The Real Climate Censorship By George Monbiot.

It’s happening, it’s systematic, and it is precisely the opposite story to the one the papers are telling.

The drafting of reports by the world’s pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For many months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel’s reports are extremely conservative – even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything which threatens their interests. While the US government has traditionally been the scientists’ chief opponent, this time the assault was led by Saudi Arabia, supported by China and Russia(1,2).

The scientists fight back, but they always have to make some concessions. The report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that “North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events”(3). David Wasdell, an accredited reviewer for the panel, claims that the summary of the science the IPCC published in February was purged of most of its references to “positive feedbacks”: climate change accelerating itself(4).

This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the right-wing press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments should seek to amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists, no explanations are required. The world’s most conservative scientific body has somehow been transformed into a cabal of screaming demagogues.

This is just one aspect of a story which is endlessly told the wrong way around. In the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley the allegation is constantly repeated that climate scientists and environmentalists are trying to “shut down debate”. Those who say that manmade global warming is not taking place, they claim, are being censored.

Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The closest any of them have been able to get is two letters sent – by the Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe – to that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort climate science(5,6). These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They were merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is a censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in the name of free speech.

In an interview four weeks ago, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4’s film The Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed that he was subject to “invisible censorship”(7). He appears to have forgotten that he had just been given 90 minutes of prime time television to expound his theory that climate change is a great green conspiracy. So what did this censorship amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been upheld by the Independent Television Commission. It found that “the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing” and that they had been “misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”(8) This, apparently, makes him a martyr.

If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints. 1. “Pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’, or other similar terms” from their communications. 2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors which “changed the meaning of scientific findings”. 3. Statements by officials at their agencies which misrepresented their findings. 4. “The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate”. 5. “New or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work”. 6. “Situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings.” They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five years(9).

In 2003, the White House gutted the climate change section of a report by the Environmental Protection Agency(10). It deleted references to studies showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a reference to a study partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, which suggested that temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency decided to drop the section altogether.

After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station to tell the programme that Knutson was “too tired” to conduct the interview. The official explained to him that the “White House said no”. All media inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes(11).

Last year the top climate scientist at NASA, James Hansen, reported that his bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was told by public relations officials at the agency that there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases(12).

Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US Fish and Wildlife Service told its scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand “the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues.”(13)

At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former aide to White House who was previously working at the American Petroleum Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush administration(14). Though he is not a scientist, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming(15).

The guardians of free speech in Britain aren’t above attempting a little suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton, threatening us with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science(16,17,18,19). On two of these occasions he has demanded that articles are removed from the internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil offends the corporation’s “right of free speech”(20).

After Martin Durkin’s film was broadcast, one of the scientists it featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate change had been misrepresented. Wunsch says he has now received a legal letter from Durkin’s production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was neither misrepresented nor misled(21).

Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when those who deny that climate change is happening complain of censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Catherine Brahic, 6th April 2007. Climate change is here now, says major report. NewScientist.com

2. David Adam, 7th April 2007. Scientists’ stark warning on reality of warmer world. The Guardian.

3. Roger Harrabin, 6th April 2007. The Today Programme, Radio 4.

4. David Wasdell, February 2007. Political Corruption of the IPCC Report? http://www.meridian.org.uk/Resources/Global%20Dynamics/IPCC/contents.htm

5. Bob Ward, the Royal Society, 4th September 2006. Letter to Nick Thomas, Esso Ltd. You can see the letter here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/09/19/LettertoNick.pdf

6. John D. Rockefeller IV and Olympia Snowe, 27th October 2006. Letter to Rex W. Tillerson, ExxonMobil. http://snowe.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=9acba744-802a-23ad-47be-2683985c724e

7. Martin Durkin, 9th March 2007. Interview with Brendan O’Neill. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/2948/

8. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel Four to Apologise to Four Interviewees in “Against Nature” Series. Press Release.

9. Union of Concerned Scientists and Government Accountability Project, February 2007. Atmosphere of Pressure: Political Interference in Federal Climate Science. http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/Atmosphere-of-Pressure.pdf

10. Andrew Revkin and Katharine Seelye, 19th June 2003. Report by the E.P.A. Leaves Out Data on Climate Change. The New York Times.

11. Union of Concerned Scientists and Government Accountability Project, ibid.

12. Andrew Revkin, 29th January 2006. Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him. The New York Times.

13. Andrew Revkin, 8th March 2007. Memos Tell Officials How to Discuss Climate. The New York Times.

14. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, 19th March 2007. Committee Examines Political Interference with Climate Science. http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1214

15. Andrew Revkin, 8th June 2005. Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming. The New York Times.

16. Viscount Monckton, 14th November 2006. Email to the Guardian.

17. Viscount Monckton, 23rd November 2006. Letter to the Guardian.

18. Viscount Monckton, 23rd November 2006. Letter to George Monbiot

19. Viscount Monckton, 24th November 2006. Email to George Monbiot.

20. Viscount Monckton, 11th December 2006. Uphold Free Speech About Climate Change or Resign. Open letter to Senators Snowe and Rockefeller. http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20061212_monckton.pdf

21. Carl Wunsch, pers comm.

Published in the Guardian, 10th April 2007.

Climate Change: Scientists Warn It May Be Too Late to Save the Ice Caps by David Adam

A critical meltdown of ice sheets and severe sea level rise could be inevitable because of global warming, the world's scientists are preparing to warn their governments. New studies of Greenland and Antarctica have forced a UN expert panel to conclude there is a 50% chance that widespread ice sheet loss "may no longer be avoided" because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Such melting would raise sea levels by four to six metres, the scientists say. It would cause "major changes in coastline and inundation of low-lying areas" and require "costly and challenging" efforts to move millions of people and infrastructure from vulnerable areas. The previous official line, issued in 2001, was that the chance of such an event was "not well known, but probably very low".

The melting process could take centuries, but increased warming caused by a failure to cut emissions would accelerate the ice sheets' demise, and give nations less time to adapt to the consequences. Areas such as the Maldives would be swamped and low-lying countries such as the Netherlands and Bangladesh, as well as coastal cities including London, New York and Tokyo, would face critical flooding.

The warning appears in a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the likely impacts of global warming and will be published in April. A final draft of the report's summary-for-policymakers chapter, obtained by the Guardian, says: "Very large sea level rises that would result from widespread deglaciation of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets imply major changes in coastlines and inundation of low-lying areas, with greatest effects in river deltas.

"Relocating populations, economic activity and infrastructure would be costly and challenging. There is medium confidence that both ice sheets would be committed to partial deglaciation for a global average temperature increase greater than 1-2C, causing sea level rise of 4-6m over centuries to millennia." Medium confidence means about a five in 10 chance.

The revelation comes as a new report points out that greenhouse gas emissions running into hundreds of millions of tonnes have not been disclosed by Britain's biggest businesses, masking the full extent of the UK's contribution to global warming. According to a report by Christian Aid, only 16 of Britain's top 100 listed companies are meeting the government's most elementary reporting guidelines on greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, almost 200m tonnes of damaging CO2 is estimated to be missing from the annual reports of FTSE 100 companies. The figure is more than the annual reported emissions of Pakistan and Greece combined.

This month the IPCC published a separate study on the science of climate change, which concluded that humans are "very likely" to be responsible for most of the recent warming, and that average temperatures would probably increase by 4C this century if emissions continue to rise. Even under its most optimistic scenario, based on a declining world population and a rapid switch to clean technology, temperatures are still likely to rise by 1.8C.

The new report is expected to say this means there is "a significant probability that some large-scale events (eg deglaciation of major ice sheets) may no longer be avoided due to historical greenhouse gas emissions and the inertia of the climate system". Scientists involved with the IPCC process cannot talk publicly about its contents before publication. But a senior author on the report said: "It's not rocket science to realise that with the numbers coming out from the IPCC [science report], the warming by the end of the century is enough to do that." The report's conclusion poses a conundrum for governments of how to address a problem that is inevitable but may not occur for hundreds or thousands of years. "That's for the policy makers to decide but it really is a very difficult question," the source said. "Those are moral questions and the answer you give will depend very much on which part of the world you live in."

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, said the key question was not whether the ice sheets would break up, but how quickly. Some models suggest rapid melting that would bring sea level rises of more than a metre per century. "That would be much harder for us to cope with," he says.

The IPCC science report predicted sea level rises of up to 0.59m by the end of the century. But that does not include the possible contribution from ice sheets, because the experts judged it too unpredictable to forecast over short timescales.

Published on Monday, February 19, 2007 by the Guardian / UK

Scientists Sound Alarm Over Melting Antarctic Ice Sheets by Steve Connor, Science Editor in San Francisco

Scientists analyzing satellite data were astonished to discover the size of the vast lakes and river systems flowing beneath the Antarctic ice sheets, which may lubricate the movement of these glaciers as they flow into the surrounding sea.

[A foraging Emperor penguin preens on snow-covered sea ice in Antarctica, in this December 9, 2006 file photo. Lasers beamed from space have detected big sloshing lakes of water underneath Antarctic ice. The discovery raises fresh questions about the speed at which sea levels might rise in a warmer world due to the rate at which parts of the ice sheets slide from the land into the ocean. REUTERS/Deborah Zabarenko]

The long-term stability of the massive ice sheets of Antarctica, which have the potential to raise sea levels by hundreds of meters, has been called into question with the discovery of fast-moving rivers of water sliding beneath their base.



The discovery raises fresh questions about the speed at which sea levels might rise in a warmer world due to the rate at which parts of the ice sheets slide from the land into the ocean, scientists said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

"We've found that there are substantial subglacial lakes under ice that's moving a couple of meters per day. It's really ripping along. It's the fast-moving ice that determines how the ice sheet responds to climate change on a short timescale," said Robert Bindschadler, a Nasa scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, one of the study's co-authors.

"We aren't yet able to predict what these ice streams are going to do. We're still learning about the controlling processes. Water is critical, because it's essentially the grease on the wheel. But we don't know the details yet," Dr Bindschadler said. "Until now, we've had just a few glimpses into what's going on down there. This is the most complete picture to date about what's going on," he said.

The findings, to be published in the journal Science, came from satellite surveillance of the surface elevation of the ice sheets, which found that they rise or lower depending on the amount of water flowing between the base of the ice sheet and the rock beneath.

The scientists identified many regions of the ice sheet either rose or deflated between 2003 and 2006 as a result of water movements below. Water would be capable of this because it is highly pressurized under the weight of the overlying ice, they said.

Glaciologists have known for some time that water exists under the Antarctic ice sheets - which can be hundreds of meters thick - but they were surprised to find how much water is involved and the speed at which it moves from one subglacial reservoir to another, said Helen Fricker at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

"We didn't realize that the water under these ice streams was moving in such large quantities, and on such short time scales. We thought these changes took place over years and decades, but we are seeing large changes over months. The detected motions are astonishing in magnitude, dynamic nature and spatial extent," Dr Fricker said.

The West Antarctic ice sheet is the second biggest on the continent, and the rate at which ice flows from it to the Ross ice shelf, and then ultimately into the sea, is critical in assessing the likely impact of climate change on global sea levels.

The study provides evidence that subglacial water is stored in a linked system of reservoirs underneath the ice and can move quickly into and out of those reservoirs. This activity may play a major role in controlling the rate at which ice moves off the continent, Dr Fricker said.

"The links between ice stream activity and the climate are not well understood. To predict how the ice sheets might respond to global warming, this new information is vital as it gives us a more complete picture of what is happening under the ice," she said.

The study was conductedusing the Icesat satellite. It carries a laser altimeter instrument to detect changes as small as 1.5 centimeters in the elevation of the ice sheet's surface, from an orbit of 400 miles above the earth. "From 600 kilometers up in space, we were able to see small portions of the ice sheet rise and sink," Dr Bindschadler said.

Published on Friday, February 16, 2007 by the lndependent/UK

Howard Uses UN Report To Push Nuke 'Solution' by Zoe Kenny

The release of the fourth assessment report by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on February 2, and the dire predictions in it of the impact of global warming on Australia, was seized on by PM John Howard to push his “solutions” to global warming. These have less to do with saving the environment than protecting corporate profits, with the main prongs being defence of the coal mining companies and support for an expanded nuclear industry.

Speaking on ABC radio’s AM program on February 3, federal minister for environment and water resources Malcolm Turnbull said: “Nuclear power is really the only, really, nil emission method of generating a base load for a big city.” He added: “You cannot run Sydney or Melbourne on a series of windmills or solar panels.”

The Howard government’s push for a nuclear “solution” to global warming began in earnest last May when, after a visit to Washington, Howard called for a “full-blooded debate” on the use of nuclear power in Australia.

A few months later, Howard set up a nuclear taskforce composed of hand-picked pro-nuclear “experts”, headed by retired astrophysicist and former Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski, to investigate the “economic viability” of establishing nuclear power plants in Australia. Not surprisingly, the panel’s report, handed down in November, fully backed the government’s pro-nuke views, calling for 25 nuclear power plants to be built by 2050.

Nukes no solution

However, even a cursory examination of the facts about nuclear power would convince any rational person that nuclear power cannot be a solution to climate change, nor much else.

While nuclear power plants themselves do not emit CO2, this is not the whole picture. The nuclear-power cycle involves numerous stages, all of which are energy-intensive — from mining and milling uranium ore, to uranium enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication. The production of electricity needed for these processes can generate large amounts of CO2.

Construction of nuclear power plants involves the use of large quantities of steel and concrete, production of which involves CO2 emissions.

Finally, there is the problem of reactor decommissioning and the treatment, storage, transport and disposal of nuclear waste.

Then there is the question of high- versus low-grade uranium ores. According to Greenpeace, some studies show that CO2 emissions from refining processes for high-grade uranium ore are about a third that of coal-fired electricity plants. However, for low-grade ore the advantages decrease significantly, as more electricity is needed to refine the uranium to a sufficient level, the CO2 emissions can be equal or more than those from conventional power plants.

At the current levels of consumption of uranium, high-grade ore deposits will only last for about 50 years. If many more nuclear power plants are built, these reserves will dwindle rapidly and low-grade ore will have to be used. Fifty years of reserves can’t compare with renewable energy sources such as the sun, which will be a reliable source of energy for another 5 billion years.

Twenty five nuclear reactors would also produce up to 45,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel, including 450 tonnes of plutonium, the most toxic substances known. This waste, which remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years, has to be safely stored for eons. The release of large amounts of radioactive gas from a nuclear power accident or meltdown could threaten the health of millions of Australians. These problems never seem to warrant a mention in Howard’s glowing accounts of nuclear power.

The massive water usage associated with nuclear-power generation is also glossed over. The February 4 Sydney Morning Herald reported on the results of research by the federal Parliamentary Library showing that nuclear power plants use up to 80% more water than conventional power stations. In the driest inhabited continent on Earth experiencing the worst drought in 1000 years, and with water shortages expected to worsen as global warming increases, the use of billions of litres of water to cool nuclear reactors highlights Howard’s dangerously cavalier attitude toward the long-term sustainability of Australia’s water needs.

Finally, it is generally acknowledged that the minimum waiting time for the first operational nuclear power plant would be at least 10 years, and some suggest it could be as long as 25 years. Many scientists warn that the next 10 years represents a crucial period to avoid catastrophic global warming. That time should not be spent waiting for the construction of dangerous and unsustainable nuclear power plants.

Unsurprisingly, most Australians are not convinced by the government’s shoddy arguments in favour of nuclear power. A study published in January by the Australia Institute, Who Wants a Nuclear Power Plant?, noted that a Newspoll survey conducted in December showed that 50% of respondents opposed nuclear power, 35% were supportive and 15% uncommitted.

A poll of 1200 people, commissioned by the Australia Institute and conducted by Newspoll on December 8-10, asked whether respondents would be willing to have a nuclear power plant in their local area. The big majority (66%) were opposed, 25% supportive and 9% undecided.

Helping BHP

The seemingly insurmountable safety, environmental and political problems associated with nuclear power have prompted some to ask whether the “full-blooded debate” is really a red herring.

Speaking to the National Press Club in December 2005, Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said: “I suspect the real motive of many who have called for a debate about nuclear power is to soften up the Australian people to accept a possible expansion of uranium mining”, in particular, BHP Billiton’s planned expansion of the Olympic Dam uranium mine in South Australia.

BHP is Australia’s most profitable company, and recently announced a record half-year profit of $8 billion. Its profits have been made through the ruthless exploitation of Australia’s natural resources and environment and through generous amounts of corporate welfare provided by state and federal governments.

According to a Friends of the Earth May 2006 briefing paper, the Olympic Dam mine uses 33 million litres of water each day (which BHP pays nothing for) and consumes a full 10% of South Australia’s total electricity production, making it the biggest greenhouse-gas producer in the state. The mine has already produced 60 million tonnes of radioactive tailings and this is increasing by 10 million tonnes a year.

BHP stands to massively increase its profits, as well as its environmental impact, if the planned four-fold expansion of the mine goes ahead.

Ironically, Howard’s key environmental policy initiative — the $8 billion plan to place the Murray-Darling Basin water resources under federal control — could result in BHP having to pay for the water it currently uses for free.

South Australian Premier Mike Rann’s Labor government is currently lobbying Howard to contribute one third of funds to construct a desalination plant to provide BHP with an alternative source of water for its Olympic Dam mine (Rann has already committed his government to cover one third of the cost).

As well as using the nuclear power issue to split the ALP (which has an inconsistent position of supporting uranium mining, but not nuclear power), another motivation for playing the nuclear card is simply to stall the hard decisions that need to be made to move toward phasing out of operation Australia’s super-profitable, and super-polluting, coal industry.

In the 2005-06 financial year, Australia exported 230 million tonnes of coal (half of it thermal coal for use in power plants), reaping BHP and a handful of other coal-mining companies earnings of $24.5 billion and making coal Australia’s biggest export earner.

While the debate about climate change is bogged down in the irrelevant discussion about nuclear power, the coal industry is let off the hook, opening new mines, increasing production and allowing Australia’s 24 coal-fired electricity stations to continue pouring 280 millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (half of all Australia’s emissions).

Real alternatives

Turnbull’s dismissal of the possibilities for using renewable energy sources is another indication of the irrational, profit-driven approach of the Howard government. In a February 7 interview on ABC TV’s Lateline program, “Australian of the Year” and leading environmental scientist Tim Flannery, who has previously endorsed nuclear power, argued that there are “better options” than nuclear power for Australia. In particular, he highlighted the use of vast geothermal, or hot dry rock (HDR), resources in South Australia’s Cooper Basin.

According to the September 9 Australian, the HDR in the Cooper Basin could be used to produce enough electricity to meet all of Australia’s current consumption needs for 450 years, at a similar cost to natural gas but with no greenhouse-gas emissions.

One of the biggest challenges to the development of this resource is the ability to transmit the power across the country. Cooper Basin is about 500 kilometres from the nearest section of the national power grid and it would cost between $700-800 million to link up a HDR-driven power station to the grid.

Other renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power are similarly proven but face the same challenge of securing substantial financial backing.

In his Lateline interview, Flannery noted that the scale of the global warming problem now necessitates massive government investment and management, akin to a war effort, in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. He said: “When you are faced with a dire crisis … [economics are] not the first thing that we address. For example … [if] you’ve got a serious disease, you don’t ask, ‘How much is it going to cost me to get cured?’ You ask, ‘What are my chances of a cure and what do I do to make sure the cure happens?’ That’s the situation I feel we’re in. We’ve got to address this issue, even if it means a sacrifice at this time for a better future.”

Flannery also advocated the eventual shutting down of all coal-fired power stations, saying: “The social licence of coal to operate is rapidly being withdrawn globally, and no government can protect an industry from that sort of thing occurring. We’ve seen it with asbestos. We’ll see it with coal.”

From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #698 14 February 2007.

Change the system - not the climate! by Norm Dixon

Green Left Weekly 26 January 2007


Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has helped dramatise the enormity of the global environmental crisis. The scale of the threat posed by industrially induced global warming, and the short time in which to take meaningful action to prevent catastrophic consequences, makes the question of how to combat global warming arguably the most urgent one facing humanity.

Globally, the 10 hottest years on record have been in the past 12 years. The atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases — primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of fossil fuels, as well as methane, nitrous oxides, water vapour and other gases — is rapidly rising. These gases trap heat and cause warming.

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that unless CO2 levels are stabilised at around twice the pre-industrial level, the Earth’s average atmospheric temperature will rise by up to 5.8°C by 2100. To keep warming to below 2°C, at which it is hoped the worst effects could be avoided, the IPCC recommended that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions be slashed by at least 60-80% by 2050 at the latest.

If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, sea-levels are forecast to rise between 20 centimetres and one metre by 2100, flooding some of the world’s most densely populated cities. Global warming will trigger severe storms and floods, worse droughts and expanding deserts, severe shortages of fresh water and increased epidemics of dangerous tropical diseases. The world’s impoverished majority will, and already are, bearing the brunt.

Radical British columnist George Monbiot convincingly argues that the more accurate target for emission cuts by the advanced industrialised countries should be an average of 90% by 2030. For the United States and Australia he urges a 94% cut.

The price of prolonged inaction could be catastrophic. If the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets collapse, sea levels could rise by up to 10 metres; more moderate melting could slow or shut down the circulation of ocean currents responsible for the relatively mild temperatures of Northern Europe.

More recent studies reveal that warming could cause the abrupt release of large quantities of methane — a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than CO2 — stored in the frozen but thawing tundra.

Fiddling while Rome burns

Yet as the scientific warnings have multiplied and become louder, governments’ response has been to opt for inadequate, voluntary, gradual measures that will cost big business as little as possible.

While scientists began warning of global warming in the 1980s, it was not until December 1997 that an international treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, was finally agreed. The US, which emits 25% of the total industrial greenhouse gases, and Australia refuse to ratify the protocol.

Under the protocol the rich industrialised countries, the major emitters, are required to cut their average emissions by only 5.2% below 1990 levels. They have until 2012 to achieve this. There are no reduction targets or timetables for beyond 2012.

Figures released in October 2006 show that since 1990 annual greenhouse gas emissions from the richest countries have risen and, adjusted for the paper reductions following the collapse of the Eastern European economies, were more than 11% greater in 2004. Of the 41 richest Kyoto ratifiers, 34 had increased emissions between 1990 and 2004. US emissions are up 21.1%, Australia’s by 25.1%. Emissions from transportation jumped 24%.

The World Meteorological Organisation reported last November that CO2 concentration increased to 379.1 parts per million (ppm) in 2005. To keep global warming to 2°C, CO2 concentration must be stabilised at around 450 ppm by 2050.

Gore focuses on individual actions, makes few serious demands on big business and endorses the largely voluntary market-based measures, such as emissions trading, that are contained in Kyoto. He, like most mainstream environmental groups and the major Green parties, place the onus of solving global warming onto individuals, while relying on the capitalist market, nudged along by so-called “green” taxes and legislative regulations.

Such views reflect a well-meaning but utopian belief that if enough of us decide to drastically reduce our demand on the world’s resources, big business and governments will respond to “market signals” and adapt to a slow-growth or no-growth economy.

It is a good thing to organise our lives to live more ecologically. But that alone will not be enough to halt the crisis. It certainly cannot be the main strategy as it will let the real culprits off the hook and divert precious activist energy away from challenging the underlying systemic dynamic driving ecological degradation.

What is required is the rapid, far-reaching reorganisation of industry, energy, transport and mass consumption patterns, and the massive transfer of clean technology to the Third World. This is simply not possible under capitalism.

As Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster explained in Monthly Review in 1995 (), behind most appeals for individual “ecological morality”, “there lies the presumption that we live in a society where the morality of the individual is the key to the morality of society. If people as individuals could simply change their moral stance with respect to nature and alter their behaviour in areas such as propagation, consumption, and the conduct of business, all would be well. What is all too often overlooked in such calls for moral transformation is the central institutional fact of our [capitalist] society: what might be called the global ‘treadmill of production’.”

Foster draws from the scientific socialist analysis of capitalism, first made by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, to illustrate how, despite the assertions of many environment movement theorists, Marxism not only provides essential insights into the fundamental cause of the environment crisis, but also offers the best political guide to its solution.

Consumption and profits

Marx’s account of the essential operations of the capitalist system identifies its fundamentally anti-ecological trait. During the long period of pre-capitalist simple commodity production, peasants and artisans sold their surplus produce for money to buy goods to meet their other immediate needs. This circuit of commodities and money takes the form of Commodity-Money-Commodity (C-M-C), and usually ends with the consumption of the commodity.

However, under the capitalist mode of production — in which commodity production is now generalised — the circuit begins and ends with money. The capitalist buys or produces commodities in order to sell them for a profit, and then buys or produces more to sell more again. The formula is now M-C-M’, in which M’ represents the original outlay to buy or produce the commodities, plus the surplus value created by the workers’ labour during their production.

There is no end to the process because capitalists’ aim is to reinvest the surplus, or accumulate the capital, from the previous cycle. Competition between capitalists ensures that each one must continue to reinvest their “earnings”, increase their production of commodities and continue to expand. Production tends to expand exponentially until interrupted by crises (depressions and wars). It is this dynamic at the core of capitalism that places unsustainable pressure on the environment.

Because capitalism pursues accumulation and growth for its own sake, whatever the consequences, schemes based on the hope of a no-growth, slow-growth or sustainable-growth form of capitalism are pipe dreams, as are strategies based on a critical mass of individual consumers deciding to go “green”.

Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have conceded that capitalism is a system devoted to the pursuit of individual wealth, which only indirectly meets society’s broader needs. But, as is becoming increasingly clear, the first goal entirely overrides and corrupts the second.

For capitalists, profit is an end in itself. It does not matter whether the commodities they produce satisfy fundamental human needs or are devoted to pointless or ostentatious consumption, or are even destructive. A buck is a buck whether it comes from mung beans, Lamborghinis or cigarettes.

People are not “consumers” by nature. A multi-billion-dollar industry — advertising — constantly plays with our minds to convince us that happiness comes only through buying more and more. In 2003 alone, US big business spent more than US$54.5 billion on advertising to convince people to constantly consume more goods and services, compared to $76 billion spent on education.

Many argue that with the right mix of taxes, incentives and regulations everybody would win: big business will have cheaper, more efficient production and therefore be more profitable, and consumers will have more environment-friendly products and energy sources. They argue that in a rational society, such innovations would lower the overall environmental impact.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a rational society.

Capitalism approaches technology — in the production process and in the final product to be sold — in the same way as everything else: what will generate the most profits? Whether it is efficient, clean, safe or environmentally benign has little to do with it.

The technologies that could tackle global warming have long existed. Despite being massively underfunded, renewable energy sources are today competitive with coal and nuclear power (if the negative social and environmental costs are factored in). Public transport systems have been around since the late 1800s, yet huge private interests have ensured that the vastly more wasteful, inefficient and polluting private motor vehicle dominates the industrialised world.

US Marxist economist Paul Sweezy describes how the “automobile-industrialisation complex” — the major car companies, the oil industry, the steel, glass and rubber corporations, the highway builders, the trucking combines, and the real-estate and construction interests tied to suburban sprawl — have been the axis “around which [capital] accumulation in the 20th Century largely turned”. This remains at the heart of the major economies’ dependence on oil.

Fundamental to capitalism’s development has been its power to shift the cost of its ecological and social vandalism onto society as whole. It does this by using the biosphere as a giant toilet: it’s cheaper to pour toxic waste into the air or the nearest river, rather than pay for the real costs of production.

Society subsidises corporate profit-making by cleaning up some of the mess or suffering the environmental and/or health costs. In August, a Dutch company with revenues of $28 billion last year dumped 500 tonnes of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, West Africa, because it did not want to pay the $250,000 disposal fee in the Netherlands. At least 10 people died from the fumes, 69 were hospitalised and more than 100,000 needed medical attention.

At the same time, the systematic polluting has been magnified by the development of synthetic chemicals associated with the growth of the petrochemical and agribusinesses. The result is much more toxic wastes, such as those from chlorine-related (organochlorine) production, the source of DDT, dioxin, PCBs and CFCs. The degree of toxicity associated with a given level of production has risen steadily since the middle of last century.

There is no natural feedback mechanism that triggers the market to rein in this sort of vandalism. Attempts to manage the damage by “regulating” capitalism with “green taxes” have had limited success, precisely because governments are run by corporate-funded political parties and politicians, with bureaucracies headed by establishment figures who see their role as defending the status quo.

Tax rates, charges or fines are set well below the level that would impact seriously on profits; more often than not it is cheaper for big business to go on polluting until the next scheduled refit than to immediately stop polluting. Taxes also tend to be set at rates that can be passed on to consumers rather than a level that forces a fundamental redirection of investment into non-polluting or renewable technology.

Taking control

A plethora of “blueprints” for an ecologically sustainable world fail, not because their proposals for a rapid conversion to renewable energy and the rational reorganisation of production and consumption are far-fetched, but because they do not accept that capitalism is incapable of bringing them into being.

A socialist society run by and for the “associated producers”, as Marx described working people, would allow the controlling levers of the “treadmill” to be seized, bringing it to a halt so we can all get off and begin to rationally plan the best way forward.

Just a fraction of what is spent on global direct military spending — more than US$1 trillion a year, of which the US accounts for almost 50% — could eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally, provide education for every child, access to water and sanitation, and reverse the spread of AIDS and malaria. It would also enable the massive transfer of new and clean technologies to the Third World to allow poor countries to skip the dirty industrial stage of development.

The end of capitalist domination would also end the plunder of the Third World, and genuine development could ensue. With the cancellation of Third World debt, the poor countries would retain vast sums to kick-start their clean development.

The wealth of the former capitalist class would also provide immense resources. According to a November 2006 United Nations report, the richest 2% of adults own more than half of all global wealth. The poorest 50% of the world’s population own barely 1%. Europe, the US and Japan account for most of the extremely wealthy.

Genuinely democratic socialist planning could collectively redirect society’s wealth into research and development of existing and new technologies to meet society’s needs, while operating well within the environment’s capacity to absorb the waste. We could rapidly bring forward the expansion of renewable energy, and speedily phase out coal and nuclear power stations.

With a huge boost to socially directed investment in research and development, reliable solar energy and wind power could soon become much cheaper than traditional sources. We could begin to harness the Sun’s energy, which every day delivers to the Earth 17,000 times as much energy as the entire population uses.

Capitalism’s dependence on the private car and truck would begin to be reversed with the rapid proliferation of mass, free public transport systems. In time, cities will no longer be designed around the private car, but around residential, community and work hubs linked by efficient public transport.

In a society that is organised to work together to produce enough to comfortably ensure people’s physical and mental well-being and social security, and in which technological advances benefit everybody without costing the environment, a new social definition of wealth will evolve. In the words of Marx and Engels, it will be defined by the degree to which it provides the means for “all members of society to develop, maintain and exert their capacities in all possible directions” so that “the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms”, is replaced “by an association [society] in which the free development of each is a condition of the free development of all”.

As society’s total disposable time expands, so too does the ability of its members to increasingly participate in running, planning and solving its problems. Lifelong theoretical and practical education, made possible by the expanding disposable time, Marx said, will “convert science from an instrument of class rule into a popular force”.

[Abridged from a presentation to the Democratic Socialist Perspective’s Socialist Summer School in Sydney, January 4-8.]

From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #696 31 January 2007.

"Wacky Weather" Is Deadly Global Heating by Glen Barry

t r u t h o u t Thursday 11 January 2007 Guest Contributor
Editor's Note: Dr. Glen Barry is responsible for an extremely valuable news source on global warming at climateark.org. The news about Earth's climate is changing rapidly day by day. While we do our best at Truthout to inform you of the top climate stories, we would like you to know that climateark.org is a good place to learn more. - kw/TO

As of 2007, the Earth System has already undergone profound global change, of which global heating is the most immediately evident profound impact. It is getting hot, and it is happening fast. Many leading scientists tell us we have 10 years at most given current trends before climate change becomes irreversible and dangerous, beyond the generally accepted rise of 2 degrees Celsius considered adaptable (we are about 1/3 the way there).

Yet the chortling television weather people tell us the unprecedented wave of global mild weather - really a lack of winter in many parts - is not climate change. We are encouraged to take advantage of our good fortune and get out there and play golf. At what point will abrupt climate change and deterioration of the Earth System's life giving biosphere be recognized as a global ecological emergency, and responded to as such? And will it then be too late to limit damages, or even to survive?

Global warming is not a slow, gentle, pleasant rise in temperatures to be savored. It is an abrupt fundamental breakdown in the Earth System's climate sub-system that threatens the Earth's, humanity's and your family's ability to live. It is not enough to blame the weather on El Ninño, which itself can be and is exacerbated by climate change. As climate change continues, unabated by systematic policy responses, and "wacky weather" becomes more prevalent, we can expect immediately budding trees to die from later frosts, agriculture to struggle to define growing seasons, pest insects to multiply, and ecosystems to deteriorate and die.

The ability of individuals, communities and nations to deny the obvious is amazing. People do not like hearing that their consumptive, wasteful lifestyle is destroying God's creation. For most, our addiction to lethargic comfort is so great, our ignorance of ecology and our total dependence upon a healthy biosphere so complete - and our psychological inability to grasp that humanity has overrun the biosphere, becoming the dominant force in nature so absolute - that we do nothing, as the greatest avertable disaster to ever face civilizations looms, increasingly recognized but not nearly sufficiently addressed.

Humanity is deeply within the Anthropocene Era, whereby our presence is the greatest force shaping the biosphere. We are witnessing the jarring collapse of the Earth's most recent climate equilibrium, and depending upon how much climate forcing occurs from continued emissions, there are no guarantees what the next climate will look like or if it will even be regularized within a decent time period. And the longer-term results will be calamitous - extreme weather including super storms, floods and droughts, massive crop failures, vegetation die-back over whole regions, a proliferation of tropical diseases, rising seas destroying cities, a massive refugee crisis, and a general breakdown of anything resembling dependable climatic patterns.

Don't believe me? Walk outside right now - see or feel anything different? Are the trees blooming in the middle of winter as they are in Washington, DC, and New York? Is there a lack of snow as in Minnesota and Europe, while other areas like Colorado get dumped upon? Are the rains failing as with Australia's "Big Dry?" So much of the global ecological system's processes and patterns that provide the life-giving context for human civilization have been lost and changed, and it continues to intensify. Essentially, no natural processes are assured as a very different Planet emerges: climate patterns, water supplies, ocean fisheries, soil fertility, terrestrial ecosystem energy and nutrient cycling are all in doubt.

Many rightly do what they can individually, but are discouraged by the fact that many necessary changes like widespread public transportation, caps on emissions, and universal adoption of a low-carbon energy economy require societal changes beyond an individual's immediate grasp. Goddamn it, snap out of it! I want to shake every climate denier and ambivalent Earth slayer, slapping them in the face to awake them from their slumberous death march. We are witnessing a human-caused disintegration of ancient climatic cycles, with anthropogenic emissions forcing the global climate beyond what has always been a high level of variability.

We must get past the ingrained illusion that humanity has not become a planetary ecological force. And that the changes we are witnessing in a single lifetime are good. As the ecologically ignorant chortle, pleased to be outside in winter in short sleeves, perhaps they should consider how global heating will impact their water, food and shelter requirements for life - to say nothing of the economy and their prospects for employment.

How deeply and sadly we are in denial regarding the consequences of the abrupt climate changes we are witnessing. The life-giving biosphere is in tatters and near collapse because of you and me and everyone. We are witnessing the logical conclusion of deforesting 80 percent of the world's natural ecosystems while working on the rest, breeding and increasing in numbers recklessly, using fossil fuel energy wastefully, and believing our lifestyles and consumption are independent of the Earth.

Massively reducing emissions must become this next greatest-generation's central call to duty. Dramatically and rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions must become the central organizing principle of governments, business and individuals. Contracting rich nations' carbon emissions, while allowing materially poor nations to converge with the rich's level of emissions, is the only way forward that is both equitable and likely to be successful. We need contests, and publicity for best practices, and technology sharing, and a rejection of coal, and emission caps, and global carbon trading, population control, huge renewable energy subsidies and so much more.

Only massive public and political pressure - now - can save the Earth and all her species. The recent vote in the US was a repudiation of oil industry governance. Now it is up to Democrats to stop pandering on gas prices and propose a progressive, workable carbon tax; ratify Kyoto and meaningfully rejoin international climate talks; launch an "Apollo project" supporting renewable energy; and generally, for the US to get on the ball and rejoin the league of civilized nations that are working on climate solutions.

I exhort all who read this to break the denial that the current "wacky weather" is natural; it is more, much more; the start of a systematic collapse of being as we know it. And I ask that you help other non-ecologically attuned people grasp what their way of life is doing to creation - risking ridicule as an acolyte of ecological truth. Take responsibility personally, and become involved in the great climate change/ecological sustainability movements that are set to rock this world - bringing forth the necessary societal changes. Time is short, but solutions exist. Save the climate, save the Earth, save yourself and your posterity. Get active, organize, agitate, protest and above all else reduce your carbon!

-------

Global Warming, Warring and Warning by Amy Goodman

Published on Thursday, January 11, 2007 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

We begin this year with many milestones. 2006 was among the hottest years in recorded history. In Britain, it was the hottest year since they started keeping records in 1659. Ten of the hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the past 12 years. Snow has yet to fall in New York's Central Park. This hasn't happened in more than 100 years. And other records have been broken. ExxonMobil profits were slated to be the greatest ever. On Dec. 31, the Pentagon announced another grim milestone: 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. It was a year of global warming, global warring and global warning.

ExxonMobil is the world's largest publicly traded company. It is also the most profitable corporation in history. The Union of Concerned Scientists just issued a report documenting how ExxonMobil has implemented tobacco-industry tactics in its efforts to fight the movement to accept global warming as truth and to require massive regulation to help slow its onset.

According to the UCS, ExxonMobil "manufactures uncertainty" with a sophisticated and well-funded campaign. They funded a network of 43 "grass-roots" organizations with $16 million, recruited scientists willing to publish non-peer-reviewed articles that challenge established science, and flooded the media with these "experts," creating the essential "echo chamber." A critical part of ExxonMobil's strategy involves lavish spending on electoral campaigns and lobbying to ensure that Congress and the White House follow the line on questioning human-caused climate change.

While the rest of the world accepts the reality of global warming, the U.S., the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, has been stymied by the disinformation campaigns of the oil industry. Let's hope the new 110th Congress shifts climate-change policy at a glacial pace -- the rapidly receding 21st-century glaciers, that is. Key committees will be chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. Replacing chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who describes global warming as a hoax, Boxer is bullish on fighting greenhouse gases. Dingell, from the heart of the auto industry in Michigan, is less direct and hedges on his willingness, for example, to push for better fuel efficiency in cars.

The flip side of oil consumption is oil production. That is where the warring comes in.

The Independent of London reported this week in a piece titled "SpOILs of War" that the Iraqi Parliament is rushing to pass a law that will open Iraq's oil reserves to exploitation by foreign corporations. The law would allow these foreign companies to retain 75 percent of the profits until they recouped their initial drilling investments, thereafter to retain 20 percent, which is about double the take normally allowed. It would be the first opening for such companies since the Iraqi oil industry was nationalized in 1972. This comports with the recommendation of the business-friendly Iraq Study Group report of James Baker III. One underreported item was the recommendation to privatize the oil industry. Recall that the initial "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign in March 2003 specifically spared the Iraqi Oil Ministry building.

As global temperatures surge, so do oil-company profits, and U.S. soldiers in Iraq. President Bush, despite plummeting to his all-time low popularity in the polls on his handling of Iraq, forces tens of thousands more young Americans to march lock step into another year's deployment into the turmOIL of Iraq. As for Iraqis, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health that an estimated 650,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the March 2003 invasion.

As for warning, the alarm has sounded: We need a sane energy policy that decreases our oil consumption (the Germans and French, "Old Europe," use half as much per capita as we do in the U.S.). The potential for environmental disaster, and the prospects of protracted wars for oil, demand no less.

Amy Goodman hosts the radio news program "Democracy Now!" Distributed by King Features Syndicate.

Fighting Fires on the Cheap and Ignoring Climate Change by John/Togs Tognolini

Looking at the haze of smoke, covering the Blue Mountains from the bushfires, 700 kilometres away to the south in Gippsland Victoria. I thought of the Country Fire Authority fire fighter I met in the Victorian Alps, when he said, ”This fire isn’t going to stop until it hits the ocean.(The coast was over 120 kilometres from where we were talking.)” I was at those fires in late November, before that the Blue Mountains were on fire for 15 days. The 8,000 hectares that was burnt here, pales in comparison to the 800,000 hectares that has so far been burnt in Victoria. Both fires were started by lightning strikes. Both fires are burning over bush dried out by one of the longest droughts in Australian history. Both the drought and the dry storms that bought the lighting strikes are a result of Climate Change.

While 2006 was recorded as one of the hottest years ever, 2007 has already been predicted to be even hotter. Australia along with United States has not signed the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, reflecting the federal government’s inaction. Prime minister John Howard does say Climate Change exist but puts forward the fantasy of clean coal technology and the nightmare of nuclear power and its waste. He is more concerned about Australia’s markets from coal and uranium mining, than using clean renewable energy sources such wave, wind and solar technology. He along with all the state ALP governments has refused to build key infrastructure such as public transport, railways, tram/light rail and extended ferry services, placing car and trucks with their greenhouse emissions as the major form of transport.

One feature that stood out was the near absence of the Australian Defence Force in helping out both career and volunteer fire fighters control the fires. Howard has them deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands fighting for the cause of oil and empire. Seven and a half million dollars were spent on helicopters alone in the Blue Mountains fire, including the forty year old “Elvis”/sky crane helicopters from the US. Not one ADF helicopter was used in the Blue Mountains. Nor were NSW fire teams and their equipment flown to Victoria by the Air Force, they had to drive their fire tankers and crews were bussed there, some went straight of the bus onto the fire ground.

Also evident in both fires was the reluctance of many experienced volunteer bush fire fighters not to step up and fight the fires. They were and are fearful they won't have a job to come back to when they return from a fire fighting shift. Reflecting how anti-community Howard's Work Choice legislation is. It's reprehensible for Volunteers to be sacked after they have put their life on the line, protecting communities and vital public assets such as our National Parks.

The fires reflect not only Climate Change but also the need for regime change in Canberra. If we take Katrina and its affect on New Orleans and the lack of emergency relief and disaster mismanagement, Australia isn’t that bad, but with these fires and cyclone Larry in North Queensland, there’s vast room for improvement and tackling the root cause of these environmental disasters Climate Change.

[I’m the Socialist Alliance Candidate for First Ward in Blue Mountains City Council elections.]

2007 Predicted to Be World's Warmest Year by Jeremy Lovell

Rueters

This year is set to be the hottest on record worldwide due to global warming and the El Nino weather phenomenon, Britain's Meteorological Office said on Thursday.

The Met Office said the combination of factors would likely push average temperatures this year above the record set in 1998. 2006 is set to be the sixth warmest on record globally.

"This new information represents another warning that climate change is happening around the world," said Met Office scientist Katie Hopkins.

The world's 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1994 in a temperature record dating back a century and a half, according to the United Nations' weather agency.

Britain's Met Office makes a global forecast every January with the University of East Anglia, and said it expected the world's average temperature to be 0.54 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 long-term average of 14.0 degrees.

There is a 60 percent probability that 2007 will be as warm or warmer than the current warmest year, 1998, which itself was 0.52 degrees above the long-term average it said in a statement.

Most scientists agree that temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees Celsius this century due mainly to carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.

They say this will cause melting at the polar ice caps, sea levels to rise and weather patterns to change bringing floods, famines and violent storms, putting millions of lives at risk.

Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said in October that urgent action on global warming was vital and that delay would multiply the cost by up to 20 times.

The Kyoto Protocol is the only global action plan to curb carbon emissions, but it expires in 2012, is rejected by the world's biggest polluter -- the United States -- and does not bind booming economies like China and India.

The Met Office said the established moderate El Nino, a phenomenon in the tropical Pacific blamed for disrupting weather patterns, would continue for the first few months of 2007.

It noted that as there was a time lag between El Nino and its full effect on surface temperatures, its influence would therefore be felt well into the year.

It will coincide with what environmentalists say will be a very busy year for climate diplomacy.

Germany, which has an active climate change agenda, has taken over the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union and the year-long presidency of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

Backed by Britain, which has pushed climate change high up the world agenda, pressure is building for the G8 summit in Germany in early June to set out a framework for discussions to take global action beyond Kyoto.

Copyright © 2007 Reuters

Garret coal comments criticised by Petra Black

15 December 2006

Comments by Peter Garret, Labor's federal environment spokesperson, that Australia’s coal is a “blessing” to be utilised, were condemned by climate action group Rising Tide Newcastle on December 12. “Apparently”, said Rising Tide’s Steve Phillips, “[Garret] regards the cause of the present global climate crisis as a blessing”.
“If coal is a blessing, then it is the devil’s blessing. Coal has played a major role in bringing planet earth to the brink of climate disaster. If the world continues to rely on coal for energy, then life on earth will be threatened with extinction.”

“And Peter Garret is thankful for it! Mr Garret can no longer call himself an environmentalist — he is a disgrace”, added Phillips.

From: Australian News, Green Left Weekly issue #693 6 December 2006.

CASE FOR SOCIALISM, Capitalism leading us to total disaster by Dave Holmes

The fundamental environmental problem facing humanity today is catastrophic climate change brought on by runaway greenhouse gas emissions. The relatively narrow band of climatic conditions within which we can function has been destabilised. As average temperatures rise extreme weather events (cyclones, floods, heat waves and droughts) are increasing and ocean levels look like rising dramatically, potentially making refugees of hundreds of millions of people. The very survival of the human race has now been called into question.

Human societies have always impacted on their environment. But the source of our current crisis is quite specific: it is the operations of modern capitalism. The drive for profits by the giant corporations (predominantly Western) has been relentless and has been pursued in complete disregard of any impact on the environment.

A recent letter to Green Left Weekly attributed the problem to overpopulation. This notion is dead wrong. Increasing populations obviously put some pressure on resources but the fundamental conditions under which we live — how we generate our power, how we get around, how our food is grown — are not decided by us but rather by the big corporations that control society’s means of production. Without the rule of corporate capital we could set in place radically different and ecologically sustainable arrangements.

Having brought about the climate change crisis, there is little evidence that capitalism is capable of making the course correction required to deal with it.

Trying to stabilise the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere and then reduce it is a life-and-death challenge for humanity. We need to phase out fossil fuels and all the problems that go with them (carbon dioxide emissions and the fact that they will not last forever). But big business thinks it can make a few adjustments and carry on as usual. The changes required are simply too wrenching, too fundamentally in contradiction with huge economic interests, to be easily contemplated.

For example, by any rational criterion Australia’s massive coal industry should be progressively phased out but instead it is looking to develop new mines and boost exports.
Even if the sheer pressure of circumstances forces neo-liberal governments to alter course we can be certain that they will drag their feet and that particular capitalist sectors will resist and sabotage the required changes.

The social fallout from climate change and any attempt to deal with it will be immense. Here too, we should be extremely sceptical of capitalism’s ability to cope.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina wrecked the city of New Orleans and many settlements on the Gulf of Mexico. The response of the US authorities was shambolic from the start. Over a year later it is clear that several hundred thousand poor people have been abandoned. The authorities have neither moved to rebuild the city nor to build new permanent settlements anywhere else.

And this is the human fallout from just one city in the developed West. What happens when whole regions — both in the West and in the Third World — are rendered uninhabitable by climate change? What happens when hundreds of millions of people have to be relocated? What happens when our food supplies are disrupted — are we to be left to the tender mercies of the market? The banana crisis will become generalised to basic foodstuffs, resulting in dietary deficiencies, if not mass starvation.

Furthermore, to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control whole economic sectors will have to be run down or phased out and large numbers of workers redeployed into new ones. Can we have any confidence that the neoliberal Howard government that introduced the savage Work Choices and the Dickensian “welfare-to-work” legislation will manage such a huge social transformation with justice and equity? Simply to pose such a question is to supply the answer.

Direction change needed

What is needed to cope with the crisis is a sharp change of direction. We need an emergency mobilisation of society, a five- or 10-year plan to achieve a drastic reorientation of our economy and use of energy. Anything else is simply not serious.

Some key elements in a program to meet the crisis include the entire power sector being put under public control and democratically run as public utilities. At the moment the private power operators (and the corporatised entities still under nominal state ownership) have a direct interest in making things worse! The more power they sell, the more profits they make. The more airconditioners that are bought, the more electricity is consumed and the more it helps their corporate bottom line.

We need to break with the neoliberal privatisation policies pursued by both Labor and the Coalition. Bring the whole power sector under public control so that this key lever is in the hands of society. Then we can steer the ship where we want it to go.

We are endlessly told that we need more and more power and hence more and more power stations. What about getting serious about energy conservation — really serious? Then we might be able to begin phasing out coal-fired power stations, the main source of our greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, what if the only light bulbs permitted were the low-power high efficiency ones, all other ones being taken off the market? Furthermore, what if they were distributed free to households by the state-owned power company? Think of how much power could be saved? What if a similar approach were applied to household refrigerators? After all, what is a few hundred million or even a few billion dollars if it could achieve the closing down of several big coal-fired power stations?

Under the national plan each sector of industry and each firm should be set hard annual targets for energy efficiency. Consistent failure of an enterprise to achieve the goals set would result in nationalisation and reorganisation.

Energy use by offices and homes could be slashed by setting strict new energy standards for new construction and embarking on a vast program to retrofit the existing stock of buildings.

The scope for energy efficiency measures is vast. Very significant gains could be achieved relatively easily — provided there is the political will.

We need a big switch to renewable energy. There is a wealth of possibilities. But Howard has gone the other way, abolishing the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, minimal though it was. Victoria has its own MRET but this is just greenwash. The real line of the state government is the oxymoronic one of “clean coal”.

Nuclear power — currently being pushed by Howard — is no solution to anything (except the corporations’ thirst for ever more profits and hang the consequences for the rest of us). Apart from all the safety and waste disposal issues, nuclear plants actually require very big energy inputs for their construction.

Nationalise public transport and freight

Cars and trucks are a major source of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. We need to achieve a drastic substitution of public transport for cars and rail freight for trucks. This has to be done and serious results obtained quickly.

Let’s make sure that all metropolitan public transport systems are firmly in public hands. Stop all expenditure on roads (except for essential maintenance) and put the funds into covering the big cities with dense integrated networks of trains, trams and buses which run frequently and at all times. Only then will it be possible to radically reduce the use of cars in cities and towns.

We also need to nationalise the freight industry (road and rail) to bring about a big reduction in the use of trucks for moving goods. Real planning for the sort of economic shifts that are needed cannot be done if the key economic levers remain in the hands of the profit-crazed corporations.

Big business should be forced to pay realistic prices for the power it uses. This will focus their minds on the task at hand.

If our society were simply an egalitarian collection of people, we could have a big society-wide discussion, work out a plan to meet the crisis of climate change and begin collectively trying to implement it.

But under capitalism this is impossible. Society is sharply divided between a handful of capitalists who own the prodtive resources (the mines, factories, etc) and the great working-class majority, who are forced to work for them in order to live. Nothing can be done which seriously hurts the interests of the ruling rich. Governments claim to be governing on behalf of everybody but in reality they represent only the capitalists. So the obvious route of a democratic social plan is ruled out.

Instead, as we approach absolute disaster the capitalists are screaming ever louder for “carbon trading” whereby the notorious “hidden hand” of the market is supposed to achieve the desired outcome. But this simply will not work.

We need to reject the idea that everything can be left up to the market through various economic mechanisms, incentives and disincentives. The normal operations of the so-called “free market” have brought us to where we are now. We need less of it, not more. At most, market mechanisms can play a minor role. Energy waste and inefficiency by big business should be penalised but the main levers for change should be enforceable targets, direct control and regulation coupled with the sorts of measures sketched above.

[Dave Holmes is the managing editor of Resistance Books. Visit .]

From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #693 6 December 2006.

Why the Corporate Rich Oppose Environmentalism By Michael Parenti

State of Nature

In 1876, Marx's collaborator, Frederich Engels, offered a prophetic caveat: "Let us not… flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us… At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature--but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst…"

With its never-ending emphasis on production and profit, and its indifference to environment, transnational corporate capitalism appears determined to stand outside nature. The driving goal of the giant investment firms is to convert natural materials into commodities and commodities into profits, transforming living nature into vast accumulations of dead capital.

This capital accumulation process treats the planet's life-sustaining resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, rivers, air quality) as dispensable ingredients of limitless supply, to be consumed or toxified at will. Consequently, the support systems of the entire ecosphere--the Earth's thin skin of fresh air, water, and top soil--are at risk, threatened by global warming, massive erosion, and ozone depletion. An ever-expanding capitalism and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course.

It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about this. Far worse than denial, they have shown utter antagonism toward those who think the planet is more important than corporate profits. So they defame environmentalists as "eco-terrorists", "EPA Gestapo", "Earth Day alarmists", "tree huggers" and purveyors of "green hysteria" and "liberal claptrap."

The plutocracy’s position was summed up by that dangerous fool, erstwhile Senator Steve Symms (R-Idaho), who once said that if he had to choose between capitalism and ecology, he would choose capitalism. Symms seemed not to grasp that, absent a viable ecology, there will be no capitalism or any other ism.

In July 2005, President Bush finally muttered a grudging acknowledgment: “I recognize that the surface of the Earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem.” But this belated admission of a “problem” hardly makes up for Bush’s many attacks against the environment.

In recent years, Bushite reactionaries within the White House and Congress, fueled by corporate lobbyists, have supported measures to:

allow unregulated toxic fill into lakes and harbors,

eliminate most of the wetland acreage that was to be set aside for a reserve,

completely deregulate the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that deplete the ozone layer,

eviscerate clean water and clean air standards,

open the unspoiled Arctic wildlife refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling,

defund efforts to keep raw sewage out of rivers and away from beaches,

privatize and open national parks to commercial development,

give the remaining ancient forests over to unrestrained logging,

repeal the Endangered Species Act

and allow mountain-top removal in mining that has transformed thousands of miles of streams and vast amounts of natural acreage into toxic wastelands.

Why do rich and powerful interests take this seemingly suicidal anti-environmental route? We can understand why they might want to destroy public housing, public education, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They and their children will not thereby be deprived of a thing, having more than sufficient private means to procure whatever services they need for themselves.

But the environment is a different story. Do not wealthy reactionaries and their corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet as everyone else, eat the same chemicalized food, and breathe the same toxified air?

In fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They experience a different class reality, often residing in places where the air is somewhat better than in low and middle income areas. They have access to food that is organically raised and specially prepared. The nation's toxic dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near their swanky neighborhoods. The pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clearcutting does not desolate their ranches, estates, and vacation spots.

The geographer and author Grey Brechin tells me of a talk he gave a few years ago to a well heeled group at St. Francis Yacht Club. His appearance was at the invitation of a scion of two great California-South African mining fortunes. After Brechin discussed the ecological damage done in California by developers and industrialists, one of the socialites blurted out: "If things are so bad, why haven't we noticed?"

They haven’t noticed because they are so comfortably insulated from the ecological devastation caused by their very own enterprises. Brechin was taken aback. He realized that like most other people, the questioner did not have “the memory to make a comparison with what once was here. All I could do was to point out the window at the empty sky and ask where the birds went, and to say that if we could see under the water, we would note a similar absence of what was once a teeming aquatic ecosystem.”

Even when the corporate rich or their children succumb to a dread disease like cancer, they do not link the tragedy to environmental factors---though scientists now believe that present-day cancer epidemics stem largely from human-made causes. The plutocrats deny there is a serious problem because they themselves have created that problem and owe so much of their wealth to it.

But how can they deny the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought on by ozone depletion, global warming, disappearing top soil, and dying oceans? Do the corporate plutocrats want to see life on Earth - including their own lives - destroyed?

In the long run they indeed will be sealing their own doom, along with everyone else’s. However, like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and now. What is at stake for them is something more immediate than global ecology. It is global capital accumulation. The fate of the biosphere seems a far-off abstraction compared to the fate of one’s immediate investments.

Furthermore, pollution pays, while ecology costs. Every dollar a company spends on environmental protections is one less dollar in earnings. It is more profitable to treat the environment like a septic tank, to externalize corporate diseconomies by dumping raw industrial effluent into the atmosphere, rivers, and bays, turning waterways into open sewers.

Moving away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and tidal energy could help avert ecological disaster, but six of the world's ten top industrial corporations are involved primarily in the production of oil, gasoline, and motor vehicles. Fossil fuel pollution means billions in profits. Ecologically sustainable forms of production directly threaten those profits.

Immense and imminent gain for oneself is a far more compelling consideration than a diffuse loss shared by the general public. The social cost of turning a forest into a wasteland weighs little against the personal profit that comes from harvesting the timber.

This conflict between immediate personal gain on the one hand and seemingly remote public benefit on the other operates even at the individual consumer level. Thus, it is in one's long term interest not to operate an automobile that contributes more to environmental devastation than any other single consumer item (even if it’s a hybrid). But again, we don’t live in the long run, we live in the here and now, and we have an immediate everyday need for transportation, so most of us have no choice except to own and use automobiles.

Mind you, we did not choose this “car culture.” Ecologically efficient and less costly mass transit systems and rail systems were deliberately bought out, privatized and torn up, beginning in the 1930s in campaigns waged across the country by the automotive, oil, and tire industries. These industries put "America on wheels," in order to maximize profits for themselves, and to hell with the environment.

Sober business heads refuse to get caught up in doomsayer "hysteria" about ecology. Besides, there can always be found a few stray experts who will obligingly argue that the jury is still out, that there is no conclusive proof to support the alarmists. Conclusive proof in this case would come only when the eco-apocalypse is upon us.

Ecology is profoundly subversive of capitalism. It needs planned, environmentally sustainable production rather than the rapacious unregulated free-market kind. It requires economical consumption rather than an artificially stimulated, ever-expanding, wasteful consumerism. It calls for natural, relatively clean and low cost energy systems rather than high cost, high profit, polluting ones. Ecology's implications for capitalism are too challenging for the capitalist to contemplate.

The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity.

The struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a fact that seems to have escaped many environmentalists. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many. This time the plutocratic drive to “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate” may take all of us down, once and forever.

Signs of Warming Continue in the Arctic by Randolph Schmid

Published on Friday, November 17, 2006 by the Associated Press

Signs of warming continue in the Arctic with a decline in sea ice, an increase in shrubs growing on the tundra and rising concerns about the Greenland ice sheet.

This satellite image released by NASA shows the concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005. Signs of warming continue in the Arctic with a decline in sea ice, an increase in shrubs growing on the tundra and rising concerns about the Greenland ice sheet. (AP Photo/NASA, FILE)
"There have been regional warming periods before. Now we're seeing Arctic-wide changes," James Overland, an oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said Thursday.

For the past five years, it was at least 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above average over the Arctic over the entire year, he said.

The new "State of the Arctic" analysis, released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also reports an increase in northward movement of warmer water through the Bering Strait in 2001-2004. This may have contributed to a continuing reduction of sea ice.

During that time, there were record lows in sea ice coverage in the region, Overland said. This year there was more normal coverage in the Bering area but a record low on the Atlantic side of the Arctic.

In the past when such a shift occurred, there would have been no net loss of ice overall, just a change in where there was a smaller amount. Now, however, there is both the shift and an overall net loss of ice, he said.

Indeed, the report said Arctic sea ice coverage this past March was the lowest in winter since measurements by satellite began in the early 1970s.

Jacqueline A. Richter-Menge of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., said the sea ice decline is now being observed in both winter and summer.

The study was designed to assess the overall impact of climate change in the Arctic and will be updated annually. It was compiled by researchers from the United States, Canada France, Germany, Poland, Norway, Sweden and Russia, she said.

In addition, 2007 has been designated the International Year of the Arctic, with intense scientific study of the region planned.

There have been many changes over the Arctic land areas, too, said Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a professor at the geophysical institute of the University of Alaska. These include changes in vegetation, river discharge into the Arctic Ocean, glaciers and permafrost.

The tundra is becoming greener with the growth of more shrubs, he said. This development is causing problems in some areas as herds of reindeer migrate.

At the same time, there is some decrease in the greening of the northern forest areas, probably due to drought. The glaciers are continuing to shrink and river discharge into the Arctic Ocean is rising, Romanovsky said.

There has been a significant warming of the permafrost over the past 30 years, he added.

Much of the damage to the permafrost soil can be blamed on human construction activities and fires, he said. In many areas, this frozen ground is close to the melting point and soon could begin to thaw.

Overland said the changes are affecting wildlife in the Arctic. Those in the middle levels of the ocean, such as pollock, seem to do well; those on the surface ice or the sea floor, such as walrus or crabs, are not coping as well.

"We're seeing a lot of indicators of climate change in the Arctic and that may be an indicator for change in other parts of the world," Overland said.

Most of the heating from the sun comes to the equator and subequatorial regions, and a lot of heat leaves by radiation from Arctic, he said.

"The temperature difference between the Arctic and equator drives all of our weather," Overland said. If the Arctic warms up and that difference is reduced, weather could change, though people remain unsure about the effect.