Sunday, December 24, 2017

A Time of Darkness, a Time of Light



Nabatean City of Petra in Jordan: Al Kazneh

Yuletide, Solstice, a time of darkness and a time of light, a time  of the year thoughtful people make resolutions not to eat so much candy. Maybe because my recent writerly project turns on introspection, or maybe because I temporarily lost my mind, I was just about to pop for my last hurrah: a trip to Jordan where the most exquisite desert in the world, Wadi Rum, offers the kind of landscape where centuries ago prophets went on vision quests, and came back with such artifacts as manna and the ten commandments.

And then I couldn’t. I couldn’t because just before I pushed the ADD TO CART button, this article appeared on my computer screen:  

How to Help My Daughter Face Climate Change With an Open Heart by Chris Moore Backman, (appearing originally in Yes! Magazine) which, with its author’s very kind permission, I republish here:

When the wildfires were still raging in California, my 12-year-old daughter and I rode Amtrak north from Oakland to Sacramento. Nearing Berkeley, we caught our first glimpse of the gray-brown wall of smoke issuing in from Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Mendocino, Butte, and Solano counties. After riding 10 or so miles further on, the illusion of the wall suddenly dissipated, and we found ourselves speeding along in a fog of fine ash, our train blanketed in its opaque haze.

Gazing into the smoke, my daughter seated beside me, I considered the stark difference our awareness of global warming created between my childhood and hers. And I felt a deep anxiety stir in my belly.

“At first, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was reasonable for us to start burning fossil fuels.”

What happens to a child’s psyche, I asked myself, as she gradually absorbs the knowledge that our planet is warming at a terrifying rate and to an unimaginably dangerous degree, then quietly observes the adults in her life, particularly those most responsible for caring for and protecting her, doing the very things that are causing the emergency? What happens as she observes the mundane spectrum of everyday life in the United States amid climate chaos: as dad pulls the car up to the pump, as mom comes home from the airport after a business trip, as the family sits down to another meat and factory farm-based dinner, iPhones at the ready and the thermostat cranked to 70?

I turned my gaze from the smoke and looked again at the book in my lap, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, by climate scientist Peter Kalmus. The page I had been reading would eventually lead to here: “Few people respond to facts… While intellect certainly plays a role, it’s a rather small one. Our dire ecological crisis calls us to go deeper.”




River of Sand: Wadi Rum (wadi means river)

In his famous meditation on children, Kahlil Gibran likens parents to the bows of the divine archer, from which children, like arrows, are sent forth into the mystery of their own souls and futures. The beloved bow, Gibran attests, sends the arrow swift and far, by bending to the archer’s strength, while at the same time remaining stable. Such flexible stability is what I long to achieve as a parent—a certain rootedness and strength of purpose, mediated by gentleness. It’s what I believe I need if I’m going to accompany my daughter as she learns to face the coming storms—and fires—with her eyes and heart open.

So it is that I’m gravitating toward the solace and instruction of other dads these days, the more humble and down-to-earth the better. Kalmus, father of two young sons, is one such dad.
“At first, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was reasonable for us to start burning fossil fuels,” Kalmus says early on in Being the Change. “However, now we do know what we’re doing.”
When it comes to social change, how we live our lives is of paramount importance.

It’s an exquisitely sane point of departure for the author’s first book, which reads as an openhearted letter to anyone deeply concerned about global warming and at all cognizant of how quickly the climate change clock is ticking. Being the Change details Kalmus’ process of bringing his daily life into alignment with his conscience—a process that carries some very welcome side effects: namely, a carbon footprint weighing in at one-tenth the U.S. average, greater happiness, and deepened connections with loved ones and life itself.

As a climate expert utterly in the know about humanity’s devastating impact on the health of the biosphere (see Chapter 3), and with as clear a picture as can be had about where our civilization’s carbon addiction is leading (see Chapter 4), Kalmus eventually proves no match for the cognitive dissonance he experiences because of his own outsized carbon footprint. His chosen response is refreshingly straightforward: “If fossil fuels cause global warming, and I don’t want global warming,” he writes, “then I should reduce my fossil fuel use.”

Although there’s zero evidence that Gandhi ever wrote or uttered the most popular phrase attributed to him—“Be the change you wish to see in the world”—the sentiment is distinctly Gandhian. Finding congruence between our deepest convictions and our outward behavior, according to this adage, is the true measure of our genuine happiness, and of our contribution to the world. It’s an old and simple idea: When it comes to social change, how we live our lives is of paramount importance. In India, Gandhi captured the heart of a massive social movement with his own rendering of this basic philosophy. “Nobility of soul,” he summarized in a letter to his cousin, “consists in realizing that you are yourself India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India. All else is make believe.”

Burning fossil fuel causes harm.

What makes Being the Change important is not Kalmus’ restatement of this age-old tenet, but his plainspoken description of putting it into concrete practice. He offers thorough, humbly stated guidance on establishing new daily practices which, step by step, can break a person free from the carbon-heavy status quo. What’s more, through his inspiring and often funny anecdotes about his homespun experiments aimed at paring down—things like bicycling , growing food, meditating, embracing a vegetarian diet, and renouncing air travel—Kalmus illustrates that overcoming our addiction to fossil fuels isn’t a path of puritanical self-mortification. Rather, low-energy living (low-energy being Kalmus’ corrective for green, because of its insidious consumerist implications) can be a deeply satisfying adventure, calling for equal parts creativity and fun.

Boiled down, the path Kalmus advocates is based on two simple and, if we’re open to them, life-changing premises.

High scarps: Wadi Rum (no vehicular transportation)
The first is that burning fossil fuel causes harm. According to Kalmus, this harm will last for around 100,000 years—10 million years if we count reduced biodiversity (and why shouldn’t we?). The reason he has taken what to many people looks like radical steps to avoid burning fossil fuel is that he doesn't like causing harm. This connection is obvious intellectually, but most people, and society, have not taken this in deeply enough to change their actions to any significant degree. Kalmus, the dad, however, feels this connection in his gut. “Burning fossil fuels should be unacceptable socially,” he says, “the way physical assault is unacceptable. The harm it does is less immediate, but just as real.” Who could argue that future generations—likely our own children and grandchildren—as they suffer the consequences of our negligence, will see this as plainly as we see the immorality of chattel slavery today.

The second basic premise of Being the Change is that burning less fossil fuel makes for a happier life. Despite every message to the contrary trumpeted by our consumption-driven society, this appears to be the normal experience of those following similar paths, not the exception.

On these two premises rests a path of radical personal transformation with deep implications for the collective. “Using less energy at the global scale would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and serve as a bridge to a future without fossil fuels,” Kalmus says. “Using less energy in our individual lives,” he further (and to my mind most importantly) asserts, “would equip us with the mindset, skills, and the systems we’ll need in this post-fossil-fuel world.”


Returning my gaze to the smoke, it occurred to me: As soon as the wildfires ran their deadly course, clean up, then construction, would immediately follow. The set would be quickly and efficiently reconstructed according to the same basic blueprint used before. And the reconstruction would undoubtedly be touted as evidence of inspiring community-resiliency, and probably of a certain American spirit, rugged and purportedly unique to us.

What if our children saw us respond to this crisis with maturity, sanity, and integrity?

It occurred to me also, holding Being the Change in my hands on that smoke-immersed train with my beloved child beside me, that Peter Kalmus has provided us with a different blueprint, and he’s shown through his own experimentation that we have the capacity to choose it, and to use it. On the cusp of climate catastrophe, we are neither choiceless nor powerless.


The gloaming in the desert: Wadi Rum
At bottom, I read Being the Change as the testament of a father trying to do right by his kids—a testament that leaves me with a much different set of questions about the psychic wellness of our children: In the face of the climate emergency, what would it do to their psyches to see us, their parents and other adult caregivers, pouring our hearts into the work of personal and societal transformation, on behalf of people we will never meet? On behalf of all other living beings, the rivers and trees and soil? What if our children saw us respond to this crisis with maturity, sanity, and integrity? With the flexible stability of Gibran’s bow? What would it do to them, for them, if we came into resonance with our own souls?

(Chris Moore-Backman and his daughter recently attended the hearing at the Ninth Circuit where children are suing the U.S. government for its irresponsibility on climate action.)

I shared Moore-Backman’s article with my son, a research physicist. This is what he replied: “For the last three or four years, I’ve been thinking that the increased craziness of youngsters, certainly influenced by the increasing craziness of adults, must also be due to the demonstrated lack of care adults show for their children’s and future generations, evidenced by their lack of care for the environment and inability to mitigate climate change.” Perhaps I had my son and everyone’s sons and daughters in mind  when I decided at the time of the Fukushima catastrophe to ditch my car and proceed on foot. I do not yet use a cane; on bad balance days, I resort to hiking poles.



1. Take the train. (Make sure the tracks are clear.) Don’t fly (burning jet fuel is highly carbon intensive.)

2. Take public transportation. (Or walk.) Don’t drive. If you must drive, car pool, stock pile errands.

3. Take taxis when you’re in a hurry. Slow down. Ditch your car.

4. Turn off the lights when not in use.

5. Reduce your garbage output to compost, and no more than 1 cubic foot per week. Avoid bulky packaging.

6. Buy organic. Patronize farmer’s markets.

7. Walk lightly. Leave a small footprint on the Earth.

8. Add to this list.

The Very Best Roses of the Week:




Sunday, December 17, 2017

II. Promises to Protect


The fate of life on our planet is everybody’s stake.  But at the very forefront of resistance, the indigenous struggle worldwide has captured the flag and spearheaded an international movement which effectively sends out the message that both capitalism and national boundaries (and nationalism itself) can no longer supply the frameworks for solving problems of such global magnitude.
400 indigenous people & supporters march 200 miles to Quito

Last week the big news in the pipelines saga revealed that the courts are finally allowing five valve turners the legal standing that will allow them to pursue a necessity defense.  That’s really big news.

This week, when all measures are failing, Earth First set up a tree sit to block the route of the Valley Lateral Pipeline. Activists are gearing up to pack the courtroom to resist TransCanada’s proposed Potomac Pipeline originating in Pennsylvania and passing through Maryland to connect the a gas distribution line in West Virginia. The State of Virginia Water Control Board delayed certification of Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline’s permit.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has several pipelines and their builders in its legal sights: Energy Transfer Partners and /Energy Transfer Equity who are suing Earth First on a charge for racketeering, and Bayou Bridge LLC’s proposed Louisiana Pipeline, where they are opposing the state licensure of private security company Black Swan, the same outfit that terrorized the resisters in North Dakota. In California, Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed an amicus brief arguing that Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal’s suit to operate a coal terminal in Port of Oakland is without merit. And the Center for Biological Diversity filed notice to sue the administration for permitting oil companies to dump fracking and drilling waste, fouling the Gulf of Mexico, and imperiling sea life. After years of pressure from environmental activists, World Bank agreed to curb its Funding of fossil fuels and stop funding oil and gas exploration after 2019. And on  the alternative energy front, U.S. energy storage surged 46% led by a Texas big wind project.

Black Snake Chronicles: Resisting Wasichu Economics 

 

This week, resisting Wasichu economics, the system that destroys Mother Earth, The Puyallup Tribe along with other climate activists have been protesting the Port of Tacoma natural  gas facility, arguing that the project will

Activists protesting the Tacoma LNG terminal
impact tribal rights to fish in treaty waters. Protecting the indigenous lands and culture of the Ecuadorian Amazon’s indigenous communities, a Brazilian court revoked the license of a proposed massive open-pit gold mine which would have impacted the Xingu River basin. as thousands of indigenous leaders and followers completed a 200-mile march to Quito. And this week the Standing Rock movement celebrated its first anniversary. Both Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux have fled court documents urging a federal judge to reject the recent arguments of federal officials and the pipeline developer that seek to ignore the tribe’s proposals. And the same day the Nebraska Public service Commission approved TransCanada’s permit to allow Keystone to operate through part of the state, two hundred indigenous people met for the Gathering to Protect the Sacred, reaffirming the international agreement among indigenous nations to protect the planet from tar sands projects, whether located in the U.S. or Canada. where 90% of the Canadian dollar value is based on tar sands. Not only are the tar sands being stopped by citizen opposition, the surge of natural gas, and of alternatives are jeopardizing the marginal value of tar sands, and because Alberta is land locked country, there’s no economic way of getting that oil to market without risking repeated oil spills down the line “as if the pipeline were passing a kidney stone,” to quote one journalist.  Just a few moths ago four pipelines designed to bring the tar sands out of Alberta were on the drawing boards, but two months ago, the longest one was scrapped by TransCanada because of declining barrel prices and the resulting drop in tar sands extraction.

Divestment is climbing, electric cars are coming on line, and Keystone XL is facing the disinterest of the very oil producers and refiners the pipelines were supposed to serve. Without customers, pipelines go broke. Enbridge Line 3 (the 915,000 barrels-a-day pipeline) is ripe for a tribal suit.

Lakota organizer Judith LeBlanc states, “The traditional indigenous practice is that you must respond to adversity with courage, humility, compassion and love of community as we always have….Native peoples have a legal, moral, spiritual, and inherent right be caretakers of the planet.”

The Dakota Sioux and their allies world over remain committed to Mni Wiconi—Water is Life.





Roses Amidst This Week’s Thorns




Amazon Watch announces Toronto-based Belo Sun Mining license to drill revoke by  a federal court upholding Brazilian indigenous rights.







Honduran resistance continues with Zelaya and Nasralla calling for peaceful and permanent general strike.







Doug Jones won a Democrat Senate seat in Alabama 49 to 51 (see Common Dreams, 12.16.17)


Sunday, December 3, 2017

What’s To Be Done?


The good news this week reported that doctors all over the country cancelled their appointments to travel to D.C. in a concerted effort to warn Senators they’re sentencing patients to death. Among those Senators is maverick vocalist McCain (“Bomb, Bomb Iran”) himself currently battling brain cancer while fully supporting the Senate version of the tax coup.

New Yorkers Greet Trumpissimo with shouts of 'lock 'im up!'
To quote Elizabeth Warren: "I wish I could tell you all of the awful things that
are in [the bill], but I am still reading [it] myself. The Republicans released [it]
only a couple of hours before the votes started last night. There were no
hearings. There was no debate. In fact, they were literally sending around edits in hand-written chicken scratch minutes before we had a vote." In fact, Democrats offered a resolution to delay the vote so legislators would have a chance to read it; all 52 Republicans voted against it.   

Writing about the provisions of the Awful Terrible Tax Coup, particularly since  its provisions have carefully been kept under wraps by the complicity of congress and some media, and the cycle of Republican tax cuts followed by Democrats restoring cuts goes unreported. These topics are better addressed by others (notably Went2theBridge) who do lots better than I can. But reflecting on the meaning of this event in today’s politico-global context is something that calls me to action.

The headline of an article in today’s Common Dreams reads: New Study Shows How Taxing the Rich Saves Lives, While [Trumpissimos’s] Plan Kills. The thought immediately arises: Can the Master Plan be about thinning the herd?  Far from seeming to offer a contradiction, can the plan be deliberately designed?

How else to explain the apparent indifference by over 600 people who happen to occupy chambers in very close proximity to one another, in a very localized region of a major city, many of them millionaires, if not billionaires, to the emiseration of millions of their fellow (and sister) citizens, many of whom, as addicted television potatoes, may have voted them into office??  What kind of moral pathology is it that holds them in its grip?  


Some of the legislation’s more Mediaeval grotesqueries include:

  • Adding 1.2 trillion to the national debt for which we will be in hock for the rest of our lifetimes.
  • Taxing students on their student loan income where in other industrialized countries, college education is free.
  • Reducing the benefits to the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
  • Repealing the ironically titled Obamacare (compulsory subscription to overpriced medical HMOs.
  • Conferring legal status to the fetus as persons.
  • Raising taxes for people facing high medical expenses. Discouraging adoption of children, including the 100,000 children now in U.S.  foster care. 
  • Increasing disability expenses for small businesses. 
  • Eliminating the tax credit that boosts investment in poor communities. 
  • Abolishing the separation between church and state. 
  • Cancelling the tax credit available to struggling immigrant families with citizen children. 
  • Providing for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (in a sop to Murkowsky). 
  • Eliminating state and local tax deduction.Offsetting massive giveaways for the rich and corporate special interests with cuts to medicare, medicaid and education under the guise of job creation.


Now comes the final coup de grace: “reconciliation” with the House version of the bill. Last time around 13 Republicans crossed the aisle.  Some of the differences between the two bills include:
  • Thirteen million Americans will lose their healthcare in the Senate bill.
  • Health insurance premiums will increase by 10% for millions more.
  • The estate tax is repealed in the House bill.
  • Wealthy businesses (including Trumpissimo’s) get huger tax breaks in the House.

What is to be done?

It seems obvious to me that if indeed we oppose the moral pathology which reigns in Washington, it is not enough to hand wring and fulminate. We have the choice to recognize fecklessness in august places as an opportunity to live in the country of the heart.

What is the cost of travel to this country? It’s free.  It’s rewards are such that any gesture of extending help to another human being now becomes a political act, an act of defiance in which—provided the circuit is completed—is to be found the source of immense personal satisfaction and joy.

What I mean by completing the circuit requires three simple steps: extending the offer of assistance to those in need in a no-strings-attached form. Acceptance of the offer by the person in need. And acceptance of the offer on that person’s terms—not the giver’s.

Recently I noticed an announcement on a social media site by a parent looking for a mentor for her ten-year-old child.  It occurred to me: I can apply for a grandchild! In magnitude, it is a small and humble act. It does not turn the valve off on a pipeline and subject me to arrest and felonious charges; it does not reduce the trillions of budget dollars allocated to the development of “usable” nuclear weapons; it does not stop the daily geo-engineered spraying of our skies with coal ash, but it does create a counter-narrative of a world in which enough people care to truly make a difference.

The doctors who travelled this week to Washington were writing their small chapter of that narrative.




Sign Move-On’s petition stopping congress from going after Medicare and Social Security to pay for their hit on the national debt.
  

Organize a general strike. Nationwide.

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Planetary Abuse II


Skywriting Dicks: Pentagon Climate Crimes Are No Joke
reprinted with permission from Went2theBridge 11.16.17


U.S. warplanes have been menacing the people of Afghanistan for more than 16 years now
As a thought experiment, I decided to imagine that I lived under the threat of bombs raining down on my family from U.S. airplanes. Say, In Somalia. I could live in any one of dozens of countries for this to be my reality. Not Canada, though, which borders Washington State and was treated to this expensive, polluting  display of sophomoric scrawl by U.S. Navy warplanes [last] week:

            The most monumental thing to happen in Omak. A penis in the sky     pic.twitter.com/SM8k1NYaj  Anahi Torres (@anahitorres_) November 16,  2017

In my thought experiment I tried to imagine how a grandmother in Somalia or Afghanistan might view this picture of boys just having fun….

Corporate media works hard to avoid meaningful context, simply reprinting the bland lies of the Pentagons PR department. Most ran the news with a headlines referencing “obscene” images. But what is the real obscenity hiding in plain sight here?

Media outlet SF Gate’s coverage of the prank included footage of the Blue Angels stunt team practicing over San Francisco in advance of the upcoming air show there.

The Blue Angels are a carbon belching nightmare. (At our expense. As we learned from the Panama and now the Paradise Papers, rich people don’t pay taxes. As a public school teacher my tax rate is around 30%)


Here in Maine, they literally burn napalm as part of the “entertainment”. Those watching do so no doubt in the context of having watched thousands of fires kindled in cinema for their viewing pleasure. (Hollywood has a pretty gruesome carbon footprint, too.)

The thing is, you may be able to evade taxation, but the cost of climate chaos falls upon rich and poor alike [although] climate justice organizers know that low income communities suffer more from the toxicity of late sage capitalism.


"Pentagon Planet" by Anthony Freda
But we’re all here on the same planet, buffeted by hurricanes, and scorched by forest fires.

 

Whether skywriting or scoping out their next civilian bombing targets, the U.S. military is filling the atmosphere with more greenhouse gas than any organization in the world. But if you search for information about the Pentagon and air pollution. what Google will let you find are articles about planning for the impact of climate change on coastal military bases. Or about the U.S. Navy greening itself, which is a bigger joke than a dick in  the sky for sure.

Our corporate masters can manage information and cheat inquiring minds of the truth, but ultimately they can’t fool Mother Nature.


Multi (Democrat) Roses Amongst This Week's Thorns


From all indicators, Michael Flynn seems to have gone rogue, cooperating the Mueller investigation.

Special Counsel Mueller probes Kushner’s contacts with foreign leaders.

Manafort flight records reveal possible deeper Kremlin ties.

Democrats seize control of governor’s offices in New Jersey and Virginia

Changing ratings seem to indicate that Democrats may enjoy up to four dozen electoral possibilities., with Dou Jones poised to win 48-44% the Alabama seat which would marrow the GOP majority to 51-49.

Larry Krasner won the Philadelphia race for district attorney.

Tim Keller won the Albuquerque mayor’s race with a publicly financed campaign and a progressive platform.

RNC shying away from backing Judge Moore.

U.S. district Judge Marvin Garbis put Trumpissimo’s ban on transgender people in the military on hold.

U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick permanently blocked Trumpissimo’s EO cutting funding for sanctuary cities.

German main center-left party willing to talk about forming a government with Chancellor Merkel.

U.S. District Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced that Trumpissimo’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity has been put on hold.

Best of all: Miriam Martinez-Lemus, mother of childhood diabetes afflicted daughter, is no longer in danger of deportation thanks to thousands who signed MoveOn’s petition.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

I. Planetary Abuse


There’s a new hue and cry to distract the American couch potato: who groped whom, and when?

When is sex not sex? Marsha Gessen writing for the New Yorker, makes the point that with the increasingly permissive attitudes towards sex in America, Americans have mounted a new war: the war on sex.

So far much of the brouhaha seems to center around transgressions by powerful white men in media and politics. Titillation is supplied by the when? by whom? and where in the pussygrab to rape spectrum. (The victim is immaterial—as Lady Bracknell would have said.)

Navy pilots take heat over aerial gymnastics


What is totally missing from this hysteria orgy has to do with discussion of asymmetry: the asymmetry that calibrates issues of power based on class, and on seniority. In particular: the working woman who to keep her job must swallow her feelings and her pride by putting up and shutting up. That looks to me like class warfare.

The 14-year-old kid on the bus yesterday with a look on her face of panic and utter despair, and who tells the bus driver that she’s sick, but who really is being assaulted in her bed every night by a drunken step father, what kind of warfare is that? He’s older, more powerful, and her mom won’t believe her because her mom is also a victim who has to put up and shut up. How will the 911 hook and ladder respond to that after it comes roaring, lights flashing down the street? We can’t exactly call it class warfare, but it is the kind of abuse characterized by asymmetry.

Taking the longer view, today’s story is a story with bearing on social organization: how a society fits together to move the cogs that keep it going.  What are those cogs? If a society gets serious about ending sexual abuse, it will have to look deeper: at its reliance on both hierarchy and patriarchy to keep it going. And if it is really serious—beyond its need to be alternatively titillated and/or scandalized—it will have to examine both. And if it is to develop new ways of seeing and doing things, it will have to take a serious look at societies organized along egalitarian, non-patriarchal lines in order to learn from them, and it will have to understand historically how it got that way.

Any takers for the heavy lifting?  or just a bunch of handwringers?

(Disclaimer: I wrote about issues of hierarchy and patriarchy like one possessed. For a more in depth discussion read Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World published by Wings Press in 2016.)

Switching channels, the survival of life on the planet hangs in the fragile balance of a hold-out imperium which has officially lifted its leg on the Paris Accords on the one hand, and potential for some 400 nuclear reactors world wide, especially in the presence of rising seas, to cause more Chernobyls. And just this week the Washington Post reports that Keystone hemorrhaged 210,000 gallons of oil on the eve of a permitting decision.

Tune in next week.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Armistice Day



In the rush to militarize everything that moves in these United States, the only calendar day celebrating that rusty concept called PEACE has been rebranded as Veterans Day, this in spite of the fact that returning vets are twice as likely to become chronically homeless as other Americans..  

Yesterday, while many enjoyed the long weekend, No Nukes Action Committee held its monthly rally outside the closed doors of the Japanese Consulate, memorializing the three-core meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi on March 11, 2011, and drawing public attention here and in Japan where the monthly event is live-streamed, to the  dangers inherent in a technology that has exploded the genie bottle never ever to be stuffed back inside. The soils, the waters and the forests of Japan are contaminated for all eternity or for 250,000 years, whichever comes first, and ever since 2011 the oceans of the world including all the living beings living there are contaminated because of irradiated water constantly running off, some of it deliberately dumped. Fukushima is the gift that keeps giving and will continue giving. It is not yesterday’s news. It will be today’s news and tomorrow’s news for all eternity or for 250,000 years, which ever comes first. And all because of human negligence—such an accident could have been prevented with appropriate controls and oversight.

Chizu Hamada speaking at the No Nukes Rally
What does the nuclear industry, both its energy- and war-making cycles have to do with a day once devoted to peace, a day which now—like any other American day, is consecrated to war making and global killing? (The United States has expanded its global war to include Niger, and Mali in addition to Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. At the going rate, the wars costs each taxpayer an average of $23,000 a year.) The only economic rationalization for installing the approximately 400 nuclear plants now existing  throughout the world, justifying their disproportionate cost-to-benefit ratio is to develop weapons-grade plutonium. Nuclear energy and nuclear war are joined at the hip. And now the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaski, are a boy scout picnic compared to the potential for global destruction posed by the B-83 which at 15 megatons equals one thousand (1,000) Hiroshima bombs. 


The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, a clone of Donald Trump, taking advantage of the growing tensions exacerbated by the United States between North and South Korea has been re-elected despite massive opposition. What might be instructive is to view Japan as a laboratory able to predict exactly where the United States is headed.

•46% of the Japanese electorate feel that the voting system does not reflect the people’s will.

•worsening labor conditions, low wages, long hours, and tiered salary schedules with the employment of temporary workers has resulted in massive recalls, and defective products, and tarnished Japan’s reputation as a “can-do” manufacturing nation.

•the passage of the secrecy act makes disparagement of the government a criminal offense, punishable by fine and incarceration.

Traditionally, Armistice Day was always observed with one minute of silence to commemorate the war dead, not just those who “served” but those millions of civilian victims, mostly women and children, of war. But yesterdays’ demonstration in downtown San Francisco could barely be heard at times for the horrific roar that blasted San Francisco’s streets. A commercial was being filmed for TV, and in a nation whose business is business, it’s no secret what comes first.

And war? War pays.

A Scattering of Roses Amongst This Month’s Thorns




Sunday, October 22, 2017

Burning the Planet at the Stake


In the Unholy Inquisition that is the Trump administration, the Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry in letter dated Sept. 28 to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) proposed putting thumb screws to the planet, and applying the rack to our weather.  Pleading grid vulnerabilities in the face of extreme weather events such as the 2014 Polar Vortex, he gave the FERC 60 days to approve the proposal which would have ratepayers subsidizing the dying fossil fuels and nuclear industries to the tune of $14 billion per year.

U.S. taxpayers already foot the bill subsidizing big oil to the tune of about $80 per year per taxpayer according to Oil Change International. Under Perry’s plan, the U.S. would add another 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide pollution over and above the Paris accords schedule which ties the U.S. down to between 30 and 45 billion tons allowed by 2050. 


Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria which left devastation in their wake in Texas, Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean, the apocalyptic fires which have reduced vast areas of California to ashes, the droughts causing the death of over a billion trees, the acidification of the oceans—all these extreme weather events are the direct result of burning fossil fuels, and Rick Perry claims he wants more burning to meet these same kinds of extreme weather events head on. He proposes subsidizing old crumbling reactors—99 of them—in order to meet further extreme weather events, despite intensifying risks to them posed by extreme weather events associated with climate warming.

A recent major study published by Lancet claims that one of every every six premature deaths can be attributed to toxic pollution—much from the fossil fuel industry—killing more people than wars, disasters and hunger. Meantime 3 million Americans in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands still do not have electricity, over 100 Portuguese have lost their lives to wild fires, nearly 35,000 Californians can’t return to their burnt-out communities. In Texas, more than 60,000 displaced people are living in hotel rooms. Irma survivors in  Florida who are trying to sign up for food stamps are being turned away because officials can’t handle the numbers, and 121 Republican congress people have voted against climate disaster relief for them. How twisted it that?

Although Perry pleads that, “Most…metrics for grid reliability suggest that [it]  is not in good shape….” his own Energy Department’s report of three months ago reports to the contrary. And by referencing the 2014 Polar Vortex to prop up his new rules, his plan fails to factor in how coal power failed abysmally in subzero temperatures because coal piles were frozen, while wind energy performed exceptionally well. Nuclear energy was also forced off line because of temperatures below their operating limit.

The U.S. is not alone. European countries also spend billions each year on fossil fuel subsidies, but the movement toward renewables is inexorable and growing. In the U.S. the solar industry already provides many more jobs compared to coal. Despite the regressive political climate, companies are still investing in renewable energy because they see the advantage. The Google Ivanpah Generating system is one example. Another remarkable example is Dong Energy based in Copenhagen. Originally involved in fossil fuel exploration and production, in less than a decade it became an 85% off shore wind company, and is currently divesting from its remaining fossil fuel interests. And spurred by the recent encyclical from the Vatican, in a project advanced by the Global Catholic Climate Movement, 40 Catholic institutions world-wide are poised to make a record divestment from fossil fuels.

North Westfalia, Germany
In the Land of the Free and Brave, despite employment trends, the administration is wedded at the hip not just to its culture wars but to its carbon-polluting elites and their political contributions.. But an impressive array of stakeholders under the Energy Industry Associations umbrella petitioned the FERC to reconsider Perry’s plan to subsidize a dying market. Resistance is already building up, as the petitions listed below indicate.


Join the Zombie March on Coal in Oakland October 30th.

No funding cuts for the EPA.

Don’t let #DirtyEnergy Trump the climate!

 

A Scattering of Roses Amongst This Week's Thorns

Hawaii builds homes for the homeless at Kahauiki Village on the sugar-plantation model.

Judge Robert Tiffany of Minnesota allows ‘necessity defense’ in climate trial for charges related to a multi-state action by climate activists last October.

Tom Marino, the administration’s pick as drug czar, withdraws after damaging opioid report.

Banque National Paribas (BNP) to halt shale oil financing, expanding renewable funding.

Judge Theodore Chuang of Maryland rules Trump’s Moslem ban unconstitutional after Hawaii judge Derrick Watson blocks most of it from taking effect.

California Governor Jerry Brown vetoes SB 649 which would have given the telecommunications  industry free reign to put micro-wave radiation antennas on street lamps, signs, and traffic lights throughout California neighborhoods.

GOP chair of nuclear safety agency secretly urges Trump to abolish the nuclear weapons program.