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Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in Peril
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in Peril
There are a few genuinely upbeat news stories when it comes to this planet and people trying to figure out how to save us from ourselves and our fossil-fuel addiction. This at a moment of record global surface temperatures and record ocean heating when, despite the Paris climate accord of 2015, carbon dioxide from those fossil fuels is once again entering the atmosphere in record amounts. Take little Costa Rica, where Claudia Dobles, an urban planner who just happens to be the wife of the country’s president, has launched a model national decarbonization plan aimed at fully weaning that country off even the slightest reliance on fossil fuels by 2050. Or consider Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, whose mayor, Frank Jensen, is working to make it “carbon neutral” by 2022. Or think about the scientists now exploring far more controversial and futuristic geo-engineering schemes to try to deal with a world that could, in the decades to come, run amuck in global-warming terms — including the possibility of spraying planet-cooling aerosols like sulfur dioxide (in imitation of the gases emitted by volcanoes) into the atmosphere to reverse the effects of global warming.
Of course, while all of the above are hopeful, none of them offer full-scale solutions to a crisis that threatens to quite literally sink not just cities, but potentially civilization itself. As it happens, there is an obvious solution to the climate-change crisis staring us all in the face, one that TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro (author of a particularly timely new book, Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Struggle for Supremacy), brings up today. Forget Costa Rica, Copenhagen, aerosols, even that climate accord. Forget Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. Forget it all.
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Tomgram: Susan Southard, Against Forgetting
Tomgram: Susan Southard, Against Forgetting
As a young man, I was anything but atypical in having the Bomb (we capitalized it then) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear attack warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on a distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape that I had never come close to experiencing (except in sci-fi novels).
And my dreams were nothing compared to those of America’s top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, writing of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans. And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, in the country’s first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy, created a scenario for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went according to plan, cease to exist. Official estimates of possible casualties from such an attack ran to 285 million dead.
An American obsession with global annihilation undoubtedly peaked when President Kennedy came on the air on October 22, 1962, to tell us that Soviet missile sites were being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” Listening to his address, Americans everywhere imagined a nuclear confrontation that might leave parts of the country in ruins. Such fears, however, began to fade when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused.
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Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters
Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters
In June, Austin “Scott” Miller, the special-ops general chosen to be the 17th U.S. commander in Afghanistan, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like so many of the generals who had preceded him, he suggested that he saw evidence of “progress” in the Afghan war, even if he refused to “guarantee you a timeline or an end date.” Smart move, general!
As it happens, just over a week ago, he got a dose, up close and personal, of what the Afghan version of “progress” really means. He was visiting key American allies in the southern province of Kandahar when the “insider” attack of all insider attacks occurred. In the sort of event that’s been going on since at least 2010, an ostensible ally, in this case a local member of the Afghan security forces who had evidently joined the Taliban, turned his gun on Kandahar’s chief of police (a crucial powerbroker in the region), the local intelligence chief, and the provincial governor, killing the first two and wounding the third. In the process, he ensured that, with local leadership literally down the tubes, elections in Kandahar would be postponed for at least a week. Three Americans, including a brigadier general, were also wounded in the attack. (In 2014, an American major general was killed in just such an insider strike.) In one of the rarest acts for an American commander in memory, General Miller reportedly drew his sidearm as the bullets began to fly, but was himself untouched. Still, it was a striking reminder that, 17 years after the U.S. invaded that country, the Taliban are again riding high and represent the only forces making “progress” or “turning corners” in that country.
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Tomgram: Nomi Prins, In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full?
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full?
Remember when “draining the swamp” was something the Bush administration swore it was going to do in launching its Global War on Terror? Well, as we all know, that global swamp of terror only got muckier in the ensuing years. (Think al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, think ISIS.) Then, last year, that swamp left terror behind and took up residence in Washington, D.C. In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump swore repeatedly that, along with building his wall and locking “her” up, he was going to definitively drain the Washington swamp, ridding the national capital of special interests once and for all. (“It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.,” he typically said. “This is why I’m proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again.”) “Drain the swamp” became one of the signature chants at his rallies.
No sooner had he been elected, however, then he decided to “retire” the concept of draining the swamp — and little wonder. After all, he quickly began appointing hordes of “former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants” to agencies where they were to help “craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck.” Then his administration started issuing waivers to those new appointees, allowing them to “take up matters that could benefit former clients.” News of just who got those waivers was kept secret and only released after publicity about them took a truly bad turn. Here’s a typical example of one of them, as reported by the New York Times: “A… waiver was given to Michael Catanzaro, who until January was registered as a lobbyist for companies including Devon Energy, an oil and gas company, and Talen Energy, a coal-burning electric utility.
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Tomgram: Michael Klare, Fossil Fuels Forever
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Fossil Fuels Forever
Think of them as omens of our age. While global temperatures have been soaring lately — May was the 13th month in a row to break all-time heat records — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just reported, more parochially, that this was the hottest June on record for the lower 48 states. (USA! USA!) No state came in below the norm and in the West and Southwest, it was hot as hell. Record hot.
Then consider this: Arctic summer sea ice is heading for oblivion at a remarkable pace (which, since ice reflects sunlight, means that those waters will now be absorbing yet more heat). In June, that ice was disappearing at a rate 70% faster than the norm. Looked at over the longer term, as Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian explained, “a vast expanse of ice — an area about twice the size of Texas — has vanished over the past 30 years, and the rate of that retreat has accelerated.”
By the way, if you want to keep your eye on the horizon for future such omens, a possible 2016 record is already looming when it comes to billion-dollar-plus weather disasters with eight of them so far this year. The average had once been five annually, but in recent years has been around 11.
If you’ll excuse a mixed (but appropriate) metaphor, given the subject TomDispatch regularMichael Klare takes up today, there seem to be an awful lot of canaries in the coal mines at the moment, and wherever you turn, they’re expiring. Klare’s latest report on our fossil-fueled planet suggests that the use of coal, oil, and natural gas will not fall, but actually continue to rise in the next decades and so, of omens, there will be plenty to come. Tom
Hooked!
The Unyielding Grip of Fossil Fuels on Global Life
Here’s the good news: wind power, solar power, and other renewable forms of energy are expanding far more quickly than anyone expected, ensuring that these systems will provide an ever-increasing share of our future energy supply. According to the most recent projections from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, global consumption of wind, solar, hydropower, and other renewables will doublebetween now and 2040, jumping from 64 to 131 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs).
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Tomgram: Bill McKibben, It’s Not Just What Exxon Did, It’s What It’s Doing
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, It’s Not Just What Exxon Did, It’s What It’s Doing
In essence, there’s no backsies when it comes to climate change. Once you’ve begun the full-scale destabilization and melting of the Greenland ice sheet and of the vast ice sheets in the Antarctic, for instance, the future inundation of coastal areas, including many of humanity’s major cities, is a foregone conclusion somewhere down the line. In fact, a recent study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change by 22 climate scientists, suggests that when it comes to the melting of ice sheets and the rise of seas and oceans, we’re not just talking about how life will be changed on Planet Earth in 2100 or even 2200. We’re potentially talking about what it will be like in 12,200, an expanse of time twice as long as human history to date.
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Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse
With 2015 in the history books, it’s easy enough to think of our changing weather as part of that history, but that would be a mistake. Climate change, if allowed to come to full fruition, will be something else altogether — not history, but the possible end of it. History, after all, is something we’re generally familiar with.
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Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse
With 2015 in the history books, it’s easy enough to think of our changing weather as part of that history, but that would be a mistake. Climate change, if allowed to come to full fruition, will be something else altogether — not history, but the possible end of it. History, after all, is something we’re generally familiar with.
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Tomgram: William deBuys, Entering the Mega-Drought Era in America
Tomgram: William deBuys, Entering the Mega-Drought Era in America
The other day here in New England it was chilly, rainy, and stormy and I complained. Where was the sun? The warmth? The summer? I happened to be with someone I know from California and he shook his head and said, “It’s fine with me. I like it rainy. I haven’t seen much rain in a while.” It was a little reminder of how insular we can be. California, after all, is in the fourth year of a fearsome drought that has turned much of the North American West, from Alaska and Canada to the Mexican border, into a tinderbox. Reservoirs are low, rivers quite literally drying up, and the West is burning. In rural northern California, where the fires seem to be least under control, the Rocky Fire has already burned 109 square miles and destroyed 43 homes, while the Jerusalem Fire, which recently broke out nearby, quickly ate upalmost 19 square miles while doubling in size and sent local residents fleeing, some for the second time in recent weeks.
Fires have doubled in these drought years in California. The fire season, once mainly an autumnal affair, now seems to be just about any day of the year. (This isn’t, by the way, just a California phenomenon. The latest study indicates that fire season is extending globally, with a growth spurt of 18.7% in the last few decades.) In fact, fire stats for the U.S. generally and the West in particular are worsening in the twenty-first century, and this year looks to be quite a blazing affair, with six million acres already burned across the region and part of the summer still to go.
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Dirty Energy vs. Clean Power
Dirty Energy vs. Clean Power
The Past Battles the Future at Seneca Lake
Let’s amend the famous line from Joni Mitchell’s “Yellow Taxi” to fit this moment in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. There, Big Energy seems determined to turn paradise, if not into a parking lot, then into a massive storage area for fracked natural gas. But there’s one way in which that song doesn’t quite match reality. Mitchell famously wrote, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” As part of a growing global struggle between Big Energy and a movement focused on creating a fossil-fuel-free future, however, the residents of the Finger Lakes seem to know just what they’ve got and they’re determined not to let it go. As a result, a local struggle against a corporation determined to bring in those fracked fuels catches a changing mood not just in the United States but across the world when it comes to protecting the planet, one place at a time, if necessary.
It’s difficult to imagine a more picturesque landscape, a more tranquil locale, a more bucolic garden spot than the Finger Lakes region. Each year, it draws tens of thousands of tourists to gaze at the waterfalls in Watkins Glen, to kayak and canoe in its deep waters, to dine in its farm-to-table restaurants and enjoy the homespun hospitality of its bed and breakfasts. Lush vineyards rustle on tree-studded hillsides. Wine Enthusiast magazine gave it top honors last year, calling it “one of the most vibrant and promising wine regions of the world.” There are fruit and vegetable farms and sugar maples, too. In 2013, the state’s maple syrup production ranked second only to Vermont’s.
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Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Climate Deniers Are Their Own Worst Nightmares
Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Climate Deniers Are Their Own Worst Nightmares
When I go out with my not quite three-year-old grandson, his idea of a good time is hide-and-seek. This means suddenly darting behind a bush too small to fully obscure him or into a doorway where he remains in plain sight, while I wander around wondering aloud where in the world he could possibly be. In this, there’s a kind of magical thinking and denial of reality that has great charm. When similar acts of denial are committed by adults, when they refuse to see what’s right before their eyes — the melting sidewalks and roads of India, the emptying reservoirs of parched California, the extreme rain and flooding in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, the news that last year was a global heat record for the planet and this year isalready threatening to be another, or that Alaska just experienced its hottest May ever, or that 13 of the 14 hottest years since temperatures began to be recorded took place in this century, or that a supposed post-1998 “pause” in the planetary warming process was a fantasy — the charm fades fast. When you discover that behind this denial of reality lies at least $125 million in dark money, it fades even faster. In just three years, unidentified conservative sources have poured that eye-popping figure into a web of think tanks and activist outfits dedicated to promoting climate denial (and not even included in that amount are the vast sums that Big Energycontinues to contribute to the promotion of denialism, as it has done since the 1980s). In other words, some of the most powerful and profitable interests on the planet are determined to deny reality with a ferocity meant to confuse the public and put a damper on any moves or movement to save a planetary environment that has long nurtured humanity. It’s a charmless spectacle.
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