So long overdue to saying ‘no’ to more drilling for oil and gas!
Just five days ago, I republished an essay from Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch fame called The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing. Despite Tom’s permission for me to republish any of the essays that appear on TomDispatch, I do try to be very selective and not republish too often.
However, what was published by Tom on the 18th, just three days ago, is so powerful that it requires the widest readership possible. That’s why Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, “Little Revolution,” Big Fracking Consequences is being republished on Learning from Dogs today and tomorrow. The reason I have split the essay into two parts is because I want to add some other material. Tom’s publication is in one part so if you can’t wait for my sequel tomorrow, then click here.
Here’s something that I want to draw your attention to:
If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month
By Philip Bump This image sums up 2012, temperature-wise. Nowhere on the surface of the planet have we seen any record cold temperatures over the course of the year so far. Every land surface in the world saw warmer-than-average temperatures except Alaska and the eastern tip of Russia. The continental United States has been blanketed with record warmth — and the seas just off the East Coast have been much warmer than average, for which Sandy sends her thanks.
I saw this on the Grist website yesterday. Here are the next couple of paragraphs from that Grist article:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration summarizes October 2012:
The average temperature across land and ocean surfaces during October was 14.63°C (58.23°F). This is 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20th century average and ties with 2008 as the fifth warmest October on record. The record warmest October occurred in 2003 and the record coldest October occurred in 1912. This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature.
If you were born in or after April 1985, (i.e. now 27 years old or younger), you have never lived through a month that was colder than average. That’s beyond astonishing.
You might want to go to the NOAA State of the Climate report just issued to read more. Indeed, go to read this: (my emboldening)
The average temperature across land and ocean surfaces during October was 14.63°C (58.23°F). This is 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20th century average and ties with 2008 as the fifth warmest October on record. The record warmest October occurred in 2003 and the record coldest October occurred in 1912. This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature. The last below-average month was February 1985. The last October with a below-average temperature was 1976. The Northern Hemisphere ranked as the seventh warmest October on record, while the Southern Hemisphere ranked as second warmest, behind 1997.
So with all that in mind, here’s the first half of Ellen Cantarow‘s essay including the ‘must-read’ introduction from Nick Turse.
oooOOOooo
Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, “Little Revolution,” Big Fracking Consequences
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Back in May 2005, this site posted “Against Discouragement,” a graduation speech by the late, great Howard Zinn. Though it hardly needs be said, it was, of course, inspiring. I also interviewed him for TomDispatch and hewrote for the site. A last book of his has just been published, Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches (1963-2009). How could I not recommend it? After all, he still speaks to us all.
Also a reminder for TD readers: we don’t encourage you to become Amazon customers, but if you already are, and you go to that site via a TomDispatch book link like the one in the previous paragraph (or any book cover image link on the site), we get a modest cut of anything you buy, book or otherwise. It’s a way to support this site at absolutely no cost to you! Tom]
To say the Central Intelligence Agency has had an uneven record over its 65 years would be kind. It found early “success” in plotting to overthrow the legitimate governments of Iran and Guatemala (even if it did fail to foresee the Soviet Union going nuclear in 1949). Then, it had a troubled adolescence. The Bay of Pigs. Vietnam. Laos. Spying on Americans. As the Agency matured, it managed to miss all signs of the oncoming Iranian revolution — the natural endpoint of its glorious 1953 coup that brought the Shah to power — and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (It did, however, manage to arm America’s future enemies there, sowing the seeds of 9/11.) Then there was the Reagan era Iran-Contra affair, the failure to notice the fall of the Berlin Wall until it was on CNN, the WMD “intelligence” of the Iraqi leaker codenamed “Curveball,” the Iraq debacle that followed, and…
Well, you get the picture. Recently, however, things seemed to be looking up. The most popular general in a generation or two, a soldier-scholar-superman who could do no wrong, became its director. Just before that, the Agency helped take out America’s public enemy number one in a daring night raid about which Hollywood is soon to release a celebratory movie.
But just as things were looking up, the rock star general was caught with his pants down, resigning in disgrace after an extramarital affair became public. That titillating development overshadowed another more serious one: a cry for help about a looming threat from the Agency and its brethren in the American intelligence community (IC). In late October, the National Research Council was toissue a report commissioned by the CIA and the IC. Superstorm Sandy intervened and so it was only recently released, aptly titled “Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis.” And what a dire picture it painted: security analysts should, it explained “expect climate surprises in the coming decade… and for them to become progressively more serious and more frequent thereafter, most likely at an accelerating rate… It is prudent to expect that over the course of a decade some climate events… will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the affected societies or global systems to manage and that have global security implications serious enough to compel international response.”
Think failed states, water wars, forced mass migrations, famine, drought, and epidemics that will spill across borders, overwhelm national and international mitigation efforts, and leave the United States scrambling to provide disaster response, humanitarian relief, or being drawn into new conflicts. That’s bad news for everyone, including the intelligence community. Even worse, the 206-page report calls for more study, more analysis, and more action — and yet none of that is likely to happen without the assent of Congress.
Keep in mind that Republican members of Congress opposed even the creation of a CIA climate change center and tried starve it of funding while, as Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones noted last year, “Republican lawmakers — including the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, respectively — have also expressed skepticism about the CIA’s climate work.”
In other words, add Republicans to the list of those who, like Cuban and Laotian communists of yore, have worked to thwart the Agency. And cross the CIA off any list of potential environmental saviors. In fact, when it comes to the health of this planet, saviors seem distinctly in short supply. As TomDispatch regular Ellen Cantarow reports from the frontlines of a full-scale climate conflict, the only hope for the environment may come from unlikely groups of people in the unlikeliest of places fighting a shadow war more important than any ever waged by the CIA. Nick Turse
Frack Fight
A Secret War of Activists — With the World in the Balance
By Ellen Cantarow
There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement. It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life.
In the end, this conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did. And yet it’s taking place far from newspaper front pages and with hardly a notice on the nightly news. Nor is it being fought in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, but in small hamlets in upstate New York. There, a loose network of activists is waging a guerrilla campaign not with improvised explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades, but with zoning ordinances and petitions.
The weaponry may be humdrum, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. Ultimately, the fate of the planet may hang in the balance.
All summer long, the climate-change nightmares came on fast and furious. Once-fertile swathes of American heartland baked into an aridity reminiscent of sub-Saharan Africa. Hundreds of thousands of fish dead in overheated streams. Six million acres in the West consumed by wildfires. In September, a report commissioned by 20 governments predicted that as many as 100 million people across the world could die by 2030 if fossil-fuel consumption isn’t reduced. And all of this was before superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on the New York metropolitan area and the Jersey shore.
Washington’s leadership, when it comes to climate change, is already mired in failure. President Obama permitted oil giant BP to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, while Shell was allowed to begin drilling tests in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. At the moment, the best hope for placing restraints on climate change lies with grassroots movements.
In January, I chronicled upstate New York’s homegrown resistance to high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, an extreme-energy technology that extracts methane (“natural gas”) from the Earth’s deepest regions. Since then, local opposition has continued to face off against the energy industry and state government in a way that may set the tone for the rest of the country in the decades ahead. In small hamlets and tiny towns you’ve never heard of, grassroots activists are making a stand in what could be the beginning of a final showdown for Earth’s future.
oooOOOooo
The second part of Ellen’s essay will be published tomorrow.
Ellen Cantarow first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. A TomDispatch regular, her writing has been published in The Village Voice, Grand Street, Mother Jones, Alternet, Counterpunch, and ZNet, and anthologized by the South End Press. She is also lead author and general editor of an oral-history trilogy, Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change, published in 1981 by The Feminist Press/McGraw-Hill, widely anthologized, and still in print.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright 2012 Ellen Cantarow
Learning from Dogs 