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Today the environmentally conscious seek salvation in solar cells, recycling and ten thousand wind turbines. "It won't matter a damn," Lovelock says. "They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don't."
We desperately need a Moses to take us to the Arctic and preserve civilization.
"It's too late to turn back."
[Do not go west, young man; go north, all the way north, to the Arctic. In twenty years or so, you'll be able to do so by sailboat. But by that time only 200 million people of the current global population of six billion will still be around to test the theory.
This is a scarier picture than even the most way-out Peak Oil Cassandra's prediction of die-off for two-thirds of the human race. But perhaps the most sobering aspect of the scenario described above is that it's taken seriously by some eminent experts on climate change.
These dire forecasts are being put forth by James Lovelock, an 87-year-old scientist who has nothing to lose; indeed, he may be following in the footsteps of his mentors who, facing likely death during the London blitz, found solace in speaking the truth. ("A missile would veer off and explode and the professors would feel an immediate need to impart their wisdom.")
Discoverer of the depletion of the ozone layer, Lovelock cannot be easily dismissed. And although his ultimate vision that those who get to the Arctic will survive there, perhaps even to thrive, it is a generic vision for the human race as a whole. On the micro level, things will not look so pretty. – JO]
The End of Eden
James Lovelock Says This Time We've Pushed the Earth Too Far
By Michael Powell
Washington Post
Saturday, September 2, 2006; C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content
/article/2006/09/01/AR2006090101800.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
ST. GILES-ON-THE-HEATH, England
Through a deep and tangled wood lies a glade so lovely and wet and lush as to call to mind a hobbit's sanctuary. A lichen-covered statue rises in a garden of native grasses, and a misting rain drips off a slate roof. At the yard's edge a plump muskrat waddles into the brush.
"Hello!"
A lean, white-haired gentleman in a blue wool sweater and khakis beckons you inside his whitewashed cottage. We sit beside a stone hearth as his wife, Sandy, an elegant blonde, sets out scones and tea. James Lovelock fixes his mind's eye on what's to come.
"It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn."
Why is that?
"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."
Sulfurous musings are not Lovelock's characteristic style; he's no Book of Revelation apocalyptic. In his 88th year, he remains one of the world's most inventive scientists, an Englishman of humor and erudition, with an oenophile's taste for delicious controversy. Four decades ago, his discovery that ozone-destroying chemicals were piling up in the atmosphere started the world's governments down a path toward repair. Not long after that, Lovelock proposed the theory known as Gaia, which holds that Earth acts like a living organism, a self-regulating system balanced to allow life to flourish.
Biologists dismissed this as heresy, running counter to Darwin's theory of evolution. Today one could reasonably argue that Gaia theory has transformed scientific understanding of the Earth.
Now Lovelock has turned his attention to global warming, writing "The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity." Already a big seller in the United Kingdom, the book was released in the United States last month. (He will speak in Washington, at the Carnegie Institution, Friday at 7 p.m.) Lovelock's conclusion is straightforward.
To wit, we are poached.
He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops -- from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.
Then, he says, it adjusts.
Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.
"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover."
Such dire talk no doubt occasions much rolling of eyes in polite circles, particularly among scientists in the United States, that last redoubt of global-warming skeptics. Lovelock's so intemperat e, and more than a few of his peers distrust his preference for elegant nouns and verbs served with no crusting of jargon. His grim predictions tend to be twinned in the press with those of the skeptics, each treated as a radical diversion -- purveyors of "climate porn," an English think-tank called them recently -- from a moderate mean.
Lovelock's radical view of global warming doesn't sit well with David Archer, a scientist at the University of Chicago and a frequent contributor to the Web site RealClimate, which accepts the reality of global warning.
"No one, not Lovelock or anyone else, has proposed a specific quantitative scenario for a climate-driven, blow the doors off, civilization ending catastrophe," writes Archer.
The headline on Archer's essay, which is in fact respectful of Lovelock's science, calls the Englishman a "renegade earth scientist." It's a curious description.
Lovelock works independently on various biochemistry projects, in a lab in an old barn behind his farmhouse in Devon. He often quarrels with the scientific establishment, which he sees as crippled by clubby orthodoxy. (Nor does he hesitate to tweak environmentalists -- Lovelock is a passionate backer of nuclear power as a carbon-clean palliative for global warming.) But it's difficult to see Lovelock, an inventor with 50 patents to his name, a fellow in the Royal Society -- England's scientific society -- as a Gaian bandito.
What's perhaps as intriguing are the top scientists who decline to dismiss Lovelock's warning. Lovelock may be an outlier, but he's not drifting far from shore. Sir David King, science adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, saluted Lovelock's book and proclaimed global warming a far more serious threat than terrorism. Sir Brian Heap, a Cambridge University biologist and past foreign secretary of the Royal Society, says Lovelock's views are tightly argued, if perhaps too gloomy.
Then you dial up Paul Ehrlich, the eminent Stanford University biologist, at his cottage in the mountains of Colorado, where he's been meeting with other scientists. Three decades ago Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb," a best-selling jeremiad in which he warned that the Earth's population was expanding much too fast.
Disaster did not arrive precisely as Ehrlich foretold, and he was treated as a doomsayer debunked. Maybe Ehrlich just was too early to the party.
Today Ehrlich sees global warming and population growth, with its attendant pressures on natural resources and demand for oil and gas, as menaces dancing in tango step. "Technically speaking, most scientists I know are scared [expletive]," Ehrlich says. "Lovelock and I are doomsayers because I'm afraid we see doom."
"Like the Norns in Wagner's Der Ring des Niebelungen, we are at the end of our tether, and the rope, whose weave defines our fate, is about to break."
You read such lines in "The Revenge of Gaia" and ask this wiry Jeremiah: Why so gloomy? Lovelock grins, his face a web of smile lines, and demurs: No, no, no. You have him all wrong. He started a family in the darkness of the London Blitz -- he has nine grandchildren, whom he loves, and a country of which he's very proud.
"I'm an optimist," he says. "I think that after the warming sets in and the survivors have settled in near the Arctic, they will find a way to adjust. It will be a tough life enlivened by excitement and fear."
That still sounds a tad short of good cheer.
Lovelock and Sandy, whom he married after the death of his first wife, take afternoon walks in Devonshire, and he quotes Shakespeare on the joy of finding oxlip by a stream. Lovelock finds too much delight in the mysteries of the universe to call himself an atheist. But he remains at heart a biochemist, a rigorous empiricist who refuses to shrink from the reality of hard times.
Lovelock grew up in working-class London. He could not afford Oxford or Cambridge and so attended at night. During World War II Lovelock walked sentry duty with professors on the roof of the lab. They watched the twinkling lights of German V-1 missiles draw close.
"A missile would veer off and explode and the professors would feel an immediate need to impart their wisdom." Lovelock chuckles. "It was like a graduate course. Terrible to say, but war makes us more alive."
Lovelock was a prodigy, earning degrees in chemistry and medicine. In the 1950s he designed an electron capture machine, which provided environmentalist Rachel Carson with the data to prove that pesticides infected everything from penguins to mother's milk. Later he took a detector on a ship to Antarctica and proved that man-made chemicals -- CFCs -- were burning a hole in the ozone.
"Gaia, shmaia," says Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, who has been critical of Lovelock's latest theory. "If Lovelock hadn't discovered the erosion of the ozone, we'd all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun."
In 1961 Lovelock worked with NASA. The space agency wanted to design a lander to search for life on Mars. That, Lovelock thought, was silly. What if a lander set down in the wrong spot? What if Martian life wasn't bacterial?
Lovelock took a conceptual leap. If Mars bore life, bacteria would be obliged to use oxygen to breathe and to deposit their wastes as methane. Lovelock found that Earth's atmosphere contained massive quantities of oxygen and methane, gases that are the very signature of life. Mars's atmosphere was thick with carbon dioxide, the calling card of a dead planet.
That discovery changed his life. He came to see Earth as a self-regulating biosphere. The sun has warmed by 25 percent since life appeared, so Earth produced more algae and forests to absorb carbon dioxide, ensuring roughly constant temperatures. In 1969, Lovelock lacked only a name for his theory. He took a walk with novelist William Golding.
A big concept needs a big name, Golding said. Call it Gaia.
Gaia proved controversial, and not just because the name made New Age priestesses go weak in the knees. ("Gaia's not 'alive' and I'm afraid I'm not a very good guru," Lovelock notes dryly.) Biologists nearly choked -- they argued that organisms cannot possibly act in concert, as that would imply foresight.
Lovelock recalls being denounced at a conference in Berlin.
The intolerance gave him a pain. Lovelock said that the world's biomass can act without being "conscious." "The neo-Darwinists are just like the very religious," Lovelock says. "They spend all their time defending silly doctrine."
Forty years later, talk of an interconnected planetary system is the lingua franca of Earth science. The queen has handed Lovelock a prize, Oxford has invited him to teach, and his small forest lab had more government contracts than he could handle. (In his lab, the octogenarian scientist follows few safety protocols save the dictates of self-preservation. "I can kill only myself; it's a splendid freedom," he says.)
But friends say he's restless.
"Maybe Jim thinks the world has gotten too comfortable with his theory," says Lee Kump, a prominent geologist at Penn State. "He sees Gaia treating us as a body does an infection -- it's trying to burn us out."
"The meltdown of Greenland's ice sheet is speeding up, satellite measurements show."
-- BBC, 2006
"Dr. Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world's top forest ecologists, says the research shows that 'the lock has broken' on the Amazon ecosystem. She adds: T he Amazon is 'headed in a terrible direction.' "
-- CNN, 2006
How will our splendid Spaceship Earth so quickly become the oven of our doom? As we sit at his table in Devon, Lovelock expands on his vision.
It begins with the melting of ice and snow. As the Arctic grows bare -- the Greenland ice cap is shrinking far faster than had been expected -- dark ground emerges and absorbs heat. That melts more snow and softens peat bogs, which release methane. As oceans warm, algae are dying and so absorbing less heat-causing carbon dioxide.
To the south, drought already is drying out the great tropical forests of the Amazon. "The forests will melt away just like the snow," Lovelock says.
Even the northern forests, those dark cool beauties of pines and firs, suffer. They absorb heat and shelter bears, lynxes and wolves through harsh winters. But recent studies show the boreal forests are drying and dying and inducing more warming.
Casting 30, 40 years into the future, Lovelock sees sub-Saharan lands becoming uninhabitable. India runs out of water, Bangladesh drowns, China eyes a Siberian land grab, and local warlords fight bloody wars over water and energy.
Lovelock sees the look on your face and pauses.
"Look, this is why it's a gloomy book," he says. "Would you care for some more tea?"
The mind reels off objections. Doesn't this amount to a great piling up of what-ifs and could-bes? "The Day After Tomorrow," "On the Beach," Helen Caldicott, Nostradamus, a thousand tipping-point predictions of doom fade into the mists of human history. We humans are clever. We'll send a space shade into outer space to deflect sunlight (as a couple of California professors have proposed)?
Lovelock nods, weary; he's heard this before.
"We like to think of Hurricane Katrina, or a killer heat wave in Europe, as a one-off," he says. "Or we like to think that we'll come up with a technological fix."
Lovelock reminds you that the Mayan seers, to name another maligned bunch of doomsayers, were spot on. Their great civilization died of an environmental apocalypse. He's not romanced by the primitive. Across the world, from the American Indians to the aborigines of Australia to European hunters, research is suggesting that native peoples played a key role in the burning of forests and the extinction of thousands of species. Today the environmentally conscious seek salvation in solar cells, recycling and ten thousand wind turbines. "It won't matter a damn," Lovelock says. "They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don't."
Lovelock favors genetically modified crops, which require less water, and nuclear energy. Only the atom can produce enough electrical power to persuade industrialized nations to abandon burning fossil fuels. France draws 70 percent of its power from nuclear plants.
But what of Three Mile Island? Chernobyl? Lovelock's shaking his head before you complete the litany. How many people died, he asks. A few hundred? The radiation exclusion zone around Chernobyl is the lushest and most diverse zone of flora and fauna in Eurasia.
Sir Brian Heap accepts this. But he worries that South Asia and Africa are about to suffer the terrible consequences of First World excesses. What of our responsibility to them? "The poor aren't our problem," Heap says. "We're their problem."
Lovelock acknowledges the moral conundrum. But he sees no we-are-the-world solutions. The heat waves that kill millions, the powerful typhoons, the droughts that suffocate cities, will force a retreat to nationalism.
After a couple of hours, you wonder about his own good cheer. His internal combustion engine shows few signs of flagging; he wakes up 5:30 a.m. and reads, writes and tramps through the countryside. The studiously polite Lovelock seems a touch annoyed only at the suggestion he's frivolous about what the future holds.
"People say, 'Well, you're 87, you won't live to see this,' " he says. "I have children, I have grandchildren, I wish none of this. But it's our fate; we need to recognize it's another wartime. We desperately need a Moses to take us to the Arctic and preserve civilization.
"It's too late to turn back."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
[I saw this march live. All the locals say that it was nothing. Chavez can turn out 200,000 people when he wants. But I am still uneasy about dirty tricks, sabotage and the unknown prior to the December 3rd elections. – MCR]
In Venezuela, thousands march in support of opposition presidential candidate
The Associated Press
Published: October 7, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/07/america
/LA_GEN_Venezuela_Presidential_Campaign.php
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
CARACAS, Venezuela Thousands marched Saturday in the biggest show of public support yet for Venezuela's main opposition presidential candidate, who pledged to undo what he called the ills of President Hugo Chavez's government.
Manuel Rosales, governor of oil-rich Zulia state, cast his event as an "opposition avalanche" as hordes of supporters converged in downtown Caracas waving Venezuelan flags and pounding on drums.
Rosales accused the government of mismanaging the country's oil wealth and ignoring crime, while also playing on fears that Chavez's close friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro was leading Venezuela down the same path as the communist island.
"They say the Venezuelan people rule — that's a lie," said Rosales. "(We have) a government that is a puppet of a communist, totalitarian system. ... We have a government that is governing from Cuba."
"This government is already eight years old. It's an old, bad, lying government, and it must go on Dec. 3," Rosales said amid cheers.
Venezuelan authorities had promised to have as many as 2,500 officers on the streets to ensure security amid concerns about violence as Rosales' supporters traversed sectors of the capital that are pro-Chavez.
A government helicopter flew overhead and a heavy police presence was on hand, but there were no reports of disturbances.
Caracas' metropolitan police estimated the crowd at about 9,000, but reporters on the scene estimated the turnout was above 10,000. The crowd packed full a 3-kilometer (2-mile) avenue.
"I'm marching for a different future, for better education," said Julia Pena, a 50-year-old teacher, who came out to show her support for the opposition for the first time since April 2002, when a short-lived coup toppled Chavez before he returned amid a popular uprising.
Rosales slammed the government's record on crime, claiming that murders, kidnappings and other crimes in the South American country have sharply risen since Chavez took office in 1999 — an issue that recent polls show is a top concern among Venezuelans.
He also accused Chavez of giving away millions of dollars (euros) in aid and donations to countries around the world, while Venezuelans remain impoverished.
"There is a paradox in this country: poor people and a very rich government. The people don't want any more crumbs," he said as he pledged to usher in a government that would distribute Venezuela's oil wealth at home and improve the investment climate.
Rosales also appeared to rule out the possibility of a boycott against the Dec. 3 presidential election, urging people to vote despite worries about transparency and electronic voting machines. Major opposition parties boycotted congressional elections last year over such concerns.
"We must vote on Dec. 3 and not believe in the threats of the government," he said. "That doesn't help anybody."
[An Oregon middle-school math teacher has organized a group of friends into a Bolivarian Circle to learn more about the truth of Venezuela, instead of the lies perpetuated by U.S. media. Bolivarian Circles originated in Venezuela in local communities to resolve issues in those communities and advise the government on solutions. As Americans involved in relocalization are learning, Venezuela has a wealth of information and experience to guide us. – CB]
The Reality of Venezuela
By Joel Wendland
October 4, 2006
PoliticalAffairs.net
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/4192/1/213/
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
Xiomara Garcia Gunderson thinks the US media and many politicians aren't telling the truth about Venezuela. A middle school math teacher who lives in Salem, Oregon, Garcia Gunderson organized a few friends and family members into a Bolivarian Circle. The sole purpose of this small group is to educate the public on the truth about what's happening in Venezuela. In addition to this work, Garcia Gunderson works with the education and outreach committee of Venezuela Solidarity, a coalition of groups and individuals that oppose US intervention in Venezuela. Garcia Gunderson recently talked with Political Affairs about what Venezuela is really like and the potential for friendship between our countries.
Of Venezuelan origins herself, Garcia Gunderson has lived in the US for about 30 years. Though she has family in Venezuela and visits it often, she only became involved in the solidarity movement after the April 2002 coup against Chávez, which was strongly supported by the Bush administration. "I was not actively involved in any movement," she said, "until I saw the manipulation in April 11 2002, how CNN manipulated the news." The US media failed to report the truth, and the Venezuelan media played an active role in promoting and aiding the leaders of the 2002 coup.
Garcia Gunderson described the 2002 events as "primarily a media coup because it was all manipulated and created by the media." In Venezuela, wealthy families, which opposed the election (in 1998 and 2001) of President Chávez and the repeated passage of his policies in the National Assembly, own and control just about all of the major television, radio, and print media. According to Garcia Gunderson, perceptions that President Chávez controls the Venezuelan media "couldn't be farther from the truth."
Media watchdogs in Caracas have reported that opposition media personalities, such as columnist Patricia Poleo, daughter of a wealthy newspaper owner, aside from giving full support to the violent and illegal coup in April 2002, may have also provoked terrorist attacks against government officials. In one such incident, government prosecutor Danilo Anderson, appointed to investigate the involvement of police and business officials in the April 2002 coup, was assassinated in November 2004.
Caracas law enforcement officials charged Poleo with playing a role in provoking the assassination, but she escaped responsibility for her actions by fleeing to the US where she was welcomed by the Bush administration. In a bit of media hype, Poleo claims to have "escaped" Venezuela on a raft in an attempt to identify herself with Cuban exiles who "fled" on rafts to Florida. Of course, once she got here, Poleo boarded first-class flights to Washington and then to Miami where she was greeted by political and business elites in both cities with limousine escorts and champagne cocktails. And this week Poleo was appointed to a lucrative position at South Florida media conglomerate MEGA-TV.
Despite the passage in Venezuela’s National Assembly of a law to promote the social responsibility of the media, the opposition-controlled media still does what it pleases and encourages violence and social disruption. This social responsibility law is regularly given as evidence that the government has tried to crack down on the "free" press in Venezuela. Some human rights groups, short of condemning Venezuela, have described the law as too vague and containing the possibility for abuse. But the promotion of violence and lawlessness and calls for the assassination of the President of the US would never be tolerated in the US, and have always engendered swift responses from law enforcement officials when such irresponsibility has been exhibited. Why can’t Venezuela do the same?
Nevertheless, the opposition-controlled media in Venezuela breaks the law "all the time and there are no consequences," Garcia Gunderson noted.
For its part, the US media persist regularly in promoting many falsehoods about Venezuela. For example, on just about any Fox News report, one can find references to President Chávez as a "strongman" and other thinly veiled claims that he is a dictator. CNN and others typically reduce the Venezuelan president to a "firebrand" or troublemaker. The truth, however, is that the Venezuelan "government is democratic and constitutional and President Chávez has been elected president in multiple elections," Garcia Gunderson pointed out.
Garcia Gunderson described the Venezuelan government as truly representative. "Venezuela has one of the most progressive Constitutions in the whole continent, if not in the world," she added. "This Constitution was done by a consultation with all the regions of the country. Every region of the country sent representatives to work out this constitution."
In an August 2004 recall referendum sponsored by the wealthy opposition parties, President Chávez won 60 percent of the vote, the highest total for any presidential candidate in that country's history. And even conservative polling companies controlled by the opposition estimate his current approval rating to be about 57 percent, somewhere between 15 and 20 points higher than President Bush's. Garcia Gunderson said that she does not believe those polls reflect the depth of Chávez’s support accurately, however. "Like we say in Venezuela," she remarked, "those pollsters don't climb the hills where the poor people live or go to the poor neighborhoods."
Despite this high level of popularity, these same pollsters dishonestly claim that public opinion is evenly divided for the upcoming December 3rd national elections. Pollsters tied to the opposition hope to give an impression that Chávez's wide lead in the opinion polls is much smaller in order to foster disruption after the election, Garcia Gunderson argued. "They're going to scream fraud and try to disrupt the country," she predicted.
The political opposition has been in disarray since the coup was thwarted in 2002. Despite their access to large financial resources and control of the major media and many large businesses, opposition parties suffer from a lack of unity and popular support, facts repeatedly demonstrated between 2003 and the present.
For example, in December 2003, opposition parties, with the backing of the Bush administration, promoted what they called a general strike, which was supported by most of the major media, including Poleo's newspaper. In reality, it was an illegal lockout by managers in major industries, especially the oil industry, that blocked workers from going to work for a couple of weeks. In addition to tremendous damage to the entire economy, the goal of the lockout was to create enough social disruption to either destabilize the Venezuelan government and force President Chávez's resignation or to seriously damage his popularity.
In the end, the workers forced their way into the industries and almost single-handedly restarted the economy. Few of the lockout masterminds were brought to account for the crime, and many left the country disingenuously claiming they were victims of political repression.
After the lockout failed, opposition parties again sought support from the US government. Through the National Endowment for Democracy, tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars have been used to intervene in Venezuelan politics. All of it has gone to opposition parties under the guise of funding civil society groups that claim to "promote democracy." Most opposition groups that received these funds, however, are less than civil. Some have been involved in violent disruptive behavior such as attacks on the Colombian and Spanish Embassies and violence towards supporters of the government. None of these stories appear in the mainstream media in either Venezuela or the US.
In 2005, opposition groups could not develop a unified, coherent platform to run effective campaigns in the National Assembly elections. Instead, they chose not to run any candidates and pretended to boycott the parliamentary elections purposely in order to give the appearance of a lack of popular support for the parties aligned with Chávez. Of course, polls indicated that they again would have been soundly defeated.
So what does the US media tell us about Venezuela and its democratically elected president? Right-leaning media bias in the US has so carefully selected the information it provides about Venezuela that most people in the US probably know precious little other than that it is an oil-producing country whose president recently called Bush the devil.
Given the Bush administration's record of promoting violence and political discord in Venezuela, why wouldn't President Chávez think badly of Bush? Indeed, personal attacks from the Bush administration and the right-leaning US media on President Chávez have been plentiful. The administration has tried to link Chávez to the "axis of evil," to characterize him as a clone of Hitler, and they have claimed he is tied to terrorists and drug dealers.
Despite the open hostility from the Bush administration, according to Garcia Gunderson, who travels frequently to Venezuela and whose family lives there, most Venezuelans distinguish between the bad policies and harsh attitude of the US president and the friendship and common history they share with the people of the United States. "President Chávez is always talking about Martin Luther King, Lincoln, and all the ideals that we share, because we have a similar history," Garcia Gunderson stated.
She pointed to the similarities of the independence movements of both countries and at the economic ties – mainly oil – that bind the two countries. She said that President Chávez's program of providing discounted heating oil to poor and marginalized communities in the US demonstrates "that never before has the connection [between our countries] been so strong, people to people." Several local and state entities in the US have either made agreements with the Venezuelan government to receive discounted oil shipments or are currently in talks to do so.
In addition to this program, after the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the Bush administration to respond rapidly and adequately to prevent the deaths of over 1,800 people, President Chávez immediately offered financial aid to the people affected by the disaster. He also volunteered assistance in petroleum and gasoline products that might be needed in the rescue and recovery operations. In a surprising and shameful gesture, President Bush declined the offer and proceeded to continue to botch recovery and reconstruction projects.
With Bush’s unrelenting and irresponsible antagonism, it is easy to see why President Chávez, his political supporters, and millions of ordinary Venezuelans would be seriously concerned about additional interference in the upcoming December 3rd elections. Chávez's opponent has earned the suspicion of Venezuelan voters because he has sought and won public support from Venezuela's elites and the Bush administration.
Garcia Gunderson said she believes Chávez will win by a large margin. "He has to be overwhelmingly elected by at least the same percent he got in the referendum so that they can once more prove to the international community that he is the president that the people in Venezuela want to elect," she added. She expressed frustration that it will take a fourth election to prove this but believes it will be accomplished.
The role of the solidarity movement and organizations like Venezuela Solidarity is to promote the basic idea that the people of a country like Venezuela have the right to elect whom they want, Garcia Gunderson concluded. Venezuela has "the right to self-determination," she stated emphatically, "without having somebody always pointing the finger and saying this is what you should do." She compared the current interference in Venezuela by the Bush administration to that of the Nixon administration in Chile in 1973. After President Salvador Allende was elected in Chile in 1970, Henry Kissinger said that the US government couldn’t let those "irresponsible people" choose their own president and proceeded to order assistance to the military coup plotters.
People in the US need not agree with Chávez's policies in order to support the basic notion that the people of Venezuela should be able to choose their own government without interference. It is nothing more than what we expect from other countries every other November.
[The below report states:
“General John Abizaid, commander of US forces in the Middle East, has warned that striking Iran could cripple oil supplies, unleash a “surrogate” terrorist army and lead to missile attacks on America’s regional allies. The army is particularly concerned about Iran’s ability to destabilise an already chaotic Iraq.”
Do you still think the U.S. is going to invade Iran? – MK]
US may accept Iranian nuclear bomb
October 1, 2006
The Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2383147.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
AMERICA is going to have to learn to live with a nuclear Iran, US intelligence analysts have concluded at a secret meeting near Washington.
Senior operatives and outside experts from the intelligence community were almost unanimous in their view that little could be done to stop Iran acquiring the components for a nuclear bomb, The Sunday Times has learnt.
Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities was rejected on the grounds that the intelligence needed for successful air strikes was lacking. “We only have an imperfect understanding of the extent and location of the Iranian programme,” said one source with knowledge of the meeting. “Even if we got the order to blow it up, we wouldn’t know how to.”
The White House’s earlier enthusiasm for military strikes if all else failed has cooled after warnings from the Pentagon and intelligence analysts that the risk to reward ratio of taking action was too high. At best 80% of the targets are mapped out and then only sketchily. The “collateral damage” to civilians could be considerable, sources say.
“Unless you can be 100% effective and set the programme back by two decades, you’ll just get a short-term delay and you may not produce a result that is better than the current one,” an intelligence analyst said.
General John Abizaid, commander of US forces in the Middle East, has warned that striking Iran could cripple oil supplies, unleash a “surrogate” terrorist army and lead to missile attacks on America’s regional allies. The army is particularly concerned about Iran’s ability to destabilise an already chaotic Iraq.
John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, has told President George W Bush that there is no rush to use force as Iran’s nuclear programme is beset with technical errors. “He has been saying, ‘Slow down, it’s not an immediate problem’,” said Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has staked her reputation on achieving a negotiated settlement with the help of the “EU3” nations of Britain, France and Germany.
“President Bush is not going to take military action against the advice of the secretary of state, US generals and the director of national intelligence,” Clawson said.
British sources confirmed that the military option was receding. “There are clear signs that the White House is keener on following a political approach,” said a senior British source. “There’s never been an appetite in the Pentagon for taking Iran on and the EU3 might get a deal that would bring the Iranians to the negotiating table in a reasonable fashion.”
Despite reports that the Iranians were willing to suspend their programme secretly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defiantly announced that Iran’s “atomic work” will not stop for a single day.
Intelligence analysts concluded at last week’s meeting that there were no negotiating carrots or sticks, such as sanctions, capable of persuading Iran to halt its pursuit of nuclear know-how — which it maintains is for peaceful energy purposes.
“The sobering view is that even if there is a deal, the Iranians would cheat,” another source said.
“The conclusion is that America is going to have to live with the bomb unless there’s some miracle, such as a major accident, a major defector or an orange revolution,” the source added, referring to the people’s protests that brought reformers to power in Ukraine. None of these scenarios is considered likely.
In a sign that a military option remains theoretically on the table, a group of minesweepers that could be used to clear any potential Iranian oil blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have been given “prepare to deploy” orders, which could see them leaving port for the Gulf as early as today.
The biggest deterrent might come from the Israelis, not the Americans. Israeli defence sources are increasingly convinced that it will fall to them to stop a nuclear Iran. In their view Iran should not be allowed to get to the “point of no return” where it has the know-how to build a bomb.
“The Israelis are going to have to make a decision earlier than we do,” Clawson said. “That’s a real problem for us.”
Shell needs to oil its Kremlin diplomacy
By James Harding
October 5, 2006
TimesOnline.co.uk
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8210-2389293,00.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
WHILE BP’s mishandling of public opinion and the political process in the US has badly damaged its reputation in the short term, Shell’s misreading of government relations in Russia threatens to do it more lasting damage. For the economics of its $20 billion Sakhalin-2 gasfield are in doubt. And while Russia’s treatment of Shell may have been arbitrary, highhanded and duplicitous, it has not been surprising.
Vladimir Putin views energy assets as his predecessors once regarded nuclear warheads. They are the means of advancing Russia’s strategic ambitions in the world. (Ironically, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, has not used Corporate America but the Pentagon to define his foreign policy; Mr Putin, the former KGB agent, has sought to advance his international agenda by relying on the soft power of Russia’s big business and natural wealth.) President Putin seems to want Russia to maintain majority control of its oil and gas industry. Such economic nationalism is not new. What has changed is that, courtesy of a higher oil price, Russia is no longer as reliant as it once was on foreign investors to explore and develop oil and gasfields.
Shell is not the only one that will have to deal with this new reality. ExxonMobil has been sent the same message on its Sakhalin investment: scale back costs or sell out. BP may find it comes under pressure to renegotiate terms of the BP-TNK joint venture.
But given that Russia has shown both the will and the werewithal to regain control of its natural resources, Shell’s decision last year to double the projected costs of developing the Sakhalin-2 field from $10 billion to $20 billion played into the Kremlin’s hands. Not only did it infuriate Moscow, but it gave Mr Putin at least a rhetorical cause for rewriting the rules of the contract retrospectively.
To be clear, Mr Putin likes to abide by the laws of global capitalism as and when it suits him. Just a week ago he was in France complaining that a Russian company’s 5 per cent investment in EADS should guarantee it a seat on the European aerospace and defence manufacturer’s board. He is ripping up commercial contracts on the one hand, championing investor rights on the other. But Shell’s business is geopolitical. Its job is to handle government relations. Jeroen van der Veer, its boss, seems to have done a worse job of handling the arbitrary Mr Putin than BP’s Lord Browne of Madingley has done of placating the more irascible members of the US Congress.
[See THE MARKETS REACT TO PEAK OIL for more analysis in this regard. – MK]
Gas tumbles, but don't get used to it
Lundberg Survey: Pump prices fall nearly 15 cents a gallon, but colder weather will drive them back up.
October 8 2006: 5:23 PM EDT
Money.CNN.com
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/08/news/economy/lundberg/
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
ATLANTA (CNN) -- Gas prices declined an average of nearly 15 cents a gallon in the last two weeks, but are expected to begin rising as the winter approaches, the publisher of the national Lundberg Survey said Sunday.
The national average for a gallon of self-service, regular gasoline was $2.28 on the Oct. 6 survey date, compared to $2.42 two weeks earlier - a decline of about 14 cents, Lundberg told CNN.
Gas prices declined a whopping 75 cents during the eight weeks between Aug. 11 and Oct. 6, she added. The average gas price on Aug. 11 was $3.03 a gallon.
The figures are compiled from a survey of more than 7,000 U.S. filling stations.
Publisher Trilby Lundberg said gasoline supplies typically are plentiful in the summer when demand is highest.
"We are fast using up the overhang (excess) of gasoline supply. Now some refining capability has to be idled for work projects to shift focus from gasoline to home heating oil - so there will be less gasoline produced," Lundberg told CNN.
"There is a turnaround in the making," she said.
As a result of fewer supplies, wholesalers already have begun to pay more for gasoline they distribute to the retailers they serve, she said. She noted that some refineries are still making repairs from last year's devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes. In addition, imports won't be as plentiful, Lundberg said.
For the latest survey period, Des Moines, Iowa, had the lowest average price for a gallon of gasoline, $2.03.
The most expensive gas was in Honolulu at $2.91 a gallon.
Here is a sampling of other cities: Atlanta $2.06; Dallas $2.13; Baltimore $2.17; Milwaukee $2.20; Albuquerque, N.M., $2.28; Long Island, N.Y. $2.36; San Francisco $2.57; Los Angeles $2.58.
Among major oil companies, shares of Exxon Mobil (Charts) and ConocoPhillips (Charts) finished higher Friday, while Chevron (Charts) declined.
[Interesting to see this come on the heels of the airline terror hoax in the U.K. – MK]
Clampdown on air travel 'a must' for Britain to meet climate target
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday October 6, 2006
The Guardian
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1888921,00.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
A severe clampdown on air travel will be necessary for the government to meet its stringent target to cut greenhouse gas emissions, climate experts warned yesterday. Calculations by researchers at the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Manchester reveal the number of flights will have to be frozen at today's levels or lower to avoid warming that could trigger catastrophic damage to ecosystems.
Moves by the aviation industry to develop greener fuels and more efficient aircraft will come into operation too late to slash carbon dioxide emissions by the target of 60% by 2050, said Kevin Anderson, research director at the centre. The aviation industry is rapidly becoming a major contributor to global warming. Over the past 30 years, air passengers in Britain have increased fivefold. While aviation now emits only 7% of the carbon dioxide emissions released by Britain's private vehicles, it is on course to be an equal greenhouse gas emitter by 2012.
r Anderson's team worked out that Britain must not release more than 4.8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2000 and 2050 if it is to meet the government's emissions target. But their calculations reveal that the country has already emitted a quarter of that amount in the past six years, expected to rise to 45% by 2012.
The scientists used computer models to assess the impact of transport on Britain's greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades. Even if the rate of growth in aviation and shipping declines by two percentage points, emissions will still be so high that only dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide in other sectors could allow the government to meet its target, they said.
Ian Pearson, minister for climate change, admitted it was unclear whether government targets could be met without constraining air travel. He said: "The UK's aviation emissions could be half of our contribution to global warming by 2030."
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The End of Eden - James Lovelock Says This Time - By Michael Powell