BP and the ‘Little Eichmanns’

By Chris Hedges

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bp_and_the_little_eichmanns_20100517/

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

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As Global Temperatures Rise, World's Lizards Are Disappearing: 20 Percent of All Lizard Species Could Be Extinct by 2080

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100513143447.htm

ScienceDaily (May 13, 2010) — For many lizards, global climate change is a matter of life and death. After decades of surveying Sceloporus lizard populations in Mexico, an international research team has found that rising temperatures have driven 12 percent of the country's lizard populations to extinction. An extinction model based on this discovery also forecasts a grim future for these ecologically important critters, predicting that a full 20 percent of all lizard species could be extinct by the year 2080.

The detailed surveys of lizard populations in Mexico, collected from 200 different sites, indicate that the temperatures in those regions have changed too rapidly for the lizards to keep pace. It seems that all types of lizards are far more susceptible to climate-warming extinction than previously thought because many species are already living right at the edge of their thermal limits, especially at low elevation and low latitude range limits.

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Gulf Oil Spill Proves the Idiocy of Unfettered Deregulation

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on May 12, 2010, Printed on May 14, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146848/

This story first appeared on Truthdig.

“Drill, baby, drill!” Those were the words that Sarah Palin used to electrify the 2008 Republican National Convention. But while she popularized that environment-be-damned slogan, it had already defined the eight years of oil-drilling policy that prevailed during the presidency of George W. Bush. 

Those red state voters of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana whose livelihood is now threatened by the idiocy of that unfettered deregulatory stance might well be having second thoughts. So, too, those Democratic Party opportunists who had prevailed on President Barack Obama to one-up the GOP by vastly increasing the scope of offshore drilling.

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The Economic Crisis and What Must be Done

By Richard C. Cook

Global Research, November 24, 2009

richardccook.com - 2009-11-23

The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the universities, etc. No one can rise to the top in any of these institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.

This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19thcentury progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

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Climate Bill Is a Misnomer: It’s a Nuclear Energy-Promoting, Oil Drilling-Championing, Coal Mining-Boosting Gift to Polluters

Statement of Tyson Slocum, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program

WASHINGTON - May 12 - After half a year of delay, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are set to release their nuclear energy/cap-and-trade bill today. Until we see legislative text, we can comment only on the broad outline made available yesterday and an additional summary being circulated among legislative staff.

It's not accurate to call this a climate bill. This is nuclear energy-promoting, oil drilling-championing, coal mining-boosting legislation with a weak carbon-pricing mechanism thrown in. What's worse, it guts the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) current authority to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Here's our take on what we know is in the new bill:

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Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth Speech to the G77 at the United Nations

By President Evo Morales

Global Research, May 12, 2010

I have come here to share the conclusions of the First World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held last April 20th to 22nd in Cochabamba, Bolivia. I convened this Conference because in Copenhagen the voice of the peoples of the world was not listened to or attended to, nor were established procedures respected by all States.

The Conference attracted 35,352 participants, and of those, 9,254 were foreign delegates, representing movements and social organizations from 140 countries and five continents. The event also benefited from the participation of delegations from 56 governments.

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Hightower: The Right-Wing Loons Should Stop Blaming "God" for the Oil Spill

By Jim Hightower, AlterNet
Posted on May 12, 2010, Printed on May 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146830/

Luckily, as our country tries to cope with another oozing oil disaster, we have political leaders with the insight, expertise and cool heads to analyze the problem precisely and guide us to rational long-term solutions. For example, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

Known as the Sage of Paint Creek, Texas, this towering intellect was among the right-wing politicos who were noisily demanding deregulation of all offshore drilling only two years ago, chanting "Drill, baby, drill!"

Now, even though BP's offshore rig, Deepwater Horizon, has created an ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, Perry is still defending the industry's always-messy practice of extracting ever-more crude from the Earth's depths. The culprit in this disaster, explained the guv, is not BP but the Almighty. "From time to time," he informs us, "there's going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented."

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Where does the concept of "climate debt" fit into a New Economy framework?

by David Korten

As the climate changes, the consequences for poor people in low-income countries-those who have had no part in the profligate consumption that created the problem-will be particularly devastating. This fact is bringing climate justice to the fore of the agenda for many progressive groups that deal with international issues. But even among those groups, all proposals for dealing equitably with the climate crisis are not equal. The differences between them highlight an important contrast between Old Economy and New Economy perspectives.

That difference is highlighted by blogs on the issue by two progressive friends and colleagues I greatly admire. A blog by Naomi Klein titled "Climate Rage" [1] spells out the Old Economy's "climate debt" take on climate justice. A blog by Gustavo Esteva with Juliette Beck, titled "Let's See Ourselves," [2] presents a New Economy take that focuses on localization. The contrast between the perspectives brings to mind the wisdom of Albert Einstein, who observed that a problem cannot be solved within the same conceptual frame that created it.

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Kerry-Lieberman Climate Proposal a Disaster for Climate

by Center for Biological Diversity

WASHINGTON - In the midst of what appears to be the worst offshore oil disaster in American history, U.S. Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) will today put forth a draft climate bill that will not solve the problems of global warming and continues pandering to the fossil fuel industry -- including expanded offshore oil drilling -- that created the problems in the first place.

The proposal, leaked one day before its official release, reflects months of back-room negotiations between the senators, major polluters, and other Washington insiders, and would:

* provide only a fraction of the greenhouse gas pollution reductions scientists have said are necessary to avoid catastrophic climate disruption;
* ban successful Clean Air Act programs from reducing greenhouse pollution;
* ban existing state and local efforts to tackle climate change;
* catalyze increased oil and gas drilling -- including offshore drilling; and
* subsidize dangerous and costly nuclear energy.

In response, Center for Biological Diversity Executive Director Kierán Suckling urged rejection of the proposal unless these problems are addressed. He issued the following statement:

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AS WE DIE FOR BP, OUR MILITARY ROTS IN THE WRONG GULF

Harvey Wasserman

As we die for BP, our military rots in the wrong Gulf
May 12, 2010

As you read this, the life of our bodies, nation and planet is being blown out a corporate hole in the Gulf of Mexico and into a BP Dead Zone of no return. 

The apocalyptic gusher of oily poison pouring into the waters that give us life can only be viewed---FELT---by each and every one of us as an on-going death by a thousand cuts with no end in sight. 

Yet our government---allegedly the embodiment of our collective will to survive---has done NOTHING of significance to fight this mass murder.  

As it did while New Orleans drowned downstream from a willfully neglected levee system, our most potentially effective counter-force dithers on the other side of the world, in the wrong Gulf. 

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DOE Still Disavows Peak Oil Forecast, Despite New Studies

by: Julia Harte  |  SolveClimate http://www.truthout.org/doe-still-disavows-peak-oil-forecast-despite-new-studies59372

Gulf oil spill adds pressure for release of "proprietary database" behind DOE's optimism.

The U.S. Department of Energy has long disavowed peak oil theory: the notion that annual world oil production will peak, plateau, and then enter a decline. But the agency’s stance appears increasingly at odds with the future predicted by many world energy analysts, including the US military.

In February, the United Kingdom Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security—a group comprised in part by renewable energy companies—published a report warning that global peak oil would probably occur within the next decade.

And in March, the U.S. Joint Forces Command released its Joint Operating Environment 2010 report, a forecast of likely national security challenges. Drawing on several energy information sources, the report concluded that "world surplus oil production could disappear by 2012, and shortages of 10 million barrels per day could be seen as soon as 2015."

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UN fears ‘irreversible’ damage to natural environment

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, May 10th, 2010 -- 11:04 am

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0510/fears-irreversible-damage-natural-environment/

GENEVA — The UN warned on Monday that "massive" loss in life-sustaining natural environments was likely to deepen to the point of being irreversible after global targets to cut the decline by this year were missed.

As a result of the degradation, the world is moving closer to several "tipping points" beyond which some ecosystems that play a part in natural processes such as climate or the food chain may be permanently damaged, a United Nations report said.

The third "Global Biodiversity Outlook" found that deforestation, pollution or overexploitation were damaging the productive capacity of the most vulnerable environments, including the Amazon rainforest, lakes and coral reefs.

"This report is saying that we are reaching the tipping point where the irreversible damage to the planet is going to be done unless we act urgently," Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, told journalists.

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We Need a Road Map to a Coal Free Future Declaration of Clean Energy Independence

by Stephanie Pistello, Ben Evans, and Jeff Biggers

In the wake of the worst coal mining disaster in 40 years, compromise and political machinations this spring have resulted in a regulatory crisis of failure; workplace safety in the mines, including the black lung scandal, has emerged as a national tragedy; toxic coal ash remains uncategorized as hazardous waste; mountaintop removal operations and devastating strip mining in 24 states continue under regulatory plunder, not abolishment; billions of taxpayers' dollars pour down the black hole of carbon capture and storage boondoggles, increasing coal production; climate legislation hangs in the balance of political games.

In 1776, Thomas Paine challenged our country to embrace the cause of independence over compromise. In a moment of crisis, he declared: "We have it in our power to make the world over again."

Our modern-day Paine, James Hansen at the NASA Goddard Center, has issued a similar clarion call: "Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. Our global climate is nearing tipping points."

It's time to envision a coal-free future. It's time for clean energy independence.

We need a road map for a coal-free future. Not a hodge-podge collection of new regulations.

Coal mining, which provides 45 percent of our electricity, will not end tomorrow. Every coal miner deserves a right to a sustainable livelihood; given the legacy of our coal miners, we also believe no coal miner should be displaced from his or her job until we develop clean energy alternatives. This means that coalfield residents, like all Americans, deserve a road map for a feasible transition to clean-energy jobs -- including a Coal Miner's GI Bill for retraining and a massive reinvestment in sustainable economic development in coalfield communities -- before we reach a point of no return.

The coalfields should be ground zero for President Obama's clean energy initiatives, Al Gore's Repower America, and all green jobs projects.

All coal mining communities know that the first time in 25 years, utilities coal stockpiles have increased during the summer; absentee coal companies are cutting jobs and idling higher-cost mines to keep their stock holders happy in a period of slumping demand; recent U.S. Geological Survey estimates place "peak coal" production as early as 2020.

As grandchildren of black-lung-afflicted coal miners from Kentucky, Illinois, and southwestern Virginia, we honor our families' sacrifices in recognizing, not denying, the true cost of coal. Our grandfathers benefited from a transition to mechanization to improve mine safety. The time has come for a transition to clean-energy jobs.

Coal is not cheap nor clean; coal has been killing us -- for over 200 years. Over 104,000 Americans have died in coal-mining accidents; three coal miners die daily from black-lung disease. Millions of acres of forests and farmlands have been strip-mined into oblivion; pioneering communities have been plundered. Half of Americans live within an hour of a toxic coal ash dump.

The Physicians for Social Responsibility recently found that coal "contributes to four of the top five causes of mortality in the U.S. and is responsible for increasing the incidence of major diseases."

The National Academy of Scientists totaled costs of coal at more than $62 billion in "external damages" to our health and lives. A West Virginia University report noted the coal industry "costs the Appalachian region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits." In Kentucky, according to a Mountain Association of Community Economic Development study, coal may provide $528 million in state revenue, but costs $643 million in state expenditures.

Nothing has motivated our commitment for clean energy more than the tragedy of mountaintop-removal and nationwide strip mining in 24 states. We have seen the devastation of clear-cutting our nation's great forests and carbon sink of Appalachia and blowing up its oldest mountain range. We have met the casualties of absentee commerce; grieving parents who have lost loved ones to coal slurry-contaminated water; veterans and elderly who endure blasting, fly rock and silica dust; families who have seen their homes washed away in floods caused by erosion; streams poisoned with mining waste; boarded-up communities, strangled by a boom-and-bust single economy.

The plunder of Appalachia and all coalfield communities must end.

More so, with coal-fired plants contributing over 30 percent of our CO2 emissions, everyone's fate is connected to the coalfields now.

"Clean coal" carbon capture and storage plans are not only chimeras for Big Coal profit, but will ultimately increase coal production by 20-30 percent.

In the end, our fiduciary responsibility to our children demands a new way of generating our electricity in Kentucky and the country. It also affords us a great opportunity for economic and social revitalization

Clean energy independence, not coal, will bring more sustainable jobs.

Wind, solar, hydropower and turbine manufacturing, along with weatherization, retrofitting appliances and homes, could create jobs. The Appalachian Regional Commission found that "energy-efficiency investments could result in an increase of 77,378 net jobs by 2030" in the region.

For us, such a clean energy revolution began with the proposed Smith # 1 coal-fired plant in eastern Kentucky, which was recently set aside. Instead of a costly coal-fired dinosaur, a recent study found that a combination of "energy efficiency, weatherization, hydropower and wind power initiatives in the East Kentucky Power Cooperative region would generate more than 8,750 new jobs for Kentucky residents, with a total impact of more than $1.7 billon on the region's economy over the next three years."

Ultimately, this clean energy independence would meet the energy needs of EKPC customers and cost less than the proposed coal plant.

A coal-free future began in Kentucky, in the heartland of our nation's coalfields. Now it's time to imagine a coal-free future for the rest of the country.

The writers are co-founders of the Coal Free Future Project.

My Mother's Day Gift to Planet: Not Having Kids

Blue Ridge Press / By Chris Bolgiano

Like me, many women could discover that a childfree life offers meaningful experiences that balance the loss of mothering, and theirs could be a great gift to a beleaguered planet.

It was Mother's Day, and the staff of the independent-living community where my mother resides had arranged a nice luncheon, with roses for all the mothers. When a cherubic child with golden ringlets pressed a flower into my hand, and I politely refused it, she became confused. No wonder, since it was assumed by everyone, that of course all adult women in attendance were mothers

At fifty-something I am an adult, but not a mother. And though some will gasp in horror, I consider that to be my greatest achievement as a conservationist, although finding the first saw-whet owl ever reported in my part of Virginia ranks pretty high, too.

For millennia, the relentless ticking of a woman's biological clock has equated her entire life with only one purpose: childbearing. And for my gender, menopause has always largely meant the end of meaning.

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Sex, Lies, and Oil Spills

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the devise voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

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Obama Admin Warned by NOAA It Was Underestimating Offshore Drilling Risks-- To Be Expected Given Big Money

By Rob Kall

The admin was warned but it had a political agenda and a government infrastructure still primarily made up of Bush appointees who earned their jobs by blocking regulations

When the Obama administration was developing its new policy on offshore drilling, it was warned by NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) officials that the risks were being underestimated, Dan Froomkin of the Huffingtonpost reports,

NOAA is the nation's lead ocean resource agency, and the warnings came in its response to a draft of the Obama Administration's offshore oil drilling plans. The comments were Web-published in October by the whistle-blowing group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

But NOAA's views were largely brushed aside as Obama went ahead and announced on March 31 that he would open vast swaths of American coastal waters to offshore drilling -- a plan now very much in doubt as a blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico spews out an estimated 200,000 gallons of oil daily, for the 13th straight day.

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Chernobyl Needs a Real Climate Bill

By Harvey Wasserman

SmirkingChimp.com

This week 24 years ago, untold quantities of lethal radiation began pouring into the atmosphere from the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl Unit 4. Nearly a million people have died because of it.

And on this horrific anniversary we have now seen the stumble of a very bad climate bill. The events are directly related.

Chernobyl's death toll has been bitterly debated.

But after nearly a quarter-century of industry denial, the New York Academy of Sciences has published, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, the definitive catalog and analysis. Drawing on some 5,000 studies, three Russian scientists have placed the ultimate death toll at 985,000.

The authors include Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the president of Russia; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist who was, at the time of the accident, director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The book has been edited by Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist expert in the health impacts of radioactivity [1].

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Bolivian President Blames Capitalism for Global Warming

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia - Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism is to blame for global warming and the accelerated deterioration of the planetary ecosystem in a speech today opening an international conference on climate change and the "rights of Mother Earth."

Bolivian President Evo Morales addresses indigenous, environmental and civil society delegates. 'We all have the ethics and the moral right to say here that the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism,' he said. (Photo courtesy ABI)

More than 20,000 indigenous, environmental and civil society delegates from 129 countries were in attendance as President Morales welcomed them to the conference at a soccer stadium in the village of Tiquipaya on the outskirts of the city of Cochabamba.

"The main cause of the destruction of the planet Earth is capitalism and in the towns where we have lived, where we respected this Mother Earth, we all have the ethics and the moral right to say here that the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism," said Morales, who is Bolivia's first fully indigenous head of state in the 470 years since the Spanish invasion.

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10 WAYS MOTHER EARTH WILL STRIKE BACK IF WE DON'T STOP OUR WANTON DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT

AlterNet / By Scott Thill

Deniers are dancing on the graves of their reputations, to say nothing of reality itself. But Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

And if the ground's not cold/Everything is gonna burn/We'll all take turns/I'll get mine too. -- Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven." 

Bad news. Thanks to perfectly timed, premeditated reality assassinations like so-called ClimateGate, nearly half of Americans may now believe that the various threats of climate change are exaggerated. That's the highest quotient ever since polling on the issue commenced. But there is good news: They're on the wrong side of history and science, and Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

Welcome to our existential nightmare. From rising seas and runaway droughts and storms to the outer limits of dystopian catastrophes like the fart apocalypse -- I'll explain later -- our planet has no shortage of ways to bitch-slap us back intoour dangerous reality, whether we want it to or not.

Of course, we could stave off some of the more egregious probabilities of extinction, if we acted now to limit global warming's inexorable rise to 2 degrees. But that means a determined destruction of the status quo, and that's always messy for those who like things just the way they are, thank you very much. But they'll still get theirs. How? Let us count the ways.

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COAL-FIRED PLANTS DRINK 1.5 TRILLION GALLONS OF WATER ABD WE DRINK THE DIRTY BACKWASH

AlterNet / By Jeff Biggers

In many respects, some folks might use more water flicking on their lights, than chugging back a glass of that wondrous stuff.

Here's a sobering fact: Coal-fired power plants use approximately 1.5 trillion gallons of water a year in the US.

In many respects, some folks might use more water flicking on their lights, than chugging back a glass of that wondrous stuff.

Makes you wonder: Has the EPA ever tabulated the external costs of coal on our water resources?

And then, after that refreshing drink of desperately needed water, the 600-odd coal-fired plants (the EIA actually reports 1,445 coal-firedgenerators) typically throw up their chemically enhanced processed wastewater into our rivers and waterways, poisoning our own drinking water.

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