“They can kill me but I won’t give up. What right do the Americans have to come here and poison our lands? I’ll protest every day if I have to. The cops might as well beat us ‘till they tire. They beat me and my boy. We got used to cops beating us. I’m 83 years, 4 months old. That’s 29234 days, counting today. All I want is for the machines to go back where came from, to America." - Gheorghe
"Is the Earth Fucked" is the most provocative title I have ever seen for a presentation at the staid American Geophysical Union annual fall meeting. I attended many AGU meetings as a young scientist where I spoke about my research on earthquakes and listened to highly technical talks with titles that needed to be translated into common English to be understood by the general public. But all the technical science and professional communication has failed to translate the urgency of climate change and environmental degradation to political leaders and the public. The best and the brightest have failed and the scientists who do environmental research know it. Their feelings of powerlessness led to the provocative title. I know that feeling well. I can hardly write because of that feeling.
I went back to St Paul's School, the elite preparatory school attended by John Kerry, Sheldon Whitehouse and many of the sons (now daughters are included) of the most wealthy and powerful families in America, for my 45th reunion. We, "the best and the brightest" have failed spectacularly to preserve the environment for future generations. We were the best and the brightest at working within the system and living well in it. We focused on our law practices, our professional work and our businesses while the invisible hand burned mountains of coal and lakes of oil and sacrificed the people, the water and land in Appalachia and the bayous of Louisiana. We did well. Some of us, such as our class president who worked to bring food, peace and stability to Sudan have done great service to humanity, but the legacy of environmental damage we are inadvertently leaving to future generations is likely far greater than the good we have done with our good intentions. When I looked at my classmates, saw their age and thought about our legacy, I felt pretty hopeless. Then I looked at my twin grandsons happily enjoying the party and felt my hope revive. The best and the brightest have failed but failure is not an option.
If we can't succeed within the system we must build a new system.
Werner says geophysics research is not something that can be left to non-science academics to explain.
The bulk of Werner’s talk, as it turned out, was not profane or prophetic but was a fairly technical discussion of a “preliminary agent-based numerical model” of “coupled human-environmental systems.” He described a computer model he is building of the complex two-way interaction between people and the environment, including how we respond to signals such as environmental degradation, using the same techniques he employs to simulate the dynamics of natural systems such as permafrost, glaciers, and coastal landscapes. These tools, he argued, can lead to better decision-making. Echoing Anderson and Bows, he claimed it as a legitimate part of a physical scientist’s domain. “It’s really a geophysics problem,” he said. “It’s not something that we can just leave to the social scientists or the humanities.”
Results from Werner’s model implied that civil resistance is our “best and only hope” because all other variables are “too embedded in the dominant economic system”
Active resistance by concerned groups of citizens, analogous to the anti-slavery and civil rights movements of the past, is one of the features of the planetary system that plays an important role in his model. If you think that we should take a much longer view when making decisions about the health of the “coupled human-environmental system”—that is to say, if you’re interested in averting the scenario in which the Earth is f**ked—then, Werner’s model implied, resistance is the best and probably only hope. Every other element—environmental regulation, even science—is too embedded in the dominant economic system.
The system of world trade that has dominated the global economy since Nixon went to China has delivered millions of Chinese from dire poverty. The poor in India are still dirt poor but the middle class in India and the world's poorest nations has expanded. Because globalization has brought material benefits to hundreds of millions of people and made millionaires into billionaires, it has been an unstoppable force. It has made corporations more powerful than nations. It has been wildly efficient at extracting wealth from labor and nature. It is so efficient at extracting wealth from nature that is rapidly unraveling the web of life that sustains us.
Let me be clear. Marxism, communism, socialism, fascism and capitalism have all fallen into the same trap of undervaluing natural resources. Today's globalized capitalism is the most efficient system man has invented at destroying the natural environment, but other systems do it too. They just aren't as good at it.
Unconventional gas production, commonly known as fracking, has raised the rate of environmental destruction to a higher level. Because fracking requires far more wells to produce gas than conventional technology, the impacts on the land, water, air and people are far higher. If well casings for fracked gas have the same rate of failure as conventional well casings, far more water will be polluted because there are far more wells. In the arid range lands of Colorado and Texas the environmental damage appears to our national leaders to be worth the cost to transition away from coal which is much less efficient at producing power and releases much more CO2. Whether or not it is true there is bipartisan agreement in Washington that it is. Moreover, they agree on something that is blatantly untrue, that fracking is compatible with intensive farming and high population densities. With bipartisan support our leaders, led by the U.S. State department under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, have been promoting fracking around the world. Fracking has left a trail of tainted water, fouled air, destroyed vegetation, and sickened farm animals and people wherever it has gone, but our leaders are promoting it as an economic panacea for countries like Bulgaria and Romania that depend on small farms with clean water.
One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton's plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria's bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read "Stop fracking with our water" and "Chevron go home." Bulgaria's parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.
Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the "best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people." But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania's parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Department's lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania's parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria's eased its moratorium.
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Despite the public outcry in Europe, the State Department has stayed the course. Clinton's successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, views natural gas as a key part of his push against climate change. Under Kerry, State has ramped up investment in its shale gas initiative and is planning to expand it to 30 more countries, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.
Following the Crimea crisis, the Obama administration has also been pressing Eastern European countries to fast-track their fracking initiatives so as to be less dependent on Russia. During an April visit to Ukraine, which has granted concessions to Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell, Vice President Joe Biden announced that the United States would bring in technical experts to speed up its shale gas development. "We stand ready to assist you," promised Biden, whose son Hunter has since joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company. "Imagine where you'd be today if you were able to tell Russia: 'Keep your gas.' It would be a very different world."
The people of the small village of Pungesti in Romania aren't buying a word of the sales pitch coming from the U.S. They know that their farms, their livelihoods and their communities would be sacrificed to make the rich richer.
The grandmothers of Pungesti said Hell No to Chevron and Fracking.
The impoverished farmers of rural Romania understand what the best and brightest don't. These small farmers have the toughness and courage the best and the brightest don't have. They, not the leaders of the western world, are demonstrating leadership. These humble grandmothers and grandfathers are giving me hope that there's a future for our grandchildren.
Locals wonder why the government is stupid. Why Chevron is stupid. That’s the word they use. They wonder how come educated officials do not understand the simple mathematics of living communities and the simple necessities of practical agriculture. These peasants understand money, corruption and greed, but they cannot understand why the greedy and the corrupt are blind to all other realities. They wonder what people are to eat if 70% of Romania’s surface is affected by the massive array of fracking sites. It’s a good, simple question, and it goes beyond the interest of the local community. They’ve become not so much the shambled and stumbling resistance protecting an old way of life, but the unlikely elderly rebels fighting for the cause of generations to come. They know this, they say it in straightforward sentences, with honest faces, almost ashamed that they have to assume this role, but they say it over and over again. And at night, when under cover of darkness the village is overrun by riot cops, they take beatings. |
Pungesti's Orthodox Priest has led the resistance to fracking.
The villagers of Pungesti have mounted a persistent resistance to Chevron's fracking.
Back in 2010, energy titan Chevron bought around two million acres of Romanian land. Their plan was to start fracking for shale gas throughout the northern Vaslui and southern Dobrogea regions of the country in the second half of 2013 and continue to do so for the next 30 years while building giant gas rigs and pumping up to 238,000 gallons of chemicals into the earth along the way.
The problem with fracking, environmentalists say, is that pumping all those chemicals into the ground can contaminate the local water supply—affecting both the stuff farmers rely on to grow their crops and the stuff you drink from your tap to stay alive—and all that subterranean rock being blasted all over the place might cause earthquakes. These side effects are a particular worry for the Vaslui region, where the soil is dry and drinkable water is a rare commodity in rural areas.
As soon as the initial probing started in the Dobrogea region, hundreds of small earthquakes hit the nearby Galaţi county. And even though there's no scientific proof that it was Chevron's operations that were responsible for the quakes, it presumably wasn't what the company's PR department wanted to hear.
That's how 600 angry farmers from the village of Pungeşti in Vaslui county ended up forming a human chain last week to stall the Chevron bulldozers heading for their land.
Marches by over 300,000 people inspire hope but large events must be followed by persistent local action, protest and resistance to bring change. We need to follow The example of the people of Pungesti. Big events do not demonstrate firm beliefs. Persistence is essential to bring real change. In North Carolina, where I live, the persistent resistance is led by Rev. Barber through the Moral Monday movement.
Rev. Barber understands that the environment, social justice and moral values are inextricably intertwined.
The same day the poll was released, a coalition of environmental, community and civil rights groups held a rally across the street from the governor's mansion in Raleigh, with a crowd of about 100 people calling on McCrory (R) and his administration to hold Duke Energy accountable. Among the groups participating were NC WARN, Democracy North Carolina and the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, which was the leading force behind the Moral Monday protests against the legislature and governor.
N.C. NAACP President Rev. William Barber pointed out that coal ash dumps tend to be located near low-income communities and communities of color. He said the coal ash spill was not merely an ecological disaster but sin, and he noted that the protest took place on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Christian calendar, when believers mark their foreheads with ashes as a sign of repentance.
"This spill is a call to repentance," said Barber. He reported that the NAACP-led Forward Together Movement behind Moral Mondays is planning to hold a town hall meeting near the site of the coal ash spill in Eden, N.C. on Monday, March 17.
The rally also called on McCrory to disclose more details about his financial ties to Duke Energy. McCrory worked for the company for 28 years and continues to hold at least $10,000 worth of stock in Duke, though he has refused to say exactly how much. His 2008 and 2012 gubernatorial campaigns benefited from over $1 million in political spending by the utility, according to a recent analysis by Democracy North Carolina. In addition, a number of key appointees in McCrory's administration -- including higher-ups in DENR -- previously worked for Duke Energy or its Progress Energy subsidiary.
Rev. Barber has revived the NAACP and is inspiring local movements for social justice and a healthy environment across America. We must build a just, sustainable society or this nation will be ripped apart by violence. There is no other way because nature is ruthless when we cross its limits. Peaceful resistance and enlightened sustainable technologies are our hope. If we fail to change the system, the earth will go on. We will be fucked. We must resist.
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UN Climate Summit/March Blogathon
September 19-23, 2014
World leaders representing nations, industry and civil society are convening in New York City for the historic September 23 UN Climate Summit. The summit, announced by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last September, is designed to bring all parties to the table to facilitate the 2015 UNFCCC passage of a global treaty to dramatically reduce global warming.
In what is being called a “movement of movements” moment, hundreds of thousands of marchers are expected at the NYC People's Climate March on Sunday, September 21. Other huge marches are occurring around the world, demanding what we all know is within reach: a world with an economy that works for people and the planet; a world safe from the ravages of climate change; a world recognizing the need for climate justice; a world with good jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities.
Please join us for a blogathon September 19-23 in a campaign to inspire people to take to the streets and to tell the story of why climate change is the defining issue of our time that can no longer wait to be addressed in earnest.
From ClimateBrad: I'm excited to announce that I will providing livestreamed, on-the-ground coverage of the People's Climate March this Sunday and at follow-up actions in the days ahead at PeoplesClimate.tv.
To see the September 21 Climate March routes and sign up, click here. To find an event in your region, click here. To learn more about the UN Climate Summit 2014, click here. The complete guest list of diarists is in this diary by rb137. All blogathon diaries here.
Our Daily Kos community organizers are Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, boatsie, rb137, JekyllnHyde, citisven, peregrine kate, John Crapper, Aji, Kitsap River, Dont Just Sit There DO SOMETHING, and jarbelaez. Photograph/Graphic credit: Facebook - People's Climate March.
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