Warnings of the Approach of Peak Oil and Its Effect on World Food Supply
There’s been a lot of stale argument recently about oil – is it running out? Are we approaching/at/passed Peak Oil (the point when global oil production goes into irrevocable decline)? Business, unsurprisingly, isn’t waiting for the answer; it’s working out what will happen next.
Take the recent report from Deutsche Bank, entitled ‘The Peak Oil Market: Price Dynamics at the End of the Oil Age’. This describes a world where the effect of failing global reserves is compounded by incoherent politics. If the US Government was honest about the cost of oil, for example, it would slap another 50c on a gallon of gasoline to pay the cost of the war in Iraq. Ludicrously, as global oil supplies dwindle, the increasingly precious part that remains is concentrated in the hands of those who give it away to their citizens for almost nothing – Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq.
Governments should be planning how best to manage the limited supply of oil sensibly, for the long-term, the bankers write:
‘We believe, based on the history of the past decades, years, and months, that they will do the exact opposite.’
Corporate Influence on Climate Change and Environmental NGO’s Exposed
By pretending the broken system can work–and will work, in just a moment, after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another–the big green groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our safety by our politicians. The US climate bills are long-term plans: they lock us into a woefully inadequate schedule of carbon cuts all the way to 2050. So when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to destruction–and calling it progress.
Bill McKibben: The Attack on Climate-Change Science
“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains. These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity’s role in causing it, and in its import for the planet: a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).
What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face — from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet). What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely. If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth — and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves.
The CLEAR Act: A Clean, Green and Clear Choice
It’s time for the climate movement to come together, right now, to defend the best option that we have to get decent, badly-needed legislation on climate passed this year, and to push back against the fossil fools. Passage of the CLEAR Act would be a definite step forward, a political tipping point, not the end game but a victory for sure.
Is Cap and Trade Really Dead? Part III
Different models of carbon cap legislation serve different interests. Videos of Parts 4 and 5 of The Real News Network’s coverage of Carbon Cap Legislation. Paul Jay interviews Professor James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who is also associated with the PERI Institute
Is Cap and Trade Dead? Part II
Continuing with our coverage of pending Cap-and-Trade and Cap-and-Dividend legislation, here are three videos from the Real News Network on different models of Carbon Cap legislation and the corruption that could be caused by Carbon Offsets and Trading. Paul Jay interviews Professor James Boyce, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He’s associated with the PERI Institute, the Political Economics Research Institute. The Real News Network has yet to publish the final one, but we will post it as soon as we get it.
Let us hope a better understanding of this issue will precipitate a new effort on the part government in the Western World to enact honest, equitable, and effective measures to reduce and remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.
Is “Cap and Trade” Really Dead?
Sadly, many large environmental organizations – as well as Goldman Sachs, big oil and big coal – have also been pushing for the adoption of Cap and Trade legislation, citing concerns that this may be the only politically possible solution for controlling carbon emissions. They have ignored the fact that the flawed multi-billion dollar economic infrastructure Cap-and-Trade would create will be impossible to dismantle once it is shown – and it will be – as disruptive, inefficient and dangerous. But President Obama is going for an energy bill alone, so Cap-and-Trade is dead, at least for now.
“Put the polluters on trial, not the planet!”
The epic fight to ward off global warming and transform the energy system that is at the core of our planet’s economy takes many forms: huge global days of action, giant international conferences like the one that just failed in Copenhagen, small gestures in the homes of countless people. But there are a few signal moments, and one comes March 15-18, when the federal government puts Tim DeChristopher on trial in Salt Lake City. Tim—“Bidder 70”– pulled off one of the most creative protests against our runaway energy policy in years: he bid for the oil and gas leases on several parcels of federal land even though he had no money to pay for them, thus upending the auction. The government calls that “violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act” and thinks he should spend ten years in jail for the crime; we call it a noble act, a profound gesture made on behalf of all of us and of the future.
Tim’s action drew national attention to the fact that the Bush Administration spent its dying days in office handing out a last round of favors to the oil and gas industry. After investigating irregularities in the auction, the Obama Administration took many of the leases off the table, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar criticizing the process as “a headlong rush.” And yet that same Administration is choosing to prosecute the young man who blew the whistle on this corrupt process.
We cannot let this stand. When Tim disrupted the auction, he did so in the fine tradition of non-violent civil disobedience that changed so many unjust laws in this country’s past. Tim’s upcoming trial is an occasion to raise the alarm once more about the peril our planet faces. The situation is still fluid—the trial date has just been set, and local supporters are making plans for how to mark the three-day proceedings. But they are asking people around the country to flood into Salt Lake City in mid-March. If you come, there will be ample opportunity for both legal protest and civil disobedience.
Forests of Carbon
Mountain pine beetle devastation in BC has resulted in 400-plus million cubic metres of dead wood, enough to rebuild the three cities of Toronto, Montreal and New York. This one ecological disaster, the largest in North America, means that BC’s 60 million hectares of forests are now a net emitter of greenhouse gases, and the province will be unable to reach its goal of reducing its GHG emissions 30% by 2020.
Study, “Managing BC’s Forests For A Cooler Planet,” by Ben Parfitt, a collaborative work of environmentalists, labour unions and academics, proposes a revolutionary change in BC’s forestry practices. The emphasis would shift from the maximum amount of cut that forests can sustain to the maximum amount of carbon that can be sequestered in trees and wood products – from an Annual Allowable Cut to a Carbon Cut Calculation (CCC).
We Can Dream, Can’t We? GM Car of the Future
Andrews Sisters Feat. Gordon Jenkins And His Orchestra And Patty Andrews – I Can Dream, Can’t I? .mp3 Found at bee mp3 search engine ************************************************************************
