DRANT #303: GENERATIONAL CAPITALISM

We must look our children and grandchildren in the eye.
And beg for forgiveness.
Beg that they will forgive us for robbing them of their future.
That they will forgive us when they have nothing to drink or breathe or eat.
Forgive us for drinking it all, and fouling it all, and wasting it all - and consuming it all, and leaving nothing for them.
We don't need cute t shirts or tear jerky photos of Polar Bear cubs, or "green" movements or "ecological" organizations.
What we need is to stop our insane consumption, now.
We must all of us change our lives-- one of us at a time, each of us - one day at a time, one hour at a time, one gluttonous decision at a time.
One meal and one car ride and one Evian at a time.
One flush and one shower, and one round of golf and one hamburger, and one dog washing at a time.
Or you can look your children in the eye, and explain why you chose the air conditioner and the nice green lawn over their future.


http://www.prospect.org/cs/special_report















Where Has All the Water Gone?
MAUDE BARLOW
"The world's water crisis poses grave threats to our survival. Can we change course?
Imagine a world in 20 years in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic water services in the Third World; or to create laws to protect source water and force industry and industrial agriculture to stop polluting water systems; or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker, and other diversions, which will have created huge new swaths of desert.
Desalination plants will ring the world's oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate-controlled nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities, which will in turn sell it back to us at a huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remaining uncontaminated parts of the world or sucked from the clouds by corporate-controlled machines, while the poor will die in increasing numbers from a lack of water.
This is not science fiction. This is where the world is headed unless we change course--a moral and ecological imperative. But first we must come to terms with the dimension of the crisis.
...The freshwater crisis is easily as great a threat to the Earth and humans as climate change (to which it is deeply linked) but has had very little attention paid to it in comparison. It is like a comet poised to hit the Earth. If a comet really did threaten the entire world, it is likely that our politicians would suddenly find that religious and ethnic differences had lost much of their meaning. Political leaders would quickly come together to find a solution to this common threat.
However, with rare exceptions, average people do not know that the world is facing a comet called the global water crisis. And they are not being served by their political leaders, who are in some kind of inexplicable denial. The crisis is not reported enough in the mainstream media, and when it is, it is usually reported as a regional or local problem, not an international one..."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Facing Up to Freshwater Pollution
NANCY STONER AND JON DEVINE
We are at a turning point as momentous as the 1970s, when the Clean Water Act was enacted.

The Backlash Against Bottled Water
KARL FLECKER

Water Wisdom
ROGER D. STONE
A conversation with water expert Peter H. Gleick on today's crisis, and a vision for tomorrow's sustainability

The Perils of Privatization
WENONAH HAUTER
The conflict between multinational corporations' quest for profits and the simple human right to clean, safe water

Changing Water Policies in the Dry Southwest
CHRISTINA ROESSLER
Smart water use and a shift in water culture form a winning strategy.

The Missing Piece: A Water Ethic
SANDRA POSTEL
We must make the protection of freshwater ecosystems a central goal in all that we do.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Read more!!

DRANT #283: THE NERGY BILL, PROGENY CAPITALISM

Please read the following in its entirety.

It provides a lucid (and thus profoundly frightening) summation of exactly where we and our planet stand at the moment, and a clear account of the perfidy of our government and it's accomplices-- the US Congress and We (the group formerly known as) The People.
Robbing the future to pay Paul.

So take a good look into the eyes of your grandchildren or children, those here now and those yet to come, and do something.

Or not.

They're counting on it.

(Warning: driving a Prius doesn't count.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rachel's Democracy & Health News #939
The Basket Our Eggs Are In
The nation's new energy law will cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions
by a mere 4.7% by 2030 at a time when scientists say we need cuts 5 to
10 times as large. The U.S. seems to be painting itself into a corner,
creating a global warming emergency, which may then be used to
convince us to accept the only "solution" favored by the coal, oil,
mining, railroad and automobile industries: burying carbon dioxide a
mile below ground, hoping it will stay there forever.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE BASKET OUR EGGS ARE IN
By Peter Montague

President Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security
Act of 2007 on December 19. The Sierra Club celebrated the new law
as a "historic victory." The Union of Concerned Scientists called it
"landmark" legislation. Reports in the nation's major newspapers
(Los Angeles Times and N.Y. Times) focused on two of the new law's
boldest provisions --

** By 2020, U.S. automobiles must average 35 miles per gallon (with
light trucks and SUVs included in the average for the first time), and

** Production of ethanol, a home-grown gasoline additive, must rise
from 9 billion gallons per year in 2008 to 36 billion gallons per year
by 2020.

The 822-page law also requires that energy-efficiency standards
eventually be set for many household appliances and electric motors,
and it outlaws the sale of most incandescent light bulbs by 2012.
Furthermore, the law says new or renovated federal buildings must use
55% less fossil fuel by 2010 and 100% less by 2030 -- in other words
by 2030 federal buildings have to produce at least as much energy as
they use.

Effect on Carbon Dioxide Emissions

An initial analysis of the greenhouse-gas-reduction potential of the
new law has been provided by the American Council for an Energy-
Efficient Economy (ACEEE). They calculate that, by 2020, the law
will have reduced U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by a cumulative
total of 2017 million metric tonnes (megatonnes); by 2030, they say,
the law will have reduced cumulative U.S. CO2 emissions by a total of
7679 megatonnes. (One million metric tonnes = one megatonne = one
trillion grams = 1E12 grams = 1 teragram; one tonne of CO2 contains
12/44 of a tonne of carbon).

How big a dent in the nation's total CO2 emissions will the 2007
energy law make?

According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, between 1990 and
2005 U.S. annual CO2 emissions rose from 5529 megatonnes to 6432
megatonnes. In other words, between 1990 and 2005, U.S. CO2 emissions
grew exponentially at the rate of 1.01% per year. If that modest
1.01% growth-rate were to continue from 2008 through 2020, the
cumulative CO2 emissions during the period would total 84,557
megatonnes and during 2008-2030 the cumulative total emitted would be
164,041 megatonnes. Therefore we can see that by 2020 the 2007 energy
law will have reduced total U.S. CO2 emissions by 2017/84557*100 =
2.4% and by 2030 the reduction will be 7679/164041*100 = 4.7%.

In sum, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will force
only a small reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions between now and 2030. And
that assumes the law is totally effective. Business Week magazine
predicts that these sections of the law will never be enforced. More
likely, they say, these sections will be ignored and fines will be
levied, merely driving up the price of automobiles and gasoline as the
cost of fines is passed on to consumers.

In any case, one thing is clear: the U.S. has announced no plans for
reducing greenhouse gas emissions to any substantial degree. Obviously
we are painting ourselves into a corner -- the longer we delay making
the needed reductions, the more drastic the required reductions
become. When Congress finally acts, it will be in response to an
emergency that the U.S. has intentionally created. As we know, the
U.S. financial and political systems thrive on emergencies just such
as this one.

During the climate change conference in Bali in mid-December, the
European Union pressed the industrialized world to commit to reducing
greenhouse gas emissions by somewhere between 25% and 40% by 2020 --
at least 10 times the reductions built into the Energy Independence
and Security Act of 2007. However, the U.S. derailed that Bali plan by
flatly refusing to go along with any numerical targets, even
voluntary ones.

While the Bali conference was under way, in the U.S. the business-
friendly Conference Board issued a report showing that 40%
reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could be achieved with
only modest investments. This raises the question, if the Conference
Board acknowledges that the desired reductions are affordable, why
does the U.S. consistently refuse to allow them to be adopted as a
voluntary international goal? The oil and coal industries have nothing
to gain from efficiency or renewable sources of energy and have
successfully resisted all efforts by Congress to force them to help
pay to remediate the problems they have created. The Energy
Independence and Security Act originally included $13 billion in taxes
on oil corporations, earmarked for the support of renewable energy. By
the time the law was enacted that $13 billion support for renewables
had evaporated. The insider's newsletter, Greenwire, attributed this
remarkable evaporation to the "raw power" of the oil corporations.
This year alone the oil corporations have given members of Congress
$75 million in reward for fealty. The question is, under what
circumstances -- if any -- will the oil and coal corporations allow
the U.S. to reduce CO2 emissions?

The Size of the CO2 Problem

In 2005, humans worldwide dumped about 27 billion metric tonnes of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from fuel combustion.[1, pg. 48]

For many years, global CO2 releases from industrial sources have been
increasing steadily by about 2% per year,[2] thus doubling in size
every 35 years. If this growth-rate continues, global industrial CO2
emissions during the 45-year period 2005-2050 will total 2 trillion
tonnes and by the end of this century will total 8.2 trillion tonnes.
This gives us some feel for the size of the world's problem -- it is
very large.

A variety of solutions to these problems have been proposed.

1. Energy efficiency. As we have seen, 40% reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions are considered affordable by the Conference Board, which
serves U.S. industrial corporations. However, we have also seen that
the U.S. delegation would not allow even 25% to be set as a voluntary
international goal at the Bali Conference, and the best Congress could
do in the 2007 energy law was a 4.7% reduction by 2030. No, the U.S.
government clearly is not able to take energy conservation seriously.
The "raw power" of the oil and coal corporations will not allow it.

2. Renewable energy -- wind and other forms of solar power. Numerous
technologies exist for rapid deployment of solar power, developing
an energy system that is carbon-free and nuclear-free -- but oil and
coal corporations oppose the necessary investments. Globally,
renewable energy is not expected to develop substantially between now
and 2030. According to the Wall Street Journal, in its most recent
annual report, World Energy Outlook 2007, the International Energy
Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2030 renewable sources of energy will be
no further along than they are today: "Renewable energy sources such
as solar will grow in use in certain areas, like the United Kingdom,
but the current logistical challenges and costs of using and
developing them mean all renewable energy sources will remain a
fraction of total energy use globally in 2030 at about 10%, unchanged
from today," says the IEA.

3. Extract CO2 from the air. A machine to extract CO2 from the air
was announced this month by Sandia National Laboratories in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their aim is to split CO2 into carbon
monoxide and oxygen, and then to use these as building blocks for new
liquid fuels, which would compete with petroleum products like
gasoline. Initially Sandia plans to extract CO2 from the smokestacks
of power plants but eventually, they say, they intend to extract CO2
from the atmosphere to create "carbon neutral" liquid fuels. It
remains to be seen whether the development of this potentially-
subversive machine will be allowed to continue.

Another technique for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere would mix it
with alkaline and alkaline-earth oxides to produce solid compounds
such as magnesium carbonate and limestone (calcium carbonate).[3,
Chapter 7] This would require mining 1.6 to 3.7 tonnes of silicates
for each tonne of CO2 and would produce 2.6 to 4.7 tonnes of carbonate
rocks for each tonne of CO2 -- in sum, a very large mining and waste-
rock disposal operation.

Another machine to extract CO2 from the air was announced earlier
this year by Columbia University. The announcement pointed out that
the captured carbon dioxide could then be buried in the ground. We
predict that this machine will quickly attract major investment from
oil and coal corporations. As we'll see, it is exactly what
they need.

4. Carbon capture and storage: Here, finally, we come to the only
approach strongly favored by the U.S. government, by the coal, oil,
automobile, mining and railroad industries, by teams of researchers at
more than a dozen universities, and by several of the big
environmental organizations in Washington and New York (Environmental
Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC], The Izaak Walton
League, The Clean Air Task Force, and even the Union of Concerned
Scientists, among others). This is the basket our eggs are in.

The plan is to extract CO2 from industrial smoke stacks (or from the
open air), compress it into a liquid, and pump it 3000 to 8000 feet
below ground, hoping it will stay there forever. This plan is known as
CCS, which stands for carbon capture and sequestration, or carbon
capture and storage.

Of all the options described above, only CCS is being vigorously
pursued. The U.S. Department of Energy has allocated roughly $2
billion to CCS projects that are going on now in 41 states. More
than a dozen universities are researching the pros if not the cons.
Several prominent environmental organizations have enthusiastically
endorsed the plan, even before a decade of necessary research has
begun. It is no exaggeration to say that CCS has become a bandwagon --
or a juggernaut.

Very few people have heard of CCS; in the U.S., at least, it is
essentially invisible. Yet it is so far along that it looks like a
done deal, almost unstoppable. It seems clear that coal and oil
corporations and their camp followers are counting on CCS to solve the
global warming problem. CCS is a major industrial plan; all other
proposed solutions to global warming are tinker toys by comparison.

No environmental organizations and no news reports have so far
mentioned it, but a major feature of the Energy Independence and
Security Act of 2007 is Title VII, which requires the federal
government to undertake a nationwide assessment of the suitability of
geological formations capable of storing carbon dioxide underground.
(A "Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the U.S." has already been produced
[29 Mbyte PDF].) Title VII also requires the federal government to
support seven projects to demonstrate the capture of CO2 from
industrial sources. This is the most far-reaching section of the 2007
energy law and you can be sure that Title VII will be vigorously
enforced. The coal industry will see to that.

The CCS plan was devised by the coal industry, but has the financial
support of many of the world's most powerful corporations, an all-star
cast from the oil, gas, mining, railroad, and automobile industries:
American Electric Power, the American Petroleum Institute, Aramco
Services, BP (formerly British Petroleum), Chevron, ConocoPhillips,
The Electric Power Research Institute, ExxonMobil, Ford Motor, General
Electric, General Motors, Marathon Oil, Peabody Energy, Schlumberger,
Shell Oil, Southern Company, and Toyota, among others. They, in turn,
have lined up support within academia and the corporate environmental
organizations.

The coal industry is betting its whole future on the CCS plan: "Coal
is going to be the answer and is the answer, and carbon capture and
sequestration is the answer to climate change," says Steven F. Leer,
chief executive officer of Arch Coal, Inc., the nation's second-
largest coal company, after Peabody Energy. If the CCS plan fails, the
coal industry will fade into history, at least in the U.S., where
carbon dioxide emissions are causing cancellations of new coal-fired
power plants.

Here is why CCS seems like such a good idea -- the only good
idea -- from the viewpoint of the fossil corporations, coal and oil:

1. CCS is compatible with the existing energy infrastructure. If
industry's carbon dioxide can be buried in the ground, the coal and
oil industries can continue Business as Usual until declining supplies
make fossil fuels too expensive. If the fossil fuel industries can
maintain Business as Usual, then so can the mining, railroad and
automobile industries. Nothing will have to change. Once CCS has been
"demonstrated" (a word that means very different things to different
people) then the major incentive to conserve energy or develop
renewables will evaporate. Even the small federal investment currently
devoted to conservation and renewables could be logically withdrawn.
Why spend money on futuristic energy technologies that are not needed
-- especially potentially-subversive sources like solar that lend
themselves to dispersed community control but not to
centralized corporate control?

2. After it has been injected into the ground, carbon dioxide will be
out of sight and out of mind. Best of all, it will be irretrievable
and its precise whereabouts will be unknowable. Once it's down there,
it's beyond human control. Of course corporate experts will claim to
know where it is, but it will be loose in the deep earth and under
tremendous pressure from the weight of the earth above it. Buoyant
forces will be constantly pushing it upward. It turns water acidic and
so can leach rocks. The site where it is buried will be poorly
understood because of a fundamental catch-22: to understand the
geology a mile below ground in detail requires numerous bore holes
sunk into the earth. But these bore holes ruin the natural integrity
of the site and make leakage more likely. So you can have a poorly-
understood site that retains its integrity, or a well-understood site
that has lost its integrity, but you can't have a well-understood site
that retains its integrity. Thus the perpetual danger of leakage will
be with us and with our children and with their children and their
children's children....

Happily, after a few decades the injected CO2 will almost certainly be
forgotten as other, bigger problems absorb humanity's attention and
resources. Humans have no experience paying attention to anything for
hundreds of years, much less tens of thousands of years. By the time
leaks begin to occur -- even if by chance anyone is still paying
attention and leakage is detected -- the people who created the
problem will be long gone. The public will be left holding the bag.
The fossil fuel industry has already proposed that its liability for
buried CO2 should end after just 10 years.) This is very similar to
present-day U.S. hazardous waste law, which allows waste corporations
to bury megatonnes of industrial poisons in the ground. Almost
everyone involved acknowledges that these poisons will eventually
leak, but the companies that do the deed are only legally liable for
30 years. After that, it's the public's problem. CO2 storage is being
proposed on this same corporate-friendly model.

3. Injecting CO2 into the ground is something that only a handful of
geologists, physicists and engineers will be able to discuss in
detail. Within the U.S. regulatory framework, in which individuals
typically are invited to public hearings where they are given 5
minutes or less to ask questions and offer facts and perspectives,
there will be no way for the public to participate in CCS decisions.
Thus this "techno-fix" will further weaken U.S. democracy, leaving the
important decisions to partisan corporate "experts," some of whom will
work directly for industry, some for academia, and some for corporate
environmental organizations. The media can be counted on to present
all these experts as independent and occasionally even adversarial.

As with the nuclear industry, those who make the decisions on CCS will
be engineers with a vested interest in saying that it can be done
"safely" (without ever defining what that word means in the context of
burying trillions of tonnes of liquid CO2 a mile below ground
"forever"). Given the decline of U.S. government regulatory capacity
during the past 30 years, there is no regulatory structure left to
counter the claims of partisan advocates and corporate experts. When
he announced that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would
soon write regulations governing CCS, EPA chief Stephen Johnson
said, "By harnessing the power of geologic sequestration technology,
we are entering a new age of clean energy where we can be both good
stewards of the Earth, and good stewards of the American economy." In
other words, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has already
been captured. We cannot expect EPA to provide a probing analysis of
the serious dangers of CCS. Who then will do it? Many of the corporate
environmental groups have also been captured. The skids are fully
greased.

4. It is relatively easy for unprincipled technical personnel to claim
that CCS can be accomplished safely. There is no way to "demonstrate"
that CO2 can be stored underground forever. No matter how long you run
your test, it could always fail next year as leaks develop. So
"successful" CO2 storage cannot be demonstrated -- given that the goal
is storage in perpetuity. Therefore, engineers will define some other
"test" that they will then claim "demonstrates" successful CO2
storage. In fact, almost any test will do. Example: CO2 is currently
being buried in the ground at three locations, about a million
tonnes per year at each site. A million tonnes may sound like a lot,
but it is minuscule compared to the total amount of CO2 being
produced. To bury even two trillion tonnes -- much less 8 trillion
tonnes -- would require scaling up current operations by a factor of
2E12/3E6 = 670,000. Despite the major difficulties inherent in such
enormous growth, a small group of corporate environmentalists and
corporate-funded academics in the U.S. is already claiming that CCS
has been successfully demonstrated. The public is not well-prepared
to understand the shameless deception and rank dishonesty of such a
claim.

5. Carbon capture and storage provides a way for energy corporations
to make a great deal of money from the CO2 catastrophe that they have
created, which they have spent millions denying and thus prolonging.
If the Columbia University CO2 extraction machine works as advertised,
perhaps the patents will be purchased by oil and coal corporations so
that they can profit doubly from the machine. U.S. coal and oil firms
may soon be marketing their "proven safe" carbon storage services to
China and India, where regulation and oversight will be even more lax
than in the U.S. Large amounts of money could be made in the short
term, and in the long term when the CO2 begins to leak out and heat up
the planet, perhaps threatening the tenure of humans on earth, it will
be somebody else's problem.

6. All the CCS activity generated by the U.S. Department of Energy
creates the impression that CCS is just around the corner. Given this,
coal companies can promise to build new power plants that could
use CCS but don't have to use CCS (they could just as easily,
and far more cheaply, dump their CO2 into the atmosphere). Such plants
are called "capture ready."

CCS will cost anywhere from $50 to $100 per tonne of CO2 captured
(not including the costs of transport and burial). So carbon capture
may eliminate coal's price advantage over renewable fuels. Therefore
actually burying carbon in the deep earth may not be what the coal
companies are counting on. "The coal industry's many proposals to
build 'clean' coal plants that are 'capture ready' across the U.S. is
a smokescreen," says Leslie Harroun, a senior program officer at the
Oak Foundation in London, U.K. Until a decade of research is
completed, CCS may just be something to talk about with bluff and
bluster, to gain permission to build a hundred or more "capture ready"
coal-fired power plants. That would be a strategy Big Coal could
take to the bank right now.

============

[1] International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2007.
Paris: International Energy Agency, 2007, pg. 48.

[2] Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen, "Implications of 'peak
oil' for atmospheric CO2 and climate." Available online in PDF.

[3] Bert Metz, Ogunlade Davidson and others, editors,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Special Report on
Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005). (23 Mbyte PDF)

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Plus- check these out as well:

The Backlash Against Biofuels
Just as the U.S. Congress passes a new law requiring a 4-fold
increase in the use of ethanol for fuel, critics argue that such
biofuels reduce the world's food supply and don't necessarily
alleviate global warming.
World Food Stocks Dwindling Rapidly, UN Warns
The world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are
soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of
the United Nations warned Dec. 17.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
To start your own free Email subscription to Rachel's Democracy
& Health News send any Email to: rachel-subscribe@pplist.net.

In response, you will receive an Email asking you to confirm that
you want to subscribe.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 160, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903
dhn@rachel.org
Read more!!

DRANT #279: PELOSI AND GLOBAL TORTURE

The destruction of the planet is the single most crucial and life threatening problem we face.
It is - as we know- unquestionably the greatest threat to our security, to our health, to our freedom- to our lives and the lives of future generations.
This energy bill is total hogwash. It never addresses the most serious problems, and purposefully omits any mention or remedy for the greatest source of environmental destruction: the global US Military machine.
Coupled with the flaccid "agreement" made last night in Bali, where the USA totally sabotaged any meaningful progress, (i.e. the EU proposal to cut GG and CO2 emissions by 40% ) Pelosi and Bush are again marching in quickstep, arm in arm, down the road to annihilation, cannibalizing our children and grandchildren.
Supporting and facilitating the torture of prisoners is less profound and evil than aiding and abetting the slow torture and execution of humanity, but many times more devastating and cruel.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hails expected congressional approval of energy bill
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune Fri, 14 Dec 2007 2:42 PM PST
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anticipating final congressional action on energy legislation next week, said the bill will "put America on a road to energy independence," save people money at the gas pumps and increase the country's security.

Pelosi hails expected congressional approval of energy bill
WOOD TV 8 Grand Rapids Fri, 14 Dec 2007 4:17 PM PST
WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anticipating final congressional action on energy legislation next week, said the bill will "put America on a road to energy independence,"...

Pelosi hails savings in energy bill
The San Luis Obispo Tribune Fri, 14 Dec 2007 2:44 PM PST
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anticipating final congressional action on energy legislation next week, said the bill will "put America on a road to energy independence," save people money at the gas pumps and increase the country's security. In remarks prepared for the Democrats' weekly radio address on Saturday, Pelosi noted that the bill will require, for the first time in 32 years, an increase ...
Read more!!

DRANT #273: AS THE WORLD BURNS

Please- send this to everyone who drinks water, or knows someone who does.
I have printed a very short excerpt below, but please --- read this in its entirety. The information and the message must be read, and disseminated everywhere.
The destruction of our living environment is the single greatest threat facing us- which may explain why it is largely ignored by the major media and major political parties- not to mention most of us, as we live out the few years left to us and our grandchildren.
Read this as if your life depends on it.
Thanks,
DR
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How Dry We Are
A Question No One Wants to Raise About Drought
By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174863/as_the_world_burns

Georgia's on my mind. Atlanta, Georgia. It's a city in trouble in a state in trouble in a region in trouble. Water trouble. Trouble big enough that the state government's moving fast. Just this week, backed up by a choir singing "Amazing Grace," accompanied by three protestant ministers, and 20 demonstrators from the Atlanta Freethought Society, Georgia's Baptist Governor Sonny Perdue led a crowd of hundreds in prayers for rain. "We've come together here," he said, "simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm." It seems, however, that the Almighty -- He "who can and will make a difference" -- was otherwise occupied and the regional drought continued to threaten Atlanta, a metropolis of 5 million people (and growing fast), with the possibility that it might run out of water in as little as 80 days or as much as a year, if the rain! s don't come.

Here's a little summary of the situation today:

Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are prohibited within city limits. Harvests in the region have dropped by 15-30%. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were holding 5% of their capacity.

Oops, that's not Atlanta, or even the southeastern U.S. That's Ankara, Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures that also have had southern and southwestern Europe in their grip.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE THING
Read more!!

DRANT #209: TAPEWORM/INCONVENIENT TRUTH

The entire discourse regarding the rape of our planet and its inhabitants has been framed as an "environmental" problem, benignly named "Global Warming" by the corporate pimp media and PR firms who work for the rapists.
Ho Hum, global warming.
Not local, not me, not here. Global -- a nicely indefinite unthreatening somewhere else.
And not destruction, or devastation or ruination. Warming. Like one of George and Laura's chicken pot pies in the White House microwave.
Perpetrators 'R Us of course. They be too many of us. Its our fault.
Not that a tiny few of Them take more than all the rest of us combined, or that the real perps are meticulously maintained in their fortress corporate anonymity- as their global parasite corporations voraciously consume the earth. Its not the insatiable waging of global war, which murderously squanders incalculable mountains of energy-- no, its us commuters in our SUVS. All we gots ta do is grow some mighty fine Monsanto GMO corn and Rumpelstilskin it into ethanol, and lordy lord our troubles are OVER !
Please read this brilliant deconstruction of our polite tsk-tsk machine -- the world of Gore and our own pervasive refusal to take real responsibility for our own annihilation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"My nickname for our current economic system is 'The Tapeworm.' ...Believing that our solutions for addressing global warming lie within the system defined by the Tapeworm goes hand in hand with obtaining our media from companies controlled by the Tapeworm, and having to choose from among leaders anointed by the Tapeworm, such as Al Gore. This belief is, in fact, the source of our hopelessness."
"... The fundamental lie that Al Gore is telling comes from defining our problem as environmental -- in this case global warming, whereas our environmental problems -- as real and important as they are -- are but a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Gore defines our problem as "what." He is silent on "who..."
"... Understanding the fundamental imbalance of the corporate model -- where enterprises have the rights of personhood, but not the finite existence of people or the legal responsibilities and liabilities -- and the corporate model's economic dependence on subsidy that drives up debt, economic warfare and the destruction of all living things is a critical piece to developing actions to reverse environmental damage. Al Gore is a man that has made money for corporations his entire life. He is a member in good standing of the Tapeworm and his current lifestyle and this documentary are rich with the resources that corporations can provide...
"... There is also no personal accountability. Al Gore has not "come clean." There is no discussion of Gore's role in the Clinton Administration in facilitating worldwide economic centralization and warfare, and with it genocide and environmental destruction..."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE SOURCE OF HOPELESSNESS: A REVIEW OF 'AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH'
Solari, Inc., January 1, 2007
http://www.precaution.org/lib/07/prn_the_tapeworm.070112.htm (http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?St=1 The Environmental Research Foundation)

By Catherine Austin Fitts,
Solari Inc. -- http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Archives2007/FittsGore.html

[Catherine Austin Fitts served as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at HUD in the first Bush Administration; she previously served as Managing Director and Member of the Board of Directors of the Wall Street investment bank, Dillon, Read & Co., Inc.]

The day after 9-11, a person whom I respect and care about a great deal said to me, "George Bush was anointed by God for a time such as this." He then asked me what I thought. I said that I thought that the Bush family was anointed by financial fraud, narcotics trafficking, and pedophilia. Stunned, he said, "If that is true, then it's hopeless." I replied that things were far from hopeless, but that for me solutions started with faith in a divine intelligence rather than affirming a dependent relationship with organized crime.

Last week I had dinner with a wonderful couple -- activists in the San Francisco Bay Area-- and the woman told me how wonderful she thought Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth was. She then asked for my opinion. When I gave it, she said, "If that is true, then it's hopeless." We then proceeded to have a rich conversation about why folks who used to call themselves "liberal" or progressive are in the same trap as folks who use to call themselves "conservative."

In order to respond to the problem of global warming, it is necessary to look at the ways that we as citizens support criminal activity by our government and how we as consumers, depositors and investors support the private banking, corporate and investment interests that run our government in this manner. This is easier said than done. When we 'get it' -- i.e., that we have to withdraw from a co-dependent relationship with organized crime in order to save and rebuild our world -- we can find ourselves struggling to envision the system-wide actions that are needed and feeling overwhelmed by the task of determining how to go about them personally and in collaboration with others.

My nickname for our current economic system is "The Tapeworm." For decades I have listened to Americans from all walks of life insist that we must find solutions within the system -- i.e. within the socially acceptable boundaries laid down by the Tapeworm. Believing that our solutions for addressing global warming lie within the system defined by the Tapeworm goes hand in hand with obtaining our media from companies controlled by the Tapeworm, and having to choose from among leaders anointed by the Tapeworm, such as Al Gore. This belief is, in fact, the source of our hopelessness.

George Orwell once said that omission is the greatest form of lie. Gore's omissions in An Inconvenient Truth are so extraordinary that it is hard to know where to start.

Watching An Inconvenient Truth is more useful for understanding how propaganda is made and used than for understanding the risks of global warming (I am not qualified to judge the scientific evidence here -- I am assuming that Gore's presentation on global warming is sound).

The fundamental lie that Al Gore is telling comes from defining our problem as environmental -- in this case global warming, whereas our environmental problems -- as real and important as they are -- are but a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Gore defines our problem as "what." He is silent on "who." For example, Gore does not ask or answer:

** Who is doing this?

** Who has been governing our planet this way and why?

** Cui bono? Who benefits?

** Who has suppressed alternative technologies resulting in our dependency on fossil fuels? Why?

** Who has generated how much financial capital generated from this damage?

** How did things get this bad without our changing? How much was related to fear of and dirty tricks of those in charge?

** How do we recapture resources that have been criminally drained and use them to invest in restoring environmental balance?

Utah Phillips once said, "The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses." In one sentence, Utah Phillips told us more about global warming than Al Gore has told us in a lifetime of writing and speaking, let alone in An Inconvenient Truth.

Needless to say, Gore offers no names and addresses. Gore's "who" discussion is limited to population. He seems to imply that the issue is the growth in population combined with busy people being shortsighted, leading to some giant incompetency "accident." That makes it easy to avoid digging into the areas that would naturally follow from starting with "who" -- which should lead to dissecting the relationship between environmental deterioration and the prevailing global investment model that is such a critical part of the governance infrastructure and incentive systems.

Gore walks us through timelines showing the global warming of temperatures. By defining the problem as simply environmental damage, and shrinking the history down to temperatures, there is no need to correlate environmental deterioration with the growth of the global financial system and the resulting centralization of economic and political power. The planet is being run by people who are intentionally killing it. Their power is their ability to offer all of us ways of making money by helping them kill it. Hence, understanding how the mechanics of the financial system and the accumulation of financial capital relate to environmental destruction is essential. If we integrate these deeper systems into an historical timeline, authentic solutions will begin to emerge. But Gore omits the deeper systems and the lessons of how we got here and in so doing closes the door on transformation.

For example, there is no place on Gore's time line that shows:

** the creation of the Federal Reserve:

** the movement of currencies away from the gold standard:

** the growth of non-accountable fiat currency systems:

** the growth of consumer, mortgage and government debt;

** the growth in the superior rights of corporations over people and living things;

** the growth of "privatization" (which I call "piratization");

** the subversive and sometimes violent suppression of renewable energy, housing and transportation technologies and innovations;

** the growth of the offshore financial system and the use of that system to launder and accumulate vast sums of pirated capital accumulated through the onshore destruction of communities.

Understanding the fundamental imbalance of the corporate model -- where enterprises have the rights of personhood, but not the finite existence of people or the legal responsibilities and liabilities -- and the corporate model's economic dependence on subsidy that drives up debt, economic warfare and the destruction of all living things is a critical piece to developing actions to reverse environmental damage. Al Gore is a man that has made money for corporations his entire life. He is a member in good standing of the Tapeworm and his current lifestyle and this documentary are rich with the resources that corporations can provide.

There is also no personal accountability. Al Gore has not "come clean." There is no discussion of Gore's role in the Clinton Administration in facilitating worldwide economic centralization and warfare, and with it genocide and environmental destruction -- for example, there is no mention of The Rape Of Russia or the driving out of Washington of an investment model proposing to align places with capital markets to create a win-win economic model that he intimates is possible. For more, see my recently published case study on Tapeworm Economics, and the competition between two economic visions during the Clinton Administration, "Dillon, Read & the Aristocracy of Prison Profits".

The documentary ends with a long list of things that we can do. Many of these items are on my list. We all need to come clean in the process of evolving towards sustainability. However, without a new investment model and the governance changes that automatically follow, the result of An Inconvenient Truth is to teach us to be good consumers of global oil and consumer product corporations and banks and -- we are supposed to intuitively understand -- vote for Al Gore or the candidates he endorses. Gore draws us down a rabbit hole, which leaves us even more dependent on the people and institutions that created and profited from the problem in the first place. What that means is that the real solution will be significant depopulation. The viewer is left to preserve a bit of the shrinking American bubble to protect us from having to face the depopulation solutions underway (See above links on "The Rape Of Russia" and "Dillon, Read & The Aristocracy of Prison Profits".)

The way a tapeworm operates inside our bodies is to inject a chemical into its host that makes it crave what is good for the tapeworm and bad for the host. An Inconvenient Truth is an injection from the Tapeworm. Don't see it and crave a new round of what has not worked before. Things are not hopeless. There is no need to waste time and money adoring and financing the people who are killing the planet, or counting on the politicians who protect them.

To get you started, let me recommend that you take the money and time that you would spend watching An Inconvenient Truth and invest it in reading or watching a few of many authentic leaders with useful maps and solutions that are leading to serious ecosystem healing and transformation:

Mind Control, Mind Freedom By Jon Rappoport

Escaping the Matrix: How We the People Can Change the World By Richard Moore

America: From Freedom to Fascism A documentary by Aaron Russo

Scholars for 9/11 Truth

What The Bleep Do We Know? A documentary by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente

Messages from Water

The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Bill Murphy, Chris Powell

Cynthia McKinney for Congress

Ron Paul for Congress

Can you imagine what these folks could do and what could happen if we all invested 2 hours each and the price of a movie theatre ticket in their work? Can you imagine what would happen if all the money donated to Al Gore and candidates like him were invested in authentic leaders and our access to them? I can -- and the truth and beauty of that future fills my life and work with hope.

Catherine Austin Fitts is President of Solari and may be contacted at www.solari.com
Read more!!