truthout http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/092305EC.shtml
original http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/9/21/17309/6650

Sunrise from the West
By David Hochschild
Grist.org

Wednesday 21 September 2005

The defeat in the California legislature of
the bipartisan Million Solar Roofs bill earlier
this month was a big blow, but the initiative -
and the broader spirit behind it - are carrying
on, says David Hochschild, director of policy at
Vote Solar Initiative, a nonprofit working to
bring solar energy into the mainstream. Here,
Hochschild shares his take in an op-ed written
for Grist®:

Late on the night of Thursday, Sept. 8,
California's Million Solar Roofs bill died when
the California legislature ended the 2005
session. Originally proposed by Governor
Schwarzenegger with bipartisan support in 2004,
the $2.5 billion bill would have created ten
years of incentives to help Californians install
up to one million rooftop solar energy systems on
homes and businesses.

The autopsy report is not long. The blame
falls squarely on the rising political tensions
between the governor and the legislature and on
the inability of various labor interests and
advocates for this bill to reach a fair consensus
that would help reduce the cost of solar energy.

Nevertheless, solar advocates have good
reason for optimism. The California Public
Utilities Commission, which created the nation's
largest solar incentive program in 2001, is
moving to establish the Million Solar Roofs
program on its own. Under California law, the
CPUC has wide authority to enact the key
provisions contained in the failed Million Solar
Roofs bill, the most important of which is the
funding. A final ruling by the CPUC to increase
and expand California's current solar rebate
program for ten years, now funded at $125 million
a year, is expected in the next three months.

CPUC President Michael Peevey, a strong solar
supporter, has been leading this effort. If he is
successful, the majority of Californians will be
grateful. According to a recent Field Poll, 77%
of Californians want the Million Solar Roofs
program implemented.

In the din of America's sensationalist
political culture, it can be easy to lose sight
of why state leadership on renewable energy
matters so much. This summer, just six months
after the Kyoto global warming treaty took effect
with the support of 141 nations, President Bush
signed into law a 1,700-page federal energy bill
chock-full of subsidies for coal and oil. That
America has rejected the only international
protocol intended to fight global warming and
instead adopted an energy policy that
accelerates, rather than alleviates, the problem
is unacceptable.

But by failing to lead in the development of
the clean-energy technologies of tomorrow like
solar power, the US is also sacrificing an
enormous economic leadership opportunity to
countries like Japan. The world's solar industry
today is undergoing changes that are similar to
what happened in television manufacturing over
the last few decades. Once dominated by American
companies like RCA and GE, television
manufacturing was transformed after Japan moved
aggressively to establish itself as the industry
leader. The company names on most television sets
in American households today tell the rest of the
story.

Today, Japan, among other nations, is having
enormous success doing the same thing with solar
energy, another technology born in the United
States. In 1994, the Japanese government
established a solar program similar to the model
California is now considering, with rebates given
to customers who install rooftop solar energy
systems. In just ten years, Japanese solar
companies like Sharp, Kyocera, Mitsubishi, and
Sanyo emerged as the titans of the world's solar
industry and the average cost of a Japanese
residential solar energy system declined by 72%.

That America's economic counterparts are
bringing solar into the mainstream is good news
from an environmental perspective. Largely as a
result of pro-solar policies implemented in Japan
and Germany, the world's solar industry grew by
62% last year, surpassing wind energy to become
the fastest-growing source of energy in the world.

This is encouraging news. But without the
meaningful participation of the United States, it
is unlikely to be enough to make a dent in
climate change. The leading contributor of the
CO2 emissions that cause global warming is
pollution from power plants. And the cost of
solar has to come down another order of magnitude
to make an impact on this problem. The most
important factor determining which nation will
lead the solar revolution in the decade ahead is
not annual sunlight but pro-solar policies. Both
Japan and Germany, which together represent 69%
of the world's solar market, receive only about
two-thirds of the annual sunlight of the United
States. Meanwhile, America, and California in
particular, is the Saudi Arabia of sunlight but
without the right policies to encourage us to
take full advantage of this clean resource.

For the next few years, it seems likely that
renewable energy will remain a national priority
without national leadership. That makes the
pioneering efforts of state governments all the
more important. If California does succeed in
implementing the Million Solar Roofs program this
fall, it will be national victory that can help
America become the political and economic
incubator that brings solar energy into the
mainstream. But whether or not California gets
the job done, the responsibility to keep fighting
for it falls to us all.

-------

(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. t r u t h o u t has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or
sponsored by the originator.)

MannGram: REVERENCE FOR NATURE

Sep 2005

I was struck by this quote within one of the homely daily email bulls:-

Quote for today:
Unless we have a deep awe of the Word we shall never have high joy over it. Our rejoicing will be measured by our reverencing. (Charles Spurgeon)

This strikes me as right on - esp remembering The Word through whom all was created (Jn 1).

But isn't it also interesting to pursue the great English Baptist's point, applied instead to this world? Is there not a sense in which we should have 'deep awe of the world'?

'This world' in the NT often stands for Satan acting thru wicked people; and of course we are instructed not to be of this world in this sense. But what I mean by reverence for this world is due respect for natural ecosystems upon which we depend for our own life and which have intrinsic values that materialism cannot recognise.

Reverence for nature has become trendy from time to time e.g GaiaSpirituality and Noo Eege generally, the 'letter from Chief Seattle' forgery, etc. Most of these modern 'spirituality' efforts have been embarrassingly shallow. But reverence for nature can have far sounder bases.

I would say on reflection:

Go big Chuckie - tell it ter Dawkins.

The best, arguably the only, way to evoke practical caring for this world is by inducing a kind of reverence, and the best examples are found in religion-based management systems. A few millennia of sustainable farming have been achieved in the famous rice terraces of Bali. Gita Mehta's superb historical novel 'Raj' reminds us that some kingdoms of ancient India were pretty stable for a few millennia. By contrast, the overdeveloped nations today worship Mammon shamelessly, causing unprecedented harm.

Reverence is of course not the same as worship. You don't have to be a pantheist, or even a panentheist, to revere the only biosphere we know of. Christian scientists such as John Morton have respected the natural created world enough to learn more about it than recent graduates can know; to describe ecosystems in reverent detail; and to advocate for conservation e.g against filling-in Ngataringa Bay, logging Whirinaki forest, etc. The dismal point is that Christian conservationists like Mort have remained rare. The church has disgracefully neglected care for Creation.

Nature includes also of course the tool-making, oh-so-clever ape about which the Creator particularly cares. Christ's atonement is primarily for us humans. But in the (neglected) Millennium a perfected world is to enjoy Christ as we now cannot. The joy in the Word during the Millennium is - on my analysis - to be correlated with, and I suppose to some extent earned by, our reverencing of the only biosphere we know of, the garden we are wrecking.

Some recent sects concentrate on personal salvation (& sometimes prosperity) without regard to the limits of the planet to provide resources or to absorb pollutants. One forthright follower of Christ recently mocked Mort's saving of Ngataringa Bay - "a few more snails wouldn't matter". Care for creation is a very low-rank dimension of work in my diocese. Asst bp Randers was a member of Eichers' Royal Commission on GM but was unable to prevent grossly unfair procedures, and showed little interest in the ethics for which he was appointed as expert.

The modern, science-based era in conservation dates from the Manapouri campaign in NZ, and globally from Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' (1962). 1972 was the annus mirabilis of this movement. The NZ Values Party, primarily conservationist, in the 1975 general FPP election, 5.2% of votes. Gwen Struik got 10% in Nelson. Now, in the mischievous German-type MMP electoral system, the NZ Green party struggles to keep above the generous 5% threshold. In many ways, the conservation movement has been not only failing to make progress but even losing ground.

I'm socking this MannGram to many believers, but also some old friends who've persisted in atheism.

How can we expect people to take due care of the biosphere? The record of godless communism was even bleaker than that of our side in the military-industrial competition. The Nash/Marshall attempt to implement Christian ethics in a mixed economy thru a secular legal system created, briefly, the finest modern civilisation; but that depended crucially on some threshold of Christianity in the private lives of the citizens. We slid below that threshold - somewheres in the 1960s I suspect. Western civilisation has been on an increasingly steep downward slide for 4 decades now. I doubt reversal of decay can be achieved on materialist grounds which have never sufficed. It is up to the church to lead the revival.

The little-known attempt by Rev Lt H Williams & northern chiefs to create a theocracy, expressed partially in the 1835 declaration, was abandoned when Henry had seen (Jan 1840) what the Wakefield wide-boys were doing around Cook Strait. Reluctantly, the CMS had to accept that a rule of law based on Christian ethics was not politically available to New Zealand except by incorporation into the British Empire (as requested by important chiefs for decades already; which the CMS had been trying to avoid). The 1840 declaration therefore superseded the 1835 announcement (which BTW is nevertheless recently revived for claimant purposes by stupid lesbians claiming the Manukau Harbour with persistent help from Ms H Fletcher CJ).

If applied ecology is to become dominant in politics - the hopeful cause since 1972 - the only practical hope for our governance is to reinforce the monarchy and in particular the heir who not only advocates but notably practises at Highgrove top-quality organic agriculture. He, and his most noble mother, are devout Christians. Supporting this royal family within the proven constitutional monarchy would seem the only sensible way to go.

But instead, the Green party has become republican. They wish to overthrow the monarchy. Their "co"leader Rod Donald makes oafish remarks about the Queen. (Their actual leader is cunning enough to leave this dirty role to him.) The Maori they at last found to replace Sue Bradford as their spokesman on Maori affairs, Ms Metiria 'innocent girl' Turei, delivered a seditious maiden speech in Parlt. She has just got back into Parlt ahead of Tandoori on account he can't cope with a child in his idea of a domestic arrangement for bringing up children. Their party is more preoccupied with propagandising for sexual deviance and racism than for applied ecology.

I agree with Garth George that political parties claiming to represent Christianity should be disbanded. The Nash/Marshall era must be regained amidst a wider exploration of means for the church to influence politics in every party and outside them. Islam is influencing NZ politics, with the help of "green" communist list-MP Keith Locke. How is Christianity to recover vigour as the moral leader in New Zealand?

As I said a few y ago: I interpret the downward slide of civilisation over the past few decades as evidence that the attempt to maintain a system of ethics & law based historically & logically in Christianity is doomed if the religion which gave rise to it is not suitably active in its continuance. Theocracy is not advocated by anyone I know; but what other church/state arrangements looks feasible & desirable? An upper house of Parlt, with formal church representation, has been tried in the UK for quite a while, and Blair's disdain for it is no final word on the general idea. When was it last looked into?

Anyhow let us take every opportunity of reaffirming the Parltry prayer as a statement of national values.

Almighty God
Humbly acknowledging our need for Thy guidance in all things, and laying aside all private & personal interests, we beseech Thee to grant that we may conduct the affairs of this house and of our country to the glory of Thy holy name, the maintenance of true religion & justice, the honour of the Queen, and the public welfare, peace & tranquility of New Zealand; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen

R.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=57&ItemID=8777

A World Turned Upside Down

The corporations are demanding regulation, and the government is
refusing to give it to them
by George Monbiot

September 20, 2005

Climate change denial has gone through four stages. First the fossil
fuel lobbyists told us that global warming was a myth. Then they
agreed that it was happening, but insisted it was a good thing: we
could grow wine in the Pennines and take Mediterranean holidays in
Skegness. Then they admitted that the bad effects outweighed the
good ones, but claimed that it would cost more to tackle than to
tolerate. Now they have reached stage 4. They concede that it would
be cheaper to address than to neglect, but maintain that it's now too
late. This is their most persuasive argument.

Today the climatologists at the Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado
will publish the results of the latest satellite survey of Arctic sea
ice(1). It looks as if this month's coverage will be the lowest ever
recorded. The Arctic, they warn, could already have reached tipping
point: the moment beyond which the warming becomes irreversible(2).
As ice disappears, the surface of the sea becomes darker, absorbing
more heat. Less ice forms, so the sea becomes darker still, and so
it goes on.

Last month, New Scientist reported that something similar is
happening in Siberia. For the first time on record, the permafrost
of western Siberia is melting(3). As it does so, it releases the
methane stored in the peat. Methane has 20 times the greenhouse
warming effect of carbon dioxide. The more gas the peat releases, the
warmer the world becomes, and the more the permafrost melts.

Two weeks ago, scientists at Cranfield University discovered that the
soils in the UK have been losing the carbon they contain: as
temperatures rise, the decomposition of organic matter accelarates,
which causes more warming, which causes more decomposition. Already
the soil in this country has released enough carbon dioxide to
counteract the emissions cuts we have made since 1990(4).

These are examples of positive feedback: self-reinforcing effects
which, once started, are hard to stop. They are kicking in long
before they were supposed to. The intergovernmental panel on climate
change, which predicts how far the world's temperature is likely to
rise, hasn't yet had time to include them in its calculations. The
current forecast - of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees this century - is almost
certainly too low.

A week ago, I would have said that if it is too late, then one factor
above all others is to blame: the chokehold big business has on
economic policy. By forbidding governments to intervene effectively
in the market, the corporations oblige us to do nothing but stand by
and watch as the planet cooks. But on Wednesday I discovered that it
isn't quite that simple. At a conference organised by the Building
Research Establishment, I witnessed an extraordinary thing: companies
demanding tougher regulations, and the government refusing to grant
them(5).

Environmental managers from BT and John Lewis (which owns Waitrose)
complained that without tighter standards that everyone has to
conform to, their companies put themselves at a disadvantage if they
try to go green. "All that counts", the man from John Lewis said,
"is cost, cost and cost." If he's buying eco-friendly lighting and
his competitors aren't, he loses. As a result, he said, "I welcome
the EU's Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, as it will force
retailers to take these issues seriously."(6) Yes, I heard the cry
of the unicorn: a corporate executive, welcoming a European directive.

And from the government? Nothing. Elliot Morley, the minister for
climate change, proposed to do as little as he could get away with.
The officials from the Department of Trade and Industry, to a
collective groan from the men in suits, insisted that the measures
some of the companies wanted would be "an unwarranted intervention in
the market".

It was unspeakably frustrating. The suits had come to unveil
technologies of the kind which really could save the planet. The
architects Atelier Ten had designed a cooling system based on the
galleries of a termite mound. By installing a concrete labyrinth in
the foundations, they could keep even a large building in a hot place
- like the arts centre they had built in Melbourne - at a constant
temperature without air conditioning(7). The only power they needed
was to drive the fans pushing the cold air upwards, using 10% of the
electricity required for normal cooling systems.

The man from a company called PB Power explained how the 4 megawatts
of waste heat poured into the Thames by the gas-fired power station
in Barking could be used to warm the surrounding homes. A firm called
XCO2 has designed a virtually silent wind turbine, which hangs, like
a clothes hoist, from a vertical axis. It can be installed in the
middle of a city without upsetting anyone(.

These three technologies alone could cut millions of tonnes of
emissions without causing any decline in our quality of life. Like
hundreds of others, they are ready to deploy immediately and almost
universally. But they won't be widely used until the government acts:
it remains cheaper for companies to install the old technologies. And
the government won't act because to do so would be "an unwarranted
intervention in the market".

This was not, I now discover, the first time that the corporations
have demanded regulation. In January the chairman of Shell, Lord
Oxburgh, insisted that "Governments in developed countries need to
introduce taxes, regulations or plans ... to increase the cost of
emitting carbon dioxide."(9) He listed the technologies required to
replace fossil fuels, and remarked that "none of this is going to
happen if the market is left to itself." In August the heads of
United Utilities, British Gas, Scottish Power and the National Grid
joined Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace in calling for "tougher
regulations for the built environment"(10).

So much for the perpetual demand of the thinktanks to "get government
off the backs of business". Any firm which wants to develop the new
technologies wants tough new rules. It is regulation that creates the
market.

So why won't the government act? Because it is siding with the dirty
companies against the clean ones. Deregulation has become the test of
its manhood: the sign that it has put the bad old days of economic
planning behind it. Sir David Arculus, the man appointed by Blair to
run the government's Better Regulation Task Force, is also deputy
chairman of the Confederation of British Industry, the shrillest
exponents of the need to put the market ahead of society. It is hard
to think of a more blatant conflict of interest.

I don't believe it is yet too late to minimise climate change. Most
of the evidence suggests we could still stop the ecosystem from
melting down, but only by cutting greenhouse gases by around 80% by
2030. I'm working on a book showing how this can be done, technically
and politically. But it has now become clear to me that the obstacle
is not the market but the government, waving a dog-eared treatise
which proves some point in a debate the rest of the world has
forgotten.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. This was reported by Steve Connor, 16th September 2005. Global
warming 'past the point of no return'. The Independent. But the
centre has just announced that its results won't be published until
the end of the month. http://nsidc.org/news/

2. Steve Connor, ibid.

3. Fred Pearce, 11 August 2005. Climate warning as Siberia melts. New
Scientist.

4. John Pickrell, 7th September 2005. Soil may spoil UK's climate
efforts. New Scientist.

5. Resource '05, 13th-15th September 2005. BRE, Watford.

6. Bill Wright, energy and environment manager, John Lewis Partnership.

7. See http://www.atelierten.com/ourwork/profiles/0513-federation-square.pdf

8. Quiet Revolution 6kW. Brochure from XCO2. Offord St, London.

9. Lord Oxburgh, 27th January 2005. Quoted in Greenpeace press
release: Shell Chair urges government to act now on climate change.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/climate.cfm?ucidparam=20050210110220

10. Tony Juniper et al, 1st August 2005. Letter to Margaret Beckett
and other ministers. Available on request from Friends of the Earth.
--
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949
http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm

Bay Conservation Group Formed by Three Berkeley, California Women Hits 40

September 14, 2005 — By Denis Cuff, Contra Costa Times

BERKELEY, Calif. — Sylvia McLaughlin didn't need to look far from her living room window in the early 1960s to see that the Bay Area was losing its most scenic asset, the San Francisco Bay.

Trucks piled rocks and earth in the water to create several square miles of new land each year.

Garbage landfills on filled marshes caught fire and glowed red at night, reinforcing the image of the shoreline as a place to dump rather than recreate.

Berkeley proposed to double its size with a fill project, just one of several large ones in the Bay.

"This Bay is a national treasure, yet we were losing it," said McLaughlin, now 88, the wife of a mining company executive. "Our Bay was in danger of becoming a river. We decided something had to be done."

At a series of gatherings over tea, she and two other homemakers, Katherine Kerr and Esther Gulick, decided to organize.

Against all odds, the tea ladies of Berkeley ignited a pioneering environmental movement that helped change the way California and other states protect their shorelines.

They struck alliances with a business-friendly state senator, a wise-cracking radio DJ and thousands of letter-writing supporters to get state lawmakers to create the first regional commission in the nation to regulate shoreline development.

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, known as BCDC, celebrates its 40th anniversary Saturday.

The agency keeps a low profile these days, but it has left a big imprint.

It stopped the shrinking of the Bay, which by 1965 had lost about a third of its 787 square miles of surface area.

Since then, 13 square miles of diked land has been added back through environmental restoration projects.

The commission also opened the door for public access to the shoreline.

Four decades ago, all but four miles of shoreline was locked away from the public. Now more than 300 miles of shore is accessible through parks, trails and visitor use areas.

"The Bay would not look like it does today if not for these three wonderful ladies from the East Bay," said Joe Bodovitz, the first chief executive of the Bay commission who later served as chief executive for the California Coastal Commission, an agency modeled on the Bay commission.

"It's remarkable they succeeded," Bodovitz said. "It took perseverance, good fortune and a lot of unsung heroes."

McLaughlin and her friends took on powerful developers, investors and local leaders who viewed filling the Bay as a way to create new homes, businesses and tax revenues.

The women were disturbed nobody was tracking the cumulative impact of many fill projects virtually unregulated by the state.

California even aided the initial rush to fill the Bay.

In the 1850s, California sold underwater land by San Francisco to raise money for the new state government.

Much of San Francisco's financial district is built on fill, as is much of northern Contra Costa's industrial lands.

In the 1960s, developers sought to accelerate filling.

"I think the attitude all over the country at that time was that your bays and your marshes were dumping grounds. It was progress to fill them," McLaughlin said in an interview in her Berkeley home.

The Bay, about 14 feet deep on average, was a ripe target.

In 1959, the federal Army Corps of Engineers issued a report suggesting it was feasible to fill about 70 percent of the Bay.

One project, known as the Westbay development, called for lopping off the top of San Bruno Mountain to fill miles of Bay from San Mateo to Palo Alto. The plan also called for a new freeway. Bay supporters were appalled.

McLaughlin, wife of a UC Board of Regents member; Kerr, the wife of UC president Clark Kerr; and Gulick, the wife of an economics professor, called a meeting in Gulick's house on Grizzly Peak Road.

Conservation leaders who attended advised the woman to form a group, and get a state law passed.

"They told us what needed to be done and said, 'Good luck,'" McLaughlin recalled. "They were too busy saving the redwoods and saving the wilderness."

In 1961, the three woman formed the environmental group Save the Bay and signed up members for $1 a piece. They also recruited high-profile community leaders to serve on an advisory committee.

In 1964, Berkeley leaders scuttled their fill plan.

Save the Bay stepped up pressure to save the entire Bay with a state law.

They enlisted state Sen. Eugene McAteer of San Francisco, a war hero friendly to businesses, to lead the charge.

They also cornered scientists whose research suggested filling the Bay threatened to harm fisheries, increase smog and warm up the Bay climate.

The Legislature agreed to create a commission to look into the Bay's problems.

But when McAteer in 1965 proposed a bill to set up a 27-member commission to regulate Bay filling, developers resisted fiercely.

Builders argued that stopping filling would cripple the Bay Area economy.

Save the Bay supporters traveled to Sacramento hearings in buses and sent lawmakers sacks of dirt and sand with notes that read, "You'll wonder where the water went if you fill the Bay with sediment."

McAteer persuaded KSFO radio show host Don Sherwood to join the cause.

Sherwood, known for wacky jokes, rallied his morning listeners to write legislators. He chatted on air with McAteer about progress on the commission bill, named the McAteer-Petris Act, and once awakened Gov. Pat Brown with a call at home to talk on air about the bill.

The Bay commission bill squeaked by on a 6-5 vote.

The Legislature passed the bill, creating the commission and empowering it to regulate filling.

Another heated battle followed in 1969 before Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a bill to make the commission permanent. The bill affirmed commission authority to bar filling unless the public benefits of a project outweighed the environmental damage.

The regulation did not choke the economy, as some had predicted.

John Briscoe, a San Francisco attorney who represents shoreline property owners, said preserving the Bay was crucial to attracting workers and companies to the region.

"Without the Bay, this would be a much drearier place to do business," Briscoe said. "There are gripes (the commission's) permit process is to cumbersome, but overall, they have been good for the region."

These days, the trio that started the movement has handed off the torch.

Gulick has died. Kerr lives quietly in the East Bay hills.

McLaughlin has retired from the Save the Bay board, but she still is busy promoting shoreline parks and other Bay causes.

The Bay still faces threats from pollution, water pumping, invasive species and global warming, she said.

Pressures to fill the bay will pop up again as the state grows, she predicted.

"I think we showed citizens can make a difference in protecting the environment," McLaughlin said. "But we have to remain vigilant because there will always be a need to save the Bay."

SAVING THE BAY:

--1959: U.S. Army Corps of Engineer report suggests 70 percent of San Francisco Bay could be filled.

--1961: Save the Bay group founded.

--1964: Berkeley scuttles plans to double its size through Bay fill

--1964: California Legislature approves study commission to examine Bay fill problems.

--1965: Legislature passes McAteer-Petris Act to create Bay Conservation and Development Commission and put a moratorium on Bay fill.

--1969: Legislature makes commission permanent and empowers it to regulate development in 100-foot-wide shoreline ban, and to require public access to shoreline.

--1995: Gov. Pete Wilson proposes to strip Bay commission of funding, but drops plan after businesses and environmentalists protest.

To see more of the Contra Costa Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.bayarea.com.

Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Dear Shareholder

For your interest, below is a copy of a media release which we issued today:

INSURERS TO PAY FOR WINDFLOW TURBINE DAMAGE

Windflow Technology's insurers will pay the full cost of reinstating its prototype turbine that was severely damaged by a freak wind shift in March. Insurers NZI are processing a progress payment of $395,000, and Windflow expects the final cost of reinstatement to exceed $500,000.

"Our insurer's decision is independent confirmation that a primary cause of failure was the extreme wind shift," said Windflow's Chief Executive Officer Geoff Henderson. "This decision is good news both technically and financially."

The company recognises that the wind shift which happened once, could happen again. "Consequently, we've redesigned our control system and made the joint that failed more robust, so that our turbine will survive similar freak conditions," Mr Henderson said. "We have not increased the weight of the turbine in solving the problem, so we still retain our competitive advantages over imported turbines."

Windflow has erected its redesigned prototype and is commissioning the new control system before recommencing its international testing and certification programme.

"We're back on track to complete the first turbines for the Te Rere Hau wind farm this summer," Mr Henderson said.

The Company's wholly owned subsidiary, NZ Windfarms has a resource consent to place 97 Windflow turbines on the Te Rere Hau wind farm near Palmerston North, and intends to release its Initial Public Offering later this year.

For further information please refer to the Company's Annual Report to June 2005 which was released today to the NZAX and is available on our website at http://www.windflow.co.nz/investorRelations/financialReports.html or contact:

Tim Armitage
tim@armi.co.nz
Phone 03 365 8960 ext 110

This man is now on the staff at Cal after some v
good writing on The New Yorker.

I think highly of him as a sc writer.

You'll notice near the end he mentions the
dreaded 'hi-fructose syrup' which you asked
about. I still think fructose is much less
harmful to the human than sucrose (the main sugar
of commerce, made from sugar cane or sugar beet).
But I can see I'll have to look into it.

R

http://www.newfarm.org/features/2005/0805/pollen/index.shtml

King Corn

The Paul Revere of industrial agriculture sounds the
alarm, but this time the invading enemy is not the
Redcoats, it’s that tassel-waving, husk-cloaked
“monstrous mutant grass Zea mays."

A speech by Michael Pollan

"Corn is, in America today, our biggest cash crop.
Actually in terms of cash, marijuana is a little bit
bigger - It’s our biggest legal cash crop. It now
covers an area of 80 million acres; that’s an area
twice the size of New York State. It’s vast. This huge
monoculture is covering most of the middle West and a
lot of the rest of the country like a second great
American lawn.

Who’d have thought it really? I mean,
this was of course the plant of the conquered people.
You would have guessed after 1492 that this plant,
like the people who grew it, would have been crushed.
But in fact, the conquered people’s plant has
conquered the conquerors. And I think it’s…the first
big irony about corn. From its humble beginnings in
Southern Mexico it has insinuated itself into our
landscapes, into our food system, into our government,
into our economy, and into our bodies."

"If you are what you eat, and especially but not
exclusively if you eat industrial food, like as we
understand 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is
corn. That carbon in your body, is corn upon corn upon
corn. All these products, as different as they appear,
consist of carbon that was fixed in a cornfield. The
sweetener in the soda, the meat in the Big Mac, but
also the corn syrup in the bread in the Big Mac and
the secret sauce which also has high fructose corn
syrup, that Slim Jim if you read the ingredients, is
full of high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, corn
starch, a great many additives, and the Lunchables
meal, for all of its four different fuels, all four of
them are essentially corn based. Even the French fries
are made from potatoes, it’s true, but odds are
they’re fried in corn oil, and that’s where 50 percent
of the calories in a McDonald’s box of French fries
come from, is the oil. So even there you’re getting
corn. Even in the salads at McDonald’s, you’re getting
corn…They’re full of high fructose corn syrup and
various thickeners that are made from corn. This is
not just an assertion, or it’s an assertion that’s
susceptible to scientific proof."

======

You can blow out a candle,
but you can't blow out a fire.
Once the flame begins to catch,
the wind will blow it higher.

-Peter Gabriel

http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com/ Haciendo Punto en Otro Blog
http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/ PROYECTO DE BIOSEGURIDAD

IMPORTANT ALERT TO CALIFORNIANS!

Last year, Mendocino County California became the first county in the U.S.
to ban genetically engineered (GE) crops. Since then, two more California
counties and two cities have followed Mendocino's example, starting a
domino-effect of similar anti-GE ordinances across the nation. Fearing the
contagious spread of BioDemocracy in North America, the Biotech Bullies are
striking back. In the past several months, 14 U.S. states, prodded by
Monsanto and the Farm Bureau, have made it illegal for local communities to
ban GE crops. Two recently introduced bills (AB 1508 and SB 1056) in the
California legislature would make California the 15th state to eliminate
local communities' rights to ban or otherwise regulate genetically
engineered seeds. This "preemption" bill would overturn GE-Free
victories in Mendocino, Trinity, and Marin counties, as well as the cities
of Arcata and Point Arena, and prohibit local communities from banning or
regulating genetically engineered crops in the future. Take action today
to stop the Biotech Bullies from taking away our democratic rights in
California!

http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/oca/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1139(
Sierra Club's Genetic Engineering Committee agrees with this action.)

PESTICIDES SPAWNING SUPERWEEDS

http://www.researchinformation.co.uk/pest/contents/01-Contents%20Aug%202005.pdf
study in the recent issue of the journal Outlooks on Pesticide Management
reports that there are now 15 weed species that have complete resistance
to the world's most widely used herbicide, Monsanto's glyphosate.
Researchers say most of these "superweeds" have developed resistance over
time, due to long-term overuse of the chemical. Glyphosate, most commonly
applied as Monsanto's Roundup, has been in heavy use globally for over
30 years. The study warns these superweeds pose "serious" problems to
farmers if new control strategies are not developed. Of course the best way
to avoid spawning superweeds is to ban genetically engineered crops and to
adopt organic farming practices.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/superweed081905.cfm

from a South African publication.

The Breaking Point

By Peter Maass

August 21, 2005

The largest oil terminal in the world, Ras Tanura, is located on the
eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, along the Persian Gulf. From Ras
Tanura's control tower, you can see the classic totems of oil's
dominion -- supertankers coming and going, row upon row of storage
tanks and miles and miles of pipes. Ras Tanura, which I visited in
June, is the funnel through which nearly 10 percent of the world's
daily supply of petroleum flows. Standing in the control tower, you
are surrounded by more than 50 million barrels of oil, yet not a drop
can be seen.

The oil is there, of course. In a technological sleight of hand, oil
can be extracted from the deserts of Arabia, processed to get rid of
water and gas, sent through pipelines to a terminal on the gulf,
loaded onto a supertanker and shipped to a port thousands of miles
away, then run through a refinery and poured into a tanker truck that
delivers it to a suburban gas station, where it is pumped into an
S.U.V. -- all without anyone's actually glimpsing the stuff. So long
as there is enough oil to fuel the global economy, it is not only out
of sight but also out of mind, at least for consumers.

I visited Ras Tanura because oil is no longer out of mind, thanks to
record prices caused by refinery shortages and surging demand -- most
notably in the United States and China -- which has strained the
capacity of oil producers and especially Saudi Arabia, the largest
exporter of all. Unlike the 1973 crisis, when the embargo by the Arab
members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries created
an artificial shortfall, today's shortage, or near-shortage, is real.
If demand surges even more, or if a producer goes offline because of
unrest or terrorism, there may suddenly not be enough oil to go
around.

As Aref al-Ali, my escort from Saudi Aramco, the giant state-owned oil
company, pointed out, "One mistake at Ras Tanura today, and the price
of oil will go up." This has turned the port into a fortress; its
entrances have an array of gates and bomb barriers to prevent
terrorists from cutting off the black oxygen that the modern world
depends on. Yet the problem is far greater than the brief havoc that
could be wrought by a speeding zealot with 50 pounds of TNT in the
trunk of his car. Concerns are being voiced by some oil experts that
Saudi Arabia and other producers may, in the near future, be unable to
meet rising world demand. The producers are not running out of oil,
not yet, but their decades-old reservoirs are not as full and
geologically spry as they used to be, and they may be incapable of
producing, on a daily basis, the increasing volumes of oil that the
world requires. "One thing is clear," warns Chevron, the
second-largest American oil company, in a series of new
advertisements, "the era of easy oil is over."

In the past several years, the gap between demand and supply, once
considerable, has steadily narrowed, and today is almost negligible.
The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If
consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the
price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels. This, in
turn, could bring on a global recession, a result of exorbitant prices
for transport fuels and for products that rely on petrochemicals --
which is to say, almost every product on the market. The impact on the
American way of life would be profound: cars cannot be propelled by
roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban lifestyles, hinged to
two-car families and constant trips to work, school and Wal-Mart,
might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is imposed, impossible.
Carpools would be the least imposing of many inconveniences; the cost
of home heating would soar -- assuming, of course, that
climate-controlled habitats do not become just a fond memory.

But will such a situation really come to pass? That depends on Saudi
Arabia. To know the answer, you need to know whether the Saudis, who
possess 22 percent of the world's oil reserves, can increase their
country's output beyond its current limit of 10.5 million barrels a
day, and even beyond the 12.5-million-barrel target it has set for
2009. (World consumption is about 84 million barrels a day.) Saudi
Arabia is the sole oil superpower. No other producer possesses
reserves close to its 263 billion barrels, which is almost twice as
much as the runner-up, Iran, with 133 billion barrels. New fields in
other countries are discovered now and then, but they tend to offer
only small increments. For example, the much-contested and
as-yet-unexploited reserves in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge are
believed to amount to about 10 billion barrels, or just a fraction of
what the Saudis possess.

But the truth about Saudi oil is hard to figure out. Oil reservoirs
cannot be inventoried like wood in a wilderness: the oil is
underground, unseen by geologists and engineers, who can, at best,
make highly educated guesses about how much is underfoot and how much
can be extracted in the future. And there is a further obstacle: the
Saudis will not let outsiders audit their confidential data on
reserves and production. Oil is an industry in which not only is the
product hidden from sight but so is reliable information about it. And
because we do not know when a supply-demand shortfall might arrive, we
do not know when to begin preparing for it, so as to soften its
impact; the economic blow may come as a sledgehammer from the
darkness.

Of course the Saudis do have something to say about this prospect.
Before journeying to the kingdom, I went to Washington to hear the
Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, speak at an energy conference in the
mammoth Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, not far
from the White House. Naimi was the star attraction at a gathering of
the American petro-political nexus. Samuel Bodman, the U.S. energy
secretary, was on the dais next to him. David O'Reilly, chairman and
C.E.O. of Chevron, was waiting in the wings. The moderator was an
éminence grise of the oil world, James Schlesinger, a former energy
secretary, defense secretary and C.I.A. director.

"I want to assure you here today that Saudi Arabia's reserves are
plentiful, and we stand ready to increase output as the market
dictates," said Naimi, dressed in a gray business suit and speaking
with only a slight Arabic accent. He addressed skeptics who contend
that Saudi reservoirs cannot be tapped for larger amounts of oil. "I
am quite bullish on technology as the key to our energy future," he
said. "Technological innovation will allow us to find and extract more
oil around the world." He described the task of increasing output as
just "a question of investment" in new wells and pipelines, and he
noted that consuming nations urgently need to build new refineries to
process increased supplies of crude. "There is absolutely no lack of
resources worldwide," he repeated.

His assurances did not assure. A barrel of oil cost $55 at the time of
his speech; less than three months later, the price had jumped by 20
percent. The truth of the matter -- whether the world will really have
enough petroleum in the years ahead -- was as well concealed as the
millions of barrels of oil I couldn't see at Ras Tanura.

For 31 years, Matthew Simmons has prospered as the head of his own
firm, Simmons & Company International, which advises energy companies
on mergers and acquisitions. A member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, a graduate of the Harvard Business School and an unpaid
adviser on energy policy to the 2000 presidential campaign of George
W. Bush, he would be a card-carrying member of the global oil
nomenclatura, if cards were issued for such things. Yet he is one of
the principal reasons the oil world is beginning to ask hard questions
of itself.

Two years ago, Simmons went to Saudi Arabia on a government tour for
business executives. The group was presented with the usual
dog-and-pony show, but instead of being impressed, as most visitors
tend to be, with the size and expertise of the Saudi oil industry,
Simmons became perplexed. As he recalls in his somewhat heretical new
book, "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the
World Economy," a senior manager at Aramco told the visitors that
"fuzzy logic" would be used to estimate the amount of oil that could
be recovered. Simmons had never heard of fuzzy logic. What could be
fuzzy about an oil reservoir? He suspected that Aramco, despite its
promises of endless supplies, might in fact not know how much oil
remained to be recovered.

Simmons returned home with an itch to scratch. Saudi Arabia was one of
the charter members of OPEC, founded in 1960 in Baghdad to coordinate
the policies of oil producers. Like every OPEC country, Saudi Arabia
provides only general numbers about its output and reserves; it does
not release details about how much oil is extracted from each
reservoir and what methods are used to extract that oil, and it does
not permit audits by outsiders. The condition of Saudi fields, and
those of other OPEC nations, is a closely guarded secret. That's
largely because OPEC quotas, which were first imposed in 1983 to limit
the output of member countries, were based on overall reserves; the
higher an OPEC member's reserves, the higher its quota. It is widely
believed that most, if not all, OPEC members exaggerated the sizes of
their reserves in order to have the largest possible quota -- and thus
the largest possible revenue stream.

In the days of excess supply, bankers like Simmons did not know, or
care, about the fudging; whether or not reserves were hyped, there was
plenty of oil coming out of the ground. Through the 1970's, 80's and
90's, the capacity of OPEC and non-OPEC countries exceeded demand, and
that's why OPEC imposed a quota system -- to keep some product off the
market (although many OPEC members, seeking as much revenue as
possible, quietly sold more oil than they were supposed to). Until
quite recently, the only reason to fear a shortage was if a boycott,
war or strike were to halt supplies. Few people imagined a time when
supply would dry up because of demand alone. But a steady surge in
demand in recent years -- led by China's emergence as a voracious
importer of oil -- has changed that.

This demand-driven scarcity has prompted the emergence of a cottage
industry of experts who predict an impending crisis that will dwarf
anything seen before. Their point is not that we are running out of
oil, per se; although as much as half of the world's recoverable
reserves are estimated to have been consumed, about a trillion barrels
remain underground. Rather, they are concerned with what is called
"capacity" -- the amount of oil that can be pumped to the surface on a
daily basis. These experts -- still a minority in the oil world --
contend that because of the peculiarities of geology and the limits of
modern technology, it will soon be impossible for the world's
reservoirs to surrender enough oil to meet daily demand.

One of the starkest warnings came in a February report commissioned by
the United States Department of Energy's National Energy Technology
Laboratory. "Because oil prices have been relatively high for the past
decade, oil companies have conducted extensive exploration over that
period, but their results have been disappointing," stated the report,
assembled by Science Applications International, a research company
that works on security and energy issues.

That corporation is notoriously crooked, I can assure you.
This doesn't mean they're wrong on this particular point;
but you shouldn't take their word for it (or for anything else,
absent independent confirmation). - RM

"If recent trends hold, there is little reason to expect that exploration
success will dramatically improve in the future. . . .
The image is one of a world moving from a long period in which
reserves additions were much greater than consumption to an era
in which annual additions are falling increasingly short of annual consumption.
This is but one of a number of trends that
suggest the world is fast approaching the
inevitable peaking of conventional world oil production."

The reference to "peaking" is not a haphazard word choice -- "peaking"
is a term used in oil geology to define the critical point at which
reservoirs can no longer produce increasing amounts of oil. (This
tends to happen when reservoirs are about half-empty.) "Peak oil" is
the point at which maximum production is reached; afterward, no matter
how many wells are drilled in a country, production begins to decline.
Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members may have enough oil to last for
generations, but that is no longer the issue. The eventual and painful
shift to different sources of energy -- the start of the post-oil age
-- does not begin when the last drop of oil is sucked from under the
Arabian desert. It begins when producers are unable to continue
increasing their output to meet rising demand. Crunch time comes long
before the last drop.

"The world has never faced a problem like this," the report for the
Energy Department concluded. "Without massive mitigation more than a
decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be
temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil)
were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and
revolutionary."

Most experts do not share Simmons's concerns about the imminence of
peak oil. One of the industry's most prominent consultants, Daniel
Yergin, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about petroleum,
dismisses the doomsday visions. "This is not the first time that the
world has 'run out of oil,"' he wrote in a recent Washington Post
opinion essay. "It's more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and
surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry." Yergin
says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will
increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological
advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from
existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today's technology, only about
40 percent of a reservoir's oil can be pumped to the surface.)

Yergin's bullish view has something in common with the views of the
pessimists -- it rests on unknowns. Will the new projects that are
under way yield as much oil as their financial backers hope? Will new
technologies increase recovery rates as much as he expects? These
questions are next to impossible to answer because coaxing oil out of
the ground is an extraordinarily complex undertaking. The popular
notion of reservoirs as underground lakes, from which wells extract
oil like straws sucking a milkshake from a glass, is incorrect. Oil
exists in drops between and inside porous rocks. A new reservoir may
contain sufficient pressure to make these drops of oil flow to the
surface in a gusher, but after a while -- usually within a few years
and often sooner than that -- natural pressure lets up and is no
longer sufficient to push oil to the surface. At that point,
"secondary" recovery efforts are begun, like pumping water or gas into
the reservoirs to increase the pressure.

This process is unpredictable; reservoirs are extremely temperamental.
If too much oil is extracted too quickly or if the wrong types or
amounts of secondary efforts are employed, the amount of oil that can
be recovered from a field can be greatly reduced; this is known in the
oil world as "damaging a reservoir." A widely cited example is Oman:
in 2001, its daily production reached more than 960,000 barrels, but
then suddenly declined, despite the use of advanced technologies.
Today, Oman produces 785,000 barrels of oil a day. Herman Franssen, a
consultant who worked in Oman for a decade, sees that country's
experience as a possible lesson in the limits of technology for other
producers that try to increase or maintain high levels of output.
"They reached a million barrels a day, and then a few years later
production collapsed," Franssen said in a phone interview. "They used
all these new technologies, but they haven't been able to stop the
decline yet."

The vague production and reserve data that gets published does not
begin to tell the whole story of an oil field's health, production
potential or even its size. For a clear-as-possible picture of a
country's oil situation, you need to know what is happening in each
field -- how many wells it has, how much oil each well is producing,
what recovery methods are being used and how long they've been used
and the trend line since the field went into production. Data of that
sort are typically not released by state-owned companies like Saudi
Aramco.

As Matthew Simmons searched for clues to the truth of the Saudi
situation, he immersed himself in the minutiae of oil geology. He
realized that data about Saudi fields might be found in the files of
the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Oil engineers, like most
professional groups, have regular conferences at which they discuss
papers that delve into the work they do. The papers, which focus on
particular wells that highlight a problem or a solution to a problem,
are presented and debated at the conferences and published by the
S.P.E. -- and then forgotten.

Before Simmons poked around, no one had taken the time to pull
together the S.P.E. papers that involved Saudi oil fields and review
them en masse. Simmons found more than 200 such papers and studied
them carefully. Although the papers cover only a portion of the
kingdom's wells and date back, in some cases, several decades, they
constitute perhaps the best public data about the condition and
prospects of Saudi reservoirs.

Ghawar is the treasure of the Saudi treasure chest. It is the largest
oil field in the world and has produced, in the past 50 years, about
55 billion barrels of oil, which amounts to more than half of Saudi
production in that period. The field currently produces more than five
million barrels a day, which is about half of the kingdom's output. If
Ghawar is facing problems, then so is Saudi Arabia and, indeed, the
entire world.

Simmons found that the Saudis are using increasingly large amounts of
water to force oil out of Ghawar. Most of the wells are concentrated
in the northern portion of the 174-mile-long field. That might seem
like good news -- when the north runs low, the Saudis need only to
drill wells in the south. But in fact it is bad news, Simmons
concluded, because the southern portions of Ghawar are geologically
more difficult to draw oil from. "Someday (and perhaps that day will
be soon), the remarkably high well flow rates at Ghawar's northern end
will fade, as reservoir pressures finally plummet," Simmons writes in
his book. "Then, Saudi Arabian oil output will clearly have peaked.
The death of this great king" -- meaning Ghawar -- "leaves no field of
vaguely comparable stature in the line of succession. Twilight at
Ghawar is fast approaching." He goes on: "The geological phenomena and
natural driving forces that created the Saudi oil miracle are
conspiring now in normal and predictable ways to bring it to its
conclusion, in a time frame potentially far shorter than officialdom
would have us believe." Simmons concludes, "Saudi Arabia clearly seems
to be nearing or at its peak output and cannot materially grow its oil
production."

Saudi officials belittle Simmons's work. Nansen Saleri, a senior
Aramco official, has described Simmons as a banker "trying to come
across as a scientist." In a speech last year, Saleri wryly said, "I
can read 200 papers on neurology, but you wouldn't want me to operate
on your relatives." I caught up with Simmons in June, during a trip he
made to Manhattan to talk with a group of oil-shipping executives. The
impression he gives is of an enthusiastic inventor sharing a discovery
that took him by surprise. He has a certain wide-eyed wonder in his
regard, as if a bit of mystery can be found in everything that catches
his eye. And he has a rumpled aspect -- thinning hair slightly askew,
shirt sleeves a fraction too long. Though he delivers a bracing
message, his discourse can wander. He is a successful businessman, and
it is clear that he did not achieve his position by being a man of
impeccable convention. He certainly has not lost sight of the rule
that people who shout "the end is nigh" do not tend to be favorably
reviewed by historians, let alone by their peers. He notes in his book
that way back in 1979, The New York Times published an investigative
story by Seymour Hersh under the headline "Saudi Oil Capacity
Questioned." He knows that in past decades the Cassandras failed to
foresee new technologies, like deep-water and horizontal drilling,
that provided new sources of oil and raised the amount of oil that can
be recovered from reservoirs.

But Simmons says that there are only so many rabbits technology can
pull out of its petro-hat. He impishly notes that if the Saudis really
wanted to, they could easily prove him wrong. "If they want to satisfy
people, they should issue field-by-field production reports and
reserve data and have it audited," he told me. "It would then take
anybody less than a week to say, 'Gosh, Matt is totally wrong,' or
'Matt actually might be too optimistic."'

Simmons has a lot riding on his campaign -- not only his name but also
his business, which would not be rewarded if he is proved to be a
fool. What, I asked, if the data show that the Saudis will be able to
sustain production of not only 12.5 million barrels a day -- their
target for 2009 -- but 15 million barrels, which global demand is
expected to require of them in the not-too-distant future? "The odds
of them sustaining 12 million barrels a day is very low," Simmons
replied. "The odds of them getting to 15 million for 50 years --
there's a better chance of me having Bill Gates's net worth, and I
wouldn't bet a dime on that forecast."

The gathering of executives took place in a restaurant at Chelsea
Piers; about 35 men sat around a set of tables as the host introduced
Simmons. He rambled a bit but hit his talking points, and the
executives listened raptly; at one point, the man on my right broke
into a soft whistle, of the sort that means "Holy cow." Simmons
didn't let up. "We're going to look back at history and say $55 a
barrel was cheap," he said, recalling a TV interview in which he
predicted that a barrel might hit triple digits. He said that the
anchor scoffed, in disbelief, "A hundred dollars?" Simmons replied,
"I wasn't talking about low triple digits."

The onset of triple-digit prices might seem a blessing for the Saudis
-- they would receive greater amounts of money for their increasingly
scarce oil. But one popular misunderstanding about the Saudis -- and
about OPEC in general -- is that high prices, no matter how high, are
to their benefit.

Although oil costing more than $60 a barrel hasn't caused a global
recession, that could still happen: it can take a while for high
prices to have their ruinous impact. And the higher above $60 that
prices rise, the more likely a recession will become. High oil prices
are inflationary; they raise the cost of virtually everything -- from
gasoline to jet fuel to

PLASTICS

and fertilizers -- and that means people buy less and travel less,
which means a drop-off in economic activity. So after a brief windfall
for producers, oil prices would slide as recession sets in and
once-voracious economies slow down, using less oil. Prices have
collapsed before, and not so long ago: in 1998, oil fell to $10 a
barrel after an untimely increase in OPEC production and a reduction
in demand from Asia, which was suffering through a financial crash.
Saudi Arabia and the other members of OPEC entered crisis mode back
then; adjusted for inflation, oil was at its lowest price since the
cartel's creation, threatening to feed unrest among the ranks of
jobless citizens in OPEC states.

"The Saudis are very happy with oil at $55 per barrel, but they're
also nervous," a Western diplomat in Riyadh told me in May, referring
to the price that prevailed then. (Like all the diplomats I spoke to,
he insisted on speaking anonymously because of the sensitivities of
relations with Saudi Arabia.) "They don't know where this magic line
has moved to. Is it now $65? Is it $75? Is it $80? They don't want to
find out, because if you did have oil move that far north . . . the
chain reaction can come back to a price collapse again."

High prices can have another unfortunate effect for producers. When
crude costs $10 a barrel or even $30 a barrel, alternative fuels are
prohibitively expensive. For example, Canada has vast amounts of tar
sands that can be rendered into heavy oil, but the cost of doing so is
quite high. Yet those tar sands and other alternatives, like
bioethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and liquid fuel from natural gas or
coal, become economically viable as the going rate for a barrel rises
past, say, $40 or more, especially if consuming governments choose to
offer their own incentives or subsidies. So even if high prices don't
cause a recession, the Saudis risk losing market share to rivals into
whose nonfundamentalist hands Americans would much prefer to channel
their energy dollars. A concerted push for greater energy conservation
in the United States, which consumes one-quarter of the world's oil
(mostly to fuel our cars, as gasoline), would hurt producing nations,
too. Basically, any significant reduction in the demand for oil would
be ruinous for OPEC members, who have little to offer the world but
oil; if a substitute can be found, their future is bleak. Another
Western diplomat explained the problem facing the Saudis: "You want to
have the price as high as possible without sending the consuming
nations into a recession and at the same time not have the price so
high that it encourages alternative technologies."

>From the American standpoint, one argument in favor of conservation
and a switch to alternative fuels is that by limiting oil imports, the
United States and its Western allies would reduce their dependence on
a potentially unstable region. (In fact, in an effort to offset the
risks of relying on the Saudis, America's top oil suppliers are Canada
and Mexico.) In addition, sending less money to Saudi Arabia would
mean less money in the hands of a regime that has spent the past few
decades doling out huge amounts of its oil revenue to mosques,
madrassas and other institutions that have fanned the fires of Islamic
radicalism. The oil money has been dispensed not just by the Saudi
royal family but by private individuals who benefited from the oil
boom -- like Osama bin Laden, whose ample funds, probably eroded now,
came from his father, a construction magnate. Without its oil
windfall, Saudi Arabia would have had a hard time financing radical
Islamists across the globe.

For the Saudis, the political ramifications of reduced demand for its
oil would not be negligible. The royal family has amassed vast
personal wealth from the country's oil revenues. If, suddenly, Saudis
became aware that the royal family had also failed to protect the
value of the country's treasured resource, the response could be
severe. The mere admission that Saudi reserves are not as impressively
inexhaustible as the royal family has claimed could lead to hard
questions about why the country, and the world, had been misled. With
the death earlier this month of the long-ailing King Fahd, the royal
family is undergoing another period of scrutiny; the new king,
Abdullah, is in his 80's, and the crown prince, his half-brother
Sultan, is in his 70's, so the issue of generational change remains to
be settled. As long as the country is swimming in petro-dollars --
even as it is paying off debt accrued during its lean years --
everyone is relatively happy, but that can change. One diplomat I
spoke to recalled a comment from Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the
larger-than-life Saudi oil minister during the 1970's: "The Stone Age
didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the
world runs out of oil."

Until now, the Saudis had an excess of production capacity that
allowed them, when necessary, to flood the market to drive prices
down. They did that in 1990, when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
eliminated not only Kuwait's supply of oil but also Iraq's. The Saudis
functioned, as they always had, as the central bank of oil, releasing
supply to the market when it was needed and withdrawing supply to keep
prices from going lower than the cartel would have liked. In other
words, they controlled not only the price of oil but their own destiny
as well.

"That is what the world has called on them to do before -- turn on the
taps to produce more and get prices down," a senior Western diplomat
in Riyadh told me recently. "Decreasing prices used to keep out
alternative fuels. I don't see how they're able to do that anymore.
This is a huge change, and it is a big step in the move to whatever is
coming next. That's what's really happening."

Without the ability to flood the markets with oil, the Saudis are
resorting to flooding the market with promises; it is a sort of
petro-jawboning. That's why Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, told his
Washington audience that Saudi Arabia has embarked on a crash program
to raise its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009 and even
higher in the years after that. Naimi is not unlike a factory manager
who needs to promise the moon to his valuable clients, for fear of
losing or alarming them. He has no choice. The moment he says anything
bracing, the touchy energy markets will probably panic, pushing prices
even higher and thereby hastening the onset of recession, a switch to
alternative fuels or new conservation efforts -- or all three. Just a
few words of honest caution could move the markets; Naimi's speeches
are followed nearly as closely in the financial world as those of Alan
Greenspan.

I journeyed to Saudi Arabia to interview Naimi and other senior
officials, to get as far beyond their prepared remarks as might be
possible. Although I was allowed to see Ras Tanura, my interview
requests were denied. I was invited to visit Aramco's oil museum in
Dhahran, but that is something a Saudi schoolchild can do on a field
trip. It was a "show but don't tell" policy. I was able to speak about
production issues only with Ibrahim al-Muhanna, the oil ministry
spokesman, who reluctantly met me over coffee in the lobby of my hotel
in Riyadh. He defended Saudi Arabia's refusal to share more data,
noting that the Saudis are no different from most oil producers.

"They will not tell you," he said. "Nobody will. And that is not going
to change." Referring to the fact that Saudi Arabia is often called
the central bank of oil, he added: "If an outsider goes to the Fed and
asks, 'How much money do you have?' they will tell you. If you say,
'Can I come and count it?' they will not let you. This applies to oil
companies and oil countries." I mentioned to Muhanna that many people
think his government's "trust us" stance is not convincing in light of
the cheating that has gone on within OPEC and in the industry as a
whole; even Royal Dutch/Shell, a publicly listed oil company that
undergoes regular audits, has admitted that it overstated its 2002
reserves by 23 percent.

"There is no reason for any country or company to lie," Muhanna
replied. "There is a lot of oil around." I didn't need to ask about
Simmons and his peak-oil theory; when I met Muhanna at the conference
in Washington, he nearly broke off our conversation at the mention of
Simmons's name. "He does not know anything," Muhanna said. "The only
thing he has is a big mouth. We should not pay attention to him.
Either you believe us or you don't."

So whom to believe? Before leaving New York for Saudi Arabia, I was
advised by several oil experts to try to interview Sadad al-Husseini,
who retired last year after serving as Aramco's top executive for
exploration and production. I faxed him in Dhahran and received a
surprisingly quick reply; he agreed to meet me. A week later, after I
arrived in Riyadh, Husseini e-mailed me, asking when I would come to
Dhahran; in a follow-up phone call, he offered to pick me up at the
airport . He was, it seemed, eager to talk.

It can be argued that in a nation devoted to oil, Husseini knows more
about it than anyone else. Born in Syria, Husseini was raised in Saudi
Arabia, where his father was a government official whose family took
on Saudi citizenship. Husseini earned a Ph.D. in geological sciences
from Brown University in 1973 and went to work in Aramco's exploration
department, eventually rising to the highest position. Until his
retirement last year -- said to have been caused by a top-level
dispute, the nature of which is the source of many rumors -- Husseini
was a member of the company's board and its management committee. He
is one of the most respected and accomplished oilmen in the world.

After meeting me at the cavernous airport that serves Dhahran, he
drove me in his luxury sedan to the villa that houses his private
office. As we entered, he pointed to an armoire that displayed a dozen
or so vials of black liquid. "These are samples from oil fields I
discovered," he explained. Upstairs, there were even more vials, and
he would have possessed more than that except, as he said, laughing,
"I didn't start collecting early enough."

We spoke for several hours. The message he delivered was clear: the
world is heading for an oil shortage. His warning is quite different
from the calming speeches that Naimi and other Saudis, along with
senior American officials, deliver on an almost daily basis. Husseini
explained that the need to produce more oil is coming from two
directions. Most obviously, demand is rising; in recent years, global
demand has increased by two million barrels a day. (Current daily
consumption, remember, is about 84 million barrels a day.) Less
obviously, oil producers deplete their reserves every time they pump
out a barrel of oil. This means that merely to maintain their reserve
base, they have to replace the oil they extract from declining fields.
It's the geological equivalent of running to stay in place. Husseini
acknowledged that new fields are coming online, like offshore West
Africa and the Caspian basin, but he said that their output isn't big
enough to offset this growing need.

"You look at the globe and ask, 'Where are the big increments?' and
there's hardly anything but Saudi Arabia," he said. "The kingdom and
Ghawar field are not the problem. That misses the whole point. The
problem is that you go from 79 million barrels a day in 2002 to 82.5
in 2003 to 84.5 in 2004. You're leaping by two million to three
million a year, and if you have to cover declines, that's another four
to five million." In other words, if demand and depletion patterns
continue, every year the world will need to open enough fields or
wells to pump an additional six to eight million barrels a day -- at
least two million new barrels a day to meet the rising demand and at
least four million to compensate for the declining production of
existing fields. "That's like a whole new Saudi Arabia every couple of
years," Husseini said. "It can't be done indefinitely. It's not
sustainable."

Husseini speaks patiently, like a teacher who hopes someone is
listening. He is in the enviable position of knowing what he talks
about while having the freedom to speak openly about it. He did not
disclose precise information about Saudi reserves or production --
which remain the equivalent of state secrets -- but he felt free to
speak in generalities that were forthright, even when they conflicted
with the reassuring statements of current Aramco officials. When I
asked why he was willing to be so frank, he said it was because he
sees a shortage ahead and wants to do what he can to avert it. I
assumed that he would not be particularly distressed if his rivals in
the Saudi oil establishment were embarrassed by his frankness.

Although Matthew Simmons says it is unlikely that the Saudis will be
able to produce 12.5 million barrels a day or sustain output at that
level for a significant period of time, Husseini says the target is
realistic; he says that Simmons is wrong to state that Saudi Arabia
has reached its peak. But 12.5 million is just an interim marker, as
far as consuming nations are concerned, on the way to 15 million
barrels a day and beyond -- and that is the point at which Husseini
says problems will arise.

At the conference in Washington in May, James Schlesinger, the
moderator, conducted a question-and-answer session with Naimi at the
conclusion of the minister's speech. One of the first questions
involved peak oil: might it be true that Saudi Arabia, which has
relied on the same reservoirs, and especially Ghawar, for more than
five decades, is nearing the geological limit of its output?

Naimi wouldn't hear of it.

"I can assure you that we haven't peaked," he responded. "If we
peaked, we would not be going to 12.5 and we would not be visualizing
a 15-million-barrel-per-day production capacity. . . . We can maintain
12.5 or 15 million for the next 30 to 50 years."

Experts like Husseini are very concerned by the prospect of trying to
produce 15 million barrels a day. Even if production can be ramped up
that high, geology may not be forgiving. Fields that are overproduced
can drop off, in terms of output, quite sharply and suddenly, leaving
behind large amounts of oil that cannot be coaxed out with existing
technology. This is called trapped oil, because the rocks or sediment
around it prevent it from escaping to the surface. Unless new
technologies are developed, that oil will never be extracted. In other
words, the haste to recover oil can lead to less oil being recovered.

"You could go to 15, but that's when the questions of depletion rate,
reservoir management and damaging the fields come into play," says
Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi oil and security analyst who is regarded as being
exceptionally well connected to key Saudi leaders. "There is an
understanding across the board within the kingdom, in the highest
spheres, that if you're going to 15, you'll hit 15, but there will be
considerable risks . . . of a steep decline curve that Aramco will not
be able to do anything about."

Even if the Saudis are willing to risk damaging their fields, or even
if the risk is overstated, Husseini points out a practical problem. To
produce and sustain 15 million barrels a day, Saudi Arabia will have
to drill a lot more wells and build a lot more pipelines and
processing facilities. Currently, the global oil industry suffers a
deficit of qualified engineers tooversee such projects and the
equipment and the raw materials -- for example, rigs and steel -- to
build them. These things cannot be wished from thin air or developed
quickly enough to meet the demand.

"If we had two dozen Texas A&M's producing a thousand new engineers a
year and the industrial infrastructure in the kingdom, with the
drilling rigs and power plants, we would have a better chance, but you
cannot put that into place overnight," Husseini said. "Capacity is not
just a function of reserves. It is a function of reserves plus
know-how plus a commercial economic system that is designed to
increase the resource exploitation. For example, in the U.S. you have
infrastructure -- there must be tens of thousands of miles of
pipelines. If we, in Saudi Arabia, evolve to that level of commercial
maturity, we could probably produce a heck of a lot more oil. But to
get there is a very tedious, slow process."

He worries that the rising global demand for oil will lead to the
petroleum equivalent of running an engine at ever-increasing speeds
without stopping to cool it down or change the oil. Husseini does not
want to see the fragile and irreplaceable reservoirs of the Middle
East become damaged through wanton overproduction.

"If you are ramping up production so fast and jump from high to higher
to highest, and you're not having enough time to do what needs to be
done, to understand what needs to be done, then you can damage
reservoirs," he said. "Systematic development is not just a matter of
money. It's a matter of reservoir dynamics, understanding what's
there, analyzing and understanding information. That's where people
come in, experience comes in. These are not universally available
resources."

The most worrisome part of the crisis ahead revolves around a set of
statistics from the Energy Information Administration, which is part
of the U.S. Department of Energy. The E.I.A. forecast in 2004 that by
2020 Saudi Arabia would produce 18.2 million barrels of oil a day, and
that by 2025 it would produce 22.5 million barrels a day. Those
estimates were unusual, though. They were not based on secret
information about Saudi capacity, but on the projected needs of energy
consumers. The figures simply assumed that Saudi Arabia would be able
to produce whatever the United States needed it to produce. Just last
month, the E.I.A. suddenly revised those figures downward -- not
because of startling new information about world demand or Saudi
supply but because the figures had given so much ammunition to
critics. Husseini, for example, described the 2004 forecast as
unrealistic.

"That's not how you would manage a national, let alone an
international, economy," he explained. "That's the part that is scary.
You draw some assumptions and then say, 'O.K., based on these
assumptions, let's go forward and consume like hell and burn like
hell."' When I asked whether the kingdom could produce 20 million
barrels a day -- about twice what it is producing today from fields
that may be past their prime -- Husseini paused for a second or two.
It wasn't clear if he was taking a moment to figure out the answer or
if he needed a moment to decide if he should utter it. He finally
replied with a single word: No. "It's becoming unrealistic," he said.
"The expectations are beyond what is achievable. This is a global
problem . . . that is not going to be solved by tinkering with the
Saudi industry."

It would be unfair to blame the Saudis alone for failing to warn of
whatever shortages or catastrophes might lie ahead. In the political
and corporate realms of the oil world, there are few incentives to be
forthright. Executives of major oil companies have been reluctant to
raise alarms; the mere mention of scarce supplies could alienate the
governments that hand out lucrative exploration contracts and also
send a message to investors that oil companies, though wildly
profitable at the moment, have a Malthusian long-term future.
Fortunately, that attitude seems to be beginning to change. Chevron's
"easy oil is over" advertising campaign is an indication that even the
boosters of an oil-drenched future are not as bullish as they once
were.

Politicians remain in the dark. During the 2004 presidential campaign,
which occurred as gas prices were rising to record levels, the debate
on energy policy was all but nonexistent. The Bush campaign produced
an advertisement that concluded: "Some people have wacky ideas. Like
taxing gasoline more so people drive less.

Husseini, for one, doesn't buy that approach. "Everybody is looking at
the producers to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, as if it's our
job to fix everybody's problems," he told me. "It's not our problem to
tell a democratically elected government that you have to do something
about your runaway consumers. If your government can't do the job, you
can't expect other governments to do it for them." Back in the 70's,
President Carter called for the moral equivalent of war to reduce our
dependence on foreign oil; he was not re-elected. Since then, few
politicians have spoken of an energy crisis or suggested that major
policy changes are necessary to avert one. The energy bill signed
earlier this month by President Bush did not even raise
fuel-efficiency standards for passenger cars. When a crisis comes --
whether in a year or 2 or 10 -- it will be all the more painful
because we will have done little or nothing to prepare for it.

The Conservation-Conscious Salute This Man's Commute
As Americans worry over high gas prices, Jeff Kline glides along for less than a penny a day in his shiny new velomobile. His what? "People want to know what it is," Kline says, standing alongside the narrow, 9-foot-long fiberglass vehicle he got two months ago. "I tell them it is a motorized bicycle."

The Conservation-Conscious Salute This Man's Commute

August 24, 2005 — By Kevin Murphy, The Kansas City Star

ST. LOUIS — As Americans worry over high gas prices, Jeff Kline glides along for less than a penny a day in his shiny new velomobile.

His what?

"People want to know what it is," Kline says, standing alongside the narrow, 9-foot-long fiberglass vehicle he got two months ago. "I tell them it is a motorized bicycle."

Picture Fred Flintstone, running on the ground to get his car going before it zips away under its own power. Kline starts pedaling, and then batteries take over to move the vehicle along at an average cruising speed of about 22 mph.

But Kline didn't spend $7,500 to amuse people. Hybrid vehicles are being taken seriously as people look for ways to avoid rising fuel expenses and be conservation-conscious. Sales of cars partly powered by batteries are soaring in the United States.

"Today's gas prices are creating significant interest in fuel-efficient vehicles, hybrids in particular," said Jim Kliesch, research associate for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in Washington.

Kline's velomobile, made in the Netherlands, is a hybrid among hybrids.

While there are more than 1,000 velomobiles in Europe, there are only about 45 in the United States, said Ethan Davis, who operates a Web site called velomobiles.net. The majority are pedal-only, Davis said.

Kline said he has the only velomobile in Missouri or Kansas. He also has one of the country's two Aerorider models, a fully enclosed vehicle with turn signals, lights and other features that make it drive like a car even though it is technically a bicycle. It does not require vehicle plates or registration.

"There is definitely a uniqueness factor to it," Kline said.

Kline said he gets plenty of double takes as he clips along in regular traffic lanes during his 28-mile round-trip commute to work in suburban St. Louis. He stays on side streets with speed limits of 35 mph or less, feels safe and, he said, other drivers show him respect on the road, often giving him a wave and a smile.

"People are not sure it's a bike or a car and so they tend to treat it like a car and give you more space," Kline said.

Kline said he can operate the vehicle entirely on pedals, entirely on batteries or in combination -- his usual method. His top speed has been 36 mph, and his record time for the 14-mile trip between home and work is 32 minutes.

Kline, 43, is a data analyst for Biomedical Systems, a Maryland Heights company that helps conduct clinical drug trials. Kline persuaded the company owner, a bike enthusiast, to have the company pay part of the cost of the vehicle, which has a Biomedical logo on each side.

Another employee of Biomedical Systems, Bruce Stahl, said Kline gets some kidding. "It's something to see his little three-wheeler parked between two Suburbans," he said.

But most people admire what Kline has done, Stahl said. And as gasoline prices creep ever higher, Kline looks pretty smart, said Andrew Kroehnke, another co-worker.

"More and more people are agreeing with him -- he is saving money while we are spending it," Kroehnke said.

Kline, who also has a two-door car and a minivan for himself, his wife and three children, said the only energy cost of his velomobile is charging the batteries. That has been calculated at less than a penny for 50 miles of travel.

Kline says, however, that he does not ever expect to cover the cost of his velomobile through fuel savings.

"To truly get your money back, you would have to go completely car-free," he said. He could then eliminate insurance, maintenance and other costs.

Still, Kline said, saving money is one reason he has the velomobile, along with wanting to exercise, reduce pollution and conserve fuel.

"You know you are doing something good; you are avoiding passive riding in a car," Kline said.

Davis said he is trying to raise money to get U.S. licensing for sale of one of the pedal-only velomobile models. Velomobiles should become more popular when more people, especially bikers, know about them, Davis said.

But no one should expect Americans to turn suddenly to hybrid vehicles, said John Brooking, founder of a fledgling Maine-based environmental group called the Organization of Petroleum Avoiding Consumers, or OPAC.

"It's going to be gradual," said Brooking, who rides a bike five miles to his job as a computer programmer. "It's not like overnight everyone is going to change."

Brooking said, however, that as hybrids become more visible and gas prices keep rising, "enough people will start paying attention" to the need to burn less fuel.

Stahl said the way the media cover a hybrid such as Kline's could help make it popular.

"My concern is for the media to create a wow factor," Stahl said. "It has to be a cool thing to have."

OTHER VEHICLE OPTIONS

--For people who want small carlike vehicles without pedaling, the next step up is something commonly called a neighborhood electric vehicle, basically a golf cart with a top, windows, lights and other features. They generally are licensed to be used on roads with speed limits of up to 35 mph.

--There are about 30,000 such vehicles licensed in the United States, said Jennifer Watts, marketing communications associate for the Electric Drive Transportation Association in Washington. They operate on rechargeable batteries.

--As for full-fledged cars, hybrids such as the Toyota Prius are becoming more popular. Toyota reported selling 9,191 Prius cars in July, up 92 percent from a year earlier. The Prius saves on fuel by using supplementary battery power.

--Toyota plans to have 10 different types of hybrid vehicles, ranging from sport-utility vehicles to small cars, within the next few years, while Ford Motor Co. has said it will have five different hybrid models by 2008. A new law granting tax credits to hybrid buyers is intended to boost sales.

To see more of The Kansas City Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.kansascity.com.

Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Solar Empowered

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled a program last August to establish a self-sufficient solar industry in 10 years by encouraging installation of solar panel systems in 1 million homes. The program -- currently at the top of the docket for California legislators -- could reduce carbon emissions equivalent to 850,000 cars each year, according to the Department of Energy

Environmental Wager

Why evangelicals are—but shouldn't be—cool toward global warming.
by Andy Crouch
Christianity Today August 2005, Vol. 49, No. 8, Page 66

The theory is taken for granted by nearly every scientist working in the field. But because it is difficult to confirm experimentally, a few vocal skeptics continue to raise pointed questions. The skeptics find a ready audience among evangelical Christians, with groups like Focus on the Family saying that "significant disagreement exists within the scientific community regarding the validity of this theory."

I'm not talking about evolution. Or maybe I am.

The issue in question is not our distant past but our near future. The theory is the all-but-unanimous scientific consensus that human beings are changing the climate by emitting gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere, and that if we do nothing to change our behavior, the warming trend that has taken hold for the past century may well become a runaway gallop.
Prompt action could not only avert the worst consequences—extreme drought and ocean levels rising as much as three feet by 2100—but could actually open up a new era of prosperity through the development of new, more efficient technologies. Some evangelical leaders—including the editors of this magazine—have called for action to address climate change. But the Bush administration, which generally listens carefully to conservative Christians, apparently hasn't heard enough to reconsider its indifference. For many churchgoers, the issue seems murky, its complexity amplified by claims of "significant disagreement."

There is in fact no serious disagreement among scientists that human beings are playing a major role in global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose scientific working group was chaired for many years by the evangelical Christian Sir John Houghton, concluded in 2001 that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities." These conclusions, Houghton points out, were vetted by more than 100 governments including the United States: "No assessments on any other scientific topic have been so thoroughly researched and reviewed."

Unfortunately, there is another politically loaded issue where scientific agreement has failed to convince the public. If evangelicals mistrust scientists when they make pronouncements about the future, it may be because of the history of antagonism between biblical faith and evolution. As pro-evolution philosopher Michael Ruse points out in a recent book, evolution began as an alternative to Christianity before it acquired scientific respectability. It was evolutionism—a naturalistic worldview that excluded the biblical Creator—before it was science.
The resulting battle between evolutionism and Christian faith has had countless unfortunate consequences. Some Christians resorted to a wooden interpretation of the first pages of Genesis that was no better as science than evolution was as a worldview. More recently, some scientists have reacted with fanatical hostility to the questions that proponents of Intelligent Design ask about evolution.

But perhaps no result of the creation-evolution stalemate is as potentially disastrous as the way it has stymied courageous action on climate change. In May, for a serious article about Intelligent Design that described one proponent's books as "packed with provocative ideas," the editors of The New Yorker chose the snippy headline, "Why intelligent design isn't." Rhetoric like that hardly disposes conservative Christians to trust the impeccably researched articles about climate change the magazine published earlier in the year.

All science is ultimately a matter of trust. The tools, methods, and mathematical skills scientists acquire over years of training are beyond the reach of the rest of us, even of scientists in different fields. Thanks to the creation-evolution debate, mistrust between scientists and conservative Christians runs deep. But those scarred by battles with evolutionists might still consider heeding the scientists who are warning us about climate change. As an evangelical scientist said to me recently, the debate over climate change is very much like Pascal's wager, that famous argument for belief in God.

Believe in God though he does not exist, Pascal argued, and you lose nothing in the end. Fail to believe when he does in fact exist, and you lose everything. Likewise, we have little to lose, and much technological progress, energy security, and economic efficiency to gain, if we act on climate change now—even if the worst predictions fail to come to pass. But if we choose inaction and are mistaken, we will leave our descendants a blighted world. As Pascal said, "You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see."

All World's Glaciers Could Melt, Latest Scientific Data Indicates

(See http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2005/2005-08-05-05.asp if you want the pictures)

ZURICH, Switzerland, August 5, 2005 (ENS) - Global warming caused by human activities may result in the complete disappearance of glaciers from entire mountain ranges, according to the latest update of a United Nations supported report issued once every five years. The World Glacier Monitoring Service warns that the greenhouse effect is leading to processes "without precedent in the history of the Earth."

"The last five-year period of the 20th century has been characterized by an overall tendency of continuous if not accelerated glacier melting," says the World Glacier Monitoring Service 1995-2000 edition of the Fluctuations of Glaciers report, complied with the support of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

"The two decades [from] 1980-2000 show a trend of increasingly negative balances with average annual ice thickness losses of a few decimetres," the report adds. "The observed trend of increasingly negative mass balances is consistent with accelerated global warming."

Analysis of repeated inventories shows that glaciers in the European Alps have lost more than 50 percent of their volume since the middle of the 19th century, and that a further loss of roughly one fourth the remaining volume is estimated to have occurred since the 1970s, the report states.

"With a realistic scenario of future atmospheric warming, almost complete deglaciation of many mountain ranges could occur within decades, leaving only some ice on the very highest peaks," it says.

The series "Fluctuations of Glaciers," prepared by the Service, continuously publishes internationally collected, standardized data on changes in glaciers throughout the world once every five years. The Service is based at the Department of Geography University of Zurich.

The objective of the publication is to reproduce a global set of data which affords a general view of the changes, encourages more extensive measurements, invites further processing of the results, facilitates consultation of the further sources, and serves as a basis for research.

This standardized data set is presented as a working tool for the scientific community, especially concerning the fields of glaciology, climatology, hydrology, and quarternary geology.

Since the initiation in 1894 of a worldwide program for collecting standardized information on glacier changes, various aspects involved have changed "in a most remarkable way," the report says.

Concern increases that the ongoing trend of worldwide and fast if not accelerating glacier shrinkage at the century time scale is of non-cyclic nature.

While earlier reports anticipated a periodic variation in glaciers, "there is definitely no more question of the originally envisaged "variations périodiques des glaciers" as a natural cyclical phenomenon, the latest report states.

"Due to the human impacts on the climate system (enhanced greenhouse effect), dramatic scenarios of future developments - including complete deglaciation of entire mountain ranges - must be taken into consideration," it emphasizes.

The report says, "Such scenarios may lead far beyond the range of historical/holocene variability and most likely introduce processes without precedence in the history of the Earth."

The scientific opinion on climate change, as expressed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and endorsed by the national science academies of the G8 nations, is that the average global temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2°C since the late 19th century, and that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."

Greenhouse gases emitted by the combustion of coal, oil and gas form a atmospheric blanket, trapping the Sun's heat close to the planet and raising the surface temperature.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service is online at: http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/

Corner Post #390
Farm & Countryside Commentary by Elbert van Donkersgoed

"Save the farmer; the farmer will save the farmland." I've heard this
argument many times, especially at the many farmland preservation
conferences that I've attended over the decades. The argument, while
appealing, is pure rhetoric, disconnected from any reality check. It is not
rooted in the economics of farming, nor in the land market.

Last week's Farmland Preservation Conference at the University of Guelph,
sponsored by the Ontario Farmland Trust, was a breath of fresh air. No one
made the simplistic argument that improving farm prices and the
profitability of farming is all it takes to assure us that our best farmland
will be there for decades to come - that the present pattern of losing 2% of
our very best farmland to the urban footprint, every decade - will stop.

The Waterloo Federation of Agriculture spoke from experience. Total receipts
per acre of successful farms in Waterloo region come nowhere near the return
per acre realized from development lands. One last crop of houses is an
economic opportunity that none of our farming systems can hope to match.
Society, not farm families, must make the decision to preserve the farmland.
Assuming that farm families will do it for us is pie-in-the-sky thinking.

The purpose of last week's conference was not to focus on the "how to" of
farmland preservation. Rather, the conference recognized that our provincial
government has taken some modest steps with the new Provincial Policy
Statement under the Planning Act and the Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt Act to
provide more protection for farmland. The conference moved on to meeting the
challenges of farming on protected land, often in the shadow of our cities.

Protecting farmland does not mean that we have saved the farm.

Dick Esseks from the University of Nebraska and Patty Cantrell from the
Michigan Land Use Institute shared their experiences with invigorating
farming communities on the edge of cities. Ho Wong, Director of Planning for
Halton Region, described the Greenbelt as a case of missed opportunities.

Protecting our farmland is essential for the success of the business of
farming. By itself, it is not enough. The business of farming must have a
strong economic future. A viable farming system makes protecting farmland
practical.

Having taken step one, the province of Ontario must now take step two.

Most of our farmland is privately owned. We have come to expect abundant,
cheap food from the farm businesses that manage these lands. In addition,
the emerging regulatory regime expects these farm businesses to enhance our
countryside's environmental goods and services - without remuneration.

This situation will not hold. Let's pay those who keep protected farmland
productive.
__

Elbert van Donkersgoed P. Ag. (Hon.) is the Strategic Policy Advisor of the
Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario, Canada. Corner Post is heard weekly
on CFCO Radio, Chatham and CKNX Radio, Wingham, Ontario. Corner Post has a
complimentary email subscriber list of more than 3,500 and appears regularly
on Agriculture Online/Views at www.agriculture.com/ag/views/ and as "Letter
from Ontario" on The New Farm website at www.newfarm.org. CFFO is supported
by 4,300 family farmers across Ontario. Corner Post is archived on the CFFO
website:
www.christianfarmers.org/sub_news_commentaries/sub2_news_com_corner_post/new
s_com_corner_post.htm.

For those who don't know of this author, he's a much respected
Cornell prof (and I believe a brother of the late great Geo Pimentel).

R

Environment, Development and Sustainability
ISSN: 1387-585X (Paper) 1573-2975 (Online)
Issue: Volume 7, Number 2
Date: June 2005
Pages: 229 - 252
Environmental and Economic Costs of the Application of Pesticides
Primarily in the United States

David Pimentel

Abstract

An obvious need for an updated and comprehensive study
prompted this investigation of the complex of environmental costs
resulting from the nation's dependence on pesticides.

Included in this assessment of an estimated $10 billion in environmental
and societal damages are analyses of:
pesticide impacts on public health;
livestock and livestock product losses;
increased control expenses resulting from pesticide-related destruction of
natural enemies and from the
development of pesticide resistance in pests;
crop pollination problems and honeybee losses;
crop and crop product losses;
bird, fish, and other wildlife losses; and
governmental expenditures to reduce the environmental and social costs of
the recommended application of pesticides.
The major economic and environmental losses due to the application of
pesticides in the USA were:
public health, $1.1 billion year;
pesticide resistance in pests, $1.5 billion;
crop losses caused by pesticides, $1.4 billion;
bird losses due to pesticides, $2.2 billion;
and groundwater contamination, $2.0 billion.

This item, a half-decade old, remains extremely relevant today.

R

NZ Herald
00-5-18

London, Reuters

Prince Charles warns that the world faces environmental disaster
unless it starts accepting that tampering with nature is an affront to God.

The Prince has already lambasted genetically modified foods but he
will use the BBC radio lecture today to make a wider attack on some methods
employed by modern science.

"We need to rediscover a reverence for the natural world,
irrespective of its usefulness to ourselves - to become more aware of the
relationship between God, man and creation" he will say.

"If literally nothing is held sacred any more, what is there to
prevent us treating our entire world as some 'great laboratory of life'
with potentially disastrous long-term consequences?

"Only by rediscovering the essential unity and order of the living
and spiritual world and by bridging the gap between cynical secularism and
the timelessness of traditional religion will we avoid the disintegration
of our environment."

Some advance extracts of his lecture were given front page coverage
yesterday. The 'Guardian' said Charles would take swipes at biotechnology,
the Labour Government's modernising zeal and economic globalisation.

But the Prince would be careful to build bridges between modern
science and the sacred, the newspaper said.

"We need to restore the balance between the heartfelt reason of
instinctive wisdom and the rational insights of scientific rational
insights of scientific analysis. Neither is much use without the other",
he will say.

Genetically altered food is now widely shunned in Britain and many
supermarkets like to tell their customers that it is no longer on their
shelves. British beekeepers have been told to move their hives 10 km from
genetically modified crop trial sites after after shop-bought honey was
found to contain GM pollen.

MP my man

You recently asked my opinion about the ban on n-propelled vessels
in NZ waters. My brief response was that I saw no reason to change the
policy. I confessed my bias, as instigator of the policy.

The attached may be of some interest in several ways.

One aspect is the embarrassing public defection of long-time
antinuclear activist Owen Wilkes. This remains unexplained; certainly, the
excuses he stated at the time were rubbish. If you happen upon any clue,
please let me know!

I hope you will urgently procure written confirmation from the USA
embassy of that statement to Dr Hoadley's research student that attack subs
are no longer to enter foreign ports.

Regarding naval n-weapons, it is relatively easy to believe that
USN ships no longer carry routinely, if ever, that array of surface-to-air
A-bombs which were always of little or no military use (because letting one
off will destroy by EMP the modern electronics of the fleet you're trying
to protect). It is much harder to believe that (especially near N. Korea)
they never carry n-warhead cruise missiles, or the good old n-depthcharges
which even the RN did admit to have some potential use for protecting
capital ships from subs.

cheers

R

AN OLD ANTI-NUKE'S PERSPECTIVE ON THE POLITTEE
(University of Auckland Centre for Peace Studies seminar July 3 1993
- which R E White now denies he organised)

Robert Mann

Introduction

Some of the older hands in the NZ anti-nuclear movement boycotted the Polittee, Poletti's special political committee on nuclear propulsion: we declined to make submissions to it. Our main reasons were as follows.

(1) There was (and there still is) no need whatever to review the matter; to insist on doing so is a cynical distraction and a waste of public resources.

(2) The review was presumably at foreign (USA) initiative.

(3) Prime Minister Bolger rejected the request by NZ's main environmental groups to include at least one anti-nuclear scientist on the committee.

(4) The inclusion of Prof. Alan Poletti, who had taken a position of vigorous public advocacy that n-ships are OK, therefore constituted a deliberate bias in the committee.

Such a biased exercise does not deserve the legitimising participation of anti-nuclear experts, or non-experts for that matter. It should have been ignored. The tiny turnout for this seminar may indicate that others have come, belatedly, to see this basic truth.

What I have heard of the Polittee's behaviour toward those naïve hopefuls who appeared before it in person compounds the above already crippling drawbacks.

On several other levels the Polittee is unsatisfactory and should be boycotted - with its ancillaries, of which this seminar is one. I am therefore not bothering to prepare what I would in the past have provided - a fully-referenced text. In any case that is presumably not needed, because a foreigner has appointed himself to convene an alternative committee on the subject, chosen (he says) for maximum expertise.

The refusals by 3/4 of the Polittee members to discuss their report by participating in this seminar should prompt to reconsideration any who still think it was a scientific, rather than a political, exercise. A further sign was the Polittee's listing, as if a reference, my most recent writing (with Dr Wills) on the subject while refusing to allude to any substantive scientific content of that article. Scientific reports do not list "reference"s while not referring to them.

A thorough scientific investigation of the purported subject would also have mentioned such authors as R E Webb (one of the few PhDs in nuclear engineering to have 'blown the whistle'); R Pollard (a retired submarine reactor operator now employed by the Union of Concerned Scientists); and the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, led by Prof. John Gofman, a leading source of careful science regarding radiation risks. Some or all of those should also have been visited during the Polittee's overseas tour, which was instead predictably unbalanced.

Major Hazards

(At the seminar I outlined, from notes, the peculiar history of NZ arguments about them. This is not the place to detail those fascinating if sordid matters.)

Here I merely sketch mainstream understanding of the hazards and corresponding risks of marine propulsion reactors. This is an expanded version of a summary requested Oct '91 by Prof Peter Lorimer for SANA to use in revising their Fact Sheet, the first edition of which I had also drafted.

Nuclear fission reactors are used by several governments to propel submarines, and a few ships. All are military - experiments with nuclear-propelled freighters (USA, Japan, W. Germany) have proved costly failures.

Marine propulsion reactors are only 1/100 - 1/10 the rated power of typical nuclear power-station reactors. Nevertheless, they are capable of melting themselves in the event of various operator errors, materials failures, or sabotage. In the unlikely event of a meltdown, harbour water will be seriously contaminated for at least a year. The Polittee's marine biologist, who now refuses to discuss the science involved, bought a "new kitchen" with $700/day 'earned' from remarkably little contribution regarding marine radiobiology.

The distribution of radioactive material between air and water will depend on the mode of failure. I remind you that the reactor runs at about one ton weight per square inch, i.e. about 160 atm. Pollard has pointed out that brief excursions into overpressure are a real fear during startup. Neutron embrittlement of the pressure-vessel walls is an acknowledged problem, a main reason why the reactor pressure-vessel can burst, or blow off its lid. In such case the boat's hull will be ripped open by the flying fragments, and the proportion of the core material which is sent skyward may be relatively large. If the core-melt is initiated by a leak in the reactor's primary cooling system (a contingency against which, as the Polittee misrepresented, the marine reactors have no emergency core-cooling system corresponding to those on typical modern nuclear power stations), the fuel may melt its way down through the bottom of the hull. The Polittee quietly evaded the question of melt-thru, scarcely elaborating (p.51) on the old Ministry of Defence claim that a molten reactor will not do so. When the white-hot tons of material meet the sea, there may ensue a steam explosion such as has been recorded from accidents at metal foundries; but on the other hand the bulk of the debris may just be relatively quietly dispersed into the sea.

In any case, some airborne radioactive debris will fall out downwind; if the fraction airborne of the emitted materials is about 1/2, this could (depending on the state of the weather at the time) render much of Auckland or Wellington uninhabitable for decades. The amount of accumulated radioactive materials in such a reactor is smaller than that in a power station, but the proximity to people, if the vessel is in a harbour such as Auckland or Wellington, outweighs that factor with respect to attempted evacuation. The Polittee's assertion that only half-a-dozen could be killed relies on pretending that only a tiny fraction, represented by 10-5 of the radioiodine inventory, could be released. This write-down by 4 orders of magnitude is unjustifiable and misleading. The NZ government's so-called 'code' for nuclear-powered shipping was bad enough in this regard, but the Polittee has been emboldened to go even further! The USSR emergency plan for Murmansk appears to be based on a much more realistic assumption about this 'source term' and envisages scores of thousands of people potentially exposed to serious radiation doses.

No official NZ scientific study has been published of the possible scope for harm. Independent scientists have calculated that evacuation could be required 20km (or more) downwind - not a mere 0.6 km as claimed by NZ pro-nuclear publicists based in the NZ National Radiation Lab (NRL). To accomplish evacuation in the short time available is so extremely difficult as to be, for most of the city's people, impossible. No effective treatment exists for the most of the cancers, mutations and malformations which would be then expected over ensuing decades. Modelling the dispersal downwind is done with minimal scope for scientific dispute by using the model of the Rasmussen report as revised by J. Beyea at Princeton. This represents the mainstream of such applied maths. However, the Polittee did not refer to this approach1, but preferred a novel model created in apparent isolation by Smyth of the NRL (an organisation with a consistent history of apologetics for the nuclear industry). Smyth's novel, untested model postulates a "drop-kick" effect whereby thermal lofting prevents significant fallout within a zone of many km downwind. This may be one possible outcome, but by no means representative of the more plausible range of fallout patterns.

Writing-down the hazard (the scope for harm) is only one of the biased policies of groups such as the Polittee. The probability of severe mishap is also written-down far beyond what science can justify. The Port of London refused admission to the German nuclear-powered freighter Otto Hahn for lack of adequate insurance. To that authority at least, as later to the NZ democratic process, the risk (i.e. the probability) of a major mishap was not negligible.

The only plausible estimate of this probability is readily formed, as an approximate upper limit: about 6,000 reactor-years of operating experience with marine propulsion pressurised-water reactors is known to have produced one meltdown. (The CIA has reported that the USSR nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin suffered a reactor meltdown. This is also stated in Zh. Medvedev's 1990 book 'The Legacy of Chernobyl', which the Polittee lists as a reference; but their dismissal of the meltdown {p.55} does not mention that evidence.) This permits the inference that the risk of a meltdown in future is unlikely to be much larger than one in 6,000 per reactor-year. The Polittee writes down this figure also by 4 magnitudes (or more, depending on which of their suggestions you take; my favourite is "lower than any number I could put my confidence on").

The Polittee's leader on risk, Prof. Elms, adopted without discussion the language-tampering of the USAEC's Rasmussen Report, misusing the word risk to mean the product of probability and consequences, which is properly called instead the expected loss value. This multiplication corresponds to no reality and is to be deprecated; and the word risk should not be hijacked for the purpose of such confusion. Suppose a recalculation of hazard led us to expect, say, one order of magnitude more damage. Would this worse hazard be completely compensated, for planning purposes, if the probability could be written down by one more order of magnitude? Even if the probabilities were calculable with any useful accuracy, which they are not, this phoney 'compensation' must be rejected.

Instead, planning should concentrate on disaster-prevention.

Minor Hazards

Auckland Harbour Board management led by Mr Lorimer in the late '70s opposed nuclear visits because of interference with normal port operations.

Routine radioactivity releases are very much smaller than the possible catastrophes, but are not easily monitored and have been the subject of systematic forgeries in Japan.

One hazard created by the Polittee is little known but could even have been listed as 'major': the recent request to Poletti by a government agency to compile (as if $700/day had been insufficient) a wish-list of what would be needed as infrastructure for New Zealand to move into the modern nuclear era: take care of not only nuclear shipping but also nuclear power stations and various other aspects of the nuclear industry. The NRL, with which Prof. Poletti has been closely involved, would of course expand enormously in the implementation of such a deluded warped vision for our land. Whatever the motives of the government in attempting some costings for a nuclear New Zealand, they are misguided and should be refused academic co-operation.

Conclusion

The point is that any further detailed discussion of this topic is, like the Polittee itself, superfluous - a wasteful distraction. Our country has, by a uniquely participatory process, evolved a democratic policy, and a law to give it expression, to exclude not only nuclear power stations but also marine reactors, as stated by the then largest petition to the NZ parliament (in 1976 - 1/3 million). There is, as I began by pointing out, no reason to reconsider this policy.

[bio note if wanted] Dr Mann taught biochemistry, environmental studies, and planning in the University of Auckland for two decades. He is now an inventor of appropriate technology, and writer.
----

(9) 524 2949
25 June 92

Owen Wilkes
P O Box 9314
Wellington

Dear Owen,

It was good to hear from you, at last, today. The matters I wish to pursue with you are partly general and partly personal.

Your 'standard handout' had already reached me - but only because Peter Wills was good enough to give me a copy. Your failure to do so much earlier was for reasons entirely unclear to me, and is unfortunately consistent with your classifying me as "on the fringes of the peace movement" and with your failure to mention our BAS paper in your revision for Peacelink. Have you any conscious basis for the attitude thus glimpsed? I can certainly assure you that no mirror-image attitude exists in me - which is why your extraordinary public utterances on the risks of n-ships particularly distressed me (beyond what their ignorant content would, regardless of author).

I can't "notice the excellent editorial which the Waikato Times did", because I've never seen it; but would of course be very glad to do so, partly to assess whether I should "take some of the credit".

In answer to your question, 80MW results from dividing a typical n-sub shaft power by the efficiency of typical steam turbines. What is wrong with you, that you babble about "electrical" ? - not impressive from one who makes the bold claim to have done more work on this issue than anyone else! At this rate you'll be reinforcing the actor Holmes® in his promulgation of the claim that we can add 70 - 100MW or more to our grid by hooking in a n-sub parked at a Wgton or Auckland wharf. The total electrical power generated on any of these vessels must be at most a few MW (except for the turbo-electric Lenin - which reminds me, why don't you count its major mishap in your impression of "safety"?).

If you are implying that one needs documented evidence for the inference that the Polittee was created at foreign instigation, you're being too sceptical. In the absence of any politically significant NZ initiative, the circumstantial evidence will serve.

If you had told me Poletti was bad, I'd have taken your word. He is much worse than I'd indicated to you. If you want details, I'll tell you next time I see you; as with the details of the technical matters on which you've revealed such surprising ignorance, I don't see why I should write a small book just for you when you've overlooked what has already been written.

Pat Helms I know nothing of.

Your own writing should reveal to you worrying aspects of your thinking and actions. You say on the one hand "Safety is not the issue" and then, assuming very plausibly that the report of the Polittee will be as implied by their biased public utterances so far, "the report will be very useful for the US in other parts of the world". Can't you see that the predictable help you've given them was unnecessary??! Your "little intervention" could not possibly have made the issue of n-ship hazards go away, and if you at any stage thought it would then I must conclude that your mental functioning was startlingly defective; I can only hope it isn't still.

If you go on calling idiots those who oppose letting n-ships in because they're not safe, you will at last overtax the tolerance of such as myself. The only reason I've not called you out publicly on your blunder is that I assumed you were undergoing some temporary stress (as is indeed hinted at by your handout, esp. para 2 p2).

I do not accept that "the nuke power establishment is now going to enormously greater lengths to keep it all safe", with respect to major mishaps as opposed to relatively small quasi-routine releases; and even if they were, I do not accept that their efforts could make a crucial difference. You assert "they have got the risks and hazards to way below what we happily put up with . . ."; what shred of evidence have you for decreased hazards?

You say "the risks in fact are so small that the consequences become negligible". This is a preposterous statement, and coming from you it is very worrying. The prospective damage from a major reactor mishap cannot become acceptable. The most "they" could do is to decrease the risk, i.e. probability; but when much of this island becomes uninhabitable (which a power station could do - as has been clear since WASH-740), the victims will not be helped by the prior claims of low risk. Your acceptance of the demonic "arithmetic" (as you wrongly call it) of discounting huge consequences through multiplying them by the alleged small probability shows that you are not familiar with the leading analysts in this field.

It is good to learn that you've more recently been doing a lot more reading up on the "safety" issue, because you certainly needed to. Your outburst revealed almost total ignorance of the relevant reasoning. (The actual arithmetic is not essentially complex.)

The claim that only 1% of naval meltdowns will breach containment completely has no standing amongst respectable analysts. You are not entitled to use it as though fact, nor even as though Peter had analysed & endorsed it. Your misbehaviour in so doing is exactly like that of a biased pro-nuclear activist. If you want to begin to understand the question, contemplate the sensible heat in the molten reactor remains, and see if you can figure out whether that white-hot gob will melt its way through the bottom of the boat. (During the big n-ship controversy of the late 70s, the Minister of Defence assured the Devonport Council in writing that it won't.) Also, we don't know what fraction of meltdowns will be preceded by catastrophic pressure-vessel rupture, the fragments from which will have breached "containment" (the very use of that word for naval reactors is itself something of a deceit).

How you can say the naval reactors are "safe" but not form any judgement on the power stations is quite some puzzle. The power stations at least don't use high-enriched fuel capable of a nuclear explosion, and they mostly have containment buildings which will decrease the hazard in many mishaps (though not all). Why so shy on this category while so bold on the other ? In my opinion the differences are of largely unknown magnitude yet minor significance because fission reactors (beyond, say, TRIGA) are all too dangerous. 0.1 or 3 GW are all far too big.

Having successfully advocated a Royal Commission on Nuclear Power, and read an enormous amount around that time, I suggest you peruse that yard of paper, and a few of its refs, before you speak out again as an apologist for such a hazardous technology.

Roundup Doesn't Poison Only Weeds
By Herve Morin
Le Monde, 12 March 2005
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/032805HB.shtml

The most used herbicide in the world: Monsanto's Roundup and its
competitors, formulated, like Roundup, on a base of glyphosate, have
long enjoyed a reputation for harmlessness to human health and the
environment. However, several recent studies seem to indicate that this
active ingredient, used by farmers as well as by public road services
and Sunday gardeners, could well not be as inoffensive as its promoters
claim. The stakes are big, because the usage of glyphosate grows along
with that of genetically modified organisms, the great majority of which
have been specifically conceived to "tolerate" this active ingredient,
fatal to plants.

In fact, while Roundup and similar products were originally used against
weeds, "they have become a food product, since they are used on GMOs,
which can absorb them without dying," maintains the biochemist
Gilles-Eric Seralini. A member for years of the French Commission on
Biomolecular Genetics (CBG), responsible for preparing the files for
requests for field studies, then GMO commercialization, he ceaselessly
demands more intense studies on their eventual health impact.

Also a member of Criigen, an association which has made control of GMOs
its passion, he has oriented his own research toward the study of the
impact of glyphosate. In an article published February 24 in the
American journal Environmental Health Perspective, the biochemist and
his team from the University of Caen demonstrate, in vitro, several
toxic effects of this compound as well as of the additives associated
with it to facilitate its diffusion.

For their study, the researchers used human placental cell lines, in
which very weak doses of glyphosate showed toxic effects and, at still
weaker concentrations, endocrinal disturbances. This, for Gilles-Eric
Seralini, could explain the high levels of premature births and
miscarriages observed in certain epidemiological studies - which are,
however, controversial - covering women farmers using glyphosate. "The
effect we have observed is proportional to the dose, but also to the
length of exposure," he emphasizes.

His team has also compared the comparative effects of glyphosate and
Roundup. And it has observed that the commercial product is more
disruptive than its isolated main active ingredient. "Consequently the
evaluation of herbicides must take into account the combination with
additives in the product," he says.

Gilles-Eric Seralini acknowledges that his study must be extended by
animal experiments. But he rejects criticisms that have been made on the
absence of any real link between in vitro and normal utilization:
"Farmers dilute the pure product and are punctually exposed to doses
10,000 times stronger," he insists. "Our results show that the length of
exposure must be taken into account."


Sea-Urchin Models

He is joined in his conclusions by Robert Belle, from the National
Center for Social Research (CNRS) biological station in Roscoff
(Finistere), whose team has been studying the impact of glyphosate
formulations on sea-urchin cells for several years. This recognized
model for the study of early stages of cancer genesis earned Tim Hunt
the 2001 Nobel Prize in medicine. In 2002, the Finisterian team had
shown that Roundup acted on one of the key stages of cellular division.

"This deregulation can lead to cancer," warns Robert Belle, who, to make
himself understood, insists on summarizing the mechanisms of cancer
genesis: during the division of a cell into two daughter cells, the two
copies of genetic inheritance, in the form of DNA, may give rise to very
numerous errors, up to 50,000 per cell. That's why repair mechanisms or
natural cell death (apoptosis) are automatically set in motion. However,
it happens that a cell escapes these alternatives (death or repair) and
can perpetuate itself in an unstable form, potentially cancerous over
the long term.

The Breton team has recently demonstrated (Toxicological Science,
December 2004) that a "control point" for DNA damage was affected by
Roundup, while glyphosate alone had no effect. "We have shown that it's
a definite risk factor, but we have not evaluated the number of cancers
potentially induced, nor the time frame within which they would declare
themselves," the researcher acknowledges. A sprayed droplet could affect
thousands of cells. On the other hand, "the concentration in water and
fruits is lower, which is rather reassuring."

For the researcher, it's not necessarily a matter of banning the product
- "Now it's for the public authorities to evaluate the benefits and the
risks" - but it is important that users take every possible precaution,
for themselves as well as for the public. "I've seen people in their
underwear spray several square meters in a playground," he exclaimed,
revolted.

"Such in vitro studies are not adequate for deducing the effects on
people," however, insists Sophie Gallotti, coordinator of studies on
contaminants at the Agence francaise pour la swcurite sanitaire des
aliments (Afssa) [French Agency for Food Health Security]. The same
sentiment is expressed by Remi Maximilien, toxicological expert at
Afssa, for whom the sea-urchin experiment "shows a potential mechanism
for cancer genesis that remains to be proved in human beings."


Contested Interpretation

Monsanto is not impressed by these results. "It's not up to us to judge
the interest of these publications, the validity of which we do not
contest, but the interpretation," indicates Mathilde Durif, spokeswoman
for the French subsidiary of the American giant. These results
contradict sixty other available studies and "neither the European
authorities nor the World Health Organization, nor the United Nations
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) have classified this product as
carcinogenic."

Glyphosate is, however, an active ingredient and "it is necessary to use
it according to the recommended usage." A cautious attitude that seems
slightly in contradiction with the firm's marketing efforts. And these
are now already under attack by the Breton association, which reproaches
Monsanto with making its product's "biodegradability" an advertising
argument - one already judged to be a lie by the American legal system.

Translation: by t r u t h o u t French language correspondent
leslie.thatcher@truthout.org

From GM Watch

1.Roundup Herbicide Runoff Is Lethal To Amphibians
2.Roundup® highly lethal to amphibians, finds University of Pittsburgh
researcher

EXCERPT: This field experiment is one of the most extensive studies on
the effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting,
and the results may provide a key link to global amphibian declines.

------

1.Roundup Herbicide Runoff Is Lethal To Amphibians
Posted on Mon Apr 4th, 2005

The herbicide Roundup is widely used to eradicate weeds, particularly
around genetically engineered crops that have been given the
controversial genes of immunity to this chemical. The patented
"Roundup-ready gene" is currently being put in every single crop type
you can imagine, and is resulting in skyrocketing Roundup herbicide use.

Unfortunately, it looks like frogs don't have a Roundup-ready gene,
which is too bad considering they have no choice but to live and breed
in watersheds and run-off zones.

A study published today by a University of Pittsburgh researcher finds
that the chemical may be eradicating much more than weeds. Pitt
assistant professor of biology Rick Relyea found that Roundup, the
second most commonly applied herbicide in the United States, is
extremely lethal to amphibians.

This field experiment is one of the most extensive studies on the
effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting, and
the results may provide a key link to global amphibian declines.

In a paper titled "The Impact of Insecticides and Herbicides on the
Biodiversity and Productivity of Aquatic Communities," published in the
journal Ecological Applications, Relyea examined how a pond's entire
community--25 species, including crustaceans, insects, snails, and
tadpoles--responded to the addition of the manufacturers' recommended
doses of two insecticides--Sevin (carbaryl) and malathion--and two
herbicides--Roundup; (glyphosate) and 2,4-D.

Relyea found that Roundup caused a 70 percent decline in amphibian
biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass of tadpoles.
Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were completely
eliminated and wood frog tadpoles and toad tadpoles were nearly
eliminated. One species of frog, spring peepers, was unaffected.

"The most shocking insight coming out of this was that Roundup,
something designed to kill plants, was extremely lethal to amphibians,"
said Relyea, who conducted the research at Pitt's Pymatuning Laboratory
of Ecology. "We added Roundup, and the next day we looked in the tanks
and there were dead tadpoles all over the bottom."

Relyea initially conducted the experiment to see whether the Roundup
would have an indirect effect on the frogs by killing their food source,
the algae. However, he found that Roundup, although an herbicide,
actually increased the amount of algae in the pond because it killed
most of the frogs.

"It's like killing all the cows in a field and seeing that the field has
more grass in it--not because you made the grass grow better, but
because you killed everything that eats grass," he said.

Previous research had found that the lethal ingredient in Roundup was
not the herbicide itself, glyphosate, but rather the surfactant, or
detergent, that allows the herbicide to penetrate the waxy surfaces of
plants. In Roundup, that surfactant is a chemical called polyethoxylated
tallowamine. Other herbicides have less dangerous surfactants: For
example, Relyea's study found that 2,4-D had no effect on tadpoles.

"We've repeated the experiment, so we're confident that this is, in
fact, a repeatable result that we see," said Relyea. "It's fair to say
that nobody would have guessed Roundup was going to be so lethal to
amphibians."

From a UPMC press release
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-04/uopm-rhl040105.php [see
below]

------

2.Roundup® highly lethal to amphibians, finds University of Pittsburgh
researcher
Public release date: 1-Apr-2005
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-04/uopm-rhl040105.php

Contact: Karen Hoffman
klh52@pitt.edu
412-624-4356
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

PITTSBURGH--The herbicide Roundup® is widely used to eradicate weeds.
But a study published today by a University of Pittsburgh researcher
finds that the chemical may be eradicating much more than that.

Pitt assistant professor of biology Rick Relyea found that Roundup®, the
second most commonly applied herbicide in the United States, is
"extremely lethal" to amphibians. This field
experiment is one of the most extensive studies on the effects of
pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting, and the results
may provide a key link to global amphibian declines.

In a paper titled "The Impact of Insecticides and Herbicides on the
Biodiversity and Productivity of Aquatic Communities," published in the
journal Ecological Applications, Relyea examined how a pond's entire
community--25 species, including crustaceans, insects, snails, and
tadpoles--responded to the addition of the manufacturers' recommended
doses of two insecticides--Sevin® (carbaryl) and malathion--and two
herbicides--Roundup® (glyphosate) and 2,4-D.

Relyea found that Roundup® caused a 70 percent decline in amphibian
biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass of tadpoles.
Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were completely
eliminated and wood frog tadpoles and toad tadpoles were nearly
eliminated. One species of frog, spring peepers, was unaffected.

"The most shocking insight coming out of this was that Roundup®,
something designed to kill plants, was extremely lethal to amphibians,"
said Relyea, who conducted the research at Pitt's Pymatuning Laboratory
of Ecology. "We added Roundup®, and the next day we looked in the tanks
and there were dead tadpoles all over the bottom."

Relyea initially conducted the experiment to see whether the Roundup®
would have an indirect effect on the frogs by killing their food source,
the algae. However, he found that Roundup®, although an herbicide,
actually increased the amount of algae in the pond because it killed
most of the frogs.

"It's like killing all the cows in a field and seeing that the field has
more grass in it--not
because you made the grass grow better, but because you killed
everything that eats grass," he said.

Previous research had found that the lethal ingredient in Roundup® was
not the herbicide itself, glyphosate, but rather the surfactant, or
detergent, that allows the herbicide to penetrate the waxy surfaces of
plants. In Roundup®, that surfactant is a chemical called
polyethoxylated tallowamine. Other herbicides have less dangerous
surfactants: For example, Relyea's study found that 2,4-D had no effect
on tadpoles.

"We've repeated the experiment, so we're confident that this is, in
fact, a repeatable result that we see," said Relyea. "It's fair to say
that nobody would have guessed Roundup® was going to be so lethal to
amphibians."

The current work comes on the heels of French work showing strong effects of this herbicide on animal reproduction after exposure to levels of herbicide one tenth the level expected from recommended spraying. Glyphosate should be re-evaluated by EPA at this time. However, the response from the regulators will likely be a PR campaign defending the pesticide rather than the frogs.

Can the planet live after the frogs are all wiped out? We may be shocked at the impact of the end of frogs may have on the framework of life on the planet.

Ecological Applications, 15(2), 2005, pp. 618-627

THE IMPACT OF INSECTICIDES AND HERBICIDES ON THE BIODIVERSITY AND PRODUCTIVITY OF AQUATIC COMMUNITIES
RICK A. RELYEA1
Department of Biological Sciences, 101 Clapp Hall, University of
Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260 USA

Abstract.

Pesticides constitute a major anthropogenic addition to natural communities. In aquatic communities, a great majority of pesticide impacts are determined from single species experiments conducted under laboratory conditions. Although this is an essential protocol to rapidly identify the direct impacts of pesticides on organisms, it prevents an assessment of direct and indirect pesticide effects on organisms embedded in their natural ecological contexts. In this study, I examined the impact of four globally common pesticides (two insecticides, carbaryl [Sevin] and malathion; two herbicides, glyphosate [Roundup] and 2,4-D) on the biodiversity of aquatic communities containing algae and 25 species of animals. Species richness was reduced by 15% with Sevin, 30% with malathion, and 22% with Roundup, whereas 2,4-D had no effect. Both insecticides reduced zooplankton diversity by eliminating cladocerans but not copepods (the latter increased in abundance). The insecticides also reduced the diversity and biomass of predatory insects and had an apparent indirect positive effect on several species of tadpoles, but had no effect on snails. The two herbicides had no effects on zooplankton, insect predators, or snails.

Moreover, the herbicide 2-4-D had no effect on tadpoles. However, Roundup completely eliminated two species of tadpoles and nearly exterminated a third species, resulting in a 70% decline in the species richness of tadpoles. This study represents one of the most extensive experimental investigations of pesticide effects on aquatic communities and offers a comprehensive perspective on the impacts of pesticides when non-target organisms are examined under ecologically relevant conditions.

Pesticide Action Network North America, April 06, 2005

Tell Bayer Not to Sell Lindane Products in U.S.!

The United States is one of the few countries in the world that still
permits agricultural uses of the pesticide lindane. More than 50
countries--including all of Europe, Canada, and most recently Mexico--have
phased out lindane use in agriculture. Ninety-nine percent of remaining
lindane use in the U.S. is for seed treatment of a handful of grain crops.

Lindane, a dangerous neurotoxic pesticide, persists in the environment and
builds up in our bodies. A recent study from the Centers for Disease
Control found lindane's breakdown product in 62% of people whose blood was
sampled in the United States, with the highest levels in women of
childbearing age. Lindane is also transported on wind and air currents to
the Arctic region, where it is one of the most commonly found chemicals in
the environment and a particular threat to indigenous people in the region.

Bayer Crop Science recently acquired the company that distributes lindane
agricultural products in North America. Canada has already banned seed
treatment with lindane, and in early 2005, Bayer announced that it will
withdraw registration of lindane seed treatment products in Mexico. Bayer
executives need to know that the U.S. public wants to join Canada, Mexico
and the rest of the world and stop using this dangerous pesticide!

Act Now: Write to Esmail Zirakparvar, President and CEO of Bayer
CropScience's North American offices, urging him to immediately withdraw
registration of lindane seed treatment products in the U.S.:
http://ga4.org/campaign/Bayer

About Lindane

Banned in at least 52 countries and severely restricted in more than 33
others, the organochlorine pesticide lindane is currently registered for
use in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. While Mexico recently committed to
phase out all uses and Canada has phased out all agricultural uses, the
U.S. continues seed treatment uses of lindane for corn, wheat and a
handful of other grains. In an average year, 142,000 pounds of lindane are
used agriculturally in the U.S. for seed treatment. Lindane use to control
headlice and scabies also continues in the U.S. and Canada.

Agricultural uses are largely responsible for the pervasiveness of lindane
and its breakdown products in the Arctic environment, where it is found
more often than any other pesticide. Indigenous peoples of the north who
rely on traditional diets of marine mammals and fish are particularly at
risk from lindane exposure through foods. In 1997, the Northern
Contaminants Program estimated 15 to 20 percent of Inuit women on southern
Baffin Island are exposed to dangerous levels of lindane in their daily
diet.

Lindane can cause seizures and damage to the nervous system, and can
weaken the immune system. Case-controlled research shows a significant
association between brain tumors in children and the use of
lindane-containing lice shampoos. The insecticide is also a suspected
carcinogen and hormone disruptor. Lindane and its breakdown products
persist in the environment, where they can expose people and wildlife long
after the pesticide is applied. A 2003 study from the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention found that 62% of U.S. residents sampled
carry the insecticide in their body, and the highest levels are found
among women of childbearing age.

In addition to agricultural uses, the Food and Drug Administration
continues to approve use of this dangerous insecticide in shampoos and
lotions for control of lice and scabies. These pharmaceutical uses are
also approved in Canada. Given that elementary schools are frequently
plagued with infestations of head lice and children are known to be
particularly vulnerable to lindane's toxic effects, approval of this
neurotoxin for head lice is especially risky. Use of these products on
young children appears to be continuing despite new labeling required by
FDA warning of the dangers of lindane use. Safer and more effective
alternatives are available for all pharmaceutical uses of lindane. Careful
combing with a specially designed fine-tooth comb for lice control is one
example.

Lindane is also a significant contaminate in urban sewer systems and can
pollute sources of drinking water. The Los Angeles County Sanitation
District estimates that one dose of lindane shampoo used as a treatment
for head lice contaminates six million gallons of water. This threat to
clean drinking water, and the enormous costs of clean up, prompted
California to ban lindane shampoos and lotions in 2002. After the ban,
levels of lindane leaving Los Angeles County reclamation plants dropped
dramatically.

Coalition against BAYER-dangers (Germany)
www.CBGnetwork.org
CBGnetwork@aol.com
Fax: (+49) 211-333 940 Tel: (+49) 211-333 911

EPA To Drop 'E,' 'P' From Name

WASHINGTON, DC - Days after unveiling new power-plant pollution
regulations that rely on an industry-favored market-trading approach to
cutting mercury emissions, EPA Acting Administrator Stephen Johnson
announced that the agency will remove the "E" and "P" from its name.
"We're not really 'environmental' anymore, and we certainly aren't
'protecting' anything," Johnson said. "'The Agency' is a name that
reflects our current agenda and encapsulates our new function as a
government-funded body devoted to handling documents, scheduling meetings,
and fielding phone calls."

The change comes on the heels of the Department of Health and Human
Services' January decision to shorten its name to the Department of
Services.

Geo-Greening by Example

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

NYT March 27, 2005

How will future historians explain it? How will they possibly explain why
President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in
the face and chose instead to spend all his electoral capital on a
futile effort to undo the New Deal, by partially privatizing Social
Security? We are, quite simply, witnessing one of the greatest examples of
misplaced priorities in the history of the U.S. presidency.

"Ah, Friedman, but you overstate the case." No, I understate it. Look at
the opportunities our country is missing - and the risks we are assuming -
by having a president and vice president who refuse to lift a finger
to put together a "geo-green" strategy that would marry geopolitics, energy
policy and environmentalism.

By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides
in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the
world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars
and we are financing the jihadists - and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian
mosques and charities that support them - through our gasoline purchases.
The oil boom is also entrenching the autocrats in Russia and Venezuela,
which is becoming Castro's Cuba with oil. By doing nothing to reduce U.S.
oil consumption we are also setting up a global competition with China for
energy resources, including right on our doorstep in Canada and Venezuela.
Don't kid yourself: China's foreign policy today is very simple - holding
on to Taiwan and looking for oil.

Finally, by doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are only
hastening the climate change crisis, and the Bush officials who scoff at
the science around this should hang their heads in shame. And it is only
going to get worse the longer we do nothing. Wired magazine did an
excellent piece in its April issue about hybrid cars, which get 40 to 50
miles to the gallon with very low emissions. One paragraph jumped out at
me: "Right now, there are about 800 million cars in active use. By 2050,
as cars become ubiquitous in China and India, it'll be 3.25 billion. That
increase represents ... an almost unimaginable threat to our environment.
Quadruple the cars means quadruple the carbon dioxide emissions - unless
cleaner, less gas-hungry vehicles become the norm."

All the elements of what I like to call a geo-green strategy are known:-
We need a gasoline tax that would keep pump prices fixed at $4 a
gallon, even if crude oil prices go down. At $4 a gallon (premium gasoline
averages about $6 a gallon in Europe), we could change the car-buying
habits of a large segment of the U.S. public, which would make it
profitable for the car companies to convert more of their fleets to hybrid
or ethanol engines, which over time could sharply reduce our oil
consumption.

We need to start building nuclear power plants again. The new
nuclear technology is safer and cleaner than ever. "The risks of climate
change by continuing to rely on hydrocarbons are much greater than the
risks of nuclear power," said Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business
Network, a leading energy and strategy consulting firm. "Climate change is
real and it poses a civilizational threat that [could] transform the
carrying capacity of the entire planet."

And we need some kind of carbon tax that would move more industries
from coal to wind, hydro and solar power, or other, cleaner fuels. The
revenue from these taxes would go to pay down the deficit and the reduction
in oil imports would help to strengthen the dollar and defuse competition
for energy with China.

It's smart geopolitics. It's smart fiscal policy. It is smart climate
policy. Most of all - it's smart politics! Even evangelicals are speaking
out about our need to protect God's green earth. "The Republican Party is
much greener than George Bush or Dick Cheney," remarked Mr. Schwartz.
"There is now a near convergence of support on the environmental issue.
Look at how popular [Arnold] Schwarzenegger, a green Republican, is
becoming because of what he has done on the environment in California."

Imagine if George Bush declared that he was getting rid of his limousine
for an armor-plated Ford Escape hybrid, adopting a geo-green strategy and
building an alliance of neocons, evangelicals and greens to sustain
it. His popularity at home - and abroad - would soar. The country is
dying to be led on this. Instead, he prefers to squander his personal
energy trying to take apart the New Deal and throwing red meat to
right-to-life fanatics. What a waste of a presidency. How will future
historians explain it?

Editor's Introduction
- by K. Lauren de Boer:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a passionate desire for a sustainable future.
The economic, the political, and the personal worlds are all part of this
evolving vision. So too, is our spiritual life. Kennedy views the
corporate assault on the environment as "a moral assault on future
generations." And he has worked tirelessly to defend and preserve the
common ecological birthright of our children.

In the 1990s, Kennedy helped lead the fight to turn back the
anti-environmental legislation during the 104th Congress. The New York
Watershed Agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and
New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in
stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. Currently,
he acts as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeepers, Senior Attorney for
the Natural Resources Defense Council, and President of the Waterkeeper
Alliance. In addition to work on environmental issues across the
continent, Kennedy has assisted several indigenous tribes in Latin America
and Canada in successfully negotiating treaties protecting traditional
homelands.

In this article, the author warns us of the attack underway on our natural
heritage, of the dangers of domination of the government by large
corporations, and of the spiritual implications of our plunder of the
Earth.

Published in the Winter 2005 issue of EarthLight

For the Sake of Our Children

by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I have been an environmental advocate for twenty years, and I've been
disciplined during that period about being nonpartisan in my approach to
this issue. The worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it
becomes the province of a single political party. Most of the
environmental leaders in our country agree with me. Five years ago, if you
asked the leaders of the major environmental groups in America, What's the
gravest threat to the global environment?, they would have given you a
range of answers: overpopulation, habitat destruction, global warming.
Today, they will all tell you one thing: it's George W. Bush. This is the
worst environmental president that we have ever had. You simply cannot
speak honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking
critically about this president. If you go to the Natural Resources
Defense Council's web site you will see over 400 major environmental
rollbacks that have been promoted by this administration over the last
three and half years. It is a concerted, deliberate attempt to eviscerate
thirty years of environmental law. It is a stealth attack, one that's been
hidden from the public.

We found, in 2003, a memo from Frank Luntz, the president's pollster, to
the president saying that if you go through with the evisceration of
America's environmental law, you are going to alienate not just Democrats
but the Republican rank and file. Eighty-one percent in both parties want
clean air, they want stronger environmental laws and they want them
strictly enforced. Luntz said that to the president, and he said, if we do
this we have to do a stealth attack. He recommended using Orwellian
rhetoric to mask this radical agenda: They want to destroy the forest, they
call it the Healthy Forest Act, they want to destroy the air they call it
the Clear Skies Act. Most insidiously, they have installed the worst, most
irresponsible polluters in America, and the lobbyists from those companies,
as the heads of virtually all the agencies and sub-secretariats and even
Cabinet positions that regulate or oversee our environment. The head of the
Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist who is probably the most
rapacious timber industry lobbyist in American history. The head of public
lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are
unconstitutional. The head of the Air Division at the EPA is a utility
lobbyist who has represented the worst polluters in America for twenty
years. The head of Superfund is a woman whose former job was advising
companies how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a
Monsanto lobbyist - these are not exceptions, these are the rules across
the agencies. I think it's a good idea to bring business people into
government, to bring that experience and expertise.

These individuals did not enter government service for the purpose of
promoting the public interest, but in each of these cases, rather to
subvert the very laws that they are now charged with enforcing. We are
seeing the impacts of this already. This year, for the first year on
record, the EPA announced that the dead zone in Lake Erie - you remember
Lake Erie was declared dead prior to Earth Day 1970 - is growing. Our
water in this country, according to EPA, is getting dirty for the first
time since the Clean Water Act was passed.

The rollbacks from the Bush administration have affected the lives of
millions and millions of Americans adversely. Consider just one industry:
the coal-burning utilities. One out of every four black children in New
York now has asthma. I have three sons who have asthma. We don't know why
we have this epidemic of pediatric asthma, but we do know that asthma
attacks are caused primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and
particulates. In the Los Angeles Times recently there was a description of
a study that's about to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine
that shows that even small amounts of ozone pollution do permanent damage
to children's lungs. In San Bernardino, for example, ten percent of the
children have lungs that are permanently damaged, that will never recover;
and that lung injury precipitates in human beings a whole host of other
diseases throughout their lifetime.

We know that the principal source of ozone and particulates in our air is
coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal
illegally. They were supposed to install controls over fifteen years ago.
The Clinton administration was prosecuting 75 of the worst of those plants.
But this industry gave $48 million to President Bush during the 2000
campaign, and they've contributed $58 million since. One of the first
things that President Bush did when he came to office was to order the
Justice Department to drop all 75 of those suits. The Justice Department
lawyers were shocked. This has never happened in our history before, where
somebody running as a presidential candidate accepts money from a criminal
and then lets that criminal off the hook. Many of you remember what
happened when President Clinton pardoned Mark Rich and how indignant the
press and the public was at that action. But Mark Rich was one person, and
he never killed anybody. According to EPA, these 75 plants, just the
criminal exceedences from these plants, kill 5,500 Americans every year.
After letting these criminals off the hook, the president then went and
rewrote the Clean Air Act, illegally we believe. We're suing him, we'll
win the suit, but it may take ten years, and in the meantime they'll
discharge what they want.

I live in New York State. Most of the fish in New York are now unsafe to
eat from mercury contamination. I live two miles from the state of
Connecticut; in Connecticut every freshwater fish is now unsafe to eat.
Last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that in 19 states it is
unsafe to regularly eat any freshwater fish, and in 48 states at least some
fish are unsafe to eat. The mercury is coming, largely, from those same
1,100 coal-burning power plants. We know a lot about mercury that we
didn't know five or ten years ago. We know that one out of every six
American women of childbearing years now has so much mercury in her womb
that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: cognitive
impairment; mental retardation; autism; blindness; kidney, liver or heart
disease. I have so much mercury in my body, I was told by Dr. David
Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that if
I were a woman of childbearing years and produced a child, that the child
would have cognitive impairment, and, he estimated, a permanent IQ loss of
five to seven points. There are 630,000 children born in this country
every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the
womb.

Recognizing this threat to the American public, the Clinton administration
reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act; that
triggered the requirement that those companies remove 90 percent of that
mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost, according to
EPA, less than one percent of the revenues of those plants for them to do
that. That's a great deal for the American people, but it's still billions
of dollars for that industry. Eight weeks ago, Bush announced that he was
scrapping the Clinton-era rules and substituting, instead, rules that were
written by the industry's lobbying firm Latham & Watkins. On their face,
they say that they have to clean up, within fifteen years, 50 percent of
the mercury. But they've woven so many loopholes into the new rule that
they will literally never have to clean up. The chief lobbyist for the
firm who wrote it is now the head of the Air Division at EPA.

We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a world where, because
somebody gave money to a politician, our children are brought into a world
where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. This is a world where,
because somebody gave money to a politician, my children and the children
of millions of other Americans can no longer enjoy the seminal, primal
activities of their youth - which is to go fishing with their father or
mother and come home and eat the fish. I live two hours south of the
Adirondack Mountains. This is the oldest protected wilderness area on the
face of the Earth; it's been protected since the 1880s. Today, one-fifth
of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized from acid rain which is
coming from those same coal-burning power plants, and this president has
put the brakes on the statutory requirement that those companies remove the
materials that are causing the acid rain.

I flew recently over the coalfields of the Appalachians. I saw something
that if the American people could see there would be a revolution in this
country. We are cutting down the mountains, literally cutting them down.
The coal companies blow off the tops of the mountains, using 2,500 tons of
dynamite in West Virginia alone every year. They fire the workers: When
my father was fighting strip mining in West Virginia in 1968 there were
114,000 coal miners digging coal out of West Virginia. He told me that
strip mining was not only going to destroy the economy of West Virginia in
the long term but it was designed to destroy the jobs so that they didn't
have to employ union labor. Now, there are only 12,000 miners left to get
the same amount of coal. They do it by blowing off the tops of the
mountains, and they take that rubble and they dump it into the adjacent
river valley. They've already covered up 1,200 miles of our streams. We
are destroying, flattening this landscape that is a part of American
history. It's the source of our values, our virtues, our character as a
people; the landscapes, the mountains where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone
roamed, and we are cutting them to the ground. Of course it's illegal, you
cannot take rubble and debris and toxic waste and dump it into a river
without a Clean Water Act permit, and the Clean Water Act could never let
you get a permit to do that. So we sued. Joe Lovett, the attorney from West
Virginia, sued the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers for
allowing this practice to happen. We won the lawsuit, and the judge
enjoined all mountain top mining. Two days from that victory, the Bush
administration rewrote the Clean Water Act to allow mountain top mining to
continue forever; not only that, but changed the structure of the act so
that anybody can dump rubble and debris simply by getting a rubber stamp
permit from the Corps of Engineers.

If you ask the people in the White House who are promoting this
legislation, Why are you doing this?, what they'll say is: We have to
choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection - that is a
false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy
is identical to good economic policy. We want to measure our economy based
upon how it produces jobs and how it preserves the value of the assets of
our community. If, on the other hand, we want to do what the Bush
administration has been urging us to do, which is to treat the planet as if
it were a business in liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash
as quickly as possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity,
we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous
economy. But our children are going to pay for our joy ride. They are going
to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup
costs that are going to amplify over time and that they are never going to
be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of
loading the costs of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our
children.

There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. The
free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of
waste. Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market economy you would
eliminate, as nearly as you can, pollution. In a true free-market economy
you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without
enriching your community. Polluters make themselves rich by making
everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by
lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by
escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay
their production cost. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy.
Corporations are externalizing machines; they are constantly trying to
figure out a way to avoid their own costs and foist it out on the public.

I'll give you an example. When the coal companies, the utilities, discharge
mercury into the air they are avoiding one of the costs of bringing their
products to market, which is the cost of properly disposing of a dangerous
processed chemical. When they avoid the costs they can out-compete their
competitors, they can out-compete gas and oil and wind power. But the costs
don't disappear. They go into the fish, they make children sick, they
permanently injure children's lungs, they put people out of work, they
acidify the lakes in the Adirondacks and they've destroyed the forest cover
of the Appalachian Mountains all the way >from Georgia up into Quebec.
Those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should be reflected in
the price of that product. All of the federal environmental laws are meant
to restore free-market capitalism in America. I don't even consider myself
an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free marketeer. I go out into the
marketplace, I track down the polluters and I say to them, We are going to
force you to internalize your costs the same way that you're internalizing
your profits. Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference
between free-market capitalism which democratizes our country, that brings
us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism
which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial hog meat production,
which is not only one of the primary threats to the American environment
but also one of the primary threats to the American worker. It's allowing
a few monopolies to control our food supply and to put farmers out of
business. Fifteen years ago there were 27,000 independent hog farmers in
North Carolina, today there are none. They have been replaced completely by
2,200 hog factories, 1,600 owned or controlled by Smithfield Foods, one
large corporation. They produce such huge amounts of waste they have to
dispose of it illegally, and so they have to corrupt political officials in
order to continue operating.

I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I said
that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am of Osama
bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in the room, but
I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau. I stand by what I said.
It's the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our country was too
strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but our
democratic institutions would be subverted by what he called "malefactors
of great wealth," who would destroy them from within. Another great
Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the heat of the Civil War in 1863,
said, I have the South in front of me, and the bankers behind me and for my
country, I fear the bankers more.

From the beginning of American history our greatest political leaders -
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson - have
warned America against allowing large corporations to dominate our
political systems and our lives. Another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower,
the most famous speech he made was warning America against the domination
by the military-industrial complex. Franklin Roosevelt said that the
domination of our nation by large corporations is the definition of
fascism. I have an American Heritage Dictionary, and the definition, if
you look up fascism, says, "the domination of government by large
corporations driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism" -
that's getting to look pretty familiar. The problem with letting large
corporations dominate our government is that it erodes democracy, it erodes
our capacity to participate in public life, our capacity for dignity, and
it allows these entities to squander resources that belong to our children.
But the thing that we've squandered worst of all is our natural heritage:
the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the wildlife, the lands -
all these things that make us proud to be American. This administration has
taken the conserve out of conservatism. They claim to like the free market,
but what they are really embracing is corporate welfare capitalism,
socialism for the rich. They claim to love property rights, but only when
it's the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor's
property or to destroy the public property. They claim to like law and
order, but they are the first ones to let the large corporations and their
corporate contributors violate the law at public expense. They claim to
love local control and states' rights, but it's only in those instances
when they're taking down the barriers to large corporations.

They claim to embrace Christianity while violating the manifold mandates of
Christianity: that we are stewards of the land, and that we are meant to
care for nature. They have embraced this Christian heresy of dominion
theology, which James Watt was the first to enunciate when he told the
Senate, I don't think that there is any point in protecting the public
lands because we don't how long the world is going to last before the Lord
returns. The woman he mentored for twenty years, Gale Norton, is running
the Department of the Interior.

The reason that we protect nature is because it enriches us. It enriches us
economically, yes, the base of our economy, and we ignore that at our
peril. But it also enriches us aesthetically and recreationally,
culturally and historically, and spiritually. Human beings have other
appetites besides money, and if we don't feed them we're not going to
become the kind of beings that our Creator intended. When we destroy
nature we impoverish ourselves, we diminish ourselves and we impoverish our
children. We're not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific
Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl.
We are protecting those forests because we believe that the trees have more
value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down. I'm
not fighting for the Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the
stripped bass but because I believe my life will be richer; my children, my
community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and
sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the Hudson
is 350 years old. Many of these people come from Dutch families that
learned the same fishing methods that they're using today from the
Algonquin Indians during the Dutch colonial period. I want my children to
be able to touch them when they come to shore to repair their nets or wait
out the tides, and in doing that, connect themselves to New York history
and understand that they are part of something larger than themselves. I
don't want my children to grow up in a world where it's all Unilever and
400-ton factory trolleys 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no
interface with humanity, and where we have no family farmers left in
America; where we've driven the final nail into the coffin of Thomas
Jefferson's vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of
freeholds owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our democracy. I
don't want a world where we've lost touch with the seasons and the tides
and the things that connect us to the ten thousand generations of human
beings that were here before there were laptops, and that connect us
ultimately to God.

I don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as
God, but I do believe that it's the way that God talks to us most clearly.
God talks to human beings through many vectors: through each other, through
organized religion, through the great books of those religions, through
wise people, through art, literature, music and poetry - but nowhere with
such clarity, texture, grace and joy as through Creation. We don't know
Michelangelo by looking at his biography, we know him by looking at the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We know our Creator best by studying
Creation, which all of the religious texts mandate us to do. If you look
at all of the great, central epiphany in every religious tradition in
mankind's history, the revelation always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha
had to go into the wilderness to experience self-realization. Mohamed had
to go to the wilderness of Mount Hira in 629 and wrestle an angel in the
middle of the night to have the Koran squeezed out of him. Moses had to go
onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. The Jews had
to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge themselves of the 400 years of
slavery in Egypt. Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness to
discover his divinity. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man of the
wilderness who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and dressed in the
skins of wild animals. All of Christ's parables are taken from nature: I
am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard Seed; the little swallows the
scattering, the seeds on fallow ground. He called himself a fisherman, a
farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. That's how he stayed in touch with
the people. He was saying things to them that contradicted everything that
they had heard from the literate, sophisticated people of their time. They
would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the
wisdom of his parables about the fishes and the birds through their own
observations of the natural world. They were able to say: He's not telling
us something new, he's simply illuminating something that's very, very old.

When we destroy these things, we're cutting ourselves off from the very
things that make us human, that give us a spiritual life. And for these
people on Capitol Hill to be saying that they are following the mandate of
Christ by liquidating our public assets, what they are really doing is a
moral affront to the next generation. That's why we preserve nature. Not
for our sake, but for the sake of the future. That obligation is expressed
by the term sustainability. All that word means is that God wants us to
use the things we've been given, to enrich ourselves, to improve our
quality of life, to serve others - but we can't use them up. We can't sell
the farm piece by piece in order to pay for the groceries; we can't drain
the pond to catch the fish. We can't cut down the mountain to get at the
coal. We can live off the interest; we can't go into the capital that
belongs to our children.

What you can do: To track the Bush record on the environment, go to
www.nrdc.org/bushrecord at the website for the Natural Resources Defense
Council, where you will also find alerts, updates on victories, and
opportunities for action.

Ref:

SNUBBING KYOTO:
OUR MONUMENTAL SHAME

LAURIE DAVID
Los Angeles Times
February 11, 2005

Next Wednesday, in the enormous glass-paneled European Union Parliament
building in Brussels, hundreds of men and women will gather to mark the
start of a new era. A similar celebration will be held in Toronto, another
in Casablanca and others in Tokyo, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, Paris,
Auckland and Mexico City, among other places.

In each of these cities, people will be celebrating an unprecedented
international treaty that's going into effect that day. It is the product
of eight years of work and it has brought 141 countries together. It
represents exactly the kind of broad global undertaking that idealists all
over the world have been striving for since the end of World War II: a
massive, worldwide plan to address a terribly pressing problem confronting
the entire planet.

The treaty is the Kyoto Protocol, a collective response to the greatest
security crisis in the world --- global warming.

But one country will not be celebrating. The United States. Even though
almost all European countries are on board, and even though Russia is on
board and even though China is on board, the United States, in an act of
supreme irresponsibility, is standing on the platform watching the train
leave the station. (The only other industrialized nations that have failed
to join the protocol are Monaco and Australia.)

This is particularly egregious when you consider that the United States
would be by far the most significant participant. That's because it is the
single biggest polluter on the planet, accounting for about one-quarter of
the world's greenhouse gases.

Why won't the United States take part? Because the Bush administration
refuses to believe in science and refuses to ask for responsible leadership
from its giant corporate backers. Instead, genuflecting to the coal, oil
and automobile lobbies, our country continues to act like a superpower
bully that does what it wants, when it wants and how it wants --- deadly
consequences be damned.

The rules that apply to the rest of the world, the administration in effect
is saying, need not apply to us. International agreements --- whether they
involve the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol or the Geneva
Convention --- should not be allowed to bind the hands of the most powerful
nation on Earth. On that point, at least, the U.S. is are consistent.

At a time when international cooperation is more important than ever, it's
hard to overstate just how out of step the United States is with the rest
of the world. Instead of providing leadership, we are standing in the
doorway of the future blocking an eminently reasonable attempt at
self-preservation.

Few people bother to deny the problem anymore. British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, for instance, noted the "emerging consensus" on climate change at
the Davos conference last month.

But the U.S. energy industry continues to spend millions on lobbyists and
propagandists in an effort to spread doubt and confusion on the subject.
The industry, instead of putting money into research and development to
come up with the renewable energy technologies desperately needed to secure
both our national security and its own economic future, has mounted a
relentless campaign to discredit the truth.

Of course, corporate America would not have the power to torpedo
common-sense solutions to an imminent threat were it not for the complicity
of our elected officials. Take Sen. James M. Inhofe (Rep.-Oklahoma),
chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. He has been so
hypnotized by enormous campaign contributions from the energy industry that
he actually had the chutzpah to say that "global warming is the greatest
hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

And what's Michael Crichton's excuse? His latest best-selling novel, State
of Fear, offers up the delusional notion that global warming is the
creation of environmental groups looking to boost their profile and fill
their coffers. This is like arguing that the link between smoking and
cancer was dreamed up by oncologists, radiologists and funeral home
directors. Unfortunately, Crichton's sophomoric fiction may be the only
thing many Americans read on global warming.

The truth is that the jury is no longer out; there is no more room or time
for confusion, doubt or skepticism. Global warming is real and rapidly
altering our weather, our economy and our world. The 1990s were the
hottest decade in the last 1,000 years, according to the Natural Resources
Defense Council. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record occurred after
1994, according to the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization.

The arctic ice sheet has shrunk 20% since 1979. And bears are coming out
of hibernation a month early, throwing off their entire life cycles.

The can't-do crowd in our industry and our government continues to claim
that anything we do to control emissions will hurt our economy
unacceptably. Get real!

The Kyoto Protocol is not the be-all to ending global warming, but it is an
important first step. And we are spitting in the eye of the rest of the
world by refusing to be part of it.

Laurie David is a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council and
co-founder of the Detroit Project, a not-for-profit campaign that pressures
automakers to produce fuel-efficient cars.

KYOTO PROTOCOL DEBUTS
SHOULD RELIGION HAVE A VOICE ???

SALLY BINGHAM
San Francisco Chronicle
February 16, 2005

Every mainstream religion has a mandate to care for creation. We were given
natural resources to sustain us, but we were also given the responsibility
to act as good stewards and preserve life for future generations.

Mounting scientific evidence suggests that we are damaging the earth and
that our continued inaction will disproportionately harm the poorest among
us. We have heard the scientists, whom we view as modern-day prophets, tell
us that excessive amounts of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels,
such as coal and oil, are the likely cause for the current changes in
climate. Even the Pentagon has called global warming a major threat to
global security, raising the specter of millions of climate refugees and
wars over water and other resources.

Yet, our dependency on foreign oil is increasing. Without cooperative
action around the world, scientists tell us that our rapidly changing
climate could create a global crisis. If the United States continues our
current "wait and see" approach, it will be far too late to take action.

The moral and ethical implications of these impending global changes are
not lost on the religious community. While our nation emits more greenhouse
gases than any other, we are also one of the only developed countries to
reject the Kyoto Protocol --- an international treaty designed to reduce
global-warming pollution. The Kyoto Treaty goes into effect today without
the participation of the United States. This is not a responsible position
for the world's richest nation and sole superpower.

It is particularly important for us to recognize that the poorest countries
will feel a disproportionate negative impact from global warming. Yet these
are the countries that can least handle disruptions to their food and water
supplies. And, unlike the wealthier nations, they are the least able to
pioneer solutions.

There is some good news, however. Six New England governors and five
premiers of eastern Canadian provinces signed a regional climate action
plan to reduce global warming emissions across the region. The governors of
California, Oregon and Washington are working on a plan for our region that
may include similar goals. A number of cities have set reduction goals for
themselves.

But there is bad news as well. In addition to not signing the Kyoto
Protocol, the United States has not shown any leadership in finding real
global solutions. Each passing day is jeopardizing our future.

If the United States had sent an interfaith coalition of clergy to the
Kyoto Protocol meetings to address global warming, we would be
participating in this historic treaty. Once the religious community became
aware of the dire global situation, we began collaborating. We have only
just begun to make our position known, but we are loud, active and
everywhere.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has written a statement on climate
change responding to Pope John Paul II's concerns that climate change will
adversely affect people.

His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, leader of the Greek
Orthodox Church, has declared environmental degradation a sin.

The Franciscan order of Roman Catholic priests has called for action on
global warming and the Anglican Church is writing a response to climate
change.

The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the 30 million-member national
Association of Evangelicals said, "There are significant and compelling
theological reasons why environment should be a banner issue for the
Christian right."

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently announced that the
Church of England is embarking on a green revolution, rolling out
eco-friendly policies. One thousand clergy and congregational leaders in
35 states recently signed a statement that expressed disagreement with the
present position of our government on climate change.

The united voice of the faith community is heartening, as there are few
subjects where such a diverse group sings in unison. Our political leaders
should learn this hymn.

The Rev. Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest at Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco, is executive director of the Regeneration Project
http://www.TheRegenerationProject.org

Activists Put Kofi Annan on Notice

Kyoto: What's to Celebrate?

While many are celebrating the Kyoto Protocol's
entering into force this week, others are finding cause
for grave concern.

A coalition of NGOs, social and environmental
activists, communities, scientists and economists from
around the world concerned about the climate crisis,
the Durban Group, charged that the 1997 climate
treaty not only fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions
enough to avert climate catastrophe, but also steals
from the poor to give to the rich.

The Kyoto Protocol says that industrialized country
signatories mustreduce their emissions 5.2% below 1990
levels by 2008-2012. However, the group noted, the
scientific community has called for global reductions
of over 60% below 1990 levels by the year 2000.

What's more, the carbon trading promoted by the
Protocol hands Northern governments and corporations
lucrative tradable rights use the earth's natural
carbon-cycling capacity, effectively stealing a public
good away from most of the planet's inhabitants.

Just last month, Danish power utility Energi E2 sold
hundreds ofthousands of dollars of the rights it had
been granted free by its government to Shell after mild
temperatures kept the utility's carbon emissions below
expected levels. (1) No such free rights have
beengranted to ordinary citizens.

The Kyoto Protocol's attempt to create "carbon
dioxide-saving" projects in poorer countries is
meanwhile stirring protests from Brazil to South
Africa. Such projects - which include industrial tree
plantations and schemes to burn off landfill gas - are
designed to license big emitters in the rich North to
go on using fossil fuels. But they usurp land or water
ordinary people need for other purposes.(2)

"We're creating a sort of 'climate apartheid,' wherein
the poorest and darkest-skinned pay the highest
price - with their health,their land, and, in some
cases, with their lives - for continued carbon profligacy
by the rich," said Soumitra Ghosh of the National Forum
of Forest Peoples and Forest Workers in India.

Worse, such carbon projects don't work. "Even in
purely economic terms, a market in credits from
'carbon-saving' projects will fail," said Jutta Kill of
Sinkswatch, a British-based watchdog organization. "You
simply can't verify whether a power plant's emissions
can be 'compensated for' by a tree plantation or
other project. Ultimately investors are bound to lose
confidence in the credits they buy from such projects."

Kill noted that almost all of the methods proposed so
far for provinghow much carbon is saved by Kyoto's
"carbon-saving" projects have been rejected by the UN
itself. "People are beginning to realize that this is
ENRON accounting," she said.

Ricardo Carrere of the World Rainforest Movement added
that "so-called carbon sink plantations will result in
the further spread of monoculture tree plantations,
which are already having enormous impacts on people and
the environment". The Kyoto Protocol also allows
genetically engineered trees to be used in
carbon-absorbing plantations.

"This will open up a Pandora's box of impacts we can't
evenguess at," said Anne Petermann of Global Justice
Ecology Project inthe US.

One of the biggest promoters of the carbon market,
including "carbon-saving" projects in poor nations, is
the World Bank, ironically also a major financier of
fossil fuel developments.

"It's ridiculous that the Bank, which has a mission of
entrenchingthe fossil fuel industry, is now
advertising itself as solving the climate crisis," said
Nadia Martinez of the Sustainable Energy
andEnvironment Network in Washington. (3)

"If we are to avert a climate crisis, drastic
reductions in fossil fuel investment and use are
inescapable, as is the protection of remaining native
forests," confirmed Heidi Bachram of Carbon Trade
Watch. "We're joining many other movements of Northern
and Southern peoples to take the climate back into our
hands."


Members of the Durban Group are todaysending an open
letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
excoriating the UN's failure to take constructive
action and giving notice of their intention to build
independent alliances to "press governments to limit
fossil fuel extraction and use while
supporting grassroots alliances struggling against
fossil fuel exploration, extraction and use and against
unjust 'climate mitigation' projects."


(To view the Kofi Annan open
letter
http://www.globaljusticeecology.org/index.php?set_table=content&articleID=303&pa
ge=getrees#articletop)

For further information/interviews:

Heidi Bachram (UK) +1 631 477
8653,heidi@carbontradewatch.org
http://www.carbontradewatch.org
andhttp://www.carbontradewatch.org/durban

Ricardo Carrere (Uruguay) +598 2 4100985 or4132989,
rcarrere@wrm.org.uy, http://www.wrm.org.uy

Soumitra Ghosh (India) +91 353 2661915,
nespon@sancharnet.in

Sajida Khan (South Africa) +27 31 208
9223,rafiquee@telkomsa.net

Jutta Kill (Germany/UK) +1 250 799
5888,jutta@fern.org, http://www.sinkswatch.org

Larry Lohmann (UK) 01258 473795 or
821218;larrylohmann@gn.apc.org,
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk

Nadia Martinez (US) +1 202 234 9382, x208,
nmartinez@seen.org

Winnie Overbeek (Brazil) +55 27 33226330 or 32237436
winnie.fase@terra.com.br

Anne Petermann (US) +1 802 482
2689,globalecology@gmavt.net
http://www.globaljusticeecology.org

NOTES FOR EDITORS
1. Carbon Market Daily, 7 Feburary
2005,www.pointcarbon.com.
2. For interviews: Winnie Overbeek, Sajida Khan,
Soumitra Ghosh(above).
3. SEEN, Wrong Turn from Rio, www.seen.org.
__________
Global Justice Ecology Project
P.O. Box 412
Hinesburg, VT 05461
+1-802-482-2689 ph/fax
http://www.globaljusticeecology.org

http://tinyurl.com/4lk35

washingtonpost.com
The Greening of Evangelicals
Christian Right Turns, Sometimes Warily, to Environmentalism

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 6, 2005; Page A01

SEATTLE -- Thanks to the Rev. Leroy Hedman, the parishioners at Georgetown
Gospel Chapel take their baptismal waters cold. The preacher has unplugged
the electricity-guzzling heater in the immersion baptism tank behind his
pulpit. He has also installed energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs
throughout the church and has placed water barrels beneath its gutter pipes
-- using runoff to irrigate the congregation's all-organic gardens.

Such "creation care" should be at the heart of evangelical life, Hedman
says, along with condemning abortion, protecting family and loving Jesus.
He uses the term "creation care" because, he says, it does not annoy
conservative Christians for whom the word "environmentalism" connotes
liberals, secularists and Democrats.

"It's amazing to me that evangelicals haven't gone quicker for the green,"
Hedman said. "But as creation care spreads, evangelicals will demand
different behavior from politicians. The Republicans should not take us
for granted."

There is growing evidence -- in polling and in public statements of church
leaders -- that evangelicals are beginning to go for the green. Despite
wariness toward mainstream environmental groups, a growing number of
evangelicals view stewardship of the environment as a responsibility
mandated by God in the Bible.

"The environment is a values issue," said the Rev. Ted Haggard, president
of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals. "There are
significant and compelling theological reasons why it should be a banner
issue for the Christian right."

In October, the association's leaders adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic
Responsibility" that, for the first time, emphasized every Christian's duty
to care for the planet and the role of government in safeguarding a
sustainable environment.

"We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward
the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part,"
said the statement, which has been distributed to 50,000 member churches.
"Because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to
public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its
citizens from the effects of environmental degradation."

Signatories included highly visible, opinion-swaying evangelical leaders
such as Haggard, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Chuck Colson of
Prison Fellowship Ministries. Some of the signatories are to meet in March
in Washington to develop a position on global warming, which could place
them at odds with the policies of the Bush administration, according to
Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for governmental affairs.

Also last fall, Christianity Today, an influential evangelical magazine,
weighed in for the first time on global warming. It said that "Christians
should make it clear to governments and businesses that we are willing to
adapt our lifestyles and support steps towards changes that protect our
environment."

The magazine came out in favor of a global warming bill -- sponsored by
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) -- that the
Bush administration opposed and the Republican-controlled Senate defeated.

Polling has found a strengthening consensus among evangelicals for strict
environmental rules, even if they cost jobs and higher prices, said John C.
Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the
University of Akron. In 2000, about 45 percent of evangelicals supported
strict environmental regulations, according to Green's polling. That
jumped to 52 percent last year.

"It has changed slowly, but it has changed," Green said. "There is now a
lot of ferment out there."

Such ferment matters because evangelicals are politically active. Nearly
four out of five white evangelical Christians voted last year for President
Bush, constituting more than a third of all votes cast for him, according
to the Pew Research Center. The analysis found that the political clout of
evangelicals has increased as their cohesiveness in backing the Republican
Party has grown. Republicans outnumber Democrats within the group by more
than 2 to 1.

There is little to suggest in recent elections that environmental concerns
influenced the evangelical vote -- indeed, many members of Congress who
receive 100 percent approval ratings from Christian advocacy groups get
failing grades from environmental groups. But the latest statements and
polls have caught the eye of established environmental organizations.

Several are attempting to make alliances with the Christian right on
specific issues, such as global warming and the presence of mercury and
other dangerous toxins in the blood of newborn children.

After the election last fall, leaders of the country's major environmental
groups spent an entire day at a meeting in Washington trying to figure out
how to talk to evangelicals, according to Larry Schweiger, president of the
National Wildlife Federation. For decades, he said, environmentalists have
failed to make that connection.

"There is a lot of suspicion," said Schweiger, who describes himself as a
conservationist and a person of faith. "There are a lot of questions about
what are our real intentions."

Green said the evangelicals' deep suspicion about environmentalists has
theological roots.

"While evangelicals are open to being good stewards of God's creation, they
believe people should only worship God, not creation," Green said. "This
may sound like splitting hairs. But evangelicals don't see it that way.
Their stereotype of environmentalists would be Druids who worship trees."

Another reason that evangelicals are suspicious of environmental groups is
cultural and has its origins in how conservative Christians view themselves
in American society, according to the Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of
the Evangelical Environmental Network. The group made its name with the
"What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign against gas-guzzling cars but recently
shifted its focus to reducing global warming.

"Evangelicals feel besieged by the culture at large," Ball said. "They
don't know many environmentalists, but they have the idea they are pretty
weird -- with strange liberal, pantheist views."

Ball said that the way to bring large numbers of evangelicals on board as
political players in environmental issues is to make persuasive arguments
that, for instance, tie problems of global warming and mercury pollution to
family health and the health of unborn children. He adds that evangelicals
themselves -- not such groups as the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth,
with their liberal Democratic baggage -- are the only ones who can do the
persuading.

"Environmental groups are always going to be viewed in a wary fashion,"
Ball said. "They just don't have a good enough feel for the evangelical
community. There are landmines from the past, and they will hit them
without knowing it."

Even for green activists within the evangelical movement, there are
landmines. One faction in the movement, called dispensationalism, argues
that the return of Jesus and the end of the world are near, so it is
pointless to fret about environmental degradation.

James G. Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first interior secretary, famously
made this argument before Congress in 1981, saying: "God gave us these
things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back." The
enduring appeal of End Time musings among evangelicals is reflected in the
phenomenal success of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic potboilers,
which have sold more than 60 million copies and are the best-selling novels
in the country.

Haggard, the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, concedes
that this thinking "is a problem that I do have to address regularly in
talking to the common man on the street. I tell them to live your life as
if Jesus is coming back tomorrow, but plan your life as if he is not coming
back in your lifetime. I also tell them that the authors of the Left
Behind books have life insurance policies."

This argument is apparently resonating. Green said the notion that an
imminent Judgment Day absolves people of environmental responsibility is
now a "fringe" belief.

Unusual weather phenomena, such as the four hurricanes that battered
Florida last year and the melting of the glaciers around the world, have
captured the attention of evangelicals and made many more willing to listen
to scientific warnings about the dangers of global warming, Haggard said.

At the same time, activists such as Ball from the Evangelical
Environmental Network are trying to show how the most important hot-button
issue of the Christian right -- abortion and the survival of the unborn --
has a green dimension.

"Stop Mercury Poisoning of the Unborn," said a banner that Ball carried in
last month's antiabortion march in Washington. Holding up the other end of
the banner was Cizik, the National Association of Evangelicals' chief
lobbyist.

They handed out carefully footnoted papers that cited federal government
studies showing that 1 in 6 babies is born with harmful levels of mercury.
The fliers urged Christians not to support the "Clear Skies" act, a Bush
administration proposal to regulate coal-burning power plants that are a
primary source of mercury pollution.

Although Cizik carried the banner and handed out literature that implicitly
criticized Bush's policy on regulating mercury, he conceded that many
evangelicals find it difficult to criticize the president.

"It is hard to oppose him when he has the moral authority of the office of
the president and a record of standing with us on moral issues like
abortion," Cizik said.

In Seattle, Hedman says that evangelicals should worry less about the
moral authority of the president and more about their biblical obligation
to care for Earth.

"The Earth is God's body," Hedman said in a recent sermon. "God wants us to
look after it."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=603752
Global warming approaching point of no return, warns leading climate expert

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

23 January 2005

Global warning has already hit the danger point that international
attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top
climate watchdog.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114
governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the
world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in
the pollution if humanity is to "survive".

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to
slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the
major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming,
complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically
asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief
scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush
administration then lobbied other countries in favour of Dr Pachauri - whom
the former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet"
candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born
naturalised American, who had repeatedly called for urgent action.

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the
Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy
Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials
described as a "very courageous" challenge.

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small
window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a
moment to lose."

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of
coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the
conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had
already been reached.

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water
temperatures rise, they lose their colours and turn a ghostly white.
Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been
destroyed.

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the
Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its
ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.

The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is
expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was
speaking parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with
temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.

He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent on
Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of global
warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting that
climate change may be accelerating out of control.

He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural systems,
the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution emitted in the
1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the increased pollution of
later decades worked its way through. He concluded: "We are risking the
ability of the human race to survive."

China Promotes Another Boom: Nuclear Power

NYT Jan 15 2005

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

AYA BAY, China -- The view from this remote point by the sea, with lines
of misty mountains stretching into the distance, is worthy of a classical
Chinese painting. In the foreground, though, sits a less obvious
attraction: one of China's first nuclear power reactors, and just behind
it, another being rushed toward completion.

There are countless ways to show how China is climbing the world's economic
ladder, hurdling developed countries in its path, but few are more
pronounced than the country's rush into nuclear energy - a technology that
for environmental, safety and economic reasons most of the world has put on
hold.

In its anxiety to satisfy its seemingly bottomless demand for electricity,
China plans to build reactors on a scale and pace comparable to the most
ambitious nuclear energy programs the world has ever seen.

Current plans - conservative ones, in the estimation of some people
involved in China's nuclear energy program - call for new reactors to be
commissioned at a rate of nearly two a year between now and 2020, a pace
that experts say is comparable to the peak of the United States' nuclear
energy push in the 1970's.

"We will certainly build more than one reactor per year," said Zhou Dadi,
director of the central government's Energy Research Institute, which has
strongly supported the country's nuclear program. "The challenge is not the
technology. The barriers for China are mostly institutional arrangements,
because reactors are big projects. What we need most is better operation,
financing and management."

By 2010, planners predict a quadrupling of nuclear output to 16 billion
kilowatt-hours and a doubling of that figure by 2015. And with commercial
nuclear energy programs dead or stagnant in the United States and most of
Europe, Western and other developers of nuclear plant technology are lining
up to sell reactors and other equipment to the Chinese, whose purchasing
decisions alone will determine in many instances who survives in the
business.

France, which derives about a third of its energy from nuclear power, is
the only Western country committed to a large-scale nuclear energy program.
It is in a building lull now, but will need to begin replacing aging
reactors within a decade or so.

Japan derives about 10 percent of its energy from nuclear sources and was
once among the most favorably disposed toward nuclear energy. But a string
of scandals involving comically shoddy practices, like mixing radioactive
materials in a bucket, and near accidents have turned public opinion in
many areas strongly antinuclear.

That leaves China as the only potential growth area for nuclear energy.
And for China, which still derives as much as 80 percent of its electricity
from burning coal, the lure of nuclear energy is as obvious as the thick,
acrid, choking haze that hangs over virtually all the country's cities.

The problem with nuclear power, some experts say, is that China's energy
needs are so immense - each year, by some estimates, the country plans to
add generating capacity from all sources equivalent to the entire current
energy consumption of Britain - that even the enormous expansion program
will do little to offset the skyrocketing power demand.

China's eight nuclear reactors in operation today supply less than 2
percent of current demand. By 2020, assuming the national plan is
fulfilled, nuclear energy would still constitute under 4 percent of demand.

There has been almost no public discussion of the merits and risks of
nuclear energy here, as the government strictly censors news coverage of
such issues. But critics question whether such a small payoff warrants
exposure to the risk of catastrophic failures, nuclear proliferation,
terrorism and the still unresolved problems of radioactive waste disposal.

"We don't have a very good plan for dealing with spent fuel, and we don't
have very good emergency plans for dealing with catastrophe," said Wang Yi,
a nuclear energy expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
"The nuclear interest group wants to push this technology, but they don't
understand the risks for the future. They want to make money. But we
scientists, we want to take a very comprehensive approach, including
safety, environment, dealing with waste and other factors, and not rush
into anything."

Chinese nuclear operators, like the people who run the Daya Bay plants
here, scoff at such concerns.

"In China we have state-owned power companies, whereas abroad they have
private companies," said Yu Jiechun, a senior engineer at the China
Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Company. "It's not a matter of someone's
profit here, whether we do something one way or another. The government
decides, and they have spent huge amounts of money on safety."

The government is also looking into a new generation of "pebble bed"
reactors that some scientists say are far safer than traditional designs,
though these are not a part of its immediate plans.

One sure sign of the Chinese industry's self-assuredness is the promotion
of the Daya Bay plants as a tourist attraction. For now - in a country
where surging power demand has led major cities like Shanghai to force
companies to stagger working hours, shut down during the week and operate
on weekends - the public is likely to support anything that promises more
electricity.

American experts, mindful of the destructive consequences of the near
catastrophic accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979, warn
against overconfidence.

"In 1970 we had a net capability of 7 million kilowatt hours, and by 1981
we had reached 56 million kilowatt hours," said John Moens, a nuclear
analyst at the United States Department of Energy. "So the rate of growth
they propose is not only conceivable, it has been done before. The problem
is, can you regulate it? Can you deal with the environmental problems? Can
you deal with the hundred different things that creep up, as the Japanese
found when they expanded their industry, just as we found when we expanded
ours?"

Reinforcing this point, David Lochbaum, a nuclear energy expert at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, a private, nonprofit group based in
Cambridge, Mass., said that of the 103 reactors in operation in the United
States, 27 have been shut down for at least a year since September 1984.

Daya Bay's location less than 50 miles from Hong Kong, where the proximity
has become a political issue, only reinforces the environmental and safety
concerns. That may sound like ample space, but it is not much different
from the distance from New York City to the Indian Point nuclear plant in
Buchanan, N.Y., which has become an issue since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Of the technologies that exist today, you have to look at what can happen
on the worst day," Mr. Lochbaum said. "With wind power, you can go
bankrupt. With a dam burst, lives can and have been lost, but it's fairly
localized. The cost of cleaning up after Chernobyl, though, is greater
than all of the benefits of the entire Soviet nuclear power industry
combined, and it could have been worse."

Dear Roger Doyle,

I was interested by your 'Melting at the Top'. As
one of the scientists pointing for the past couple decade to climate
degradation I naturally welcome such warnings.

However, I hope you'll look further into

>Natural gas hydrates, icelike
>crystal solids trapped below the permafrost,
>theoretically contain more energy than all
>conventi onal r e s er ve s of oi l , n at ural g as a nd
>coal combined. But the full exploitation of

Thawing of permafrost containing bulk methane hydrate is a possible
accelerant of the accelerated greenhouse effect.

This is sketched in the special issue of The Ecologist 2 - 3 y ago
devoted entirely to climate degradation. Peter Bunyard, a 3rd-rate
scientist but often on the right track, wrote it up along with other
aspects of climate degradation.

Yet we still read Lindzen of MIT, and Bob Carter of James Cook U,
Qld, intoning 'climate change? What climate change?'.

Regards
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

Mitsubishi Electric US Enters Photovoltaic Module Market

Mitsubishi Electric & Electronics USA Inc. has announced its entry into
the growing U.S. solar/photovoltaic (PV) or module market, with two
high-efficiency modules that contain no lead solder. The company will
initially focus on the southwestern United States through its network of
dealers and distributors, and expand to other regions in the months ahead.

- By Mitsubishi Electric & Electronics USA Inc.

I've excerpted this outstanding section from
A Lovins et al free-download book 'Winning the Oil Endgame'
http://www.oilendgame.org/pdfs/WtOEg_72dpi.pdf .

This is Supernerd at his best, well worth onspreading.

pp. 258-60

What about nuclear power?

... nuclear power has no prospects in market-driven energy systems,
for a simple reason: new nuclear plants cost too much to build. In
round numbers, electricity from new light-water reactors will cost twice as
much as from new windfarms, five to ten times as much as distributed
gas-fired cogeneration or trigeneration in buildings and factories (net of
the credit for their recovered heat), and three to thirty times as much as
end-use efficiency that can save most of the electricity now used.

Any one of these three abundant and widely available competitors alone
could knock nuclear power out of the market, and there are three, with more
on the way (ultimately including cheap fuel cells). None of these
competitors was included,however, in the widely quoted 2003 MIT study of
nuclear power.

It found that if new nuclear plants become far cheaper, are heavily
subsidized (at least initially), and benefit from heavy carbon taxation or
its trading equivalent, then they may become able to compete with new
coal-fired or gas-fired combined-cycle power stations.

However, those, too, are uncompetitive with the three cheaper options that
weren't examined - and these comparisons ignore "distributed benefits"
which typically favor decentralized options by about an extra tenfold.
In these circumstances, new nuclear plants are simply unfinanceable in the
private capital market, and the technology will continue to die of an
incurable attack of market forces - all the faster in competitive markets.
This is true not just in the U.S., where the last order was in 1978 and all
orders since 1973 were cancelled, but globally.

Rather than selling a thousand units a year as they'd predicted, nuclear
salesmen scour the world for a single order, generally heavily subsidized,
while vendors of competing technologies often struggle with too many
orders. Only in a handful of countries with centrally planned energy
systems that lack market accountability might the odd order still
occasionally be placed.

During 1990-99, nuclear power worldwide added 3.2 billion watts per year
(it grew at a 1% annual rate,vs. 17%for solar cells and 24% for
wind-power). In recent years, windpower worldwide has added ~6 -7 billion
watts per year. No vendor has made money selling power reactors. This is
the greatest failure of any enterprise in the industrial history of the
world. We don't mean that as a criticism of nuclear power's practitioners,
on whose skill and devotion we all continue to depend; the impressive
operational improvements in U.S.power reactors in recent years deserve
great credit. It is simply how technologies and markets evolved, despite the
best intentions and immense effort. In nuclear power's heydey [sic], its
proponents saw no competitors but central coal-fired power stations. Then,
in quick succession, came end-use efficiency, combined-cycle plants,
distributed generation (including versions that recovered valuable heat
previously wasted), and competitive windpower.

The range of competitors will only continue to expand more and their costs
to fall faster than any nuclear technology can match.

Even if something much worse than the worrisome recent events at
Davis-Besse and Mihama never occurs and the technology's other outstanding
issues are resolved, nuclear power has no future for purely economic
reasons.

Monetizing carbon emissions won't help, because it would equally
advantage at least two of the three strongest competitors (efficiency and
windpower) and partly advantage the other (gas-fired co-/trigeneration).
There is thus no analytic basis for the MIT authors' personal opinion that
all energy options will be needed, so nuclear power merits increased
subsidies - thereby, though they didn't say so retarding its competitors by
tilting the playing field against them and diverting investment away from
them.

The widespread economic fallacy of counting the wrong competitors is
commonly accompanied by another blunder: ignoring opportunity cost (the
impossibility of spending the same dollar on two different things at the
same time). Let's use an illustration slanted to favor nuclear power. If
saving a kWh cost as much as 3 ¢ (well above average), while delivering a
new nuclear kWh cost as little as 6 ¢ ((extremely optimistic), then each 6
¢ spent on a nuclear kWh could have bought two efficiency kWh instead.
Buying the costlier nuclear kWh thus perpetuated one kWh's worth of
fossil-fueled generation that's otherwise avoided by choosing the best buys
first. (The same logic applies to any other costly option, such as a solar
cell, that 's bought instead of cheaper options like electric efficiency.)
The MIT study found that only a major expansion of nuclear power would
justify the high costs of addressing its many challenges: a tripling of
world nuclear capacity,for example, would be needed to cut by 25% the
conventionally projected increase in world CO2 emissions to 2050. But
because it's so much costlier than other ways to reduce CO2, and because it
diverts funds from efficiency, such nuclear expansion would actually make
climate change worse than if cheaper options were bought instead.

Nuclear advocates have long hoped that a hydrogen transition would finally
give them an economic rationale. But whether the hydrogen is made by
splitting water with nuclear electricity or with a chemical reaction driven
by nuclear heat, the economics are so far out of any competitive range 953
that spending a billion dollars to prove this experimentally is a clear
waste of money. The advocates ' other last hope was new (or recycled
old)nuclear technologies, such as the South African pebble-bed reactor - a
Holy Grail of reactor developers for decades, with no. Lovins 2003b.
success yet, no solution to the basic economic problem,and a much higher
risk of proliferating nuclear weapons.

Even a little proliferation, especially to non-state actors, obviously
destroys U.S. national security, since anonymous nuclear attacks with no
return address, e.g. via shipping container, and with no physical base to
retaliate against, can be neither deterred nor punished, and are very
difficult to prevent.

The only semi-effective defense is prevention, by removing the technical
ingredients and innocent "cover" for proliferation, and by eliminating the
social and political conditions that feed and motivate the
pathology of hatred.

The proposed design has some innovative and evolutionary features. Its
key economic uncertainty is whether its passive safety design is convincing
enough to avoid building a containment structure, which its lower power
density would render large and costly. (A no-containment design is
unlikely to be licensable in most countries, partly because of terrorist
risk and partly because, as the late Dr. Edward Teller pointed out decades
ago, any leak in the helium/steam heat exchanger can send steam into the
reactor core where it can cause a coal-gas reaction,form methane and
hydrogen, and perhaps explode. Every high-temperature gas-cooled reactor
built so far has suffered substantial leaks in its helium coolant circuit.)
The ESKOM developers claim a capital cost, without containment, of about
$1,000/kW, about 2-3 times less than for a [contained ] light--water
reactor; independent analysts estimate more like $2000/kW, generally with
containment. The claimed busbar cost of ~2.6 ¢/kWh at a 6%/y discount rate
would still be uncompetitive against the three options named above,whether
for producing electricity or hydrogen.

Proliferation could be a show-stopper: the 8% 235U fuel is 84%of the way,
in separative work, to 90% enrichment, and each 2.4 GW of pebble-bed
electric capacity would require an enrichment plant with a capacity of 500
tonnes of separative work per year (TSWU/y),implying hundreds or thousands
of such enrichment plants for large-scale deployment. Professor Hal
Feiveson of Princeton summarizes the result: "Lots of enriched uranium
close to bomb quality,lots of [enrichment ] plants, lots of incentive for
innovation to make [enrichment ] cheaper and quicker..To me this is an
unsettling prospect " - especially since uranium-based bombs are relatively
easy to design and make. No technical or political solution to this
problem exists. Indeed,any nuclear power technology is proliferative
because it provides the materials,equipment,skills,and innocent-looking
civilian cover for making bombs,as the world is now rediscovering to its
potentially immense cost. Conversely,acknowledging the right parenthesis
in the nuclear enterprise,and helping all countries substitute cheaper and
inherently nonviolent energy options,would make proliferation far more
difficult by making the ingredients of do-it-yourself bomb kits harder to
get, more conspicuous to try to get, and politically costlier to be caught
trying to get, because the reason for wanting them would be unambiguously
military (Lovins,Lovins,&Ross 1980;Lovins &Lovins 1979).

http://www.oilendgame.org/pdfs/WtOEg_72dpi.pdf is a free-download book
'Winning the Oil Endgame' from Amory Lovins. At 1.7 MB it takes ¾10 min to
receive.

Those who like me have been impressed by this
supernerd's writings lo, this past 3 decade may get a _deja vu_ feeling
from this new stuff. Lovins makes it all seem technically straightforward
- and, more & more over the decades, makes it all seem so overwhelmingly
attractive to corporate greed *and plus you get your Pentagon* that one
does have to wonder why corporations - even excluding oil companies if
they are assumed just too pig-headed - are failing to cash in on the
technologies purportedly ready to replace oil-derived fuels.

One tiny clue may be found in comparing his 'demonstrated'
shoebox-sized fuel cell using alcohol to make electricity with the
periodic public statements from the actual centre of excellence in fuel
cell research for vehicles, which happens to be in the U.C Berkeley college
of chemistry. The top profs there, who are near retirement and presumably
highly motivated to claim some success, give a far less optimistic picture.
I believe them rather than Lovins who has time & again alleged renewable
technologies 'ready to go'.

But more generally, I admit I cannot reconcile Lovins' line with
what's happening (or rather, not happening). A decade ago (at the end of
my paper on my solar-thermal inventions) I suggested:-

>Scientists & engineers involved in appropriate technology should think
>hard about why almost two decades of Lovins-type proof that soft energy
>technologies are 'economic' has not resulted in much deployment of such
>technologies. My own tentative explanations are:-

>(i) the renewable-energy systems which Lovins so plausibly
>advocated in the late '70s did not all exist in readily available forms;
>(ii) distortions of finance & propaganda continued to favour
>electric grids;
>(iii) schools of engineering and artytechture continued,
>indefensibly, to neglect soft-energy concepts in teaching and research.

Today I could add

(iv) degraded standards of professional ethics in outfits like
Bechtel, Science Applications Inc, etc now routinely produce
"professional"® slogans, sometimes on oath, little better than PR lies;
(v) similar drastic degradation of truthfulness has largely
penetrated regulatory authorities e.g ERMANZ, USDA,
(vi) "Laboratories are hatching such marvels as doubled-efficiency
heavy trucks, competitive solar cells, liquid-hydrogen cryoplanes, and
quintupled-efficiency carbon-fiber cars powered by clean hydrogen fuel
cells" (p.6) sounds too much like what Lovins was saying in 1977 for me to
take it at face value.
(vii) "Transitions can be swift when market logic is strong,
policies are consistent,and institutions are flexible" intones Lovins.
Such conditions are less prevalent today than 3 decade ago. In most of the
relevant western govts & corporations, power has been seized to a large
extent by an axis of ideologies which will reduce the rationality of policy
formation & discussion. The dominant fads of wimminsLib, neoRacism &
militant homosexualism largely prevent rational policy on dangerous
technologies (notably gene-tampering), or on energy.

Lovins sets out attractively many interesting technical
possibilities and fascinating hints e.g piezoelectric pintels. Oddly, he
doesn't mention water injection, nor the rather well proven Orbital stroker
already working on outboard motors and some scooters.

You can hardly help being intrigued by snippets such as
>when 30
>Abrams tanks were set against 30 Baja dunebuggies armed with precision-
>guided munitions, the prompt result was 27 dead tanks (21 completely
>immobilized) and three dead dunebuggies. (In a subsequent experiment,
>missile-toting dirtbikers apparently outgunned the tanks even worse.)

He adzes nuclear power handily (pp. 258-60), bringing up to date
the main drawbacks of atrocious economics and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Somehow I'm not surprised that supernerd could write unquestioningly

>When the National
>Academies' National Research Council found in a 1999 study that biofuels
>could profitably provide 1.6 Mbbl/d by 2020,
>new methods of converting cellulose- and lignin-rich (woody) materials
>into liquid fuels,
>e.g. using genetically engineered bacteria and enzymes,were just emerging.

Lovins is so eager to be respectable that he refrains from
mentioning Thos Gold's primordial methane theory. On the other hand he is
good enough to remark

> The market is a powerful and efficient tool for the short-term allocation
>of scarce resources. But markets also have limits.
>They're not good at long-term,and especially at intergenerational,
>allocation; generally
>aren't concerned with distributional equity (markets are meant to be
>efficient, not fair); may not tell us how much is enough; reveal cost and
>perhaps value but not values; and can't substitute for politics,ethics,or
>faith.

But then the old supernerd "shines" {obscurantises} thru, outdoing
himself with the immortal

> A $1,000/0.01-gpm U.S. feebate 'slope' ... is societally efficient
>because it arbitrages the difference in the discount rates used by new-car
>buyers and by society.

The quaint insistence of pedants like P S Corbet & myself on *net
energy* in energy farming is ignored by SuperNerd for even ethanol, let
alone
> duPont's 3GT polymer platform.

In his euphoric sketch of a big 'hydrogen economy', it may come as
a pleasant surprise to Windflow® to learn

>Wind machines dedicated to powering electrolyzers could eliminate the
>cost, maintenance,and uptower weight of the gearbox and power electronics.

As usual, he's claiming there's no need for USA behaviour to be
moderated. He leaves it to others to trace what could be achieved by
various extents of restraint in that matchlessly consumptive society which
has been consuming more and enjoying it less. Who has taken up this
challenge? Where is Ted Trainer, now that we need him?

This is a very interesting book, but I feel its main gap is in
social psychology.

R