Category: Politics

In memory of Neil.

There will only ever be one Neil Armstrong.

Like millions of others on this planet, I was held spellbound by the historic and epic moment of man placing his mark on another heavenly body, the Moon.  I had been so wrapped up in NASA’s space missions that I took a holiday from work (I was working at the time for ICIANZ in Sydney, Australia) for the week of July 16th, 1969.

It was, of course, July 16th when the Apollo 11 Mission launched from the Kennedy Space Center culminating at precisely 20:17:39 UTC on July 20, 1969, the moment when the Lunar Module made lunar contact.

But in terms of me writing my own obituary for Neil, what could I offer?

Then a couple of items changed my mind.

Neil Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)

The first was reading the obituary printed in The Economist.  I have long admired the many, many beautiful obituaries that have been published by this newspaper and this one was no exception.  Take this extract from the Neil Armstrong obituary,

He had an engineer’s reserve, mixed with a natural shyness. Even among the other astronauts, not renowned for their excitability, he was known as the “Ice Commander”. Mike Collins, one of his crew-mates on the moon mission, mused that “Neil never transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly.” He once lost control of an unwieldy contraption nicknamed the Flying Bedstead that was designed to help astronauts train for the lunar landing. Ejecting only seconds before his craft hit the ground and exploded, he dusted himself off and coolly went back to his office for the rest of the day. There was work to be done.

Then the beautiful words that bring the obituary to a close,

Earth’s beauty

Over half a century, the man who never admitted surprise was surprised to observe the fading of America’s space programme. The Apollo project was one of the mightiest achievements of the potent combination of big government and big science, but such enterprises came to seem alien as well as unaffordable. Mr Armstrong, who after his flight imagined bases all over the moon, sadly supposed that the public had lost interest when there was no more cold-war competition.

Yet the flights had one huge unintended consequence: they transformed attitudes towards Earth itself. He too had been astonished to see his own planet, “quite beautiful”, remote and very blue, covered with a white lace of clouds. His reserve, after all, was not limitless. One photograph showed him in the module after he and Buzz Aldrin had completed their moon-walk, kicking and jumping their way across the vast, sandy, silver surface towards the strangely close horizon. He is dressed in his spacesuit, sports a three-day beard, and is clearly exhausted. On his face is a grin of purest exhilaration.

” … they transformed attitudes towards Earth itself. He too had been astonished to see his own planet, “quite beautiful”, remote and very blue, covered with a white lace of clouds.”   For that reason alone, we need to celebrate the achievement of the Apollo 11 mission for putting our own planet into perspective within the enormity of the universe.

The second item that persuaded me to write this was a wonderful historic insight into how a potential catastrophy on the surface of the Moon would have been handled by President Nixon.  This historic item was published on Carl Milner’s blog the other day, the specific item being  What if the Moon Landing Failed?  Republished with the very kind permission of Carl.

What if the Moon Landing Failed?

Posted on September 1, 2012 by 

When Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, they had a speech ready for him to deliver to the world just in case the 1969 moon landing had ended in disaster. In fact many experts believed there was a big chance that Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin could have really gotten stuck on the moon. It’s something we don’t really think about now because we all know it was such a success. American Archives have unearthed the speech that would have been delivered if the late great Armstrong and Aldrin had never made it back to earth. This is such a great piece of history that I thought I might never see.

Give it a read, It’s such a moving and well prepared speech, and such a good thing that President Nixon never had to delivered it.

So, as with millions of others, I am delighted that this speech remained unspoken and instead we experienced: “At 5:35 p.m. (US EDT), Armstrong and Aldrin successfully docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:50 p.m. on July 24.”

Neil Armstrong’s legacy is not only being part of the wonderful team that allowed man to make the first footprint on the Moon but also bringing into our human consciousness that this blue, wonderful planet we all live on is the only home we have.

First Full-View Photo of Earth
Photograph courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center
This famous “Blue Marble” shot represents the first photograph in which Earth is in full view. The picture was taken on December 7, 1972, as the Apollo 17 crew left Earth’s orbit for the moon. With the sun at their backs, the crew had a perfectly lit view of the blue planet.

Strikes me that celebrating July 20th each year as Blue Planet Day might not be a bad idea!  Any takers?  Now that would be a legacy for Neil!

Understanding Europe!

A delightful tale sent to me by Richard Maugham.

Richard and I go back too many years!  He has been a dear friend despite the obvious hurdle that when we first met, he declared that he was a typewriter salesman for Olivetti in the UK with me admitting that I was a typewriter salesman for IBM UK!  Here’s the story.

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WHAT WENT WRONG IN EUROPE – SIMPLY EXPLAINED!

Not Helga’s Bar!!

Helga is the proprietor of a bar. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

Helga keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers’ loans).

Word gets around about Helga’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Helga’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in town.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Helga gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer – the most consumed beverages.

Consequently, Helga’s gross sales volumes and paper profits increase massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognises that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Helga’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

He is rewarded with a six figure bonus.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS. These “securities” are then bundled and traded on international securities markets.

Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as “AA Secured Bonds” are really debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continue to climb and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

The traders all receive six figure bonuses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Helga’s bar. He so informs Helga. Helga then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons but, being unemployed alcoholics, they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Helga cannot fulfil her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Helga’s 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBOND prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Helga’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations; her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government.

They all receive a six figure bonus.

The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who’ve never been in Helga’s bar……………………….!

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I can add not a single word to this!

Too hot to handle!

A stark reminder that more of the same will hurt us.

On the 14th August I published a post with the title of From feeling to doing.  The post was a 15-minute video presented by David Roberts of Grist showing, in essence, how fundamentally simple was the issue of climate change and how profound the implications if we didn’t halt the rise in the temperature of Planet Earth.

I’m not going to insert that video in this post because you can click on the link above and do that yourself.  What I will do is to draw your attention to the accompanying article on Grist under the title of Climate change is simple: We do something or we’re screwed. That article includes the slides that were in the video, such as this one:

So with that in mind, here’s what the BBC published on their news website yesterday morning,

Science advisor warns climate target ‘out the window’

Pallab GhoshBy Pallab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News

One of the Government’s most senior scientific advisors has said that efforts to stop a sharp rise in global temperatures were now unrealistic.

Professor Sir Robert Watson said that the hope of restricting the average temperature rise to 2C was “out the window”.

He said that the rise could be as high as 5C – with dire conseqences.

Professor Watson added the Chancellor, George Osborne, should back efforts to cut the UK’s CO2 emissions.

He said: “I have to look back (on the outcome of sucessive climate change summits) Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban and say that I can’t be overly optimistic.

“To be quite candid the idea of a 2C target is largely out of the window.”

As the BBC points out Professor Watson is a highly respected and world renown scientist on climate change policy and is currently Chief Scientist at the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and a former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Professor Watson was also with the World Bank and an advisor to former Vice President Al Gore.  The BBC item goes on,

Professor Watson, who is due to step down from his role at Defra next month, suggested that the Chancellor, George Osborne, reconsider his opposition to tough measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Mr Osborne has said that the UK’s ambitious targets for CO2 should be relaxed so as not to drive businesses to countries which have set themselves much lower targets.

“I would say to George Osborne, ‘work with the public sector. Work with the public on behavior change. Let’s demonstrate to the rest of the world that we can make significant progress here” Professor Watson argues that the UK and Germany should continue to take the lead in driving efforts to reach an effective international treaty.

Hurt Poorest

“If we carry on the way we are there is a 50-50 chance that we will get to a 3 degree rise,” he said.

“I wouldn’t rule out a 5 degree world and that would be quite serious for the people of the world especially the poorest. We need more political will than we currently have”.

The IPCC 2007 assessment summarised the probable impact of various temperature rise sceanrios.

It shows that the impact on human health, the availability of food and water, the loss of coastlines becomes progressively worse as the average temperature of the planet rises.

The 2C target was agreed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in 2010.

The majority of countries though prefer a lower target of 1.5C.

A number of analyses have also concluded that the 2C would be missed. The most recent was by the International Energy Agency earlier this year.

Professor Watson added that deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.

“This doesn’t take a revolution in energy technology, an evolution would get us there.”

What I would add to this report that has been widely circulated is that while it’s natural to assume, ‘We need more political will than we currently have‘, that political will flows from the will of the people.

Take the effect of a 4C rise, as David Roberts explains,

Which is described in the Grist article as,

Here’s the edition of the Royal Society journal that came out of the conference on 4 degrees C of warming. Read through it and see if you think “hell on earth” is an exaggeration. Desertification, water shortages, agricultural disruptions, rising sea levels, vanishing coral, tropical forest die-offs, mass species extinctions, oh my. Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists involved, was moved to say that “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

So come on people, get real!  Make sure that the democratic systems work and that our leaders know the sort of change that has to take place.  As the wise Professor highlighted, ‘… deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.’  Sort of makes sense to me.  How about you?

Avoiding the catastrophe of indifference.

Doing nothing is not an option.

Introduction

So back to non-doggy stuff although I hope the themes of truth and integrity continue to rein supreme though this blog!

In the last couple of weeks, I have devoted a number of posts to the subject of change, as in how do we humans change.  The first post was Changing the person: Me where I started examining the process of change; by process I mean the models of change commonly understood in, say, management change.

The next post was You have to feel it! which drew heavily on research from Ezra M. Markowitz & Azim F. Shariff regarding the psychological aspects posed by climate change to the human moral judgement system.

The final post was From feeling to doing.  In this post, David Roberts of Grist showed that one could put aside all the ‘head stuff’ about change and in just 15 minutes cover all that one would ever want to know about the biggest issue of all facing this planet.

So rather a long introduction to two guest posts that today and tomorrow set out the case for what we all have to consider; doing nothing is just not a viable option.  The first is from Martin Lack of the popular and hard-hitting blog Lack of Environment.

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Avoiding the catastrophe of indifference.

by Martin Lack.

Paul has very kindly invited me to follow-up his recent post regarding David Roberts’ item on the Grist blog entitled ‘Why climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, and how it could’ followed by a second post in which was embedded David Roberts’ excellent video ‘Climate change is simple – we do something or we’re screwed’.

So my guest post is an expansion of a comment I submitted in response to the first of those two posts, You have to feel it.  However it would be wrong not to first add my voice to all those that have applauded David Roberts for all his excellent work.

Clive Charles Hamilton

In 2010, the Australian social anthropologist Clive Hamilton published Requiem for a Species: Why we Resist the Truth About Climate Change – one of the scariest but most important books I think I have ever read.

Reading Hamilton’s book was one of the reasons I decided, as part of my MA in Environmental Politics, to base my dissertation on climate change scepticism in the UK.

In the process, I read much but Hamilton’s book was one of very few that I actually read from cover to cover – I simply did not have time to read fully all the books for my research. However, because I have a background in geology and hydrogeology, my greatest challenge was learning to think like a social scientist.

I was all for taking these climate change sceptics head on and demolishing their pseudo-scientific arguments or taking them to task for the ideological prejudices that drive them to reject what scientists tell us. Thus, it fell to my dissertation supervisor to mention politely but firmly that I needed to disengage with the issues and analyse patterns of behaviour and frequency of arguments favoured by different groups of people.  In short, I needed to stop trying to prove the scientific consensus correct and start understanding the views held by those that dispute that consensus.

Having said how I read Professor Hamilton’s book in full, I must admit to learning about a load of other equally-scary sounding books since subscribing to Learning from Dogs;  Lester Brown’s World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse being just one that comes to mind!

David Roberts

Then of course there is what David Roberts himself says, which is just as scary. I think we have good reason to be scared. However, as Hamilton points out, we must move beyond being scared, which is simply debilitating, and channel our frustration into positive action.

Because if we do not, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that civilisation may well fail. If that means engaging in acts of civil disobedience, as it has done for James Hansen and many others, well, so be it. I suspect that nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved without someone breaking the law in order to draw attention to injustice – the abolition of slavery and child labour, the extension for all of the right to vote including women, come to mind.

That is the conclusion of Hamilton’s book; that civil disobedience is almost inevitable (p.225). Just as turkeys won’t vote for Christmas, our politicians are not going to vote for climate change mitigation unless we demand that they do so.

So it was the steer from my dissertation supervisor that lead me to read David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History, and much more about psychology. All of which guided the Introductory section of my dissertation, which summarised the philosophical roots of scepticism, the political misuse of scepticism, and the psychology of denial; see a recent post on my blog Lack of Environment.   In terms of what I want to say here, it is an elaboration of the last of those topics, the psychology of denial.  Indeed, it formed the preamble to the findings of my research.

To help me research this unfamiliar subject, my dissertation supervisor sent me a PDF copy of a paper written by Janis L. Dickinson in 2009 and published in Ecology and Society.  It was called ‘The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change’ and dealt with a challenging, almost taboo subject, namely our own mortality.

Despite my initial reluctance to learn about psychology, the more I read the more I realised just how central psychology was to explaining why we humans have failed to address the problem of climate change.

I ended up summarising the work of Dickinson, together with other sources of material, in the following manner.

In considering reasons for the collective human failure to act to prevent anthropogenic global warming (AGW), a number of authors appear to have been influenced by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). For example, Aaronovitch proposed that we try to avoid the “catastrophe of indifference” that a world devoid of meaning or purpose represents (p. 340).  Hamilton suggested that climate disruption “has the smell of death about it” (p. 215).

Janis Dickinson elaborates a little more, exploring what she describes as “…one of the key psychological links between the reality of global climate change and the difficulty of mobilizing individuals and groups to confront the problem in a rational and timely manner”, then referring to what psychologists call terror management theory (TMT) – Dickinson also categorises denial of climate change; denial of human responsibility and immediacy of the problem as proximal responses (Dickinson 2009).

Furthermore, as referenced here, both Dickinson and Hamilton suggest that other distal TMT responses, such as focussing on maintaining self-esteem or enhancing self-gratification, can be counter-intuitive and counter-productive. Dickinson summarises the recent work of Tim Dyson by saying “[b]ehavioral response to the threat of global climate change simply does not match its unique potential for cumulative, adverse, and potentially chaotic outcomes” (ibid).

Based on the evidence of the most frequently used arguments for dismissing the scientific consensus regarding climate change, I collated the findings of my research and which might be summarised as follows:

Having analysed the output of such UK-based Conservative think-tanks (CTTs), along with that of scientists, economists, journalists, politicians and others, it would appear that the majority of CTTs dispute the existence of a legitimate consensus, whereas the majority of sceptical journalists focus on conspiracy theories; the majority of scientists and economists equate environmentalism with a new religion; and politicians and others analysed appear equally likely to cite denialist or economic arguments for inaction.

As I find myself saying quite frequently, the most persistent arguments against taking action to mitigate climate change are the economic ones.

However, as all the authors mentioned have suggested, or at least inferred, I think it is undoubtedly true that the most potent obstacle to people facing up to the truth of climate change is our psychological reluctance to accept responsibility for something that is obviously deteriorating – namely our environment!

Nevertheless, all is not yet lost.  We do not all need to go back to living in the Dark Ages to prevent societal and environmental collapse but we do need to accept a couple of fundamental realities:

  1. Burning fossilised carbon is trashing the planet. Therefore, fossil fuel use must be substituted in every possible process as rapidly as possible. Unfortunately, it is not substitutable in the most damaging process of all; aviation.  That merely increases the urgency of substituting where we can (i.e. power, lighting and temperature control).
  2. Poor people in developing countries have a legitimate right to aspire to having a more comfortable life but the planet definitely cannot cope with 7 to 10 billion people living like we do in the “developed” countries.

Once we accept these realities, we will learn to use less fossil fuels and, if we can become self-sufficient using renewable energy sources, we can have a flat-screen TV in every room and leave them on standby and the A/C on full power 24/7 and still have a clear conscience. However, we must get off fossil fuels ASAP.

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I am indebted to Martin for writing such an insightful analysis of how we all have to change.  Tomorrow, another guest post further exploring the options that face us all as we work towards a sustainable future.  As I opened this post, doing nothing is not an option!

Stop, read, reflect and Act!

The latest from Bill McKibben has to be read and shared.

Introduction

We live in a world where there’s a great fondness for shortness, whether it’s headlines, soundbites, Twitter length ‘conversations’, text messages, and the rest.  However, I’m introducing an essay from Bill McKibben that is long.  When I use the word long I mean both literally, the essay is a shade under 6,200 words, and subjectively, the essay is long, very long, on meaning.

It was published in the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.  As Allyse of the 350.org team wrote in a widely distributed email,

Here at 350.org, we do a lot of our internal communication via online chat, and our written shorthand for “YES!” and “totally awesome!” and “you rock!” is “++”. Which is why I say to you: ++ Social Media Team, ++. You all rock.

Bill McKibben’s article in Rolling Stone—which we asked you to spread around the internet last week—has been shared on Facebook almost 100K times and seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Great work. If you haven’t read it yet, please do.

This article really lays out the intellectual framework for much of our work in the weeks, months, and years ahead. We want to keep pushing these ideas out there, especially this one: our objection to the fossil fuel industry is structural—these businesses are in fact planning to wreck the planet!

So we took a quote from Bill’s article and made it into a graphic that’s already been shared almost 2,500 times on Facebook. Will you help us push it past 5,000? Click here to share.

As you know if you’ve read the article, this is really an all-hands-on-deck moment for humanity. Thanks for doing your part—in ways both large and small.

Onward,

Allyse

Will you put aside some time, settle down in a comfortable chair, and read the article?  Please do!

It crossed my mind to split it over a couple of days but I decided against that.  But I have inserted a ‘click to reveal more’ about 1,100 words into the article – please do read on when you reach that point.  And just as important, do comment!

Oh, want to see that image on Facebook that has been shared so widely?  Here it is:

A’int that the truth!

Finally, feel free to share this as far and wide as you want.  Thank you.

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(Apart from the first image from Edel Rodriguez, all the other photographs have been inserted by me and are not in the original Rolling Stone production – I decided to insert them to make reading the article more visually attractive on a screen.)

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – and that make clear who the real enemy is

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

By Bill McKibben
July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

Continue reading “Stop, read, reflect and Act!” →

More reflection on being human!

The voice of reason from James Howard Kunstler.

Yesterday, I published a Post that I called What it is to be human.  It was inspired and based on the compelling film ‘I AM‘ by Tom Shadyac.  As so often seems to happen, shortly after completing yesterday’s Post, an item from Chris Martensen’s Blog caught my eye.

Chris publishes the blog Peak Prosperity and on July 14th Chris had an item featuring James Howard Kunstler.

Let me give you an idea of that item from Chris.

Author and social critic James Howard Kunstler has been one of the earliest, most direct, and most articulate voices to warn of the consequences — economic and otherwise — of modern society’s profligate wasting of the resources that underlie its growth.

In his new book, Too Much Magic, Jim attacks the wishful thinking dominant today that with a little more growth, a little more energy, a little more technology — a little more magic — we’ll somehow sail past our current tribulations without having to change our behavior.

Such self-delusion is particularly dangerous because it is preventing us from taking intelligent, constructive action at the national level when the clock is fast ticking out of our favor. In fact, Jim claims that we are past the state where solutions are possible. Instead, we need a response plan to help us best brace for the impact of the coming consequences. And we need it fast.

 

James Howard Kunstler

Mr. Kunstler is the author of the very successful book The Long Emergency and his latest book, as mentioned above, Too Much Magic expands on his alarming argument that our oil-addicted, technology-dependent society is on the brink of collapse, ergo that the long emergency has already begun.  His website is here.

Anyway, back to the Chris Martenson’s piece.  Chris goes on to quote Mr. Kunstler, as follows:

[We now live in] this weird, peculiar period in American history when the delusional thinking has risen to astronomical levels — predictably, really — in response to the stress levels that our society feels. And it is expressing itself as sort of “waiting for Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy” to deliver a set of rescue remedies to us so that we can continue running Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, Suburbia, the U.S. Army, and the Interstate Highway System by other means. That is the great wish out there. It is kind of understandable, because that is the stuff that we have, and people tend to defend the stuff that they have in any given society and the systems and platforms that they run on. But it is probably a form of collective behavior that is not really going to benefit us very much and really amounts to simply wasting our time, and wasting our dwindling resources, and even our spiritual resources when we could be doing things that are a lot more intelligent.

Here is something I have detected as I travel around the country: There is a clamor for “solutions.” Everywhere I go, people say “Don’t be a doomer; give us solutions.” And I discovered that the subtext to all that is they really want solutions for allowing them to keep on living exactly the way they are living now. To keep on running Wal-Mart, and keep on running Suburbia, and keep on running the highway system, and the whole kit of parts. And what that really means is that they are looking for ways to add on additional complexity to a society that is already suffering from too much complexity.

(Read the full article here.)

There is a podcast of the interview with James Kunstler here and also on YouTube, as below.

My own reflection on this item, as with so many other articles, essays and items available to read online, is that the power of the Web is informing and educating millions of people around the world in a way that Governments and the media have failed to so do.

That promises change and, maybe, sooner than we might expect.

Food and health

The good, bad and the ugly.

Four days ago, there was a post on Learning from Dogs under the heading of We are what we eat!  As is often the way, subsequently after writing that article (back on the 8th), there was a flurry of other associated items that I wanted to bring to your attention today.

The first was on the website of The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia.  It was a very inspiring two-part article written by Anthea Hudson under the title of Preparing Our Children For a Resilient Future.

Part One was all about recycling and our role as facilitators.  Here’s a little challenge for you, lifted from that first part,

Landfill — Our Dirty Legacy

Let’s begin by understanding a bit about how long the things we send to landfill last, before they break down.

Have a look at the list below and see if you can guess the order these items should be placed in, from the things that break down quickest, to those that take the longest. Then have a guess as to how long you think each one will take to break down.

  • paper bag
  • plastic jug
  • cigarette butt
  • glass bottle or jar
  • banana
  • aluminium can (soft drink can)
  • leather boot or shoe
  • plastic 6-pack rings
  • Styrofoam cup
  • cotton pillowcase
  • rubber sole of the leather boot (above)
  • wool sock or scarf
  • tin can (e.g. baked beans or soup can)

Don’t cheat by looking at the answers below, until you have made your own list.

Think you have worked it out?  Now go here and check your answers!  You may be suprised.

Part One is very comprehensive and Part Two even more so.  Indeed, it serves as a wonderful check-list of all the reasons why and how we can be more responsible for what goes into our stomachs.  It really is a most comprehensive review, nay tutorial, on how to grow your own.  It includes such gems as this,

This video was created by the 2009 spring plant physiology class at Plymouth State University.

Next to the bad and ugly stuff.

Anyone who was shocked by the revelation of the harm being done to bees highlighted in my recent Post (the full article is on Food Freedom News) and to us humans,

A recent study showed that every human tested had the world’s best-selling pesticide, Roundup, detectable in their urine at concentrations between five and twenty times the level considered safe for drinking water.

will be further shocked, alarmed and (fill in your words) by this two-hour film introduced by Gary Null. We all need to watch it and yet I’m bound to say it will ruin your day!  Jean and I have watched it in full and to all my readers, especially American ones, I say this – do watch this video, Please!

Progressive Radio Network presents
A Gary Null Production
WAR ON HEALTH: The FDA’s Cult of Tyranny
Introduced by the director (from his speech at the world premiere in New York City, June 15, 2012)

In the near future, American medical practice may change dramatically for the worse. No longer will maximal dose natural supplements—vitamins, natural compounds, and scientifically proven medicinal herbs—be available over the counter in local health and grocery stores. Holistic practice, which relies upon non-prescription natural treatments instead of Big Pharma drugs prescribed life-long, will diminish. American healthcare will be imprisoned, patients will be forced to abide by a single medical paradigm defined by corporate drug and food executives and dictated by a government enforcement agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This is the bleak scenario if the FDA succeeds in limiting Americans’ options to prevent and treat diseases.

‘War on Health’ is the first documentary detailing and challenging the FDA agenda and its allegiance with the international Codex Alimentarius, which hopes to establish a monolithic food and health regime. Betraying its founding mandate to assure drug, food and chemical safety in the interests of public health, the FDA today is a repressive bureaucracy serving pharmaceutical and agricultural greed and profits. Vaccines, medical devices, prescription drugs are fast tracked at alarming rates through the FDA at the expense of scientific oversight to assure their efficacy and safety. The
result is hundreds of thousands premature deaths annually from pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines and medical devices and an epidemic of medical incompetence and fraud sanctioned by federal health officials.

Featuring many pioneering American and European attorneys, physicians, medical researchers and advocates of health freedom, War on Health lifts the veil on FDA’s militaristic operations against organic food providers and alternative physicians. The film’s conclusion is perfectly clear: the FDA is a tyrannical cult founded upon the denial of sound medical science with little intention to improve the nation’s health and prevent disease.

Written and Directed by Gary Null
Produced by Valerie Van Cleve
Associate Producer: Richard Gale
Editor: Richie Williamson
Offline Editing: Valerie Van Cleve, L.A. Jones
Camera Operators: Marcello Coppuchino, Peter Bonilla, David Grier, L.A. Jones
Gregory Jason Russ, Jake Hammer Mesmire, Edson Tanakae, Valerie Van Cleve, Richie Williamson

As my dear friend of many, many years, Richard M., has a habit of saying, “Must go now, need to get back to Planet Earth!“

We are what we eat!

So why do we insist of manipulating the genetics of food!

I read somewhere recently, and of course now can’t find the reference, that the genetic modification of our food represents as big a danger to the long-term survival  of man as does the damage to our biosphere.

So a recent item on the blog Food Freedom News jumped out at me.  This was an item that was introduced as, “The author of Seeds of Destruction (about Monsanto) has a new piece out on pesticides and mass animal deaths… very sobering.”

Clicking on the ‘new piece’ link takes one to here, from which I quote the opening paragraphs,

Death of the Birds and the Bees Across America

By F. William Engdahl
Global Research

“A recent study showed that every human tested had the world’s best-selling pesticide, Roundup, detectable in their urine at concentrations between five and twenty times the level considered safe for drinking water.”

Birds and bees are something most of us take for granted as part of nature. The expression “teaching about the birds and the bees” to explain the process of human reproduction to young people is not an accidental expression. Bees and birds contribute to the essence of life on our planet. A study by the US Department of Agriculture estimated that “…perhaps one-third of our total diet is dependent, directly or indirectly, upon insect-pollinated plants.”

The honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the most important pollinator of agricultural crops. Honey bees pollinate over 70 out of 100 crops that in turn provide 90% of the world’s food. They pollinate most fruits and vegetables–including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots.  But while managed honey bee populations have increased over the last 50 years, bee colony populations have decreased significantly in many European and North American nations. Simultaneously, crops that are dependent on insects for pollination have increased. The phenomenon has received the curious designation of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), implying it could be caused by any number of factors. Serious recent scientific studies however point to a major cause: use of new highly toxic systemic pesticides in agriculture since about 2004.

That first paragraph alone made me sit up, “A recent study showed that every human tested had the world’s best-selling pesticide, Roundup, detectable in their urine at concentrations between five and twenty times the level considered safe for drinking water.”  What a strange race we are!

Wlliam F. Engdahl

Then it was easy to find out more information about the author of the book Seeds of Destruction, William F. Engdahl, including his website.  Mr. Engdahl is clearly no stranger to controversy as this YouTube video illustrates,

Back to that Food Freedom article.  Further on, there is evidence of the size of the problem in the UK,

Alarming UK results

A private UK research organization, Buglife and the Soil Association, undertook tests to try to determine cause of the bee death. They found that the decline was caused in part by a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Neonicotinoids are “systemic” chemicals that kill insects by getting into the cell of the plant. In Britain it’s widely used for crops like oilseed rape and for production of potted plants.

The neonicotinoids are found in the UK in products including Chinook, used on oilseed rape and Bayer UK 720, used in the production of potted plants which then ends up in gardens and homes around the country. The new study examined in detail the most comprehensive array of peer-reviewed research into possible long-term effects of neonicotinoid use. Their conclusion was that neonicotinoid pesticides damage the health and life cycle of bees over the long term by affecting the nervous system. The report noted, “Neonicotinoids may be a significant factor contributing to current bee declines and could also contribute to declines in other non-target invertebrate species.” The organization called for a total ban on pesticides containing any neonicotinoids.

The president of the UK Soil Association, Peter Melchett, told the press that pesticides were causing a continued decline in pollinating insects, risking a multimillion pound farming industry. “The UK is notorious for taking the most relaxed approach to pesticide safety in the EU; Buglife’s report shows that this puts at risk pollination services vital for UK agriculture,” he said.

Indeed in March 2012 Sir Robert Watson, Chief Scientist at the British Government’s Department of Environment announced that his government was reconsidering its allowance of neonicotinoid use in the UK. Watson told a British newspaper, “We will absolutely look at the University of Stirling work, the French work, and the American work that came out a couple of months ago. We must look at this in real detail to see whether or not the current British position is correct or is incorrect. I want this all reassessed, very, very carefully.”  To date no policy change has ensued however. Given the seriousness of the scientific studies and of the claims of danger, a prudent policy would have been to provisionally suspend further uise of neonicotinoids pending further research. No such luck.

And if the harm to bees wasn’t serious enough, try this extract,

Effect on Human Brain?

But most alarming of all is the evidence that exposure to neonicotinides has horrific possible effects on humans as well as on birds and bees.

Professor Henk Tennekes describes the effects:

“Today the major illnesses confronting children in the United States include a number of psychosocial and behavioral conditions. Neurodevelopmental disorders, including learning disabilities, dyslexia, mental retardation, attention deficit disorder, and autism – occurrence is more prevalent than previously thought, affecting 5 percent to 10 percent of the 4 million children born in the United States annually. Beyond childhood, incidence rates of chronic neurodegenerative diseases of adult life such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia have increased markedly. These trends raise the possibility that exposures in early life act as triggers of later illness, perhaps by reducing the numbers of cells in essential regions of the brain to below the level needed to maintain function in the face of advancing age. Prenatal and childhood exposures to pesticides have emerged as a significant risk factor explaining impacts on brain structure and health that can increase the risk of neurological disease later in life.”

There is also growing evidence suggesting persistent exposure to plants sprayed with neonicotinoids could be responsible for damage to the human brain, including the recent sharp rise in incidents of autism in children.

This really is an article that you should read in full, which also includes a full bibliography and notes section.  Plus you can leave your responses as a comment – go for it!

Apis mellifera – the honey bee (family Apidae)

Are you negligent, incompetent or complicit?

A guest post from Martin Lack points to the crux of the issue of denying man-caused climate change.

Introduction

I saw this post on Martin’s Blog Lack of Environment the day after I wrote a piece called In praise of fairness.  In my piece I mentioned the sad case of Mr. Bob Diamond and Martin continued with the theme in such a manner that I wanted to republish his article in full.  Here it is.

oooOOOooo

Are you negligent, incompetent or complicit?

This was a question posed to former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond this week, when he appeared before a Parliamentary Select Committee of MPs on Wednesday. It is a question that I would like to ask Dr Richard Lindzen… In fact, I have asked the question and – just as Bob Diamond did – he has refused to answer it… Here is the evidence on which you should decide for yourself:

Many readers will recall that, following my visit to London to hear Lindzen speak to a room full of fake sceptics in the Palace of Westminster on 22 February this year, I attempted to get some answers to questions. Unfortunately, I failed. I have been particularly frustrated by one thing; possibly the most misleading aspect of Lindzen’s entire presentation – a combination of graphs of recent atmospheric CO2 and temperature data that was mysteriously omitted from the PDF of the presentation that was initially posted on the Internet.  Although Lindzen never answered any of my questions, he did insert this slide into the PDF of his presentation despite my pointing out to him – MIT and the AGU – that it was essentially meaningless (as the y-axes could be stretched to show either correlation or no correlation as preferred by the speaker).

Here is a screenshot of the misleading graph from the video of the presentation:

Misrepresentation of data?
Steeply inclined Keeling curve versus apparently non-correlating temperature – if you stretched the temperature axis enough it would appear to correlate quite well. Therefore slide neither proves not disproves anything.

This bears more than a passing resemblance to the World Climate Widget – a very similar-looking combination of graphs (i.e. manipulated to suggest that there is no correlation between recent atmospheric CO2 and temperature data) – that can be downloaded as a widget from Anthony Watts’ Watts Up With That? (WUWT) misinformation blog.

If you go to the WUWT widget page, you will find the two graphs in both of these images (above and right) are there presented separately. However, to prove my point – that anyone using these graphs to try and prove there is no correlation between long-term CO2 and temperature changes – just look at what happens when you take the graph of University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) global lower atmosphere data as used by WUWT (i.e. cooler than surface temperature data) and stretch it:

Clearing the fog of data misrepresentation created by Lindzen et al. - Note the clear upward trend in the temperature graph on the left (it was there all the time).
Clearing the fog of data misrepresentation created by Lindzen et al. – Note the clear upward trend in the temperature graph on the left (it was there all the time).

Therefore, for anyone – including Lindzen – to try and use the original combination of graphs to suggest there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature, this suggests that they are either negligent, incompetent, or deliberately trying to mislead people. For many people who are not scientists to be fooled by this is understandable but, for a prominent scientist like Lindzen to make this mistake – and not apologise for doing so – is unforgivable. Furthermore, it would seem that, no matter how many times he is criticised, he just keeps repeating the same old mistakes: Skeptical Science: Lindzen and Choi 2011 – Party Like It’s 2009

It would appear that, despite the best efforts of the majority of prominent climate scientists, Lindzen’s London Illusions are still fooling a lot of people. If you follow that last link, it will take you to the website of what I prefer to call The Global Wonky Policy Foundation, where it is reported that only 43% of the British adult population felt able to agree with the following statement: “Global warming is a fact and is mostly caused by emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities”.

It has been suggested to me that this question is carefully phrased to deter people from saying “yes” (i.e. they might agree that warming is occurring and/or that humans are the primary cause; but they might not agree that vehicles and factories are the primary source of emissions). However, this is ‘clutching at straws’ in my opinion; and leaves me wondering what percentage of the population would feel able to agree with this statement:

“The sunrise is a fact and is mostly caused by the Earth not being flat and spinning once a day whilst orbiting the Sun”…?

oooOOOooo

I’m very grateful to Martin for allowing me to republish this.

In praise of fairness.

An original idea that shouldn’t be regarded as innovative.

We live in interesting times!  Whenever I use that phrase, and it seems to slip from my lips too often these days, I am reminded of the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”

There are a goodly number of countries that have legislation that ‘impose’ a minimum wage for employees.  Here in the USA, the Federal level for 2012 is $7.25 per hour but it isn’t necessarily the same across all States.  Based on a 40-hour working week, 50 weeks a year, that comes to a gross of $14,500 for the full year.

Let’s contrast that with a person who has been in the news recently, Mr. Bob Diamond, Chief Executive of Barclays.

As the BBC reported on the 2nd July,

Mr Diamond has said he will not take a bonus for this year as a result of the scandal.

It is not the first time the 60-year-old Boston-born former academic – he began his career as a university lecturer – has made the headlines.

Mr Diamond was previously best-known for his huge wealth: last year he topped the list of the highest-paid chief executives in the FTSE 100.

‘Unacceptable face’

In 2011 Mr Diamond earned £20.9m, comprising salary, bonuses and share options, and he is reported to have a personal wealth of £105m.

There has long been controversy about the amount he earns.

In 2010, Lord Mandelson described him as the “unacceptable face of banking”, saying he had taken a £63m salary for “deal-making and shuffling paper around”.

Barclays dismissed the figure as “total fiction” saying that his salary as head of Barclays Capital was actually £250,000.

BBC business editor Robert Peston said he believed Mr Diamond had earned £6m in 2009 from a long-term incentive scheme and £27m from selling his stake in a Barclays-owned business that had been sold.

So whether he earns £20.9m, £6m or even £250,000 frankly makes no difference to the fact that the gap between what the poorest may earn and the sorts of monies that are given to Mr. Diamond and his like is just plain wrong.  [And since writing this on Monday, the news broke on Tuesday morning that Mr. Diamond is now unemployed.]  Don’t often quote the bible in Learning from Dogs but 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 is irresistible (King James Version),

Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality.  At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.” [my emphasis]

I subscribe to Naked Capitalism and the other day there was a deeply interesting article about France pushing for a maximum wage.  Let me take the liberty of quoting all of it,

SUNDAY, JULY 1, 2012

France Pushing for a Maximum Wage; Will Others Follow?

A reader pointed out a news item we missed, namely, that the new government in France is trying to implement a maximum wage for the employees of state-owned companies. From the Financial Times:

France’s new socialist government has launched a crackdown on excessive corporate pay by promising to slash the wages of chief executives at companies in which it owns a controlling stake, including EDF, the nuclear power group.

In a departure from the more boardroom-friendly approach of the previous right-of-centre administration, newly elected president François Hollande wants to cap the salary of company leaders at 20 times that of their lowest-paid worker.

According to Jean-Marc Ayrault, prime minister, the measure would be imposed on chief executives at groups such as EDF’s Henri Proglio and Luc Oursel at Areva, the nuclear engineering group. Their pay would fall about 70 per cent and 50 per cent respectively should the plan be cleared by lawyers and implemented in full…

France is unusual in that it still owns large stakes in many of its biggest global companies, ranging from GDF Suez, the gas utility; to Renault, the carmaker; and EADS, parent group of passenger jet maker Airbus.

Of course, in the US, we have companies feeding so heavily at the government trough that they hardly deserve the label of being private, but the idea that the public might legitimately have reason to want to rein in ever-rising executive pay is treated as a rabid radical idea.

From Doug’s post:

For those, however, receiving bailouts, deposit insurance, government guarantees, tax breaks, tax credits, other forms of public financing, government contracts of any sort – and so on – the top paid person cannot receive more than twenty-five times the bottom paid person. This ratio, by the way, is what business visionary Peter Drucker recommended as most effective for organization performance as well as society. It also echoes Jim Collins who, in his book Good To Great, found that the most effective top leaders are paid more modestly than unsuccessful ones. And, critically, it is a ratio that is in line with various European and other nations that have dramatically lower income inequality than the United States.

In other words, the French proposal isn’t that big a change from existing norms, at least in most other advanced economics (ex the UK, which has also moved strongly in the direction of US top level pay). But despite the overwhelming evidence that corporate performance is if anything negatively correlated with CEO pay, the myth of the superstar CEO and the practical obstacles to shareholder intervention (too fragmented; too many built in protections for incumbent management, like staggered director terms; major free rider problems if any investor tries to discipline extractive CEO and C level pay, which means it’s easier to sell than protest) means ideas like this are unlikely to get even a hearing in the US.  Let the looting continue!

As Patrice Ayme commented on that Naked Capitalism article, “France will pass the 20 to 1 law, as the socialists control the entire state, senate, National Assembly, Regions, big cities, etc. Only the French Constitutional Court could stop it.  That’s unlikely, why?  Because one cannot have a minimum wage, without a maximum wage. It’s not a question of philosophy, but of mathematics.”

Let me go back and requote this,

 …. the top paid person cannot receive more than twenty-five times the bottom paid person. This ratio, by the way, is what business visionary Peter Drucker recommended as most effective for organization performance as well as society. It also echoes Jim Collins who, in his book Good To Great, found that the most effective top leaders are paid more modestly than unsuccessful ones. And, critically, it is a ratio that is in line with various European and other nations that have dramatically lower income inequality than the United States.

Thus if society was to embrace this approach to fairness, in America the top paid person in 2012 in the USA would be on 25 times the minimum wage level of $14,500 a year or, in other words, $362,500 a year.

I’m not a raving liberal but I am bound to say that this sits pretty well with me.  How about you?

As I opened, an original idea that shouldn’t be regarded as innovative.