Shale Gas Hype

SUBHEAD: The view from Russia of USA's public relations campaign on fracking American gas abundance. By Dmitry Orlov on 8 May 2012 for Club Orlov - (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/05/shale-gas-view-from-russia.html) Image above: Tower for drilling horizontally into the Marcellus Shale Formation for natural gas, from Rt 118 in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. From (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marcellus_Shale_Gas_Drilling_Tower_1_crop.jpg). The official shale gas story goes something like this: recent technological breakthroughs by US energy companies have made it possible to tap an abundant but previously inaccessible source of clean, environmentally friendly natural gas. This has enabled the US to become the world leader in natural gas production, overtaking Russia, and getting ready to end of Russia's gas monopoly in Europe. Moreover, this new shale gas is found in many parts of the world, and will, in due course, enable the majority of the world's countries to achieve independence from traditional gas producers. Consequently, the ability of those countries with the largest natural gas reserves—Russia and Iran—to control the market for natural gas will be reduced, along with their overall geopolitical influence.

If this were the case, then we should expect the Kremlin, along with Gazprom, to be quaking in their boots. But are they? Here is what Gazprom's chairman, Alexei Miller, recently told Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Shale gas is a well-organized global PR-campaign. There are many of them: global cooling, biofuels.” He pointed out that the technology for producing gas from shale is many decades old, and suggested the US turned to it out of desperation. He dismissed it as an energy alternative for Europe. Is this just the other's sides propaganda, or could Miller be simply stating the obvious? Let's explore. I will base my exploration on Russian sources, which is why all the numbers are in metric units. If you want to convert to Imperial, 1 m³ = 35 cubic feet, 1 km² = .38 square miles, 1 tonne = 1.1 short tons).

The best-developed shale gas basin is Barnett in Texas, responsible for 70% of all shale gas produced to date. By “developed” I mean drilled and drilled and drilled, and then drilled some more: just in 2006 there were about as many wells drilled into Barnett shale as are currently producing in all of Russia. This is because the average Barnett well yields only around 6.35 million m³ of gas, over its entire lifetime, which corresponds to the average monthly yield of a typical Russian well that continues to produce over a 15-20 year period, meaning that the yield of a typical shale gas well is at least 200 times smaller. This hectic activity cannot stop once a well has been drilled: in order to continue yielding even these meager quantities, the wells have to be regularly subjected to hydraulic fracturing, or "fracked": to produce each thousand m³ of gas, 100 kg of sand and 2 tonnes of water, combined with a proprietary chemical cocktail, have to be pumped into the well at high pressure. Half the water comes back up and has to be processed to remove the chemicals. Yearly fracking requirements for the Barnett basin run around 7.1 million tonnes of sand and 47.2 million tonnes of water, but the real numbers are probably lower, as many wells spend much of the time standing idle.

In spite of the frantic drilling/fracking activity, this is all small potatoes by Russian standards. Russia's proven reserves of natural gas amount to 43.3 trillion m³, which is about a third of the world's total. At current consumption rates, that's enough to last 72 years. Russian gas production is constrained by demand, not by supply; it is currently down simply because Eurozone is in the midst of an economic crisis. Meanwhile, US production has surged ahead, for no adequately explored reason, crashing the price and making much of it unprofitable.

Let's compare: Gazprom's price at the wellhead runs from US$3 to $50 per thousand m³, depending on the region. Compare that to shale gas in the US, which runs from $80 to $320 per thousand m³. At this price, the US cannot afford to sell shale gas on the European market. Moreover, the overall volume of shale gas being produced in the US, even given the feverish drilling rate of the past couple of years, if cleaned up, liquified, and shipped to Europe in LNG tankers, would not be enough to book up just the LNG terminal in Gdańsk, Poland, which is currently standing idle. It seems that Gazprom has little to worry about.

The US, on the other hand, does have plenty to worry about. There has been much talk already about groundwater pollution and other forms of environmental destruction that accompanies the production of shale gas, so I will not address these here. Instead, I will focus on two aspects that are just as important but have received scarcely any attention.

First, what is shale gas? Ask this question, and you will be told: “Shut up, it's methane.” But is it really? The composition of shale gas is something of a state secret in the US, but information about the gas produced from the nine Polish shale gas test projects did leak out, and it's not pretty: Polish shale gas turned out to be so high in nitrogen that it does not even burn. Technology exists to clean up gas that is, say, 6% nitrogen, but Polish shale gas is closer to 50% nitrogen, and, given high production costs, low yields, rapid depletion and low wellhead pressure, cleaning it up to bring it up to spec (which is 1% nitrogen) would most likely result in a net waste of energy.

Even if shale gas is low enough in nitrogen to burn, the problems do not end there. It may also contain hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic and corrosive and has to be removed before the gas can be stored or injected into a pipeline. It probably contains toluene and other organic solvents—ingredients in the fracking cocktails—which are carcinogenic. Lastly, it may be radioactive. All clays are mildly radioactive, and shale is a sort of heat-treated clay. While Barnett shale is not particularly radioactive, Marcellus shale, which has recently been the focus of frantic drilling activity, is. Thanks to Marcellus shale gas, radioactive radon gas is being delivered directly to your kitchen, via the burners of your stove, or to a power plant smokestack upwind from where you live. This is expected to result in increased lung cancer rates in the coming years.

Second, why is shale gas being produced at all? Natural gas prices have fallen through the roof, and are currently around $2 per thousand cubic feet. This works out to around $70 per thousand m³. If shale gas costs from $80 to $320 per thousand m³ to produce, it is unclear how one might make any money with it. But perhaps making money with it is not the point. What if shale gas is just a PR campaign (with horrific environmental side effects)? Going back to what Alexei Miller said, what if the entire point of the exercise was to increase the capitalization of shale gas exploration and production companies? The number one company in shale gas is Chesapeake Energy, the owner of the Barnett basin and a major player in the Marcellus basin. This company almost went bankrupt in 2009, but then managed to claw its way back to profitability in 2010 and 2011 by drilling, and drilling, and drilling, and then drilling some more. Sixty percent of their revenue is from drilling operations. And now there is a scandal involving Chesapeake Energy's (former?) chairman, Aubrey K. McClendon, who apparently awarded himself a stake in each well his company drilled, used them as collateral for billions in loans, and used the loans to bet that natural gas prices will go up (they haven't). In the meantime, natural gas drilling rig count has dropped to a ten-year low. Given that shale gas wells deplete very quickly, it looks like the shale gas boom is over.

But now that it's over, what was it, exactly? It appears to have been something like the dot-com bubble: companies with no conceivable way of turning a profit using hype to attract investment and drive up their valuations. Since 2008, various kinds of hype-based market manipulations have become the staple of economic life in the US, and so this is nothing new or different. One interesting question is, What sort of bubble will the US attempt to blow next, if any? There is the Facebook IPO coming up. Facebook is a ridiculous time-waster and, as such, seems a bit overpriced. Are we going to attempt blowing up another dot-com bubble? Another round of subprime mortgages does not seem to be in the works. What's a bubble boy to do? If there are no more bubbles to blow, then it's back to just plain printing money.

So this whole shale gas thing didn't work out as planned, did it? But could it have? Had it turned out to be much better in every way, could it have swung geopolitical influence away from Russia and Iran and back toward the US? Alas, no.

You see, there is no such thing as a global natural gas market. Yes, there are some LNG tankers sailing about, but that is very much a point-to-point trade. There is a closed North American market, a European market, and another market in the Asia-Pacific region. These markets do not interact. The North American market and the European market could have potentially shared just one producer: Qatar. Qatar once wanted to export LNG to the US, but then decided to export it to Europe instead, generating less of a loss, because European gas prices are substantially higher. And the reason Qatar is dumping natural gas in Europe is because it has gas to dump: its northern gas field is a very “wet” field, with a substantial percentage of natural gas condensate. Qatar's OPEC quota is 36-37 million tonnes of oil per year, but natural gas condensate is not considered to be oil and is not covered by OPEC quotas. Exploiting the condensate loophole allows Qatar to export 65.7 million tonnes: 77% over quota. The LNG is just concomitant production, and Qatar can afford to export LNG to Europe at a loss. This is a juicy bit of trivia, but really something of a footnote: an exception that proves the general case: there is no global natural gas market.

There is still, however, a global American disinformation and PR hype market, although this too is changing. The view from Russia is that it is pretty clear what this was all along: American propaganda and financial shenanigns. Nothing to see here, people, keep moving.

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CUIC > KIUC

SUBHEAD: Maybe its time to abandon KIUC for a more useful Cooperative Utility for the Island of Kauai.  

By Juan Wilson on 8 May 2012 for Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/05/kiuc-cuik.html)


Image above: Detail of d graphic showing KIUC going down in flames near Port Allen, Kauai. Graphic by Juan Wilson. See below for whole image.  

Letting go of KIUC
 It is time people on Kauai came to together and realized that KIUC is not solving our expanding energy problems. Their corporate culture, equipment and debt has them (and us) on a treadmill that locks out broad stroked transformations. KIUC is not so much a cooperative than it is a dwindling group of hostages who are totally dependent on "The Grid".

A new model of energy generation is necessary. It is in part characterized by decentralization; do-it-yourself maintenance and operations. That includes self management of consumption and priorities. Given its current leadership and institutional inertia, there is little reason to be optimistic about reforming KIUC into a progressive organization.

Moreover, given KIUC's monumental debt and investment in outdated technology it may be impossible.

Some smell the Smoke
Had we let Kauai Electric go bankrupt a decade ago and accepted the inconvenience of some interrupted service we would not have saddled ourselves with an impossible debt. That inconvenience was postponed, but will reappear again at the end of KIUC's usefulness. That time may be at hand.

If you have not noticed, the military, corporations and other forward looking institutions are working to be less dependent on our Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC).

They are generating their own power using photo-voltaic panels. They are, to name a few: Costco (Kukui Grove); Fire Department Station (Kapaa); Kauai Community College (Puhi); Pacific Missile Range Facility (Makaha Ridge); Pioneer Seed, (Waimea).

We must now plot a better course to a decentralized cooperative that would operate solely on renewable energy sources. This is the reverse of KIUC, hence the name CUIK. In my response to the KIUC open letter to its members (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/05/open-letter-to-kiuc-board.html) I wrote:

The KIUC plan to provide 50% alternative energy by 2023 is too little tool late. My prediction is that in the next few years it will become impossible for KIUC to finance large energy projects. Consequently KIUC will never reach generating 50% of what we use today with alternative sources. Here on Kauai it is likely that oil will become too precious for us too burn for power on demand 24/7/365 . That means that unless you have PV panels or a wind generator on your roof you'll have access to less than half the energy your using now. Maybe that is the secret of KIUC's program for demand destruction.

What I take away from that is we should expect much less service from KIUC for much more money on into the future. We are going to go through a painful transition even if we don't turn away from KIUC.

  Image above: Detail of d graphic showingCUIK merging from the wetlands of Puolo Point near Port Allen, Kauai. Graphic by Juan Wilson. See below for whole image.  

File under Pipe Dreams
Because we have lost so much time trying to hold onto the status quo that the transition will include brown-outs, black-outs and loss of service. This will be true whether we hang onto KIUC or abandon it for an alternative, like CUIK. Crucial changes needed for a positive transformation would be:

• Finding the means to finance and construct solutions for generating electricity on a house-to-house basis.
• Reducing the expectation on the amount and availability of the use of power in our daily lives.
• Prioritizing what we need electrical power for - Night lighting, Refrigeration, Telecommunications? Power tools? Appliances? Entertainment?
• Seeking alternative sources of drinking water because the Water Department requires KIUC to lift water from wells to most of its reservoirs.

We need to examine what level of collective action is best suited to our individual situations and the tasks at hand. In some cases a group of homes owned by a family might pool efforts to supply there own power.

In other cases it might be an apartment complex or nursing home. There will certainly need to be institutions that provide rotating funds to groups and individuals with plans for generating their own power. This might be through bank mortgage arrangements or other private means. There are opportunities for County government to play a role in this.

For that matter, as unlikely as it seems, even KIUC could define itself and have a hand at making itself superfluous. As it stands the centralized electric grid is a big part of our energy problem and KIUC is the centralized grid.

A self organizing new and shiny CUIK could be a decentralized replacement that agile enough to accommodate the future.

Image above: Background of Puolo Point area near Salt Pond beach. Photo and graphic by Juan Wilson. Click to enlarge.

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Two Open Letters to KIUC board

SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com)
SUBHEAD: Responses to the KIUC Board arrogant "open" letter to the Kauai community.  

By Adam Asquith on 7 May 2012 in Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/05/two-open-letters-to-kiuc-board.html)

 
Image above: Citizen speaks his mind in detail from "Freedom of Speech" by Norman Rockwell, 1943. From (http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/artwork.php?artworkid=3298).
 

I would like to thank the Board of KIUC for providing me with a hearty belly laugh. I literally spilled my coffee Sunday morning reading the “Open Letter”. The audacity of the Board, demeaning member concern and participation, pushes vexation into the sublime. In the end, you can only laugh at their hubris.

Other than some third-world banana republic, what brand of elected leadership believes that the one and only input from constituents is on election day? Our Board should be celebrating and embracing those members who find the time and motivation to consistently attend meetings and share information and ideas with Directors. Instead we get this condescending letter whining about how underappreciated they are and what a great job they are doing. 

Yeah. They are doing such a great job of interacting with the members that I had to go to the extreme length of the legal system just to get them to answer my repeated correspondence. While we’re at, let’s look a little more closely at some of their other claims and see who deserves a pat on the back. 

1. They have done the research and are satisfied that smart meters are safe. They are going to put them on their own homes. Go for it. When I was attending Oregon State University, as part of a pest control class we watched a film clip of a professor in the 1960’s demonstrate the safety of DDT by eating a big bowl of it like it was corn flakes. Sure, acute toxicity was very low, but fortunately we know a lot more now. Only fools rush in.
2. Their blueprint for hydroelectric? Oh what a short memory. Their “blueprint” for hydroelectric involved hiring some pirates from the mainland to use federal powers to lay claim to Hawaii’s sovereign waters. This claim jumping was so audacious that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission severely chastised KIUC for inappropriate use of Federal law (See FERC Order of 20 October, 2011, in which FERC accuses KIUC of “claim-jumping”). Now, after they were prevented from stealing our agricultural waters for their control, they refuse to purchase any electricity generated by that irrigation system. If the rules don’t tip the game in your favor you just take your ball and go home. Grow up.
3. Transparency? You’re kidding right? You cannot receive any written information from KIUC without first signing away your rights. It is far easier to suffer a full body search at the hands of the TSA to board a flight than it is to engage in the “transparency” of KIUC. And how about allowing us to actually hear from our elected Board members regarding votes. Even the Supreme Court finds wisdom in publishing a dissenting opinion when votes are not unanimous. There is no strength in hiding behind a façade of unity.
4. KIUC renewable energy projects? Thank you to the hundreds of individual home and business owners who have invested their own money in PV and wind to reduce the load on the grid and our consumption of fossil fuels. Thank you to the landowners for the space and the tax payers for subsidizing our KIUC PV systems. Thanks to A&B, Green Energy Hawaii, Hawaiian Mahogany, andPacific Light & Power for assuming the risk and investing your own money in generating sustainable energy for us. Thank you to all the good employees at KIUC that keep the lights on. ……Thank you KIUC Board for continuing to purchase and burn fossil fuels with member money.
5. KIUC as good neighbors? My neighbors don’t spy on me with electronic equipment. My neighbors don’t take my farm water to run an air conditioner in Poipu. My neighbors use their own resources to solve their own problems. My neighbors share my values and listen to my concerns with sincerity. Me and my neighbors share humble pie everyday.

It is pathetic when our Board of Directors must stoop to belittling Member efforts at communication, such as this letter, and offer only their own propaganda (e.g. Currents) as an alternative. It is arrogant and unprofessional to treat members with such disrespect. Shame on all Directors that signed on to that letter. But thanks for the laugh.

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By Mike Shooltz on 6 May 2012 in the Island Breath - 

I've just read your message below which you've shared today. I must admit that I'm feeling a bit dismayed by some of your comments. I would primarily like to address two of them. 

First, I have attended your last two Board Meetings and have also attended Mike Yamani's presentation to the members regarding Smart Meters. I have listened intently at the Board Meetings to each Committee's reports. Never, in any of these three meetings, was there any mention by anyone on the Board of Directors, from any committee, to indicate that anyone was doing anything at all to ascertain the health risks of Smart Meters.

I personally questioned the full Board at both of the meetings, and I also asked Mike Yamani at his presentation, about who at KIUC is charged with assessing the health risks of Smart Meters. It was acknowledged that none of the Board Committees were assigned that task, and that no one on the staff of KIUC has the responsibility to look at the health risks of Smart Meters. Mike Yamani's answer was that he is responsible for implementing the Strategic Plan that he receives from the Board and CEO. 

So, I am a bit surprised that you state in today's communication below, and in The Garden Island Newspaper, that, "We've done the research and we're satisfied that smart meters are safe and don't represent a threat to health or privacy." 

In all of my interactions with KIUC the only "research" I have heard spoken of was a reference to FCC guidelines being followed. But unfortunately, as you know, the medical professionals at the American Academy of Environmental Medicine stated in their letter of January 19, 2012 to the California PUC recommending a moratorium on Smart Meters, that "FCC guidelines are inadequate for use in establishing public health standards." They stated that sufficient scientific and medical evidence suggest health risks......and raises serious concerns. 

At the last Board of Directors meeting there was also CEO Bissell's unfortunate comment that, "We have to trust the government", which brought waves of laughter from all those in attendance. So, in light of the serious concerns of the members of KIUC regarding these health issues it would seem reasonable that you would share with us who at KIUC has done the research, and present the results of that research to we the members. 

In light of your expressed concerns about where we the members are getting our information, and your suggestion that we "get as many facts as we can" it would seem reasonable that if you have information regarding the health issues around Smart Meters you would want to share it with the membership. It would be much appreciated. You suggest that we don't just "take our word for it", but it seems that on this very significant issue of health you are asking us to do just that!

Second, in your message you speak of your efforts to support our island in the efficient use of energy. This week I experienced a bit of incongruence in your operations vs. the goal of efficient use of energy.

I stopped by your offices to pay my electric bill. While there I asked for a deferral form for myself and also for six of my neighbors. I was informed that I could receive one deferral from but that my neighbors would have to each come in individually to pick up their own forms. I couldn't help but notice that at the receptionist's desk there were numerous other forms set out for the members to pick up themselves with no restriction on the number of forms taken, while the Deferral Forms were held out of sight behind the counter. And, while you temporarily provided the link to the deferral form on your website, it quickly was removed.

My neighborhood is in the Wailua Homesteads so it takes a fair amount of time, and gasoline to drive to your offices. These are obviously wasted energies caused only by your choice to make things difficult and inconvenient for we the members/owners. 

Little things like this speak volumes in terms of how you are relating to the member/owners of KIUC and how you are striving to make it as difficult as possible for the members to exercise their preferences. I applaud your commitment to "being good neighbors who listen and who act not in self-interest, but for the good of Kauai." The sharing of health information and removing the unnecessary obstacles would be great ways to demonstrate those intentions.

 See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Open letter back to KIUC board 5/6/12

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Greeks leap into the dark

SUBHEAD: No! to austerity and Merkozy – but with the rise of Golden Dawn it's not clear what Greece said yes to.

 By Maria Margaronis on 7 May 2012 for The Guardian - 
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/07/greece-leap-into-the-dark)

 
Image above: Golden Dawn supporter holds flag of the organization. From (http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2012/05/european-elections-reaction-live-blog/).
 

The message of Sunday's election in Greece is clear: the Greeks have said no to more of the cuts and austerity measures that have devastated the country, pushing unemployment above 20%, shattering the healthcare system, tearing families apart and leading some to suicide.

It was above all a vote of rage against the two major parties, Pasok and New Democracy, which between them ran the economy into the ground, signed up to a disastrous austerity programme in exchange for dead-end bailouts from the EU and IMF, and then allowed the blows to fall on the most vulnerable.

The medium, though, is more confused and troubling. As elsewhere in Europe, the draining away of the centre has revealed a jagged landscape: the shorthand of "extremes of left and right" doesn't begin to map it.

The most obvious rift in Greece in the last months – a rift that's been described to me more than once as a "civil war"– has been between those who are for and against the "memorandum", the EU/IMF schedule of demands.

The pro-memorandum forces want to keep Greece in the eurozone at any cost; most of their opponents also want to stay in Europe – but not of "Merkozy", austerity and the banks.

Across that rift runs an older, deeper one, whose roots go back at least as far as to the actual civil war that followed the Axis occupation, leading to 30 years in which the left was outlawed, and culminating in the neo-fascist junta of 1967 to 1974.

The social and political collapse brought by the crisis has revived those memories, too, as well as old family loyalties. In the summer of 2011, when the aganaktismenoi ("outraged") of Syntagma Square briefly became the darlings of the foreign media, conservative truck drivers could rub shoulders with eco warriors and direct democracy mavens; the Greek flag could stand for self-determination as well as nationalism. But not any more.

The biggest shock of yesterday's election was the arrival of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in parliament, with 21 out of 300 seats and 7% of the popular vote – the first neo-Nazi party to enter a European assembly since the second world war.

Its leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, threw Greek journalists who wouldn't rise for him out of his press conference and dedicated his victory to "the brave boys in the black shirts". "Those who slander us," he barked, and "those who betray this country should be afraid: we're coming."

Near Kalavryta in the Peloponnese, the site of one of the most terrible Nazi massacres in the 1940s, Golden Dawn graffiti calls for "a new Holocaust to clear the filth from the country".

It's not yet clear, demographically, where this horrifying surge has come from. But Golden Dawn won votes across much of the country – and not just in the inner cities, where it is encouraging the persecution of immigrants and woos old ladies with offers to escort them to the cash machine. It also got the votes of one in 10 young people.

Adding Golden Dawn's vote to those of the other two far-right parties, Laos and Panos Kammenos' Independent Greeks, one in five Greeks voted for rabid nationalism and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Three things have nurtured the rise of Golden Dawn and its less flagrant cousins. First, the humiliation and rage provoked by the austerity measures and by the crude scapegoating of Greeks abroad; second, the presence of thousands of destitute migrants desperate to go north but trapped in Greece by the EU's cynical migration policies; third, the fact that mainstream politicians – especially but not only conservative New Democracy leader and likely new prime minister Antonis Samaras – have shamelessly pandered to their blood-and-belonging nationalism.

Samaras has promised to support the church and religious education and to repeal a law giving citizenship to children of legal immigrants; one of his campaign ads featured Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the lost cathedral of Byzantium and symbol of Greek irredentism, shorn of its Ottoman minarets.

The other surprise winner inlast night's election was Alexis Tsipras's Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, which easily beat Pasok to second place, sweeping all of the greater Athens region and Thessaloniki. But predictions either of a revolution on the edge of Europe or of a miraculous rebirth of radical politics are a little premature.

Syriza is not so much a party as a campaign coalition, the product of repeated efforts to bind the fissiparous Greek left into an electoral force. Its deepest historical root is in the old Eurocommunist party, but it includes a range of tendencies from Trotskyist to left nationalist, from Maoist to green.

Tsipras's stroke of genius in the election campaign was to offer a political home to a broad spectrum of anti-memorandum forces: the trade unionists disillusioned with Pasok, the protesters in the squares, the occupiers of schools and government buildings, the organisers of solidarity networks and barter systems and alternative micro-economies.

His popularity surged a few weeks ago when he proposed a government of the three left parties, including the Communists (who would never allow such a thing).

Adept at being all things to all potential constituents, he has made few proposals for reform beyond making the rich pay tax; he speaks easily of "the people" and has implicitly compared himself to Chávez and Allende.

Tsipras is the man of the moment, the one who has managed to channel a diffuse but powerful hunger for rebellion and release; but beyond rejecting the memorandum, it's not clear what he plans to do with his new power.

Like all left populists, has a nationalist streak: he condemned the last government for being "not quite Greeks", and though he has been impeccable on race and immigration, he hasn't ruled out co-operating with the hard-right Independent Greeks on the issue of the memorandum.
 
Greece has said no to austerity; it isn't clear what it's said yes to yet. Much will depend on what kind of government, if any, can be formed out of the fragments and on what happens elsewhere in Europe: on whether François Hollande sticks to his promises, on next year's election in Germany.

Driven by a heady mixture of defiance and despair, the Greeks have taken a dangerous, thrilling leap into the dark. We can't know yet where it will take them, or the rest of us.

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1, 2, 3 Puke!

SUBHEAD: We are approaching a dark inflection point where the fall elections collide with a shitstorm of broken promises.  

By James Kunstler on 7 May 2012 for Kunstler.com -  
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/05/1-2-3-puke.html)

Image above: Painting slum with Fantasyland background from series called "Dismayland" by Jeff Gillette. From (http://www.ufunk.net/artistes/dismayland-entre-favelas-et-disneyland).

Europe may soon be choking on that plat du jour of government a la Hollandaise with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is composed of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural indebtedness. The lies are promises that the debt will be paid back.

For two months the financial markets have gone sideways on a cushion of the European Central Bank's Long Term Refinancing Operations and the hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining airborne may dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German team spirit while a centripetal vortex of unpaid obligations sucks notional wealth through the event horizon of massive deflation.

Things are heating up, in other words. Wake up, sleepyheads! Welcome to the rest of the year 2012.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, is so amusing this morning. I, too, almost upchucked my "Paleo" diet breakfast of salmon hash with four eggs (pas de Hollandaise). Krugman writes in his column:

What's wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe's ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn't exist -- that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.

What an excellent misrepresentation of reality by one of the official molders of public opinion and policy in this exceptional land. I would attempt to debate his statement above that spending less government money is proposed to encourage consumers, blah blah. It is proposed because government doesn't have the money to spend and has run out of the ability to borrow more money due to the bad odor now wafting off the world's compost heap of sovereign bond paper. Everyone is going broke simultaneously, including putative lenders, i.e. buyers of bonds, who are the same ones selling them.

I like the way Krugman avers offhandedly to the concept of "depression." I believe this is a new thing for him to admit a certain absence of "green shoots" on the spring economic scene. Heretofore his halftime act between two presidential terms has been sheer cheerleading, but I guess he forgot to bring his pompoms to the office yesterday. I would refer to the situation as something more severe than a "depression," which merely suggests a valley between peaks. I would say that we are instead out on the arid buzzard flats beside the deep blue sea where modernity is shortly to drown itself in a fugue of suicidal bad faith.

All of which is to say the pretense that has reigned since 2008 (viz: "recovery") may not float through the rest of 2012. Surely in the USA, we are approaching a dark inflection point where the fall elections collide with the broken promises now gathering into the shitstorm vulgarly called "Taxmageddon." The event horizon for that extravaganza of financial lightning strikes is officially January 1, but the effects will be felt long before that as households, businesses, pension funds, municipal governments, and various branches of the US military prepare to roll over and die.

Enjoy the European sideshow for now because the roustabouts are still setting the props for act in the center ring. When the clown cars pull into the political conventions this summer, I would like to see these circus troupes greeted by large and lively mobs of furious citizens hurling objurgations at the likes of Barack Obama and Willard "Mitt" Romney. This is probably the least we can do to register some objection to the two useless parties' way of running things. Also, by the way, I would wonder what the generals over in the Pentagon will think (or might do!) as they see their country fall to tatters.

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State denies Hanalei River polluted

SUBHEAD: State officials say recent claims of pollution in Hanalei Bay unfounded.  

By Leo Azambuja on 3 May, 2012 in The Garden Island -  
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/state-officials-say-recent-claims-of-pollution-unfounded/article_cbbbe5aa-95e2-11e1-849c-0019bb2963f4.html)


Image above: Aerial view looking out at Hanalei Bay with river in foreground. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: This article from TGI is a counter argument to Terry Lilley's piece we posted yesterday. Terry may be wrong about the source and how unusual arsenic, barium, chromium and lead is in a stream on a volcanic rock island like Kauai. We apologize for misleading our readers. However Terry is an honest and concerned resident of Kauai. He is right in pointing out that this natural occurrence may be an additional stress on the health of the reefs and oceans. Agricultural run-off, global warming, ocean acidification also play a part. In the last decades we have lost much of the life near Kauai under the water.]

After a North Shore resident disclosed earlier this week that recent test results pointed to high levels of metal pollution in Hanalei River and Hanalei Bay, state officials quickly dismissed the findings, saying they are unfounded and have created unnecessary fear and concern in the community.

Gary Gill, Deputy Director for Environmental Health at the state Department of Health, said the Hanalei watershed, including the river and the bay, are probably the most studied and managed water system in the state.

“For decades the department of health and community members have been investigating a variety of potential pollution causes, and working together to resolve any pollution in the Hanalei area,” Gill said. “The samples of sediments that were taken for metals indicated only that there was no metallic pollution in the sediments.”

The levels of metallic sediments found by Terry Lilley were completely normal, according to Gill.

“The metals that were found are found naturally in the soil, so there was absolutely no reason to be concerned based on the test results that were found by Mr. Lilley,” Gill said.

The report released by Lilley last week shows that Hanalei River has 29 milligrams per kilogram of arsenic, 19 mg/Kg of barium, 120 mg/Kg of chromium and 2.4 mg/Kg of lead. The report also shows that Hanalei Bay waters have 18 mg/Kg of arsenic, 7.0 mg/Kg of barium, 65 mg/Kg of chromium and 1.3 mg/Kg of lead.

DOH spokeswoman Janice Okubo sent a press release Wednesday, two days after Lilley’s report was published, stating the department is “very concerned” about the misleading information.

“The concentrations of arsenic, barium, chromium and lead reported by Terry Lilley with the Hanalei River heritage Foundation are within anticipated, natural background levels for the volcanic soils and related sediments of the Hawaiian islands,” Okubo states. “The metals are naturally occurring, are tightly bound within minerals in the soil and are not toxic to humans or wildlife.”

Gill said the metals found in the water are due the volcanic nature of the island. If Lilley’s tests showed “dramatically higher” numbers, he said, the DOH would look for a potential source of pollution, but that is not the case.

“There is nothing unusual about those numbers and there is no source of heavy metal contamination in the bay,” Gill said.

Okubo said in the release the levels of metals found in Hanalei are similar to levels that would be found anywhere else in the islands, are not manmade, and have been “well documented” in numerous reports over the past several decades

“The terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna of Kaua‘i have lived with these metals since the island was created millions of years ago,” Okubo said.

Lilley “incorrectly” compared the sediments he found to regulatory standards for drinking water, according to Okubo..

Open letter back to KIUC board

SUBHEAD: KIUC press release tries to increase trust of its members and steers them away from other's opinions.  

By Juan Wilson on 6 May 2012 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/05/open-letter-to-kiuc-board.html)


Image above: KIUC is "Your Touchstone Energy Cooperative". See Touchstone Energy’s fleet of hot air balloons that will be carrying the spirit of electric cooperatives into blue skies across the nation in 2012 by burning lots of natural gas. From (http://www.ect.coop/newsmakers/co-op-news-newsmakers/touchstone-energy-hot-air-ballon-program/42974).

Apparently alternative media is having some impact on the Board of KIUC. Today they issued a press release/email titled "Open Letter from KIUC Board" explaining themselves to a frustrated membership. It seems their feelings are hurt because they are "criticized and second-guessed". No Surprises Here They claim:

"More than anything else, we hear from people who are frustrated by the size of their electric bills."

That may be so. We have do the highest rate for electricity in the country. But that shouldn't be too much of a surprise. For one thing, KIUC was cursed from the get go by taking on $240 million in debt to acquire the failing Kauai Electic utility a decade ago.

We still owe $190 million - significantly more than than the company was worth. Paying off that adds to our bill every month. KIUC has done little over the last decade to destroy demand. We live in one of the most isolated places in the world. It costs extra to get fuel here.

Despite that, KIUC encourages us expect to our electric juice 24/7/365 and in copious American sized servings. Is that to pay off the burdensome debt? KIUC lost a decade in moving towards alternatives to diesel fuel. Only recently have they begun serious efforts to incorporate photo-voltaic as a power generating source, but only after third parties demonstrated the practicality PV. KIUC has been behind the curve all the way. The KIUC plan to provide 50% alternative energy by 2023 is too little tool late.

My prediction is that in the next few years it will become impossible for KIUC to finance large energy projects. Consequently KIUC will never reach generating 50% of what we use today with alternative sources. Here on Kauai it is likely that oil will become too precious for us too burn for power on demand 24/7/365 .

That means that unless you have PV panels or a wind generator on your roof you'll have access to less than half the energy your using now. Maybe that is the secret of KIUC's program for demand destruction.  

Constant power - Constant movement
The central thrust of KIUC's planning for the future is the continued 24/7/365 reliability of the power grid. This is not surprising. That is how power utilities are run throughout America. It's not unlike America's commitment to the 24/7/365 access to nation-wide interstate highway system - Boston to Pheonix without a stop sign.

That may have been the way of the second half of the 20th century - but it is not the way of the future. KIUC has done little to understand or accommodate that future. It's probably because, as KIUC is currently operating, there is no place for them in the future. The KIUC press release also states;

"Opinions disguised as facts are amplified, repeated and distorted in letters, on blogs, on the radio and in public meetings. It's no wonder people are confused about what we're up to."... "Just don't expect to get the whole story from bumper stickers, YouTube videos and letters to the editor."

Well if it were not for the blogs, letters to the editor, and public statements of individuals we would have little knowledge of:

1. Dateline 2009 - The weakness of the Pacific West Energy deal to sell cane sugar based ethanol to KIUC from the converted Kaumakani mill.
2. Dateline 2010 - That in preparing for building another fossil fuel generator and increasing its debt load, KIUC relied on out-dated demand forecasts. A setup for bad decision-making.
3. Dateline 2011 - The Free Flow Power/KIUC hydro-electric power deal that the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission called a "type of unwarranted 'claim-jumping'".
4. Dateline 2012 - The possibility of staff member appointments to Board Committees would have VOTING RIGHTS on the committees - diminishing the little influence members have on board decisions.

Given my meager knowledge of the KIUC board of directors I was surprised all signed this press release. Namely: Teofilo Tacbian, Carol Bain, Karen Baldwin, Pat Gegen, David Iha, Calvin Murashige, Allan Smith, Jan TenBruggencate, and Peter Yukimura. I urge the board to realize that KIUC does not operate as a co-operative endeavor and should. Instead, in their open letter they advise us that:

"We represent you, so please read Currents, check out our website and sign up for our emails."

If you represent us then you should be listening us , not telling us using expensive PR blitzes. You do end your letter with what must be a reluctant request - "Talk to us". But that is exactly what we are trying to do. Since you make it difficult to do so in your public meetings it will mean you have to hear our blogs, letters to the editor and radio commentary.

 See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: KIUC Power Play 4/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Say NO to KIUC/FFP Deal! 6/13/11 .

KIUC Juggernaut

SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com) SUBHEAD: Who protects us from corporate greed trampling our rights, health, and security in our own homes?  

By Mark Naea on 4 May 2012 in Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/05/kiuc-juggernaut.html)

 
Image above: Star Wars Imperial A6 Juggernaut deployed in tropical jungle against the rebels. From (http://scifipedia.wikispaces.com/Heavy+Assault+Vehicle%EF%80%A2+Wheeled+A6+Juggernaut).
 

What do 56 local governments and almost four million people have in common? It’s not what you think, and crosses all boundaries, classes and categories.

Give up? They all oppose and reject the installation of smart meters, for health reasons, safety reasons, privacy reasons, and financial reasons. But it also goes to the fundamental right to exercise ones freedom of choice.

This polarization is now being experienced here on the sleepy little island of Kauai. With less than 35,000 accounts, KIUC has arbitrarily decided what’s best for our coop and residents.

With little or no input from residents, ignoring the mountain of adverse health studies, safety and security issues, as well as five years of data that shows no financial savings, KIUC has lied to and bullied our Ohana, our County Council, our Mayor and the PUC.

With promises of a better future, they have gotten the blessings of the PUC. But not one of those promises has any foundation in reality. KIUC uses words like “it can” and “we could see” and “could use less” and my personal favorite, “you could save money and save the environment”.

But when KIUC is asked for any factual data, all of a sudden they don’t want to talk about it. “Could, can, might”; see in the future, are the terms that KIUC has bandied around as if this is an actual reality.

It’s like being in a casino, the way that KIUC has bet $11 million of our money on a future outcome with no real world winners to showcase. This is not betting, this is closer to money laundering of an unbelievable scale for a tiny little island like Kauai.

Where are the checks and balances that our forefathers gave their lives for, what our parents and grandparents fought two world wars for? Who protects us from corporate greed that tramples our rights, our health, and security in our own homes?

From our Mayor to the County Council, to our state representatives and state senator, the silence has been deafening. And the only response from the few that have taken the time to respond is to pass responsibility to the PUC.

Since when has the PUC taken over the responsibilities of Kauai’s elected government and the state’s Health Department? How long has the PUC had the power to authorize wire-tapping and surveillance device installation without a court order? By what Hawaii constitutional decree or law does the PUC exercise these powers?

It is disconcerting to see such rampant abuse being forced upon the people of Kauai. Are our duly elected officials not given the power of oversight, to protect the public from corporate greed or departmental apathy? Who do I need to contact to get a straight answer? Who will stand up and protect our Keiki, our Kupuna, our families and health?

In the spirit of Ho’oponopono, who will do us justice, not just for Kauai’s Ohana , but for the Aina of Kauai that speaks out against this injustice?

I for one have stood up, and others have as well. But when will our elected government take their place among us, and be counted?

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: KIUC Power Play Meeting 4/24/12

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Japan is Nukeless

SUBHEAD: The Tomari plant shutdown leaves Japan without electricity from nuclear power for fist time in forty years. By Staff on 5 May 2012 for BBC News Asia - (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17967202) Image above: Tomari Nuclear power plant in Hokkaido prefecture Japan. Note the Mondrian-like painting on the 4 foot thick reactor containment structures. Do you remember the cute blue-sky white-cloud motif on the wrecked Fukushima buildings? From (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/japan-shuts-down-nuclear-power-16154651.html).

Japan is switching off its last working nuclear reactor, as part of the safety drive since the March 2011 tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima plant.

The third reactor at the Tomari plant, in Hokkaido prefecture, is shutting down for routine maintenance.

It leaves Japan without energy from atomic power for the first time for more than 40 years.

Until last year, Japan got 30% of its power from nuclear energy.

Hundreds of people marched through Tokyo, waving banners to celebrate what they hope will be the end of nuclear power in Japan.

Power shortages

Since the Fukushima disaster, all the country's reactors have been shut down for routine maintenance. They must withstand tests against earthquakes and tsunamis, and local authorities must give their consent in order for plants to restart.

So far, none have.

Two reactors at the Ohi plant in western Japan have been declared safe. The government says they should be restarted to combat looming shortages.

However, regional authorities would still have to give their approval.

Ministers have warned Japan faces a summer of power shortages.

The BBC's Roland Buerk, in Tokyo, says the government could force the issue, but so far has been reluctant to move against public opinion.

Organizers of the anti-nuclear march in the capital estimated turnout at 5,500.

Demonstrators carried banners shaped as giant fish. The "Koinobori" banners, traditionally the symbol of Children's Day, have been adopted by the anti-nuclear movement.

"There are so many nuclear plants, but not a single one will be up and running today, and that's because of our efforts," campaigner Masashi Ishikawa told the crowd.

Engineers began the process of shutting down the final Tomari reactor, inserting control rods to bring the fission process to an end.

All operations at the plant will have stopped by 14:00 GMT, a spokesman told Associated Press.

Japan will then be without nuclear power for the first time since 1970.

Businesses have warned of severe consequences for manufacturing if no nuclear plants are allowed to re-start.

In the meantime, Japan has increased its fossil fuel imports, with electricity companies pressing old power plants into service.

If the country can get through the steamy summer without blackouts, calls to make the nuclear shutdown permanent will get louder, our correspondent says.

The six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was badly damaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Blasts occurred at four of the reactors after the cooling systems went offline, triggering radiation leaks and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people.

A 20km (12 mile) exclusion zone remains in place around the plant.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima worse than Chernobyl 4/24/12 .

Poisonous mud in Hanalei

SUBHEAD: Lab tests indicate that there is a sandbar in Hanalei Bay laced with toxic heavy metals.  

By Terry Lilley on 28 April 2012 in Island Breath - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/05/poisonous-mud-in-hanalei.html)
 
Image above: Recent aerial view of the mouth of the Hanalei River and mud sandbar. From Terry Lilley.

You may know I have been studying the reefs in Hanalei Bay since 2006 trying to find out why the corals are dying in shallow water. It appears the coral die off is related to the continual mud flowing out of the Hanalei River.

These materials are also making large sand bars at the mouth of the river. I found several ongoing digging projects in the wetland that were not permitted under the Endangered Species Act. Two projects are private and one is government. None of these projects are using the mandatory sediment traps to keep mud from flowing into the bay.

Just go North out of Hanalei right now and you will see a bridge rebuilding project taking place on a small creek. Notice in the creek you will see the mandatory yellow sediment traps being uses properly. Several weeks ago I took several mud sample for testing by a professional lab in Honolulu called "Test America" to see what is in the mud in the river and bay. This mud is building up right now near the Hanalei Pier like it did last summer.

 
Image above: Muddy sandbar at the mouth of Hanalei River with the pier in the background. From Terry Lilley.

The test results just came back and they are stunning!! Here are some of the results right out of the report and I have the report available for review.

Arsenic 29 ppm (parts per million) Barium 19 ppm Chromium 120 ppm Lead 2.4 ppm

We are also testing for Dioxin which is the most dangerous chemical on earth! I bet it will be in the bay and river since it was used in agent orange testing in the river years ago. The EPA website (Environmental Protection Agency) has on their web the legal limit of these chemicals in drinking water and they are less than "one" ppm! That means our samples have more than 29 times the legal level for drinking water for Arsenic!!

Heavy metal poisoning can cause serious illness. Just read the info on the EPA web site. It is a violation of the Clean Water Act to dump mud and heavy metals into the Hanalei Bay but this occurs daily! I have lots of video and pics with GPS, time and date. I believe and can show with video and lab test, that this mud and heavy metal release is killing the reef in Hanalei Bay and making people sick!

The DOH in Honolulu (Watson Okubo) told me in an email that their department did similar lab test of the mud in the Hanalei Bay a year ago but have not released the results to the public, as they are still being analyzed! It only took us one hour to analyze our reports and I believe they both were done by the same lab!

If you are bothered like I am to have high levels of heavy metals in the water where we surf and swim, then maybe you could call the DOH, EPA, DLNR and Mayor to express your concerns and demand a clean up.




Image above: Handful of mud from Hanalei River that was is laced with heavy metals. From Terry Lilley.

The numbers are in the phone book. I have already sent these agencies a full report but they are not responding. This is not a right wing, left wing, good old boy network, or political issue. It is a simple heath issue that effects us all and it is getting worse with time. This problem can be fixed!!

It just needs a little public attention. We are also raising funds through our non profit to do more testing to see if the heavy metal concentrations are high through out the bay or just in localized spots. If you can help with funding please let me know as we have spent over $2,000 so far on these expensive test. Feel free to forward this email to anyone who may care about the health of Hanalei Bay.

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Japan tsunami aftertaste

SUBHEAD: A staggering mess as Japanese tsunami debris hits Alaska coast early. By Michael Van Baker on 30 April 2012 for The Sun Break - (http://thesunbreak.com/2012/04/30/a-staggering-mess-as-tsunami-debris-hits-alaska-coast-early/) Image above: Plastic container seems untouched by long journey as flotsam from Japan. From original article.

Gulf of Alaska Keeper, a non-profit organization that estimates it has cleared nearly 1,000,000 pounds of plastic debris from Alaskan coasts over the past 10 years, is reporting “tons” of what it believes is likely tsunami debris washing up on the coasts of the Kayak and Montague islands. Chris Pallister, president of Gulf of Alaska Keeper, told Alaska’s KTUU TV that ““It’s a staggering mess [...] the magnitude of this is just hard to comprehend and I’ve been looking at this stuff a long time.”

In an email to The SunBreak, Pallister let loose:

In my opinion, this is the single greatest environmental pollution event that has ever hit the west coast of North America. The slow-motion aspects of it have fooled an unwitting public. It far exceeds the Santa Barbara or Exxon Valdez oil spills in gross tonnage and also geographic scope. (I was in Prince William Sound during the during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and so have a sense of comparison).

Tens of thousands of miles of coastline from California to the Aleutian Islands are going to be hit with billions of pounds of toxic debris. NOAA’s latest estimate is that 1.5 million tons of largely plastic debris will hit the western United States coast. That is 30 billion pounds. We expect Alaska to get the largest percentage of that with much of it lodging on northern Gulf of Alaska beaches. Most of this will be plastic which is full of inherent toxic chemicals that will leach into the environment for generations.

Possibly worse are the millions of containers full of anything from household chemicals to toxic industrial chemicals that are floating our way. They will eventually burst upon our shores…in sensitive inter-tidal spawning and rearing habitat, endangering shorebirds, marine mammals, fish and everything in between. We are already finding empty and partially full containers of tsunami related chemicals and fuel drums along the northern Gulf of Alaska shoreline. The heavier fuller containers will come later because the wind doesn’t push them as fast toward the Gulf of Alaska as they are more current driven. The light-weight, high-windage debris such as Styrofoam, buoys, bottles, empty containers and drums have already arrived in staggering quantities.

Everyone is careful to say the debris is only “suspected” of having come from Japan’s March 2011 tsunami; there is plenty of marine debris on the ocean in general. Here is Pallister on the scope of the everyday marine debris problem.

But the newer condition and quantity of the debris that has been seen–”chunks of pink and blue insulation, which appear to be from buildings [and] white and black floats the size of oil barrels”–argue for the use of Occam’s Razor. This isn’t the first debris with Japanese printing to show up off our coasts: a soccer ball was returned to its owner, and a derelict fishing ship was sunk before it interfered with shipping lanes.

Image above: Extent of early debris on Alaskan coast is troubling indicator of future. From original article.

The problem is that it’s early. The estimated time of arrival for the debris, in whatever shape, radioactive or not (KTUU says not), was supposed to be 2014. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) has been spearheading, with Senator Mark Begich (D-AK), a multi-pronged effort to prepare for the debris and protect the West Coast from being submerged beneath it. Cantwell has asked President Obama to give the National Science Foundation emergency funds for research to help better track tsunami debris and develop response plans, and has been pressuring the administration to rethink a 25-percent budget cut for NOAA’s Marine Debris Program.

On hearing of the extent of the recent debris washing ashore, Begich released a statement that said: “The time for talk is over. The prospect of debris coming to our shorelines is not just a theory, it is here. I urge the Obama Administration to respond to our request from several weeks ago to free up funding and resources so we can effectively deal with this debris and not be scrambling when it arrives.”

That seems like common sense, but as Pallister explains: “Unlike an oil spill or industrial environmental accident, there are no easily identifiable culprits with deep pockets that can be pursued to help pay for the clean up. This will all be on the American taxpayer, so you can understand the glacial pace of the response preparation.”

NOAA has since released this somewhat ominous updated graphic illustrating their understanding of how much tsunami debris is still headed this way. You’ll want to refer to this pdf on “What to do if you see debris,” in preparation.

Video above: From (http://youtu.be/e654m9bScNc).

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Too hot not to notice!

SUBHEAD: We beginning to realize we are becoming a planet connected by wild weather. By Bill McKibbon on 3 May 2012 for Tom Dispatch - (http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175537/tomgram%3A_bill_mckibben%2C_the_most_important_story_of_our_lives/) Image above: Wreckage of the 141 year old Bartonsville Covered Bridge over the Williams River in Rockingham, Vermont. From (http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/92420/bartonsville-bridge-to-be-rebuilt/). The Williams River, in Vermont, was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it. There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day. If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They’ll hold, in essence, a giant dot -- and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they’ll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges. In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a “dry creek regatta” to highlight the spreading drought down under.

Pakistani farmers -- some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years -- will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December’s epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.

Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia. In Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains, and the damage caused to South Korea’s rice crop in recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate-change-induced drought has been shrinking that sea.

In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and coastal communities around the world that are feeling the impact of climate change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a teach-in. In Oman, elders will explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in their lifetimes. There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and in the highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the lives of local farmers. In Monterrey, Mexico, they’ll recall last year’s floods that did nearly $2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the Alps.

And across North America, as the sun moves westward, activists in Halifax, Canada, will “swim for survival” across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while high-school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will gather on a football field inundated by 2011’s historic killer floods.

In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March’s record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full uniform will remember last year’s record forest fires and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station. In Miami, Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line streets that scientists say will eventually be underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant banner with just two words, a quote from that classic of western children’s literature, The Wizard of Oz. “I’m Melting” it will say, in letters three-stories high.

This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on. But -- as with the tobacco industry before them -- the evidence has simply gotten too strong.

Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today. Now, it’s not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird. Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.

The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is... the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate. In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows. Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change -- and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.

So here’s a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we’re mounting across the world, “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” won’t be connecting the dots. They’ll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich’s retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney’s coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we’re going to tell this story -- and it’s the most important story of our time -- we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.

Bill McKibben, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is the founder of 350.org, which is coordinating Saturday’s Connect the Dots day. You can find the event nearest you by checking climatedots.org.

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Democracy's Arc

SUBHEAD: There’s no shortage of crises sufficient to tip the current system into its final stalemate.  

By John Michael Greer on 3 May 2012 for Archdruid Report - 
  (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/05/democracys-arc.html)

 
Image above: Detail of packaging for the computer game "Junta". From (http://www.rollthedice.nl/2009/10/08/strijps-bultje-1-nineteen-eighty-four-1984-een-zoektocht/).
 

The troubling news about methane releases from the Arctic ocean that was the focus of last week’s post on The Archdruid Report belongs, as I mentioned then, to the wider trajectory of industrial society’s decline and fall, not to the more specific theme I’ve been developing here in recent months.

The end of America’s global empire takes place against the background of that wider trajectory, to be sure, and core elements of the predicament of industrial civilization bid fair to play a crucial role as the United States backs itself into a corner defined by its own history. Still, important as the limits to growth are just now, there’s much more at work in the endgame of American empire.

Thus this week’s post will plunge without further ado from the austere heights of atmospheric chemistry to the steaming, swampy, snake-infested realities of American politics. It’s a jarring shift in more ways than one, since everybody basically agrees on what methane is, what the atmosphere is, and so on; the terms that frame debates about the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic global warming are clearly defined and bear some relationship to observable fact. We don’t have that advantage in politics. In particular, the possibility of an intelligent conversation about American politics is hamstrung by the spectacular distortions imposed on basic terms by nearly everybody involved.

The worst example, and the one I propose to explore this week, is democracy. It’s hard to think of a word that’s bandied about more freely, but I keep on waiting for Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride to stand up and say his classic line: “You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

On both ends of American politics, for example, democracy is for all practical purposes defined as a political system in which a majority of voters will support whatever group happens to be using the word at that moment. That definition can be seen at work most clearly in the shrill insistence, common these days over much of the political spectrum, that the United States isn’t a democracy; after all, the argument runs, if the United States was a democracy, the people would vote in favor of their own best interests, which of course just happen to be identical with the platform of whoever’s talking. The fact that this claim can be heard from groups whose ideas of the people’s best interests differ in every conceivable way—for example, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street—simply adds to the irony.

Behind the rhetoric is a conception of democracy that has nothing in common with the real world, and everything in common with the Utopian fantasies that have come to infest contemporary political discourse. When Americans talk about democracy or, with even richer irony, “real democracy,” they usually mean a system that does not exist, has never existed, and can never exist—a system less real than Neverland, in which the free choices of millions of individual voters somehow always add up to an optimal response to the challenges of a complex age, without ever running afoul of the troubles that inevitably beset democratic systems in the real world.

Here’s an example. Nearly all those who insist that the United States is not a democracy cite, as evidence for that claim, the fact that our elections are usually corrupt and sometimes fraudulent. Now of course this is quite true; the winner in an American election is generally, though not always, the candidate that has the most money to spend; the broader influence of wealth over America’s media and political parties is pervasive; and election fraud is as much a part of American culture as baseball and apple pie. the Democrats who waxed indignant about the rigged election returns from Florida in 2000, for example, by and large seem to have gone out of their way to forget about the voting machines at the bottom of Lake Michigan that put John F. Kennedy in the White House in 1960.

Does this prove that the United States isn’t a “real democracy”? Not at all. This is how democracies actually function in the real world. Under a system of representative democracy, the people who have wealth and the people who have power are by no means always the same; some of those who have wealth want power, some of those who have power want wealth, and the law of supply and demand takes it from there. That extends all the way down to the individual voter, by the way.

 Give citizens the right to dispose of their votes freely, and a significant number of them will use that freedom to put their votes up for sale—directly, as in old-fashioned machine politics, or indirectly, by voting for candidates who provide them with goodies at the public expense. There’s no way to prevent that without depriving citizens of the right to vote as they choose, and you can’t eliminate that and still have a democracy.
 

By this point I suspect some of my readers may be wondering if I’m opposed to democracy. Quite the contrary, I’m very much in favor of it; despite its problems, it beats the stuffing out of most systems of government. It has three benefits in particular that you don’t usually get in other forms of government.

First, democracies tolerate much broader freedom of speech and conscience than countries ruled by other systems. I can critique the personalities, policies, and (as here) fundamental concepts of American government without having to worry that this will bring jackbooted thugs crashing through my door at three in the morning; in nondemocratic countries, critics of the government in power rarely have that security.

 Equally, I can practice the religion I choose, read the books I prefer, carry on conversations with people in other democratic countries around the world, and exercise a great many other freedoms that people in nondemocratic countries simply don’t have. These things matter; people have fought and died for them, and a system that makes room for them is far and away preferable to one that doesn’t.

Second, democracies don’t kill anything like as many of their own citizens as most other forms of government do. The history of the twentieth century, if nothing else, should have been enough of a reminder that authoritarian governments come with a very high domestic body count.

All governments everywhere kill plenty of people whenever they go to war, and all governments everywhere go to war when they think they can get away with it; imperial democracies also tend to build up very large prison populations—the United States has more people in prison than any other nation on Earth, just as Britain in its age of empire shipped so many convicts to Australia that they played a sizable role in the settling of that continent. Still, all other things being equal, it’s better to live in a nation where the government doesn’t dump large numbers of its own citizens into mass graves, and democracies do that far less often, and to far fewer people, than nondemocratic governments generally do.

Finally, democracies undergo systemic change with less disruption and violence than nondemocratic countries do. Whether we’re talking about removing a failed head of state, coping with an economic depression, dealing with military defeat, or winning or losing an empire, democracies routinely manage to surf the wave of change without the sort of collapse such changes very often bring to nondemocratic countries. The rotation of leadership hardwired into the constitutions of most successful democracies builds a certain amount of change into the system, if only because different politicians have different pet agendas, and pressure from outside the political class—if it’s strong, sustained, and intelligently directed—very often does have an impact: not quickly, not easily, and not without a great deal of bellowing and handwaving, but the thing does happen eventually.

All three of these benefits, and a number of others of the same kind, can be summed up in a single sentence: democracy is resilient. Authoritarian societies, by contrast, are brittle; that’s why they can’t tolerate freedom of speech and conscience, why they so often murder their citizens in large numbers, and why they tend to shatter when they are driven to change by the pressure of events. Democratic societies can also be brittle, especially if they’re newly established, or if a substantial fraction of their citizens rejects the values of democracy; still, all other things being equal, a democratic society normally weathers systemic change with less trauma than an authoritarian one.

One measure of this greater resilience, ironically enough, may be seen in the lack of success radical groups generally have when they try to delegitimize and overturn an established democratic society. Rhetoric that would bring a brutal response from authoritarian governments get little more than a yawn from democratic ones. A few years back, the phrase “repressive tolerance” was the term for this on the American far left. I doubt those who denounced it under this label would have preferred to be dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, shot through the head, and tumbled into an unmarked grave; the rest of us, certainly, have good reason to be thankful that that’s not the way America generally deals with its dissidents.

That aside, there’s equally good reason to want a system in place just now that can handle systemic change with the smallest possible amount of trauma and violence, because we’re headed for a great deal of systemic change in the years and decades ahead. Part of that is due to the wider trajectory of industrial society I referenced toward the beginning of this essay, part of it is due to the ongoing decline of America’s global empire, but a good deal of it comes from a different source.

The Greeks, who had a penchant for giving names to things, had a convenient label for that source: anacyclosis. That was the moniker coined by the Greek historian Polybius, who chronicled the conquest of Greece by the Romans in the second century BCE. He noted that the squabbling city-states of the Greek world tended to cycle through a distinctive sequence of governments—monarchy, followed by aristocracy, followed by democracy, and then back around again to monarchy. It’s a cogent model, especially if you replace “monarchy” with “dictatorship” and “aristocracy” with “junta” to bring the terminology up to current standards.

A short and modernized form of the explanation—those of my readers who are interested in the original form should consult the Histories of Polybius—is that in every dictatorship, an inner circle of officials and generals emerges. This inner circle eventually takes advantage of weakness at the top to depose the dictator or, more often, simply waits until he dies and then distributes power so that no one figure has total control; thus a junta is formed. '

In every country run by a junta, in turn, a wider circle of officials, officers, and influential people emerges; this wider circle eventually takes advantage of weakness at the top to depose the junta, and when this happens, in ancient Greece and the modern world alike, the standard gambit is to install a democratic constitution to win popular support and outflank remaining allies of the deposed junta. In every democracy, finally, competing circles of officials, officers, and influential people emerge; these expand their power until the democratic system freezes into gridlock under the pressure of factionalism or unsolved crisis; the democratic system loses its legitimacy, political collapse follows, and finally the head of the strongest faction seizes power and imposes a dictatorship, and the cycle begins all over again.

It can be educational to measure this sequence against recent history and see how well it fits. Russia, for example, has been through a classic round of anacyclosis since the 1917 revolution: dictatorship under Lenin and Stalin, a junta from Khrushchev through Gorbachev, and a democracy—a real democracy, please remember, complete with corruption, rigged elections, and the other features of real democracy—since that time. China, similarly, had a period of democracy from 1911 to 1949, a dictatorship under Mao, and a junta since then, with movements toward democracy evident over the last few decades. Still, the example I have in mind is the United States of America, which has been around the cycle three times since its founding; the one difference, and it’s crucial, is that all three stages have taken place repeatedly under the same constitution.

A case could be made that this is the great achievement of modern representative democracy—the development of a system so resilient that it can weather anacyclosis without cracking. The three rounds of anacyclosis we’ve had in the United States so far have each followed the classic pattern; they’ve begun under the dominance of a single leader whose overwhelming support from the political class and the population as a whole allowed him to shatter the factional stalemate of the previous phase and impose a radically new order on the nation. After his death, power passes to what amounts to an elected junta, and gradually defuses outwards in the usual way, until a popular movement to expand civil rights and political participation overturns the authority of the junta.

Out of the expansion of political participation, factions rise to power, and eventually bring the mechanism of government to a standstill; crisis follows, and is resolved by the election of another almost-dictator.
 

Glance back over American history and it’s hard to miss the pattern, repeating over a period that runs roughly seventy to eighty years. The dictator-figures were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, each of whom overturned existing structures in order to consolidate their power, and did so with scant regard for existing law.

The juntas were the old Whigs, the Republicans, and the New Deal Democrats, each of them representatives of a single social class; they were overthrown in turn by Jacksonian populism, the Progressive movement, and the complex social convulsions of the Sixties, each of which diffused power across a broader section of the citizenry. The first cycle ended in stalemate over the issue of slavery; the second ended in a comparable stalemate over finding an effective response to the Great Depression; the third—well, that’s where we are right now.

There’s no shortage of crises sufficient to tip the current system into its final stalemate, and no shortage of people in the political class who show every sign of being willing to give it that final push. The great difficulty just now, it seems to me, is precisely that fashionable contempt for democracy as it actually exists that I addressed earlier in this essay.

In 1860, that habit was so far from finding a place in the political dialogue that the constitution of the Confederate States of America was in most respects a copy of the one signed at Philadelphia a long lifetime before. In 1932, though a minority of Americans supported Marxism, fascism, or one of the other popular authoritarianisms of the day, the vast majority who put Roosevelt into the White House four times in a row expected him to maintain at least a rough approximation of constitutional government.
 

That’s much less true this time around. Granted, there’s less public support for overtly authoritarian ideologies—I expect to see Marxism make a large-scale comeback on the American left in the next few years, for reasons I’ll explain in a future post—but as Oswald Spengler pointed out almost a century ago, in the endgame of democratic societies, it’s not the cult of ideology but the cult of personality that’s the real danger.

As the Russian proverb warns, it’s never a good idea to let the perfect become the enemy of the good; in our time, as a growing number of Americans insist that America isn’t a democracy because it doesn’t live up to their fantasies of political entitlement, it’s all too possible that one or more mass movements could coalesce around some charismatic figure who offers to fix everything that’s wrong with the country if only we let him get rid of all those cumbersome checks and balances that stand in his way. How many of the benefits of democracy I listed above would survive the victory of such a movement is not a question I would like to contemplate.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Seascapes with Methane Plumes 4/25/12

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