins. But from another perspective, they have instead been absolved and have left their sins behind them, because it is no longer possible to claim compensation from them - and especially so if the compensation should be proportional to the harm these companies more or less deliberately have inflicted upon society. In some ways Black may come across as extreme. His answer would be that a major threat must be countered with measures that (to some) may seem extreme (today). In other ways, however, he is moderate in his approaches and assumptions. Something I find to be a weakness is that he never criticizes or even reflects upon fundamental assumptions about the American way of life based on cars and long distance transportation, despite the fact that he clearly makes an effort to think about the ‘real’ price of gasoline:

”The true price of every gallon of gasoline, adding in expenditures for tax subsidies and government programs, harm to our health as a result of toxic emissions, environmental damage and military operations to protect the supply, is almost impossible to reliably calculate […] But some of the most quoted and informed studies conclude the true cost of oil to be more than $15 per gallon”

The claim that oil and gasoline actually cost much more than what you pay at the petrol pump is in line with the contents of a report ("Powering America's Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security") from the military think tank CNA. The report, written by CNA's military advisory board (consisting of 12 retired generals and admirals) states that the real cost of providing U.S. military with fuel is between 15 and hundreds of dollars per gallon (!), depending on the need for security and logistics to ensure that the fuel is in the right place at the right time. These prices for example include costs to protect maritime transports and to station troops and maintain numerous military bases abroad. A concrete example is a specific study from Iraq, where only 10% of the fuel for ground troops is used by tanks and other vehicles that "deliver lethal force". The remaining 90% is used by armored vehicles, trucks and helicopters that deliver and protect fuel and troops. Another example is the estimated cost of $42/gallon for aerial refueling of fighters. Of course, these calculations do not include "softer" aspects such as pollution of the environment or poor health among military and other personnel mentioned by Black above. When the gasoline price skyrocketed in 2008 and many Americans were brought to their knees, the price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. reached unheard-of levels of $4 per gallon. This price is not at all high from a Swedish perspective where we have to go back to the end of the 1980's to find such "bargain" prices! But, a $4 per gallon price tag on gas in the U.S. is two to three times as much as the price during the period 1990-2004. Today, in the midst of a raging recession, the price of gasoline is slightly higher than $2.50 per gallon, and already that price is too much for many (un- or underemployed) Americans. Although The Plan is a crisis plan, Black would prefer for it to be implemented already before a major crisis arises. A nice thought, but don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen – the ideas are far too rational to be taken seriously. .

How’s that Hopey, Changey Stuff Doin’?

SUBHEAD: Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign--a campaign that promised to challenge the broken system in Washington. Image above: Computer blending of the faces of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. From (http://deensharp.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/is-obamas-foreign-policy-different-from-bushs) By Albert Bates on 14 February 2010 in The Great Change - (http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2010/02/hows-that-hopey-changey-stuff-doin.html) We have been outside the USA for the past month, wandering in the wilderness, as it were, and pondering the way forward. Back home in Tennessee, Sarah Palin is saying:

“This was all part of that ‘hope and change and transparency,’ and now a year later I got to ask the supporters of all that, how’s that hopey, changey stuff workin’ out for ya?”

It was a valid question. Ms. Palin had no better policies to offer, no grand vision. She could only evoke the mythic Ronald Reagan — not the real one who saddled the US with the most massive deficit in its history, torpedoed a rare opportunity to purge the world of atomic arms, trashed the ingenious energy policy and Mideast peace bequeathed by his predecessor, armed and trained Al Qaida, and subverted the Constitutional limits on Presidential war powers while enriching a small coterie of George H.W. Bush’s wealthy friends, particularly in Saudi Arabia. Irony is, Reagan was small potatoes compared to George W. Bush, and Bush was tame compared to his immediate successor. What Palin seem to imply was that if she were President, you could just dispense with the goodie-goodie Obama charade, because she would be Reagan on steroids. Where does that leave American voters? Wandering in the wilderness. Won’t you join us? We are not tea partiers or right wing wackos. Obama is not a naïf, Mirandizing terrorists, closing Guantanamo, and socializing the medical system. Neither are we green apologists or starry-eyed leftists. Obama is not hamstrung by his opponents, still climbing a learning curve, gauging electoral sentiments, or bridge-the-divide moderate to a fault. He may be captive to his advisors, many of them seeded there by Dick Cheney, but he is still his own man. It is that man that troubles us. We seem to have elected King George, again. He has protected those who trampled both the Constitution and the nation’s honor, to the point of destroying the rules of international law to effectuate that perfidy. He has expanded illegal wars of aggression. He has lent his full support to the genocide in Palestine, sending the Army Corps of Engineers to erect a Great Wall between Gaza and Egypt. His army has dithered and withheld aid while our own Palestinians, the Haitians, died in their own sad version of the SuperDome or Gaza, receiving black-Kevlar’ed jack-booted paratroopers where water and first aid was the most desparate need. He has shrouded his true foreign and domestic policies in secrecy. While renouncing torture, he has continued it under a different name. He has resumed illegal rendition. He has re-inserted Blackwater as a covert arm of his policies. He has ordered the anthrax and 9-11 attacks and cover-ups, the Camp No murders, Eric Prince and worse, to go uninvestigated and hidden. He has authorized the assassinations, without trial, of U.S. citizens found on foreign soil. He has imprisoned and tortured thousands of innocents abroad, including children, without charges, rights of council, or due process of any kind, and continues to imprison and torture more each day. He has used the full weight of his Justice Department to oppose judicial scrutiny, even in private suits where the US is not a party. Fresh war crimes are commited daily, at his express direction. He has expanded illegal drone attacks on neutral countries, killing numberless civilians (“bug-splat” in military parlance) despite the clear evidence of multiplying resentment and blowback towards our national security. In secret he has built new and huge military bases and future internment centers in countries such as Colombia and Pakistan — more than 800 in Afghanistan alone. In an era of diminishing oil supply he has ordered completion of fleets of oil-dependent supercarriers and the jets to bedeck them, and this despite the fact that the US now has more aircraft carriers than all other nations of the world combined, each nearly twice as large as the largest of any other country’s. While Michelle Obama plants an organic garden in her backyard and packs PBA-laced water bottles into her children’s lunchboxes to wean them off soda pop and onto something far more deadly, her husband has put forward no plan to replace fertilizer dependency with healthy soil programs, ban terminator seeds, or wean the nation from its oil-dependent food vulnerability. With a three-day supply of groceries in most cities and world crude reserve estimates in free-fall, the US is being set up for famine. Let them eat aircraft carriers. He has subverted the rule of international law by rejecting the UN consensus process, abandoning the Kyoto Accords and wrecking the Copenhagen summit on climate change, our last best chance to have a binding international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He has instigated a program of economic growth where economic contraction is demanded. He has installed corrupt bankers to manage the nation’s currency and evaporating reserves, and they have looted the public treasury to lavish gifts upon the guiltiest among themselves. Although greater taxes are required to restore stability, he has called for tax cuts and freezes on spending for schools, hospitals, State government services, and care for the disabled, elderly, and hungry. In sheltering the criminal conduct of his own and his predecessors while lending aid and comfort to oppressors of human rights abroad, he has ceded the moral high ground, just as the British Raj ceded it when they clubbed and shot peaceful protestors in India. Without a moral cause, our troops and veterans are dying not from enemy bullets, but of their own internal torment and self-inflicted wounds. Napolean said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.” This is something Sarah Palin and the Republican Party would do well to take to heart. For those of us that hold no brief for either insanity, we need neither posture nor protest. We can perform our own land redistributions, sponsor local production for local needs, and grow voluntary simplicity from seed to harvest. We can be democratic and re-instill nonviolent, cooperative society, community by community. Barack, we thought we knew ye. Then we hoped you were playing the long game, one we could ne’r ken. We were badly wrong. You are just plain and simple evil. We know that now. And we will stand up to be rid of you, and all you stand for. .