Tag Archives: Climate Change

A Broken Thermostat and Things Won’t Be OK

06 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation

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This NASA map, based on satellite data, shows the new record-low summer sea ice extent of 1.58 million square miles in the Arctic Ocean, as recorded on August 26. The amount of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer is now 45 percent lower than the average from 1979 to 2000. The black dot represents the region surrounding the North Pole. (NASA) – link 
 

This graph, prepared by the University of Washington’s Pan Arctic Ice Ocean Model Assimilation System (PIOMAS) shows the precipitous drop in the volume of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Since this graph was prepared, PIOMAS estimates that the volume of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen farther, to 3,500 cubic kilometers — a decline of 72 percent compared to the average from 1979 to 2010. (Polar Science Center/Applied Physics Laboratory/University of Washington) – link

Everything Won’t Be All Right, By Ashvin Pandurangi

Looking around at those… around me – family, friends, acquaintances and random faces in the crowd of apathy – the level of complacency is so concentrated I can taste it, yet I can’t even describe how bad it tastes. I’m not really talking about the understanding people lack about the numerous predicaments we face as a species – that’s definitely there too… but what I’m talking about is even worse. It’s the assumption that we can just go about our day to day lives, doing our day to day work, having our day to day fun… and humanity will eventually heal itself, no matter how bad the injuries sustained.

This is a cultural phenomenon that has infested the Western world, and refuses to be eradicated. It is where many of us ultimately place our hope and stake our lives, sometimes without even realizing we are doing it. We previously discussed the entertainment enemas that have penetrated modern culture (and the lives of deluded teenagers) in Culturally Programmed Myths of Omnipotence. They have given us the vision that we can always become bigger, “better” and stronger as individuals and nations, evolving towards God-like glory, no matter what obstacles are in our way – all of the stories about superheroes, vampires, werewolves, wizards, robots and aliens – it’s all about the propaganda of pernicious power.

We even see this mentality taking root in academia and scientific research through the field of “transhumanism” (very well portrayed in the documentary, TechnoCalyps). As you can probably guess from the name, transhumanism tells us that we are on the way to becoming something more, something other, than human beings. Forget random mutation and natural selection, the transhumanist says – we can circumvent all of the slow evolutionary nonsense that we only theorized about a century ago. Now we can transform ourselves into a new species over the course of a few decades with the help of modern technology and “intelligent designers”. Just a little bit ironic, don’t you think?…

Surfing the net last night, I see Guy McPherson is trying to pierce the self-delusional bubble described above, but to no avail…

Kill the Messenger

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

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The process of industrial civilization’s collapse has been happening for some time now. It’s not a sudden overnight occurrence that can be appreciated by the fight-or-flight reflexes and here-and-now sensory stimulation of humankind. As the natural world slowly retreats and disappears under the expansion of humans, subsequent generations are normalized to an increasingly biodiverse-poor environment. What appreciation does a child have for an animal only seen in books? In a recent essay by Guy McPherson entitled ‘Global Madness‘, he writes:

If silence is the perfect music, then we’re about to have the (musically) perfect planet. But I doubt we’ll be pleased with the silence as we slip, one by one, into the abyss of unconsciousness.

As the invading cacophony of industrial civilization fills the air – car traffic, fire alarms, ambulance sirens, jet planes, bulldozers – the animal and insect voices of the natural world are extinguished, never to be heard from again. For the last forty years, Bernie Krause has been recording those now-absent sounds of nature:

…such is the rate of species extinction and the deterioration of pristine habitat that he estimates half these recordings are now archives, impossible to repeat because the habitats no longer exist or because they have been so compromised by human noise. His tapes are possibly the only record of the original diversity of life in these places.

“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening,” he writes in a new book, The Great Animal Orchestra. “Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.

“If you listen to a damaged soundscape … the community [of life] has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.”

Hawaii, he says, is the extinction capital of the world. “In a couple of centuries since the islands were populated by Europeans, half the 140 bird species have disappeared. In Madagascar, 15 species of lemur, an elephant bird, a pygmy hippo and an estimated half of all the animals have gone extinct.”

Even partially disturbed habitats lose much of their life for many years, says Krause. Recordings of a meadow in the Sierra Nevada mountains east of San Francisco before the surrounding forest was selectively logged in the 1980s sounds very different to when Krause returned a year later…

A recent study helps prove how interwoven ecosystems are and that anything other than a holistic approach to conservation is futile:

…Lead researcher Dr Frank van Veen of the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation said: “Our experiment provides the first proof of something that biologists have argued for a long time: predators can have indirect effects on each other, to the extent that when one species is lost, the loss of these indirect effects can lead to further extinctions. Although our study focused on insects, the principle would be the same for predators in any ecosystem, ranging from big cats on the African plains to fish in our seas.

“Our research highlights the fact that a ‘single species’ approach to conservation can be ineffective and even counter-productive. For example, protecting cod could lead to increased fishing pressure on other predatory fish which then, by the mechanism we have demonstrated here, could lead to further negative effects on the cod…

The feeble attempts humans make at saving the myriad of flora and fauna that support us is now called “conservation triage“. The web of life is looking more like a moth-eaten doily cloth beneath the morbidly obese feet of humanity:

…Even in our existing system we practice a form of triage by simply not funding recovery efforts for species that we don’t think we can afford to save. Many conservationists are saying, ‘Look, it would be much better if we had a more explicit, more rational system for making these decisions.’…

“Many species are threatened by climate change and there’s a concern that some species may be too far gone in some sense to save, that there may be forces that are too broad, too far along and that species is essentially a lost cause,” she said.

On Facebook, Amy J. Loiselle said there is one crucial element left out of this conversation: the impact of humans on other species.

“In all the conversations about species extinction there is hardly ever any mention of the continued impact of human population growth on the environmental problems we face,” she wrote. “This is driving extinction, climate change, poverty etc. All the other ’causes’ are directly related to increases in human numbers. Without solving this problem there is no foreseeable way to solve any of these other problem.

Choosing to control human population goes against a basic drive found in all species to ensure its survival – the desire to reproduce. Being the apex species with no predators does pose a bit of a problem with nature’s ability to check and balance our numbers. Of course the microscopic world of viruses and bacteria will create a growing threat to us in the post-antibiotic and post fossil fuel world:

Drug-resistant organisms will spread across the country in ever increasing numbers, and we are not going to be bailed out by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Gilbert, a physician at Providence Medical Center in Portland. “There is nothing in the pipeline. It takes up to 15 years to bring a new drug through the approval process.

Additionally, climate change will wreak havoc with the spread of new and exotic diseases and bugs:

…Long before the actual Runaway emerges, we can expect a host of exotic diseases will spread across the world and wreak havoc – and all the fools clamoring for warm temperatures (e.g. for “longer growing seasons”) will wish they were dead. Especially as we’re already losing efficacy of anti-biotics from over-use(See, e.g. Global Climate and Infectious Disease:The Cholera Paradigm, in Science, Vol. 274, 20 December, 1996, p. 2025.)

If people think the current invasion of West Nile fever is bad, wait until they’re faced with dengue fever (which I caught in the West Indies – and which can – after the 3rd successive bite-infection – lead to hemorraghing from all body orifices). Wait until cholera becomes endemic and other hitherto unseen (and unheard of) diseases appear. Then the morons will understand the enormous downsides of their ‘warmer’ world and huge price for their ‘longer growing seasons’.

Mostly understated in all the talk of exotic disease incursions, is the real risk we will be swamped by parasites throughout the country and even the world…

Will man go extinct? He certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure it happens:

…the worship of an economic system that reduces everything to a financial object.

…the continued exploitation and burning of an increasingly more expensive and environmentally damaging energy source which is causing the climate to swing out of control with various feedback loops.

…the dismantling and perversion of regulations and the rule of law to satisfy greed and a grossly unjust social hierarchy.

…the indoctrination of the population into a materialist society detached from the appreciation of nature’s fundamental role in our survival.

…the degeneration of public debate into infomercial sound bites by way of mass media manipulation.

…the wholesale destruction of the natural world and the latest attempts of a so-called green economy to monetize every bit of nature in order to save capitalism.

…and the spread of the above described culture through globalization.

Guy McPherson, being the anti-establishment voice that he is, says he’s even received death threats against himself. This goes to show how much inertia and willful ignorance are built into the current system. ‘Kill the Messenger’ is the modus operandi of industrial civilization and Empire.

Today Grab a Dollar that Results in Your Death Tomorrow

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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This post features a couple of stories highlighting the total inner rot behind the facade of a free press, completely driven by the profit motives of corporations, and this country’s so-called democratic system with its fictitious “free work force”.

14 Year Ex-MSM ‘Journalist’: “None of it is Real.”

The financial elite and Washington have become a single entity, with the rotating door between lobbyists, industry, and positions of government operating more like an eight-lane autobahn highway. Under the stampede of corporations buying off the instruments of government, the news media or fourth estate has been completely flattened into the grease-palmed asphalt of that profiteering highway. Once in a while a flicker of ethical consciousness propels a few souls to climb out of the corrupt cesspool. A case in point is Andrea Seabrook, a 14-year mainstream media journalist who states, “None of it is Real.”

After 14 years at National Public Radio, Andrea Seabrook left in July and, to hear her talk about her experience covering Capitol Hill, it’s clear that she had one takeaway: It’s damn frustrating. “I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say,” Seabrook told POLITICO. “And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.

We’re still light years behind the eight ball of actually doing anything radical enough to save ourselves, but it is reaffirming to hear straight from the horse’s mouth that the system is total B.S..

Climate Change Denier makes it Mandatory his Minions of Coal Miners Attend a Romney Rally.

Earlier this month, Mitt Romney was welcomed for a campaign event at the Century Mine in Beallsville, Ohio, by hundreds of coal workers and their families. Now many of the mine’s workers are saying they were forced to give up a day’s worth of pay to attend the event, and they feared they might be fired if they didn’t, according to local news radio WWVA.

The claims have been mostly denied by Rob Moore, Chief Financial Officer of Murray Energy Company, which owns the mine. He acknowledges that workers weren’t paid that day but says no one was made to attend the event. Well, kind of.

The claims have been mostly denied by Rob Moore, Chief Financial Officer of Murray Energy Company, which owns the mine. He acknowledges that workers weren’t paid that day but says no one was made to attend the event. Well, kind of.

“Our managers communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend,” he told local news radio WWVA, which has received several emails from workers claiming that the company records names of workers that don’t attend those types of events…

Murray, who is also a climate-change denier, has been an outspoken critic of President Obama’s stance on coal. That view may be why Moore told WWVA that having employees attend the Romney event “was in the best interest of anyone that’s related to the coal industry in this area or the entire country…

Better you not think about the civilization-ending reality of climate change because your job depends on this CO2-polluting substance. That’s got to be the epitome of short-term thinking – today grab a dollar that results in you and your children’s death tomorrow. Nobody ever said this living arrangement was sensible.

For the Elite, The Ability to Buy Government Institutions is the Mark of a Free Country

01 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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Democracy Now had an interesting little run-in with David Koch at the RNC that the corporate-laden media tried to sweep under the rug. With all the dittoheads in the audience chanting “USA! USA! USA!” as the Romneybot of the billionaires mouthed his platitudes, it was refreshing to see an actual journalist at work:


 
While oil and gas giant David Koch was protected from questioning by his ‘survivaball’ of humans that sprang upright around him, Amy Goodman was able to direct the same question to Edward Cox who answered in the following manner:

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about, especially young people, looking at what’s happening in the country, where a handful of multi-millionaires and billionaires are so disproportionately determining the democratic process?

EDWARD COX: That’s a statement that isn’t true. This country is governed by the people. That’s what it’s always been based on.

RNC SECURITY 1: Will you keep this moving? One deep.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, I will. I will.

RNC SECURITY 1: OK, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, one deep, I got you. Mr. Cox answered a question. Why can’t—why can’t Mr. Koch answer a question? I only have one question.

KOCH HANDLER 2: He’s not going to answer. Get out of here.

If you really want to know how David Koch would have answered Amy’s question, a similar inquiry was put to him by Politicker “about the controversial level of influence major contributors have on American elections.” Here was his answer:

We have a free society and people are free to do what they want, you know, as long as they don’t hurt others and they obey the law,” Mr. Koch said. “So, I believe in free speech and if people want to spend money in politics or something else, it’s their right, nothing wrong with that. So, I endorse that.

So you see, as far as the elite are concerned, we live in a free society in which there should be no constraints on the corrupting influence that wealth has on government institutions and public policy. For them, freedom includes the ability to buy the instruments of government so that the interests of the elite may be best served rather than the common good of the citizenry who failed to rise to the ranks of the 0.001% in the game of capitalism. As Noam Chomsky explains in “Plutonomy and the Precariat: On the History of the U.S. Economy in Decline“:

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh — and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1% and even less — the .1% — it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

 
Going back to Chomsky’s article, the interests of the elite do not include facing up to the reality of climate change because it’s a direct threat to their power and the wealth they have hoarded. Capitalism must be defended at all costs, even if that means denying that this system is causing our own extinction:

…Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke. And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted — and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter…

In the minds of the elite, if they can’t keep a stranglehold on the world, then they’ll be damned if anyone else is going to be allowed to live on a habitable planet.


King Romney’s Dream for America: Slave Labor in Barb-Wired Factories & a Double Down on Fossil Fuels

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Wall Street Fraud

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On the Labor front….

I came across the above video yesterday evening. It’s a recording of Mitt Romney recounting his days at Bain Capital when he was off-shoring U.S. manufacturing to slave labor camps in China. From the video I’m assuming that America’s gift to the world, as Romney refers to it, is neoliberal capitalism and the privilege that economic system brings to the masses who can enjoy working for pennies per hour in a sweatshop factory complete with dormitories holding “12 girls per room”, all of which is enclosed by barb-wired fencing. And as Romney relates, the fences are to keep the hoards of people out who are dying to fill a position in the factory as soon as someone falls over. For Romney and the typical vulture capitalist, this is a wet dream: endless numbers of cheap laborers ready to fill assembly-line positions which are unencumbered by unions, safety regulations, and basic rights for workers. In such factories humans are reduced to cattle in order to extract the maximum profit. A Foxconn executive expressed the general sentiment of corporate capitalists when he referred to his workers as “animals” earlier this year. Despite recent reports by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) on the heels of an eye-opening report on labor conditions, the reality on the ground, as Romney can attest to from his days at Bain, is the same as it ever was:

As reported here, China Labour Watch is claiming that bribery is undermining the audit system. China Labour Watch founder Li Qiang has not minced his words: “Although the working hours at Foxconn have been reduced to less than 60 hours per week, the intensity of the hourly work has been increased. According to our follow-up investigation, the workers have to complete the workload of 66 hours before within 60 hours now per week. As a result, the workers get lower wages but have to work much harder and they are not satisfied with the current situation. The harsh working conditions are by no means isolated to just Foxconn but exist throughout Apple’s supply chain. However, that report only focused on Foxconn factories. It is Apple’s entire supply chain system that should be responsible for the squeezing of workers.”

On the Energy Front:

King Romney is going to double down on fossil fuels in America, further dismantling regulations and awarding more tax breaks for Big Oil:

Romney unveiled his energy plan, which makes no mention of climate change and focuses on reaching energy independence by 2020 through increased extraction and use of oil, gas and coal, accompanied by reduced regulation for these industries.

The plan underlines the fact that the Republican Party and the oil, gas and coal industries, long in agreement on policy and ideology, have grown closer than ever before. Romney, whose top energy adviser is the wealthiest oilman in the country, is on pace to raise more money from these industries than either George W. Bush or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) did when he ran for president. The industries are also pumping millions into the new unlimited money vehicles, super PACs and dark money nonprofits, that are spending tens of millions of dollars per month to influence the election…

…A central part of the plan is taking the power to permit and license new onshore drilling on federal lands out of the hands of the federal government and putting it into the hands of the states. That means that states like Alaska or North Dakota, which is enjoying a massive oil boom under the current regulatory regime, would be able to allow drilling on federal lands with no oversight from Washington.

North Dakota stands out, in particular, as it is where Romney’s top energy adviser, oil billionaire Harold Hamm, is making his fortune. Hamm, whose stump speech is only three words, “Beat Barack Obama,” has given $985,000 to Restore Our Future and raised money for the Romney campaign. He would profit greatly from this change in policy as his company, Continental Resources, would be freed to drill beyond the Bakken fields in North Dakota using techniques including hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling….

…Among many other policies supporting the industry, Romney calls for a repeal of regulations limiting the amount of mercury, a hazardous pollutant, that can be emitted from coal and oil power plants…

Overlooking the catastrophic externality of climate change, notice that Romney is heralding America’s energy independence through his plan of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ of fossil fuels. If you look at the following graph, you’ll see that there is no amount of drilling we could do within America to achieve fossil fuel energy independence:

As you can see, America hit peak oil around 1970 at 9.637 mbpd (million barrels per day), as predicted by Hubbert, and then in 1993 America’s domestic oil production was surpassed by consumption, a point from which we have never recovered. Even with the recent drastic drop in consumption due to an anemic economy, we are still importing around 10 to 11 MBPD while domestic production is somewhere between 7 to 8 MBPD. Domestic production would have to double from the current rate or total consumption, which sits currently at roughly 18 to 19 MBPD, would have to be halved while allowing for the requisite economic growth that we worship. That’s not going to happen. As Loren Steffy explains, “U.S. oil production gains are like water pumps on the Titanic“:

…The much-ballyhooed increase in U.S. production simply isn’t enough to have a meaningful effect on global oil prices, which doubled from 2005 to 2011. That ultimately is the biggest factor in setting prices for retail gasoline.

U.S. production gains look impressive, but much of it offsets declines earlier in the decade because of major hurricanes that disrupted offshore and Gulf Coast facilities. Domestic production was 7.5 million barrels a day in 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration, and that number probably increased to about 7.7 million barrels last year, estimates Jeffrey Brown, an independent petroleum geologist in Fort Worth who writes frequently on oil issues.

In 2004, before the spate of hurricanes, production was 7.2 million barrels. That means domestic production hasn’t increased more than about 500,000 barrels a day despite the fracking binge and other efforts to encourage drilling. During the same period, net exports for all countries in North America — including Canada, Mexico and Venezuela, some of our biggest suppliers — fell by 1.4 million barrels, or 23 percent, according to Brown’s analysis.

Brown compares the situation to water flowing into the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.

“Let’s assume that water is pouring into the ship 10 times faster than than water is being pumped out,” he said. “The water being pumped out is analogous to the slow increase in U.S. crude oil production. The water flowing in is analogous to declining annual net exports. Guess which metric most people seem to be focused on?”

That doesn’t even account for China, India and other rapidly developing countries, whose oil imports are rising sharply, increasing the competition for oil with countries like the U.S.

“So, while slowly increasing U.S. crude oil production is very important, the dominant trend we are seeing is that developed oil importing countries like the U.S. are being gradually priced out of the global market for exported oil,” Brown said…

King Romney, nevertheless, will use the rallying call of his energy plan to increase domestic oil production, with its attached gifts of even more environmentally destructive deregulation and kleptocratic giveaways to Big Oil from the taxpayer, as a reason for voters to put him into the White House. But as pointed out at Fair.org, this is all a smokescreen manipulating public perception:

In a New York Times story (8/24/12) about Mitt Romney’s energy proposals, reporters Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss make this observation:

With gasoline prices again approaching $4 a gallon, Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is also trying to merge energy and economic policy in a way that will make voters see increased energy production as a pocketbook issue.

Note that Lipton and Krauss don’t say that increased U.S. energy production will actually affect the $4-a-gallon price of gas and hence the voters’ pocketbooks; that would be inaccurate, since oil is a global commodity and it’s impossible for the U.S. to increase its production enough to change it substantially. In fact, with the formulation “in a way that will make voters see,” the Times  reporters suggest that they are well aware that increased oil drilling will not actually alter gas prices–that this is a matter of changing public perceptions, not economic realities.

But then, Lipton and Krass don’t do anything in their piece to let the reader know that the implied connection between increased drilling and lower gas prices is fraudulent…

The doublespeak used by politicians of all stripes to bend reality is the same as it ever was.

The System Has Reached Entropy

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Getting It Wrong on Natural Gas

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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This guy Friedman sparked my interest from the last post on America’s corporate talking heads, so I looked to see what Tom has been writing about recently (Get It Right on Gas) and thought I’d dispel Tom’s delusional corporate-funded views about natural gas in America. But before I do that, I little history on Tom:

Thomas L. Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third Pulitzer for The New York Times. He became the paper’s foreign-affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. In 2005, Mr. Friedman was elected as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

In a recent essay, Glenn Greenwald, who by the way is now writing for the UK Guardian, described Friedman in the following manner:

If I had to pick just a single fact that most powerfully reflects the nature of America’s political and media class in order to explain the cause of the nation’s imperial decline, it would be that, in those classes, Tom Friedman is the country’s most influential and most decorated “foreign policy expert.”

Now on to Friedman’s misinformed article about natural gas in America, Get It Right on Gas, which gets it totally wrong on natural gas. In the article, Friedman calls America’s natural gas deposits a “potential game changer” and that it “may soon be powering cars, trucks and ships as well.” It’s the usual spiel we’ve been hearing for several years now. The reality is that the supposed natural gas boom is indeed a financial Ponzi scheme on a grand scale based on false claims of economically recoverable reserves. Remember last year the news story about internal documents from financial insiders and experts of gas drillers that surfaced? Various internal memos said the following:

An August 2009 memo from the firm IHS Drilling Data says, “The word in the world of independents is that the shale plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work.” Earlier this year, an analyst at PNC Wealth Management compared natural gas projects to the dot-com boom, saying, “money is pouring in” even though drilling is “inherently unprofitable.” In another memo, a retired geologist for a major oil giant writes, “These corporate giants are having an Enron moment… They want to bend light to hide the truth.”

Off the back of that news story from last year comes the following revelation from business insider Wolf Richter, as quoted in an Automatic Earth article:

…thanks to the Feds zero-interest-rate policy and the trillions it has handed over to its cronies since late 2008, the sweeps of creative destruction have broken down. Instead, boundless sums of money have been searching for a place to go, and they’re chasing yield when there is none, and so they’re taking risks, any kind of risks, in their vain battle to come out ahead…

…But the money has dried up. And drilling for natural gas is collapsing. Last week, there were only 562 rigs drilling for dry natural gas, the lowest number since September 1999…

…At $2.53 per million Btu at the Henry Hub, the price of natural gas is up 33% from the April low of $1.90 per million Btu, a number not seen in a decade.

…even if it doubled, it would still be below the cost of production. And if it tripled, it might still be below the cost of production for most producers. That’s how mispriced the commodity has become.

The economics of fracking are horrid. All wells have decline rates where production drops over time. But instead of decades for traditional wells, decline rates in horizontal fracking are measured in weeks and months: production falls off a cliff from day one and continues for a year or so until it levels out at about 10% of initial production. To be in the black over its life under these circumstances, a well in the Barnett Shale would have to sell its production for about $8 per million Btu, pricing models have shown….

…Drilling is destroying capital at an astonishing rate, and drillers are left with a mountain of debt just when decline rates are starting to wreak their havoc. To keep the decline rates from mucking up income statements, companies had to drill more and more, with new wells making up for the declining production of old wells. Alas, the scheme hit a wall, namely reality…

It’s interesting to note that the Russian gas company, Gazprom, hired an American consulting firm just 20 miles from the White House in Fairfax, Virginia to analyze the economic viability of the natural gas “boom” in America. With the data collected by Pace Global Energy Services, Gazprom concluded the following:

“We think the current US gas market model is unsustainable in the medium and long term,” Komlev told Platts via email. “We forecast that soon, the disparity between the shale gas costs and sales price will disappear. When it happens, it will make the US plans to become a major gas exporter economically unviable.”

…Based largely on Pace’s review of quarterly earnings reports and other financial data from US gas companies, Gazprom says the true costs of shale-gas production are upwards of 150% higher than the revenues its practitioners have been reaping in the last few years. But companies are continuing to use the approach for now, Komlev says, because they are also producing some higher-priced gas liquids in the process.

Gazprom also believes that shale-gas drillers will incur additional costs to ensure that the chemicals they use in the fracking process will not contaminate underground sources of drinking water.

In a May 2012 article, Dmitry Orlov quotes Gazprom’s chairman, Alexei Miller:

“Shale gas is a well-organized global PR-campaign. There are many of them: global cooling, biofuels.” He pointed out that the technology for producing gas from shale is many decades old, and suggested the US turned to it out of desperation.

In addition to the poor or nonexistent EROEI and short life of shale gas wells in the U.S., Orlov also brings up a problem I was not aware of with Marcellus Shale, and that is its radioactivity:

Thanks to Marcellus shale gas, radioactive radon gas is being delivered directly to your kitchen, via the burners of your stove, or to a power plant smokestack upwind from where you live. This is expected to result in increased lung cancer rates in the coming years.

Michael Miller, writing an article for the Anton News of New York, had this to say about the natural gas bubble:

Last week, three Bradford County families reached a $1.6 million settlement with Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City (“America’s Champion of Natural Gas”), compensation for the ruination of their water wells by methane gas migrations from nearby high volume hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) operations. This is the first time ever that details of a Marcellus Shale settlement have been revealed to the public, at the insistence of the families…

…Gas companies sold large chunks of futures last year at more than $5 per million BTU. Even if they’re still doing well on paper, these prices are far below the cost of production. Chesapeake Energy now leases drilling rights on over 15 million acres of land (more than eight times the area of Nassau and Suffolk Counties) and makes its profits mostly by flipping properties. In 2010, the company sold land it had purchased in Texas for $2,000 an acre to a large Chinese oil company for $11,000 an acre, making a profit of $2.2 billion…

…Natural gas wells can’t compete for investment capital with oil wells, which have a much higher “Energy Returned On Energy Invested” ratio (after only several months, sometimes only several weeks, production from fracked wells falls off the table and levels off at about 10 percent of initial production). That’s why gas companies are flooding daytime television and the halls of the State Capitol in Albany with millions of dollars in advertising and lobbying power, trolling for small investors and warning off politicians who might be tempted to meddle. And this has been working.

Many of us, exposed to the incessant propaganda, think that America is poised to become the energy-exporting powerhouse it once was, if only the government would get out of the way. In fact, the natural gas industry as we know it wouldn’t exist without massive subsidies and tax breaks. Last week, it was reported that since its founding 23 years ago, Chesapeake Energy has paid only $53 million on its $5.5 billion in profits.

The U.S. Department of Energy has cut its estimate of gas available in the Marcellus Shale by nearly 70 percent. A Colorado School of Mines report estimates that the U.S. has a recoverable gas supply of 23 years, not the “near 100-year supply” that President Obama still talks about as a centerpiece of his energy plan.

Recently, a coalition of 55 institutional investors with over $1 trillion in assets called on companies involved with shale gas fracking to police themselves and reign in the tactics that are turning off America and putting everybody’s money at risk. T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire who toured the country promoting natural gas as the answer to our country’s energy problems, announced in May that he was “out of the natural gas stocks…We didn’t like natural gas.”

The money is talking.

There are no easy answers to our energy, climate and fiscal situations, and fossil fuels are made mostly of carbon, not magic.

I contacted Michael Miller by email and asked for his sources which he emailed me, also telling me other sources included personal contacts of “people in government, particularly Albany.” So there you have it. The natural gas boom is pretty much a bust egged on by low-interest loans by the Fed, financial shenanigans of energy corporation executives, and America’s desperation for energy in the age of peak oil. I did not get into the other major environmental disasters of gas fracking in this post, but I have talked about them in Profiting Off Acts of Desperation, and I posted the mini-documentary “The Sky is Pink” here. I noticed that Josh Fox, producer of the aforementioned documentary, made a comment on Tom Friedman’s article:

Recently, politicians and publications have conditionally endorsed so-called “safe fracking” as a part of the nation’s energy mix. But safe fracking is an impossibility, and the industry’s claims for it are knowingly based on false premises.

Chief among them is the notion that a “leakproof well” is possible. We’ve heard time again that strict regulation is the key to moving forward on fracking, and that new regulations should make sure that industry constructs leakproof wells that do not pollute the water table. There is no such thing as a leakproof gas well. The gas industry knows this; in fact, it has known it for decades.

I recently made a short film addressing the well casing failure issue called THE SKY IS PINK and you can watch it here: www.pinkskyny.com.

A 2003 joint industry publication from Schlumberger, the world’s No. 1 fracking company, cites astronomical failure rates of 60 percent over a 30-year span. To imagine gas companies voluntarily committing to an eternity of costly maintenance on wells failing at ever-increasing rates is beyond credulity. “Safe fracking” is a contradiction in terms.

Leaking gas wells at these rates mean thousands across the nation have enough contaminants in their water and land to render them unfit for residential use.

It’s not only the gas wells that have integrity problems; it is the oil and gas industry itself. We can believe in their self-interested assertions of leakproof wells about as much as we can expect pigs to fly.

In addition to what Josh mentioned above, a 2009 Cornell University study suggests that Shale Gas may be worse than coal as far as greenhouse gas emissions are concerned, with substantial levels of methane leaks traced back to underground Shale Gas operations. Will America’s natural gas reserves make it energy independent? I’ll believe that when pigs fly.

Post Script: I just noticed that the other major corporate mouthpiece, Fareed Zakaria, is also singing the praises of America’s wondrous bounty of natural gas…

As long as there’s sheople to fleece, you’ll have people like Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria filling the corporate airways.

Also see:

Is Fracking DOA in NYS? 

Update on the Embattled Water-Energy-Food Nexus

18 Saturday Aug 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

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I’m working on adding graphics and trimming down a couple videos made from an extraenvironmentalist podcast of interviews with energy specialists Chris Nelder and Gregor Macdonald; but in the meantime, here is an update on the water-energy-food nexus exacerbated by climate change which I blogged about here. The social consequences are spelled out:

…US farms are already crippled: the Department of Agriculture says the corn (maize) crop is likely to be the worst since 1995. As a result, the Food Price Index (FPI) of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization rose 6 per cent in July, to 213.

That is dangerously high, says Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Massachusetts. He has found that if the FPI goes above 210, riots and unrest become more likely around the world. Both the 2011 Arab Spring and the 2008 riots in places such as Mexico, India, Russia and Belgium may have been partly triggered by high food prices.

More unrest is likely in the next year, although we cannot predict where, says Bar-Yam. That depends on how governments respond… – source

…and on the energy and water front:

…Power plants are a hidden casualty of droughts, says Barbara Carney of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Morgantown, West Virginia, because they are completely dependent on water for cooling and make up about half the water usage in the US. That makes them vulnerable in a heat wave. If water levels in the rivers that cool them drop too low, the power plant – already overworked from the heat – won’t be able to draw in enough water. In addition, if the cooling water discharged from a plant raises already-hot river temperatures above certain thresholds, environmental regulations require the plant to shut down.

One nuclear plant in Connecticut recently had to shut down because the sea water used for cooling was too warm. Nationwide, nuclear generation is at its lowest in a decade, with the plants operating at only 93 per cent of capacity.

Nuclear is the thirstiest power source. According to NETL, the average nuclear plant that generates 12.2 million megawatt hours of electricity requires far more water to cool its turbines than other power plants. Nuclear plants need 2725 litres of water per megawatt hour for cooling. Coal or natural gas plants need, on average, only 1890 and 719 litres respectively to produce the same amount of energy….

Bio fuel thirst

Reports of how much energy the US has generated this summer won’t be released for some months, he says. The North American Energy Reliability Corporation’s most recent report (PDF) calls the drought outlook “not optimistic” for energy, but says that most of the US should be able to meet its energy demands this year. The exception is Texas, where resources are expected to be tight.

Utility-scale power isn’t the only energy source being hurt by the drought, however. With corn harvests expected to be as low as 75 per cent of normal yields, biofuel production is also suffering. Compared to other energy sources, biofuel production requires the most water.

…Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente in the Netherlands calculates the total water use of different industries – including not just cooling but every step in the supply chain as well. According to his “water footprint calculator”, biofuels require orders of magnitude more water than any other energy source… – source

Some farmers profit from the energy industry’s scramble for water while other farmers are fearful, holding back water for their crops…

…Select Energy sources water for oil companies in drilling hotspots across the country, and some landowners can make between $70,000 and $85,000 over the course of a year and a half by selling the water in their ponds to the company, said Mike Wilson, a regional sales manager at Select Energy.

But many landowners aren’t as willing to give up their water now that supplies have become so scarce.

“Farmers are scared about the water supply, too,” said Jeff Gordon, CEO of Texas Coastal Energy Co., a small oil company that began exploring in Kansas last year. “They are now saying, ‘We need to save our water for our crop and our livestock.’ ”

Related: Farmers hit the jackpot in Kansas oil boom

With two oil wells slated to be drilled in the next month, Texas Coastal is considering drilling its own water well at a cost of between $10,000 and $25,000.

Otherwise, it would have to pay to truck water in from out of state or buy it from local farmers and ranchers. Either method could add 3% to 4% to the overall cost of drilling an oil well. Depending on the size of the well and the amount of water required, that could add up to between $20,000 and $200,000.

To the oil companies, it’s worth it. With oil prices hovering around $90 a barrel and the cost to produce a barrel of oil only around $15, the profits are huge, said Gordon, whose company is still aggressively leasing mineral rights, which gives it rights to drill on certain properties.

If the drought worsens or persists for too much longer, however, it could threaten the oil boom, particularly among the smaller drilling companies that can’t afford the added costs and delays, he said.

Related: Boom chasers, next stop Kansas

“That can cripple a drilling company, as lack of water can basically suspend operations,” he said.

Petro River’s Alba said the drought won’t affect his current drilling plans, but he will carefully assess water availability before expanding into other areas of Kansas.

Scrambling to get the oil companies to stay: Mike Lanie, the economic development director in Harper County, which is at the center of the oil boom, is determined to keep oil companies from pulling out. – source

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as well as the American livestock industry have recently urged Congress to suspend the ethanol mandate.

The financial drain on the system from the drought…

The U.S. government recently announced it would buy $170 million in various meats to help drought-stricken farmers. Other costs to the taxpayer from this epic drought include payouts from federal crop insurance programs:

Crop insurance losses: Your tax dollars on the hook
The drought of 2012 is also likely to result in record payouts from the federal crop insurance program. This taxpayer-funded program subsidizes insurance for farmers and also partially compensates private insurers, with additional emergency assistance that kicks in during extreme events like the current drought.

Last year, weather-related events led to crop insurance claims of $10.7 billion as of April 30, 2012. According to Bruce Babcock, a professor of economics at Iowa State University, this year’s losses could add up to $30 to $40 billion. Gary Schnitkey, a University of Illinois extension economist, calculates that 2012 insurance payouts for Illinois corn alone could top $3.2 billion. – source

Our response to the primary underlying cause of these increasingly disastrous droughts has been to find more drought-resistant crops and livestock. I suppose this strategy will work up to a point, but it doesn’t get at the root of the problem which is industrial civilization’s unbreakable marriage to fossil fuels.

Last Man Scrambling

14 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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If Ayn Rand was alive today, she would believe that climate change was a conspiracy theory.

I want to preface this post by saying I don’t endorse either Wall Street stooge of our political system’s two-headed corporate hydra monster. The Democratic party fell sway to Big Money a long time ago. See ‘Death of the Liberal Class‘ by Chris Hedges. But I do want to focus on the party that doesn’t mince words or even pretend (at least not very well for those who read) to represent the greater good of society. The primary ideology of the Republicans (and faux Democrats) is neoliberal capitalism whose tenets are laid out here. If there ever was a time when ‘the greater good’ should be our primary objective, the time is now. We are facing an environmental crisis, financial crisis, economic system crisis, food crisis, energy crisis, wealth disparity crisis, etc. Oh, I should have mentioned we’re also facing the possible probable extinction of our own species. But the modus operandi that the our leaders rulers are following is not to solve any of the civilization-ending crises, but to do what Richard Heinberg described as the “Last Man Standing” strategy:

I thought that world leaders would want to keep their nations from collapsing. They must be working hard to prevent currency collapse, financial system collapse, food system collapse, social collapse, environmental collapse, and the onset of general, overwhelming misery—right? But no, that’s not what the evidence suggests. Increasingly I am forced to conclude that the object of the game that world leaders are actually playing is not to avoid collapse; it’s simply to postpone it a while so as to be the last nation to go down, so yours can have the chance to pick the others’ carcasses before it meets the same fate.

The elite 1% are playing a similar game against the 99% which I call “The Last Man Scrambling”. Paul Rosenberg’s latest essay discusses a 2006 book by Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker who explains how the 99% are being financially eaten alive by what is termed the “risk-shift” – the systematic shifting of risk from large institutions onto the backs of citizens, including the most vulnerable among us, under the neoliberal rhetoric of “individuals taking personal responsibility”:

…The figures Hacker cited were staggering. First, regarding basic economic security: Personal bankruptcies increased from 300,000 in 1980 to 2 million in 2005 – a 567 per cent increase. The chance that an average American’s income will drop 50 per cent or more over a two-year period increased from 7 per cent in the 1970s to 17 per cent in 2002 – a 143 per cent increase. Long-term unemployment (more than 6 months) at the peak of the business cycle is triple what it was in the 1960s.

Second, regarding health security: The number of Americans without health insurance was 46.6 million, up from about 24 million in 1980. The decline was entirely due to cuts in employer-provided health coverage. Worse still, over 80 million Americans lack health insurance over some time during a two-year period.

Third, regarding retirement security: The percentage of large and medium-sized corporations offering traditional “defined-benefit” pensions, with a guaranteed monthly benefit for life, fell from more than 80 per cent in 1980 to less than a third in 2006. And 401(k)s that replaced them? There’s a reason folks call them 201(k)s now.

Fourth, the burden was particularly hard on families with children, whom conservatives claim to care about most. Their bankruptcy rates are twice that of childless couples.

These are just a few of the frightening figures Hacker cited, and in every case, he argued, the basic cause was the same: risk had been systematically shifted from large institutions most capable of handling it onto the shoulders of the most vulnerable. This was largely a result of a rhetoric of “personal responsibility”, but what was actually being shifted was not responsibility, but risk.

Rosenberg then ties this in with what Romney/Ryan have planned for the American plebs:

So what does all that have to do with Paul Ryan? Simple: Ryan’s infamous budget plan has many well-known problems with it, but it would also vastly intensify the Great Risk Shift, as Democratic strategist Mark Schmitt cogently pointed out in April 2011 (“The Ryan Plan: The Biggest Risk Shift Ever“).

“It’s not just that Ryan slashes spending,” Schmitt wrote, “he places the burden of risk on American families’ shoulders.” That’s precisely what the Great Risk Shift has done step-by-step over the past 30 years.  With the Ryan plan, the process would be dramatically accelerated.

In one concise paragraph, Schmitt summarised Hacker’s point about the true value and function of the welfare state that America’s elites have been gradually dismantling since the 1970s:

The achievement of the New Deal and the Great Society was not primarily in providing benefits to the poor and the old, although that’s often how both liberals and conservatives talk about it now. What those programmes did best was to reduce risks for individuals by sharing them across society. Whether it was health insurance through Medicare and Medicaid, insurance against poverty in old age through Social Security, federal mortgage insurance that made homeownership possible, or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that enabled people to save for the future with confidence, when government absorbed and shared some of the risks of life, individuals were able to take chances and make the most of their potential.

And, in contrast, he noted: 

Today, though, the only risks we’re sharing are the wrong ones: Wealthy investors are protected by real or implicit guarantees such as “too big to fail,” while the risks that should be shared, through social insurance, are instead privatised – that is, pushed down the line onto us as individuals.

So that’s what you call “The Last Man Scrambling” –for a livable-wage job, for affordable health care, for food on the table… Forget retirement; most will now die with their working boots on. And all this occurs while corporate profits soar to their highest level since WWII and the corporate tax burden sinks to its lowest level...

Catastrophic Planetary Tipping Points

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

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“Did you feel you were tricked by the future you picked?” ~ Peter Gabriel

Another Version of the Truth

I was set to write a post about gross inequality, but I had a dream nightmare last night about the end of the world as we humans know it. Remember the monkey wrench I wrote about recently? If the pervasive mindset amongst our leaders and society at large is that we can continue growing the economy, using the environment as a sink for our waste, and that our burning of the planet’s fossil fuels has no effect on the thin atmospheric skin covering the earth, all other issues of social injustice become meaningless. All the magnificent art, music, scientific breakthroughs, and intellectual writings of our species will be swept away like dust mites before a broom. With the pick of Paul Ryan as VP, you can disregard what King Romney, aka Mr. etch-a-sketch, said about climate change. The interdependence of industrial civilization with fossil fuels is an unbreakable bond that overrides all other human concerns including the very hospitableness of the planet for our species. 

Humans are now burning more than 1 million tons of coal, oil, and natural gas every hour.

 at his blog Brane Space has just posted an essay which should give you pause for what havoc we are unleashing by our insatiable appetite for the carbon energy we dig up and suck out of the Earth. In addition to the references cited by Copernicus, I want to mention an article written a couple of years ago in the online German publication of Die Welt which reported on the discussions at a scientific conference in Aussois, France concerning the planet Venus. They determined that the hellish planet of Venus was much more similar to Earth than previously thought. Their conclusions were based on high-tech measurements and analysis from the European Venus Express, launched in 2005.

Venus in the past may have been very similar to Earth – with oceans – and even life. Then the climate changed, and the planet turned into red-hot desolation.

…it is a prime example of a runaway greenhouse effect that may have started in a way that is feared to be now taking place on Earth.

…

Due to its thick cloud cover, only 20% of the solar energy reaches the planet’s surface. This 20%, however, cannot be radiated back into space because of Venus’s dense atmosphere, and thus leads to enormous heating of the planet.

…The manmade pollution of the Earth’s  atmosphere – warns a majority of climatologists – could also lead to a runaway situation whose final result would be what we have on Venus today.

Scientists have been studying other planets like Venus, Mars and Jupiter for some time now and have come to the overall conclusion that huge consequences for a planet’s climate from feedbacks like the greenhouse effect is “not a mere speculative theory. It was an observation of real events.” Man’s hubris and power of self-deception know no bounds. The Earth cannot be shoehorned into man’s fabricated economy of endless growth and infinite money printing. The crutches of religion and technology will quickly wither when we are faced with catastrophic planetary tipping points.

As Copernicus observes in his latest post How Did a Once ‘Good’ Planet Go Bad?:

It is clear that learning the object lesson of what happened to our neighbor planet can have mighty consequences to what may befall our own (though admittedly not from the same causes)….Perhaps we need to pay much more attention to our own planet and especially its carbon load and carbon footprint made by each of us, lest we hasten our path to becoming another Venus. Why do good planets go bad? Maybe because natural conditions incite the bad effects in the first place, or…..maybe a resident species aids and abets the natural causes by consuming too much of the wrong form of energy!