By:
Badlands Journal editorial board
The claims for economic, social and environmental justice are ultimately based a moral claim not to waste, oppress or despoil the biosphere. The idea is that if people rationally consider the arguments, they will go and do better in these areas. However, a completely different side of those arguments is provided by natural reality: the economy is based on oil, the quantity of oil is diminishing, therefore the economy will have to
change; systematic impoverishment of the working class destroys the market for the nation's industries and leads to sharper and sharper criticism of the rich and finally to social unrest; and impacts of accelerating global warming are themselves the greatest material argument for the existence of a grave environmental crisis.
The United States is in a terrible position to cope with the real changes (as opposed to the promised ones) now occurring because they will take massive investments and financial leaders in the country are still busy trying to hide the massive debt incurred by reckless gambling on securitized mortgages whose value changed abruptly when its unregulated market lost faith in them. Nor, due to its geographic position and squandering its own oil supply on the automobile will it be able to be plan on a stable supply in the future. New contenders for oil -- China and India particularly -- are
closer to the main supplies and Russia holds a commanding geopolitical position in the Caspian Sea area. Given present US policies and local resistance to them, the US is doomed not to one Vietnam but a half dozen of them in years to come to secure its still growing demand for oil. At some point it will no longer be able to economically sustain the military quagmires resulting from an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain control of supply for "national security."
Meanwhile it has offshored its own industrial economy and lost the political support of its own working people. The state of Michigan and of Ohio is the
national industrial future, not its past. Corporate finance is more likely to continue to invest in its control of government, from City Hall to Congress, to continue to invest in obstructing the economic, social and environmental changes we desperately need -- rather than to invest in them in anything like a sufficient quantity to give us a chance to rebuild for the 21st century. And the character of the necessary research and development and industries we are talking about is somewhat different than what has come before -- they aren't necessary to create wealth and prosperity as much as they are to save life on the planet.
The corporate state we now inhabit has not invested in the only real strength any nation ever has, the development of its own people. It has invested in our weaknesses instead, in our infinite desire to consume, in our petty selfishness, our greed for distraction, entertainment, fantasy, delusion and illusion, our capacity for denial, our hatreds, our ignorance, alienation from each other, individual narcissism and in class warfare. It isn't that all people at all times do not possess these weaknesses; but in the US the constant onslaught of advertising and corporate propaganda, increasingly political as time moves on, acts constantly to increase them making it more and more difficult to see our economic, social and environmental peril even as it increases. Some say this is due to over-production and falling rates of profit in industry. Corporate propaganda, created to protect and increase by political means corporate profits, has erased our memory of our own history and crippled our capacity to reason as one politically constituted people in one place at one time.
The analysis of the actual material condition of the world has been done and is constantly improving. Science continues to monitor the downward spiral. Science continues to do its job, despite constant corrupting pressures to which science sometimes succumbs. But "free market" capitalism continues to do its job, too, which is to maximize profits for private corporations, regardless of consequences to the welfare of consumers or material condition of the world. The healthcare reform debate has been illuminating on this issue.
The fraud was accomplished by a combination of two basic achievements by finance, insurance and real estate special interests: they bribed enough members of the US Congress to gut the financial regulatory laws established during the New Deal; and they bought off what weak regulation still existed on the books.
Real planning, like the Pentagon projected in National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (2003), would plan for diminishing natural resources, climate change and social breakdown rather than for the next financial bubble. But that sort of planning implies a government that is not captured by corporations and is able to respond to its citizens.
Where do we go for vision? The political economic system has betrayed the citizens, where even health insurance corporations (lightweights compared to the energy, defense corporations not to mention the combined forces of finance, insurance and real estate that plunged us into the worst recession since the Great Depression) can openly bribe the entire Congress to protect their unjust enrichment at the expense of our declining health? At the citadel of high Anglican Christianity, we read:
A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.
“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?” ... The event was organized by the St Paul’s Institute, a group that “seeksto recapture the cathedral’s ancient role as a center of education or public debate.” --
Bloomberg, Oct. 21, 2009
While the political economic situation in some degree resembles the Renaissance of strong nobles (today's private corporations) and weaker kings and queens (today's elected heads of state), "torturing Nature for Her secrets" as Bacon advised at that time, will no longer produce the same imperial abundance as it did in times of yore. The search for Nature's bounty is now producing not one Vietnam, but a number of them, simultaneously, with more to come as the resource wars "for national security" grind on their universally destructive path, swallowing larger portions of the world's oil supply for "the American way of life." Yet, without those wars and that oil, American agribusiness, to cite a local example, is inconceivable.
The trillions the government is spending on imperial resource adventures should be invested in planning for a future of less, not more oil, and for climate change. Yet by bailing out the institutions with the largest investment pools in the nation because they are “too big to fail,” it appears that the banksters have a stronger grip on government investment than ever. Yet the bailout, personal debt and the razzle-dazzle “securities” still off the banks’ books, amount to many trillions of dollars, and the trade goes right on going on, still unregulated. Where is the money for the kind of huge public investment the US needs today if it is even remotely possible to plan for a certain future of fuel shortages and climate change? There is not even enough political will among the political elites to ask the question.
If leaders continue to behave as if there is no tomorrow because the future no long appeals to their vanity, that could be the consequence. On the other hand, there are some positive pledges from the public-investment sector (see below), yet, somehow, one has to be skeptical about the state of California’s ability to invest in anything at the moment. Nevertheless, the words are brave and going in the right direction and the state treasurer got a good trip to Switzerland for the conference. Meanwhile, back home, California had a 12.2-percent unemployment rate, 26 percent of the population is receiving average weekly benefits of $316.89, the unemployment trust fund has $118,013,000 and has borrowed $4,606,697,970.78 (http://www.propublica.org/special/is-your-states-unemployment-system-in-... ). In other words, the unemployment system, like the state itself, is bankrupt, due in large part to the total control of the state Legislature by finance, insurance and real estate special interests that have successfully dictated for 25-30 years that the only economic growth in California should be in real estate development. Two years ago that bubble burst in what was found to be the largest financial fraud ever committed on the face of the earth – perpetrated by the same banks and insurance corporations bailed out by the people of the US, who are now paying their executives so many billions in bonuses from public funds that even our ultra-cool new president is a bit miffed. The magnitude of the losses and of the fraud is inconceivable. It is equally inconceivable that the go-go hedge funds, weaned on a diet of easy credit and huge profits on investments in financial instruments they didn’t understand, will have the courage, the intelligence or even the interest to become traditional venture capitalists in the industries that might help rebuild rather than further destroy the nation in the future. From their record so far, it is hard to imagine that they even know how to read a financial statement any better than California state treasurers did when they were investing billions of state pension funds in securitized mortages.
Badlands Journal editorial board
2005
Blood and Oil
Michael T. Klare
The onset of the permanent energy crisis was signaled in January 2004, when Royal Dutch/Shell, one of the world's leading energy firms, disclosed that it had overstated
its oil and gas reserves by 20 percent, the net equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels of oil.
Just one month later, a second sign of crisis appeared. On February 24, the New York Times disclosed that prominent American energy experts believe that Saudi Arabia -- the world's leading oil producer -- had consistently exaggerated its oil production capacity and would soon be facing the wholesale exhaustion of its older fields. The first of these developments aroused widespread concern in the financial community because it appeared that Shell had overstated its reserves in order to conceal from investors its failure to discover any major new sources of oil and gas -- a sure sign of steadily diminishing output in the years to come. The second produced alarm because Saudi Arabia is projected by the Department of Energy to supply one-fourth of all new oil in the decades to come; if it is unable to do so, there is little chance that the oil industry as a whole will be able to satisfy projected worldwide demand in 2025, since no other country is capable of generating this much additional output.
Industry and government officials were quick to insist that these developments did not portend a future shortfall in the global supply of oil. The DoE, for example, sought to allay concerns in its International Energy Outlook 2004 by asserting that the Royal Dutch/Shell overstatement was not representative of the industry as a whole and that Saudi Arabia had provided assurances that it was fully capable of satifying future
demand. But many oil experts remained skeptical, pointing to a pattern of declining discoveries and wholesale oil field exhaustion in several key producing areas.
"Collectively, Alex Berenson of the New York Times reported in June 2004, these signs "paint a picture of an industry that has dpleted nearly all of the world's easily exploited reserves outside the Middle East and that is now struggling to sustain production (at current levels) much less increase it." ... As suggested by retired oil geologist Colin Campbell in September 2004, "Up till now we've been living in a world with the assumption of growth driven by oil. Now we have to face the other side of the mountain" ... pp. 205-207
2-18-08
MarketWatch
Thomas Kostigen's Ethics Monitor
Trillions turn green
Investment dollars flow to climate change, clean tech
The time has come for a new global ethic
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/billions-of-investment-dollars-flow-to-climate-change-clean-tech
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Institutional investors are committing billions of dollars to investments in climate change and are embarking on a bold new action plan to raise the profile of energy efficiency and clean technologies around the world.
Nearly 50 leading U.S. and European investors representing more than $8 trillion of assets met on Feb. 14 at the United Nations to lay out a timetable for their commitments to global climate change and to call on governments and other investors to act with theirmoney as well.
"Our goal is to transform the world economy into one that is clean, green and sustainable," says California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who serves on the board of the leading pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, collectively managing more than $500 billion in assets. "California's public pension funds have already committed over $800 million to this effort through investments in environmental technology. And they are actively pressing the corporate world to fully assess and disclose the risks and
opportunities climate change presents for their business operations."
The group says its investment commitments will boost energy efficiency and clean technologies as well as require tougher scrutiny of carbon-intensive investments that may pose long-term financial risk. That means investments in industries that are heavy carbon emitters are under threat. By raising the specter of divestments due to risk these investors are firing a warning shot.
Risk is the ultimate red alert in investing circles because the more there is of it, the more people head for the hills. Pulling money out of the coffers of, say, the automotive industry will get auto companies to pay more attention to practices that will mitigate their carbon footprints. And this is the overall point of the investors who support the climate-action plan proposed at the summit: "Wake up polluters, you're in danger of losing shareholder support."
"With today's action plan, investors are advancing the need for closer scrutiny of investments to include the financial risks of climate change, while also harnessing emerging opportunities," says Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink. "Florida is on board as the first state treasury in the nation to require fund managers to disclose how they incorporate climate risk into prudent investment management."
Putting a dent in global warming
Balancing divestment with reinvestments in alternative energy is a great plan of attack to reduce the amount of carbon pollution by industry while at the same time supporting solutions with tangible measures.
"This action plan reflects the many investment opportunities that exist today to put a dent in global warming pollution, build profits and benefit the global economy," says
Mindy S. Lubber, president of the Ceres investor coalition and director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk, and one of the sponsors of the summit.
The 49 signatories of the plan will:
•Support clean technology, with a goal of deploying $10 billion collectively over the next two years
•Aim for a 20% reduction in energy used in core real estate investment holdings over a three-year period, and consider green building standards in making investment decisions
•Require and validate that investment managers, investment consultants and advisers report on how they are assessing climate risks in their portfolios, whether from new carbon-reducing regulations, physical impacts or competitive risks
•Encourage Wall Street analysts, rating agencies and investment banks to analyze and report on the potential impacts of foreseeable long-term carbon costs, in the range of $20 to $40 per metric ton of CO2, particularly on carbon-intensive investments such as new coal-fired power plants, oil shale, tar sands and coal-to-liquid projects
•Push the SEC to issue guidance leading to full corporate disclosure of climate risks and opportunities
•Push Congress for a mandatory policy to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the 60% to 90% reductions below 1990 levels by 2050 that scientists suggest is urgently needed to avoid the worst and most costly impacts from climate change
I can't support efforts like this enough. This is the market and its most savvy players coming together to solve the biggest long-term threat against the world.
And here's the icing on the cake:
A McKinsey Global Institute report presented at the summit says that major investments over the next decade in energy productivity -- the level of output achieved from the energy consumed -- could earn double-digit rates of return for investors.
How 'bout them apples? Reason enough to go green with your investments.
10-13-09
The Luxist
George Soros Plans Billion-Dollar Climate Change Investment…Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
http://www.luxist.com/2009/10/13/george-soros-plans-billion-dollar-climate-change-
investment/
Billionaire George Soros has made a big move for climate change. Recently in Copenhagen he announced that he will commit more than $1 billion of his estimated $13 billion fortune to clean energy investments and political efforts which help to benefit the environment. The money could help startups with an eco focus get much needed money to go forward at a time when venture capital is at a major low. Analysts say that Soros will likely focus on "mezzanine" investments helping relatively mature startups with some proven success get to the next level. Soros is a savvy investor and this isn't strictly an altruistic move. He says that he is looking for opportunities that will be both profitable and "make a real contribution to solving the problem of climate change." Soros also pledged $100 million over a 10-year period to the Climate Policy Initiative, a foundation created "to protect the public interest against special interests."
10-20-09
Belfast Telegraph
Climate change could alter pensions forever
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/opinion/editor-viewpoint/climate-change-could-alter-pensions-forever-14536469.html#ixzz0UtHp6LEG
Pensions are big news these days, whether it's political announcements that we are to work longer before we become eligible for the state pension or announcements of short falls amongst personal pension investments.
One area that will increasingly influence the likelihood of shortfalls in fund returns is climate change - unless pension fund trustees begin to pay more attention to the negative impact it can have.
A report commissioned by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) on pension fund trustees has found a significant lack of awareness, knowledge and understanding of the potential impact of climate change on pension funds, and this comes at a time when there are so many other pressures coming to bear on investment funds.
The new report, which is the first study to address trustees' attitudes to the impact of climate change has warned this issue is expected to have a material impact on financial investments over the coming decades due to the increased frequency of extreme weather
events and increased costs for the insurance industry associated with global warming.
The research was conducted over two phases and whilst the second phase of research - which was completed earlier this year - found that many trustees' levels of awareness regarding the importance and relevance of climate change to pension funds had been raised, possibly due to climate change issues within the media, this awareness had not been translated into action in any significant way.
Trustees are in a unique position, with significant power to affect corporate behaviour
through the strategy they implement within pension funds, with such funds owning the largest proportion of shares in UK listed companies.
It must be said that, whilst trustees were not complacent about climate change, the fact that they did not appreciate the links between it and the performance of their pension funds is worrying.
I believe that there is an onus and duty on all those involved in these investments to address the financial risk involved and protect pensions against them.
After all, pensions are among the most significant consumer products and investments purchased by society. Protection against this material financial risk is crucial to society's future welfare.
We would like to see guidance being developed with the support of the mainstream institutional investment community and more training which provides education on the financial risks of climate change.
If these strategies are not adopted there will be no change in trustee practice to deal with climate change risks or indeed opportunities.
This issue is one that will not go away today or tomorrow and the financial servicesindustry must sit up and take notice and act for the economy and for society as a whole.
10-21-09
Bloomberg
Goldman Sachs’s Griffiths Says Inequality Helps All...Caroline Binham
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=adpR6SEZyBa4
Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.
“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period. The amount set aside this year is just shy of the all-time high $16.9 billion allocated in the first three quarters of 2007. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally in New York declined to comment.
Banks in the U.K. and U.S. have been pressured by lawmakers to contain compensation after bailouts of financial firms by national governments. Goldman Sachs repaid $10 billion plus dividends to the U.S. government this year, and resumed allocating billions of dollars for year-end bonuses after slashing compensation last year when the firm reported its first quarterly loss.
Griffiths, 67, called on bankers to boost their charitable giving to help improve the financial industry’s reputation following a worldwide crisis.
‘Much Is Expected’
“To whom much is given much is expected,” he said. “There is a sense that if you make money you are expected to give.”
Griffiths said that banks should hire and promote people based on criteria beyond how much money they could or did make.
“It was the failed moral compass of bankers which was primarily responsible for why we had this crisis,” he said. “The question is: what can we do in the culture of institutions to make them behave in a more socially responsible way?”
Financial Services Authority Chairman Adair Turner, speaking at the same event, repeated his call for a global tax on financial transactions, a so-called Tobin Tax. He said in August a tax could redistribute bank profits to the world’s poor and to causes like fighting climate change.
“The role of regulation is to bring a concordance between private actions and beneficial results,” Turner, 54, said yesterday. Central bankers, lawmakers and regulators bear the greatest blame for the seeds of the financial crisis, not traders or their senior executives, he said.
Tobin Tax
James Tobin proposed a tax in 1971 on currency trading to deter speculation in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of pegging currencies. Tobin, who died in 2002, won the 1981 Nobel Prize for his work on financial markets.Turner told U.K. banks last month that they should place “social usefulness” above profit. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leader of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, have previously warned against banks returning to “business as usual” amid concerns that momentum for policy changes in the wake of the financial crisis will subside.
Turner and Griffiths spoke at London’s 300-year-old landmark church where Winston Churchill’s funeral was held. The event was organized by the St Paul’s Institute, a group that “seeks to recapture the cathedral’s ancient role as a center of education or public
debate.”
10-23-09
From Democracy Now! transcript of interview with Bill McKibben and Tim Flannery on cap-and-trade legislation the the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/23/amidst_uncertainty_on_us_role_in
...AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged President Obama and Chinese Prime Minister Hu Jintao to join him and personally attend the Copenhagen talks.
PRIME MINISTER GORDON BROWN: And let me just say how important I believe your discussions today are. In every era, there are one or two moments when nations come together and reach agreements that make history, that change the course of history. And Copenhagen must be such a time. There are now fewer than fifty days to set the course for the next few decades. So, as we convene here, we carry great responsibilities, and the world is watching. If we do not reach a deal over the next few months, let us be in no doubt, since once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that choice. By then, it will be irretrievably too late. So we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Flannery, your response? It does look like President Obama will be going, because he’s going to be going to get the Nobel Peace Prize in the region anyway, so he would be right there. It would be more of a comment if he didn’t go than if he did.
TIM FLANNERY: I’m not sure, Amy, that President Obama is going to attend the meeting. All of that hangs in the balance at the moment. And really, the only hope we have now is for the heads of government to attend this meeting, because the traditional negotiating process has become completely bogged down. And we need the key decision makers there to at least agree as sort of a heads of agreement meeting, where we can, you know, lay out the main things we want to do and then, over the following months, fill out the detail of how all of that’s going to be allocated.
So, Gordon Brown is absolutely right. It’s critical that heads of state attend. But
unfortunately, at the moment, we’re still in the position where that is far from certain. In fact, Todd Stern recently said it was unlikely that President Obama would be attending. So it all hangs in the balance. The next fifty days are incredibly important.
What 350.org is doing is extraordinarily important.
But could I just say to you—the key block at the moment is the US Senate. You know, if the cap-and-trade bill passes, President Obama—or looks like it’s going to pass,
President Obama can go to those meetings in good faith and say, “Here is what our nation is going to do. Here’s the cap.” And that’s what’s required of any international negotiation. Without that bill, I’m afraid that not only the US will fail to have a cap, but Australia and Canada will follow suit. And we were bound by the Kyoto Protocol, so that’s a major step backward. It is just so critically important in this country that the policy gets sorted out to give the President credibility and to lead, because that’s what we need right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Can we play for you recent comments by Republican senators on the Boxer-Kerry climate bill?
SEN. JAMES INHOFE: It can’t be denied that this would be the largest tax increase in the history of America.
SEN. KIT BOND: The Kerry-Boxer bill is a giant new energy tax on families and workers.
SEN. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: And your electricity rates, your gasoline per gallon costs are going to go up. This is not the time to be adding costs.
SEN. JOHN BARRASSO: What we know, that it is going to raise prices for American families. It’s going to make it much tougher for American families.
SEN. JOHN THUNE: All we know is that everything is going to go up. Electricity is going to go up. Diesel fuel is going to go up. Natural gas is going to go up. Fertilizer is
going to go up.
AMY GOODMAN: Just an example of some of the opposition, Tim Flannery. Your response?
TIM FLANNERY: Look, there is no doubt that there will be modest cost increases across some of those areas, most of which can be dealt with, incidentally, by just some efficiency gains in very, very simple ways.
But, you know, unless we invest in the future now in that regard, American manufacturing and American industry is going to suffer greatly over the next decade or two. And the reason for that is that countries like China are now moving ahead with their eye firmly on that market of five billion people around the planet who can’t get enough energy. We know that we can’t deliver that energy to those people using traditional means; we’ll pollute the planet out of existence. So the big gains to be had over the next decade or two or three are building a new energy economy, and America needs to invest in that, so its own manufacturers and its own chambers of commerce and businesses are in a good position to take a slice of that enormous market that’s emerging. So, unless we get the cap-and-trade bill through and unless the appropriate investments are made, this country is going to lose its place in the world, I’m afraid. We can see that already happening with China moving ahead so swiftly.
So, yes, there will be some increase now, a modest increase now. It’s not going to send anyone broke. We’ve seen that in Europe. We’ve seen their economy expand and prosper as they’ve taken on cap and trade. But the investment is critical.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet, there are some members of the environmental movement here in the United States who question the use of the cap and trade as a means of addressing the problem. Could you respond to those concerns?
TIM FLANNERY: Sure. Look, cap and trade, by itself, is not enough, but it is essential in terms of these international negotiations. And one way of showing that is to look at the alternatives. Just say the US went with a carbon tax. That would leave the President in a position where he’d be going to Copenhagen and saying, “Look, we’ve got a carbon tax, but we’ve got no idea really what it’s going to do in terms of our emissions profile.” So, countries would just say, “Well, what are you actually pledging to? What are you—how are you going to deal with your emissions?” You know, the only method, really, to allow countries to see transparently what other countries intend to do and then share the burden equally is through a cap-and-trade system. So it’s not enough to deal with emissions overall, but it is an essential prerequisite for any global deal on climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of cap and trade, many environmental and watchdog groups have opposed the system. This is Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen about cap and trade on Democracy Now!
TYSON SLOCUM: Look, Public Citizen supports strong, effective climate legislation, and the fact is, is that this bill does not do that. We can talk about the aspirations of hoping to achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions, but when you look at what this bill will do, it will not result in significant reductions.
It creates a legal right to pollute for industries and gives away credits for free to allow companies to meet those targets without having to pay for them. And that is simply not going to spur the kind of investments we need. President Obama had it right when he announced in his budget in February that if you wanted to pollute, you would have to pay for the right to pollute. And by holding an auction, the government would raise hundreds
of billions of dollars that could be reinvested back to the American people to offset the impacts of higher energy prices that a cap-and-trade program would bring and to spur billions of dollars in needed investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Flannery?
TIM FLANNERY: Look, cap and trade does work. It does do part of the job we need to do to get to where we need to go. We see that in Europe. They had a similar system of giving away permits. But the five percent reduction over 1990 levels that that cap-and-trade system was intended to generate have actually happened.
The US—I know the bill isn’t perfect. I know there’s a lot of giveaways in it, and I know a lot of people aren’t happy about provisions for subsidies for nuclear power and so forth. But we just have to get moving on this. We have to empower the president of the most powerful nation on earth to be able to negotiate and lead. And cap and trade is really about that.
And besides, I really do have faith that that system will bring about the reductions of 14 or 17 percent below 2005 levels that it pledges. It’s a comprehensive bill. In the agricultural area, it is really good. It does things that no other nation has really looked at doing.
So, could I just make a personal plea to Americans to support this bill? Imperfect as it is, it is a first absolutely essential step for this country to engage and lead and empower others in other parts of the world...
10-23-09
The Guardian
Groups use 350's big day to fight cap-and-trade
International day of climate action on Saturday opposes market-based approaches to capping global warming emissions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/23/network-climate-change
350.org is taking a big-tent approach to activism on its International Day of Climate Action this Saturday, inviting anyone who wants to help to join a climate-change demonstration, or create one of their own.
That open invitation means not everyone will be pushing the same message. In fact, a trio of groups will use the day, and the number 350, to highlight their opposition to market-based approaches to capping global warming emissions. In other words, to oppose cap-and-trade, the mechanism integral to the clean energy bill in Congress and to the United Nations approach.
Those groups—Rising Tide North America, Carbon Trade Watch, and the Camp for Climate Action—recently launched 350reasons.org, a collection of reasons why they oppose emissions trading. At climate-day events on Saturday they'll be handing out pamphlets (sorry, "zines"), detailing some of those reasons. They've also promised a "video report," to be released soon. They've essentially taken a no-compromise approach to climate action, preferring to defeat a flawed plan rather than see it succeed and hope it can be fixed later on.
"We're trying to say there's no way to reach 350 parts per million
through carbon trading," said Rising Tide's Brihannala Morgan, a U.C.
Berkeley graduate student. "It's a false solution."
Among the 350 reasons:
• Carbon Trading means more coal. The site notes that the Waxman-Markey energy bill passed by the House included not just cap-and-trade but provisions to allow 43 new coal
plants.
• It perpetuates the dominance of rich countries over poor.
• Carbon trading is based on an ideological belief in the omnipotence of the market.
• Carbon markets are fundamentally undemocratic. Climatologist James Hansen opposes cap-and-trade. He says the proposed UN plan is "guaranteed to fail."
Actually, the group has 450 reasons at the moment, Morgan said; it's working to edit them down.
350.org founder Bill McKibben says the point of Saturday's events was never to choose specific policies, but to build a broad movement demanding that leaders reverse the rising atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. For too long, he said, the climate problem has been a debate between experts—scientists, economists, and policy wonks.
"There's been no movement to back them up, no counter-pressure big enough to stand up to the unrelenting pressure from vested interest," he said last week. "We're helping provide the popular part of that movement."
While 350.org doesn't take positions on specific policy strategies such as cap-and-trade,
it shares the sense of urgency of the no-cap-and-trade groups. For that matter, most people working to push a climate bill through Congress share the same sense of urgency.
Most readily admit that any bill that can pass through Congress will be too weak to stop climate change. But they would prefer to get started rather than to insist on a perfect bill.
"We have to start some place and we have to start now," Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, said in response to a Rising Tide campaign last month.
350.org organizers say they're OK with off-message groups joining Saturday's events.
"We encouraged lots of different groups to join," said May Boeve, a 350.org partnerships director. "We've cast a very large net."
Those groups will include churches, performance artists, and extreme athletes. They will include Chinese businessmen holding a black-tie gala in Shanghai, an odd partner for the 350reasons.org groups critical of corporate influence.
When I asked McKibben about how to engage the 'no-compromise' types last week, he said it was too soon to fight over plans. No legislation would be sufficient until the public was making more noise on the climate emergency.
"It's too early to make calls on what happens with the legislation, because we haven't built a movement to push that process as hard as it needs to be pushed," he said.
"Politicians aren't feeling pressure either in Washington or in Copenhagen to do more than the minimum. We need to provide that pressure.
"Another way to say that is, we need to give people who want to do the right thing some room to do it. Barack Obama has not laid his cards on the table yet. We need to give him some maneuvering room, to show him that people have his back, not just here but all over the world."
The question, then, seems to be whether 350reasons.org and the like will amplify the pressure on political leaders, or fracture it.
October 2009
Monthly Review
Do Increased Energy Costs Offer Opportunities for a New Agriculture?...Frederick
Kirschenmann
http://www.monthlyreview.org/091019kirschenmann.php
Frederick Kirschenmann is the current president of Stone Barns Center for Food and
Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York, as well as a Distinguished Fellow at the
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He also oversees management of his family’s 3,500-acre certified organic farm in south central North Dakota.
Let us accept the current challenge — the next great energy transition — as an opportunity not to try vainly to preserve business as usual (the American Way
of Life that, we are told, is not up for negotiation), but rather to re-imagine human culture from the ground up, using our intelligence and passion for the welfare of the next generations, and the integrity of nature’s web, as our primary guides.
— Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything
One of the great missteps in most of the future energy scenarios propagated in the popular media is the notion that we can transition to “alternative, renewable energy” and thereby “wean ourselves from Mideast oil.” The underlying assumptions in this scenario seem to be that energy supply is an isolated challenge that can be solved without major
systemic changes, that we can meet that challenge by simply switching from one energy source to another — from fossil fuels to wind, solar, biofuels or a host of other alternatives — and that our current industrial culture and economy then can continue on the present course.
Probably nothing could be farther from the truth. As Richard Heinberg points out, “Making existing petroleum-reliant communities truly sustainable is a huge task. Virtually every system must be redesigned — from transport to food, sanitation, health care, and manufacturing.”
As Heinberg implies, the transition we now must contemplate is a shift from an oil dependent society to an oil independent society. Such a transition must include, but is clearly not limited to, our food system. The transition must be comprehensive. We must “re-imagine human culture from the ground up.”
The “transition movement,” which was launched by Rob Hopkins, a permaculture teacher schooled in ecological design, acknowledges such a comprehensive approach, and the movement is designed to help communities make that transition. Originally focused on
transitioning towns, the movement has now expanded to transitioning islands, peninsulas, and valleys, and it may serve as a model for the kind of transition we need to contemplate in our food and agriculture systems.
In his new book, Hopkins points out that the “transition initiatives are based on four key assumptions”:
1.Life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.
2.Our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil.
3.We have to act collectively, and we have to act now.
4.By unleashing the collective genius of those around us to design our energy descent creatively and proactively, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching, and that recognize the biological limits of our planet.
While “virtually every system must be redesigned,” the redesign of our modern industrial food and agriculture system is particularly urgent because food is essential and our current food system is almost totally dependent on vast petroleum inputs at every level.
As Dale Allen Pfeiffer has put it, in our modern food system we are, in effect, “eating fossil fuels.” All of our fertilizers and pesticides are either made from, or acquired by means of, fossil fuels. Farm equipment is manufactured and operated with fossil fuels;
irrigation is carried out using fossil fuels; and our food is processed, packaged, and transported from farm to table with fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels, our industrial food system likely would collapse...
...As with all externalities of production, the depletion of our human and social capital — perhaps the worst toll exacted by our industrial agriculture — is a consequence of an economic system that promotes short-term profits for individuals and corporations at the expense of long-term sustainability. Industrialization of our farming systems has systematically eliminated the very farmers who were most closely connected to their land.
Market forces in our capitalist industrial economy favor centralized farm management of large, consolidated operations that can reduce the transaction costs of transferring raw materials to large manufacturing firms. But our culture still seems to be largely oblivious to the impact that this erosion of indigenous human know-hot and creativity may have on our ability to address the challenges ahead. Here, an appeal to an ethic that
stresses the outcomes (or consequences) may be the most compelling.
Wendell Berry has perhaps articulated most clearly and succinctly the connection between human/social capital and our ability to maintain our productive capacity:
If agriculture is to remain productive it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. Nothing that has happened in the agricultural revolution of the past fifty years has disproved or
invalidated these requirements, though everything that has happened has ignored or defied them. Berry reminds us that we cannot reasonably expect ecological or agro-ecological systems to be managed well without people living in those ecologies long enough and intimately enough to know how to manage them well. And he correctly asserts that we need social,
cultural, and economic support systems in place to sustain such wise management. Proper land management, in other words, is a practical, ethical imperative not provided for in industrial-capitalist economies, which are focused solely on maximum production and short-term economic returns.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has articulated a similar position. Over a decade ago the NAS asserted that “soil degradation is a complex phenomenon driven by strong interactions among socioeconomic and biophysical factors.” The NAS recognized that proper soil management is a key factor in improving soil quality and that healthy soils provide the opportunity “simultaneously [to] improve profitability and environmental performance.” Long-term productivity and profitability, in other words, is not a simple business arrangement but is grounded in social and cultural factors that attend to the long-term care of the soil. A sustainable farm economy is ultimately tightly linked to social, cultural, and ethical commitments that safeguard the health of the land.
The core strategy of industrial farming systems has been to specialize in one or two crops with little or no biological diversity, and reduce production management practices to the use of one or two single-tactic inputs such as commercial fertilizers and pesticides. This approach has yielded production systems that are extremely labor saving but tend to be so focused on maximizing production and short-term economic returns that little consideration is given to the need for long-term resilience.
Another hallmark of agribusiness has been the systematic elimination of the very farmers with the ecological and cultural wisdom and commitment required to restore the physical and biological health of our soils. These farmers owned their land, lived on their land, were intimately related to their land, and planned to pass it on to future family members — all factors that nurtured a culture of caring for the land.
Fortunately, in the wake of this loss of human know-how and community (with the land, as well), some research continues to demonstrate the broad principles we must employ to restore soil health. Science magazine reported on a research project in Switzerland that traced the biological and physical properties of soils by comparing soils under conventional industrial management with soils under ecological management, over a twenty-one-year period. The researchers found that ecologically managed soils, using complex green manure and livestock manure to replenish soil nutrients, showed remarkably higher soil quality, including “greater biological activity” and “10 to 60 percent higher soil aggregate stability” (promoting better intake and storage of water for plants to use) than the conventional industrially managed soils.
Such information suggests a critical ethical imperative. Since we have been able to conceal the decline in productive capacity arising from the loss of soil health over the past half century by applying cheap fossil-fuel based ingredients to the soil, we have not confronted the fact that ultimately soil health is crucial to maintaining productivity. The NAS study reminds us that “soil degradation may have significant effects on the ability of the United States to sustain a productive agricultural system.” That statement takes on new significance in light of the depletion of the very conditions that have allowed us to ignore the importance of the health of our soil: namely, cheap energy, surplus water, and stable climates. So one could argue that there
is now a compelling, practical imperative for exploring nature’s ways of restoring soil health and employing the cultural, social, and economic incentives to put people on the land who know the land well and know how to use it wisely.
All of this indicates, I think, that we are increasingly recognizing that the health of the soil is, as Sir Albert Howard noted seventy years ago, an indicator of the health of the entire living community. Hopefully, the dual drivers of increased energy costs and a renewed land ethic will bring about the sustainable agriculture our children and grandchildren will need.
10-26-09
TomDispatch.com
Welcome to 2025
American Preeminence Is Disappearing Fifteen Years Early … Michael T. Klare
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175131/michael_klare_the_great_superpower_meltdown
Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.
Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025 , it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained." For many Americans, the loss of that preeminence may be a source of discomfort, or even despair. On the other hand, don't forget the advantages to being an ordinary country like any other country: Nobody expects Canada, or France, or Italy to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 68,000 already there and the 120,000 still in Iraq. Nor does anyone expect those countries to spend $925 billion in taxpayer money to do so -- the current estimated cost of both wars, according to the National Priorities Project .
That, of course, was then; this -- some 11 months into the future -- is now and how things have changed. Futuristic predictions will just have to catch up to the fast-shifting realities of the present moment. Although published after the onset of the global economic meltdown was underway, the report was written before the crisis reached its full proportions and so emphasized that the decline of American power would be gradual, extending over the assessment's 15-year time horizon. But the economic crisis and attendant events have radically upset that timetable. As a result of the mammoth economic losses suffered by the United States over the past year and China's stunning economic recovery, the global power shift the report predicted has accelerated. For all practical purposes, 2025 is here already…
So, welcome to the world of 2025. It doesn't look like the world of our recent past, when the United States stood head and shoulders above all other nations in stature, and it doesn't comport well with Washington's fantasies of global power since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But it is reality.
The question remains: How much longer will Washington feel that Americans can afford to subsidize a global role that includes garrisoning much of the planet and fighting distant wars in the name of global security, when the American economy is losing so much ground to its competitors? This is the dilemma President Obama and his advisers must confront in the altered world of 2025.
