Ecoshock Show Notes

Oil to Occupy: The Restless West Coast

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:19:01 PST

Two weeks ago on Radio Ecoshock we heard from Australia and the distant past. Last week a top British scientist warned us of super-dangerous climate change.

Now we head for the restless West Coast of North America.

In Canada, trillion-dollar corporations and countries are desperately searching for a way to ship dirty Tar Sands crude, after the Obama administration said "No" to the Keystone XL pipeline. They want to build a new pipeline across the Rocky Mountains, across countless rivers and wilderness, across native lands.

And two Texas billionaires are plotting to turn the once green city of Vancouver into a major oil shipping port.

They want to make more billions polluting the atmosphere and changing the climate forever.

You will hear three speakers in a packed public meeting promise neither plot will succeed.

Then we'll take to the streets of San Francisco, with as-it-happens audio during the Occupy Wall Street West protests. Our Bay Area correspondent Karen Nyhus interviews environmentalist Ananda Tan as he waits with locked arms to be arrested. Then the risky radio the mainstream won't dare: you are there as the crowd microphone chants the words of Ted Nace, on the Court House steps, demanding justice. That's in our second half hour.

From tanker mania to Wall Street greed, I'm Alex Smith, and this is Radio Ecoshock.

OIL FREE COAST

On Sunday January 22nd I recorded "Oil Free Coast, Tankers and Pipelines" at the Roundhouse Community Centre in downtown Vancouver, Canada. The event began with the voice of an amazing ten-year-old singer and song-writer, little Ta' Kaiya Blaney, the First Nations wonder. I'll play you a minute of her anti-tanker song "Shallow Water" - then we'll go to our speakers Art Sterritt, Rex Weyler and Nathan Cullen.

Listen to the whole song. Here are links to the You tube video of "Shallow Waters" and the Ta' Kaiya Blaney web site.

More details on the song and recording from You tube:

"10 year old Ta'Kaiya Blaney is Sliammon First Nation from B.C., Canada. Along with singing, songwriting, and acting, she is concerned about the environment, especially the preservation of marine and coastal wildlife. Shallow Waters was a semi-finalist in the 2010 David Suzuki Songwriting Contest, Playlist for the Planet. The song was recorded in studio by Audio Producer Joe Cruz. Footage from Vancouver, BC was filmed by Colter Ripley. Footage of the traditional ocean-going canoe from the Squamish Nation (Burrard Inlet, North Vancouver, BC) ; Ta'Kaiya in traditional cedar bark regalia (Tofino, BC); the Oil Refinery in Burrard Inlet; and the Vancouver Aquarium was filmed by Tina House. Additional footage contributed from Canada Greenpeace and Living Oceans Society. Lyrics on Drychum channel."

Ta' Kaiya belted it out live at the Roundhouse, surprising us with such a strong adult voice from a small young singer. She will wow delegates at the Rio 2012 Conference. Also look for her song "Earth Revolution".

THE NORTH TAR SANDS PIPELINE

Let's start with the northern pipeline, proposed by the Enbridge Corporation, crossing thousands of miles of mountains and wilderness, reaching from the climate-killing Tar Sands to the delicate fjords of Canada's West Coast. Our host is Linda Kemp, a sustainable living expert from Langara College.

[Art Sterritt presentation]

That was Coastal First Nations leader Art Sterritt, recorded January 22nd, in Vancouver, Canada by Alex Smith. The event "Oil Free Coast, Tankers and Pipelines" was at the Roundhouse Community Centre in downtown Vancouver. It was presented by Coastal First Nations, and by Member of Parliament Nathan Cullen.

Sterritt gave a very moving speech, saying British Columbia was an organism where all its "arteries" are rivers that flow West from the Rockies to the sea. Everything about the First Nations life and rights is at stake, should one of these pipelines leak into the headwaters of the two most productive salmon runs in the world: the Fraser River run, and the Skeena River run.

The whole richness of coastal life, plus the food supply for First Nations people, would be wrecked by a single big tanker accident. Sterritt says the 10 major coastal First Nations have united, along with environmentalists, municipal governments and unions to oppose the construction of the Enbridge pipeline to Kitimat, on the North-Central coast of British Columbia.

That represents a huge sacrifice by some of the poorest people in Canada. Many First Nations people still live below the poverty line, with unclean water, and improper housing. The billions of dollars in bribes likely on offer by Enbridge, and the pro-oil Canadian government, still haven’t brought the aboriginal people to accept the dangers of oil.

Sterritt says he and his people went to Louisiana to talk to fisher people there, after the BP oil spill. They learned from what happened when another Enbridge pipeline broke in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They investigated ship wrecks in Australia.

But really, Sterritt and the Git-Gat people didn't have to leave home to know what oil damage is about. A British Columbia ferry called "The Queen of the North" hit an island just across from their home, Hartley Bay. Oil leaked out for more than a month, wrecking local clam beaches and more. That was despite having the most modern navigation equipment. The wreck was more or less on the same route super-tankers are expected to travel, in some of the stormiest waters on Earth.

This is Radio Ecoshock, the "restless West Coast" edition. You are listening to three speakers at a packed public rally to stop pipelines and tankers from wrecking the pristine wilderness of British Columbia, and the beautiful city of Vancouver.

STOPPING VANCOUVER FROM BECOMING A TAR SANDS SUPER PORT

[Rex Weyler]

Rex Weyler is a co-founder and historian of Greenpeace. He is now working with the group Tanker Free BC to stop the threat of mega tankers to the west coast, the fragile Georgia Strait, and the port of Vancouver. Find out more at tankerfreebc.org.

Rex and other friends started noticing more and more tankers were coming into the part of Vancouver harbor known as Burrard Inlet. They were heading to B.C.'s only oil refinery, deep down this narrow passageway.

Then the more right-wing B.C. government decided to sell off publicly owned assets to private investors. They sold the gas distribution company, "B.C. Gas". Two Texas
billionaires, named Kinder and Morgan, bought the pipeline rights. Kinder was a lawyer and lead council for Enron, the company that went bankrupt, among a wave of criminal charges for fraud.

These two foreign billionaires decided, without any public consultation, and in many cases without even notifying local governments, to start shipping Tar Sands crude from Alberta to Vancouver through their pipelines. They have been increasing capacity, and hope to reach from 500,000 to 700,000 barrels a day. That would mean one super-tanker a day going out of Vancouver harbor.

It would only take one accident to wreck "the green city" with its famous Stanley Park, its beaches, and multi-million dollar ocean-front real estate.

The Sierra Club has set up an app for cell phones which will notify anyone every time a tanker leaves the Burrard refinery docks. Tankerfreebc is gearing up to stop Vancouver from becoming the Tar Sands outlet to China. Nobody living here wants Vancouver to become a major oil port, especially now that we are being hit with climate change.

CANADIAN PM STEPHEN HARPER CALLS ENVIRONMENTALISTS PUPPETS OF THE AMERICANS

Now the politics of promoting Tar Sands oil - and the voices for sanity. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper just claimed all Canadians who oppose the Tar Sands are just puppets for big American foundations. He questions the national loyalty of any critics, and threatens the environmental review required by law.

Harper calls all concerned citizens of British Columbia as "radical environmentalists" (and maybe "an enemy of the state").

Check out this video of the "Ethical Oil" tar sands lobby calling environmentalists mere agents for American foundations. They don't mention the two Texan billionaires pushing oil tankers through Vancouver, and the $20 billion dollars investment by China into the Tar sands. Who are the foreign influencers the Prime Minister hears?

Here is another story, where the Environment Minister, who is supposed to represent all Canadians, not just oil companies, says "radical groups" are trying to sabotage the Canadian economy. His remarks are extraordinary and never before heard from any government Minister. How much can we trust the Enbridge Pipeline environmental review process now - now that the Minister has called it a waste of time!

According to CBC News... these "radical environmentalists" ..."threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda," stack the hearings with people to delay or kill "good projects," attract "jet-setting" celebrities and use funding from "foreign special interest groups."

Our next speaker is from the leading opposition New Democratic Party, or the NDP. Nathan Cullen is a Member of the National Parliament, and a candidate for the leadership of the NDP, currently Canada's largest opposition party. He lives in Smithers British Columbia, in the North, right where the pipeline will impact all of his constituents. And his constituents are very vocal - they don't want this pipeline!

[Cullen speech]

Cullen's description of the route these giant tankers must take to get out of Kitimat, which is at the head of a very long fjord. It includes "two 90 degree hair-pin turns". And during the lifetime of the pipeline and port, about 50,000 tanker trips would have to be made flawlessly, with no drunken captains, no show-of captains, no mechanical failure, no great storm (that
"nobody could have foreseen that").

When they make it out of the storied "inside passage" (where a multi-billion dollar cruise ship industry is threatened by a spill) - then these tankers head into Dixon Straight. That is where some of the strongest winds and highest waves in the world have been recorded.

What could go wrong?

Stay tuned for our on-the-streets radical radio from the San Francisco Wall Street West protest, January 20th.

Welcome back to the Radio Ecoshock restless West Coast edition. Now we're going to break the rules of radio. When people take to the streets in protest, your mainstream media gives you a glimpse, with maybe a chant in the background, while a reporter in a suit or dress tells you what it means.

Not here. We're going to start with an interview of environmentalist Ananda Tan as he sits, with his arms locked with other protesters, waiting for arrest outside the Bank of America in San Francisco. Risking her own person and equipment, is Radio Ecoshock Bay Area correspondent Karen Nyhus.

Amid the chaos of waiting for arrest, with folks dropping in, Karen keeps Ananda talking, about the risk these "too big to fail" corporations pose to us all. He is a member of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, of Rising Tide (which is going to open an office in Vancouver), and of the group "Mobilization for Climate Justice".

Here is a print report on the protests, from "The Progressive".

Now I'm going to make it hard and fun for you.

We'll take to the streets of San Francisco with Karen Nyhus to hear green American author Ted Nace. Except in the soggy crowd of a rainy day, you can't hear him. There is no microphone on the Court House steps. Just a crowd microphone. I think it works, involving the people, not as passive listeners, but as participants in the speech. Let me know what you think.

Just before we hear Ted, the first speaker is Abraham Entin from Move To Amend.

Hear it as it happened.

That was a distant Ted Nace, author and environmentalist, passed on by the crowds at the San Francisco Occupy Wall Street West protest January 20th. It was a skunky rainy day. So Ted Nace began this parable, about the people with wet feet, and the corporations who can never know that experience.

My thanks to Radio Ecoshock Bay area correspondent Karen Nyhus for braving the elements and the police to get those on-the-street recordings from the Occupy Wall Street Protests.

If you violate copyright, you go to jail. If you violate people's home ownership, their pension plans, and their economy - no problem. Take a hundred million on your way out the door, and head out for the next scam. Until the people demand so loudly, so often, with such determination, that justice will be done.

I'm Alex Smith for Radio Ecoshock. Thank you for joining us.

Kevin Anderson: The Brutal Logic of Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:05:35 PST

Welcome. I'm Alex. Are you ready for the bad news about climate change? Really?

I'm going to play you a speech too awful to run during the holidays. People with clinical depression and very young children may want to avoid this program.

It's also going to be a challenge for our many North American listeners, because our speaker is Kevin Anderson. From his recent post as Director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK's top academic institute researching climate change, Anderson speaks quickly, says a lot, and holds nothing back.

This lecture is part of the London School of Economics Department of International Development Friday Lecture Series. The title is "Beyond 'dangerous' climate change: emission scenarios for a new world" Anderson calls it "the brutal logic of climate change."

This talk set up a blaze of urgency, and a stiff warning to people and governments: we are failing to address the greatest challenge ever faced by humanity. Something unimaginable is happening.

Following this edited-for-radio speech, I'll chat again with Professor William Calvin from the University of Washington. He sees the bleakness, but offers a grain of hope.

I'm going to throw you into the deep end with this one. I suggest you download the program from our web site at ecoshock.org, or find links in the blog at ecoshock.info. Things are not what they seem.

This speech courtesy of the London School of Economics Lecture Series was recorded October 21st, 2011.

The subtitle for this talk is "Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope".

Dave Roberts of Grist wrote two articles about the implications of this talk, which he called "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change". Try this one, and this one.

Find a .pdf of Kevin Anderson's pivotal paper on our near hopeless situation of unfolding climate change here.

A recording of the original speech, running 1 hour 28 minutes with a Q and A is here.

And you can find the slides for that here.

To get a written summary, I can't do better than the Dave Roberts Grist articles linked above. Dave even throws in some helpful graphs.

My own conclusions from this speech could be:

1. The 2 degree target (keeping below 2 degrees of global mean temperature rise to prevent dangerous climate change) is quite arbitrary, and likely too high. As Dr. James Hansen of NASA points out, we should be at 350 parts per million CO2 to keep the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets which moderate our climate. In previous history, levels higher than that triggered melting of the ice sheets, and eventually a much hotter greenhouse world. We are currently at 390 ppm and rising fast.

2. That 2 degree target is no guarantee of a "safe" climate, but just a 50% chance of staying within merely "dangerous" climate change, and "extremely dangerous climate change".

3. As we are almost 1 degree above pre-industrial times already, with at least 1 degree hidden by aerosol pollution (including sulfates from world coal plants) - it may already be too late to stay at 2 degrees.

4. The RATE of increase of our emissions is steadily going up, meaning the dangerous impacts of climate change keep getting closer and closer to us in time. Not 2050, but sooner. Yet government reports keep assuming 1 or 2% increase in emissions, when we are generally increasing at 3% over the past few years, and hit almost 6% in 2010. That is a 6 % increase over the increasingly high emissions during all the past years.

5. Kevin Anderson is particularly critical of all the government assessments which low-ball the emissions and the impacts. He says some climate scientists try to tell politicians, but those warnings are polished up as they rise through the ranks. Top ministers don't want to hear we may have to accept grave austerity, and a halt to growth, since they are promising growth as a way out of economic recession. But more growth means higher emissions. Period.

6. There are also a crew of scientists who make the situation sound more rosy or hopeful, when they will admit later, over a pint of beer, that they don't believe it themselves. They know we are headed into deep trouble.

MY CONCLUSION: WE ARE IN MORE TROUBLE THAN THE PUBLIC HAS BEEN TOLD

All this is dissected as Professor Anderson, now at Manchester University, goes through the brutal logic, the physics of how climate change and atmospheric pollution really work. No mater what your politics are, or what politicians promise, if we keep emitting more carbon, our civilization if not our species is at risk.

I've said this repeatedly on Radio Ecoshock. My scientist guests have said it. In this chilling program you hear one of the top climate experts in Britain telling it like it is.

I know our cities are entirely dependent on fossil fuel burning. Most of Canada would have to be abandoned, or the population decimated just to heat the people, using the forests as wood heat. I know we are using cars to get around, and again, in a Northern winter, there aren't a lot of options yet, if you live outside the narrow web of mass transit (like New York subways).

It seems we are committed, just by being alive, to polluting the sky. Yet I play with my grandson, and inwardly fear for his future. In fact, if Kevin Anderson is correct, I and my children will also suffer. We won't have to wait a generation or two.

How can we face this contradiction?

Yet we know, when World War Two came to the United States, a simple act of government, at the federal level, ended all car production, and switched over to tanks and ship-building overnight. Make that wind machines and solar panels and you get the possibility. All it would take is (a) the recognition we are going over a cliff (with no return) and (b) the will among us all to make the change.

A LITTLE HOPE FROM PROFESSOR WILLIAM CALVIN

I also talk that over with Professor William (Bill) Calvin from the University of Washington. He's specialized in the development of the human brain, and lately, how our journey through the ice ages and climate change helped us develop.

We know the human brain was big enough for things like agriculture and advanced tools at least 100,000 years ago. Yet, for some reason, human intellect didn't seem to take off until 50,000 years ago. Bill Calvin compares it to a software upgrade to available hardware.

I express my fear we will see million dying on High Definition television, before the climate and food impacts hit us in the developed countries (although diseases can spread in a day in these times of air travel). Calvin agrees, but then we realize: our own time is another burst of human creativity. We have experienced a kind of
software upgrade in our own times.

What if that mental evolution is not finished? What if we can make the moral leap it would take to protect the future, and all future generations?

There is some hope. And Calvin also feels more optimistic because we could use ocean algae to capture more carbon out of the atmosphere. We might be able to reverse this process.

James Lovelock also talked about the scheme to put in whole fields of pipes into the ocean. The surface algae are missing essential elements like phosphates, which are found in deeper water below them. If we pump that up, cause an algae bloom (which sucks carbon dioxide out of the air) - and then pump the dying alge back down to the deep, we might sequester some carbon.

It would take a giant project, covering about 1% of the Earth's oceans, to remove enough carbon, but perhaps a war-like project could do it. We haven't even bothered to build one such experimental station so far.

Is it possible? Is the future possible? Radio Ecoshock asks you that question.

Our web site is ecoshock.org. Thank you for listening.

Alex Smith

CLIMATE MAY FORCE HUMAN EVOLUTION

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:51:02 PST

What caused 5 previous mass extinctions of species? Scientists say we are in the 6th one now.

Dr. Andrew Glikson of Australian National University studied the rocks and the timelines. He's also an expert on asteroid hits.

A deep 44 minute interview with a world-class climate scientist and geologist - on what the past says about our future under climate change.

Dr. William Calvin of the University of Washington is author of over a dozen books, including "Global Fever, How to Treat Climate Change" and "A Brain for All Seasons, Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change". We have a short chat, about how the ice ages shaped our brains, and recent signs of climate shift.

Followed by Calvin's introduction in a speech at the University of Victoria, by Dr. Colin Campbell of the Sierra Club. Insightful on the way climate shapes our species, and all species.

Oil Shock - The No Growth World

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:00:28 PST

http://bit.ly/zVEXwh Radio Ecoshock 120104 Oil Shock the Post-Growth World with Jeff Rubin, Charles Maxwell from ASPO 2011 and interview with Italy's Ugo Bardi on climate change vs. peak oil.

The price of oil hits you at the pump, in your food bill, and everything you buy. What if you can't afford it?

For years, I've covered Peak Oil as the story of a limited resource. Meanwhile, the oil industry, glutted with billions in profits, keeps drilling deeper offshore, finds more dirty oil in the Tar Sands. They have a mountain of goo in the "heavy oil" of Venezuela - the industry just needs to build more refineries capable of handling it. And we can always make more oil by liquefying coal!

All these options drop from using about one barrel of oil to get 100 barrels, like the pressurized oil wells we grew up, to using one barrel of equivalent energy to get three (like the Tar Sands.) That means many, many times more emissions for every mile or kilometer we drive, house we heat, or factory we run. Oil costs soar and it's a recipe for climate disaster.

Meanwhile, big oil companies, aided and abetted by polluting countries like Canada and Russia, are already plotting to drill in the extreme conditions under the Arctic ice. One leak there, stays for centuries. Nobody can clean it up, and the oil-eating bacteria are few in the cold environment. We can't let that happen. Oil companies must not take advantage of the ice they helped melt.

What about Peak Oil?

Economist Jeff Rubin says we've hit a new kind of peak oil: the peak price our civilization can pay and still grow. We've passed that point now, Rubin says. If China and India grow,

Western countries must shrink. And "shrinking" isn't pretty. Expect unemployment, disappointed dreams, and governments drowning in debt they cannot repay.

Who is Rubin? He was the Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets, a global-scale bank trading operation. As a forward thinker on energy issues Jeff Rubin gets a lot of press and TV appearances. His 2009 book "Why Your World Is About To Get a Whole Lot Smaller" (8 minute You tube here) shook up the financial world. He predicts an end to globalization, and a return to regional production, due to ever-rising oil prices.

In this week's Radio Ecoshock show you hear Jeff Rubin's presentation at ASPO 2011. That was the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas USA, in Washington D.C. at the beginning of November 2011.

Then you'll get the main clips from a talk by Charles T. Maxwell. He is the senior Energy Analyst for Weeden Co. Charley's been a top ranked energy authority for years. Charlie outlines who has more oil (very few countries, like Norway and Columbia) and who is running out fast (like Mexico and maybe Saudi Arabia).

Rubin and Maxwell were recorded by Radio Ecoshock Washington correspondent Gerri Williams, and presented courtesy of ASP USA. As far as I know, Radio Ecoshock is the only place to find these recordings online.

But neither of these gurus include the challenge and damage of climate change in their forecasts. They don't mention it. Why not? To wrap up that angle, we'll finish off the show with a Radio Ecoshock interview with Ugo Bardi. He's a cross-breed, as founder of ASPO Italy, and an editor at the Oildrum.com blog - but also part of the Italian climatologist scene. I'll ask

Ugo why these two camps, don't talk much to each other.

JEFF RUBIN

Wiki on Jeff Rubin here.

Jeff Rubin is a Canadian with a Masters in Economics from McGill University. But he sounds like a Texan, with almost a drawl. Maybe he spent so much time with Texan oil men?

Jeff was chief economist from 1992 to 2009 for CIBC World Markets, a huge Canadian global trading and investment company, part of the equally huge Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). By correctly predicting many trends, Rubin made a lot of people a lot of money. In 2009, Rubin decided to resign from CIBC to pursue his career of writing and public speaking.

In particular, Rubin warned of the increasing price of oil, and it's impact on business and society at large. For this, he was adopted as a popular speaker at Peak Oil events like the annual ASPO USA gathering. His 2009 book "Why Your World Is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller" sold a lot of copies, and brought him international TV coverage. Rubin was already a weekly financial columnist for Canada's national newspaper.

In this stimulating talk recorded November 4th, Jeff Rubin offers his own definition of peak oil. Instead of basing it on the geological limits of oil on Earth, Rubin says the peak is the price a global economy can afford to pay, before it slows down, or crashes. Rubin doesn't say the price of oil will always increase. He says it will go up until it becomes unaffordable.

The economy goes into a recession (or worse), oil falls, then things pick up a little. We keep hitting the ceiling of "too high", doing damage to our economic system all along the way (like creating unsolvable debt levels).

Every major recession, Rubin says, has the "fingerprints of oil all over it."

As national debts pile up, every politician says they will "grow" their way out of it. Creating growth is the only way to pay off all that debt, which only grows with interest. But with oil limitations, whether geological limits, limits caused by lack of needed refineries, or limits imposed by price - the days of growth for everybody are over, Rubin says.

We have hit a plateau of "no growth".

That means if one country grows, another must shrink. For example, the China's economy is growing rapidly. But the economies of Greece, Italy and others are shrinking. Perhaps with real accounting, and taking out the currency factor, America's economy is shrinking also. If more consumers use more oil on one side of the world, people have to consume less and use less oil somewhere else. Nothing in our political system, nor our classic capitalist economics, is ready for a no-growth world. That means a rocky road ahead.

National debt might as well be denominated in barrels of oil, Rubin says. We depend upon it so much. The higher the price of oil, the higher the amount of our true debt.

And this is no "oil shock" like the oil embaro of the 1970's. Right now, there is no limit to producton other than people's ability to pay, and the industry's ability to go get it. But it's too expensive to support more growth, and only going to get more expensive. The end of growth is not a temporary thing. It's the new reality that nobody is ready for.

Unlike our next guest speaker, Charles Maxwell, Rubin says a no-growth economy is going to make a lot of people unhappy. There will be high unemployment. Many dreams will be shattered. There could be civil unrest, possibly for decades.

And as he describes in his book, triple digit oil prices will kill off globalization. It becomes just too expensive to ship things all over the world. Some industries will return to the United States and Canada, for example, despite the low cost of labor overseas, Rubin says. Some environmentalists will cheer the end of globalization, and the oil age, but Rubin says the process isn't going to be pretty.

It's an interesting take, and I think he's right. Check out Jeff Rubin's complete talk in this week's Radio Ecoshock show. (Click the title above to download)

Find Jeff Rubin's blog here.

CHARLES MAXWELL

We move on to one of the heavy-weights of the energy investment business, Charles Maxwell, the senior Energy Analyst for Weeden Co. Charlie is a legend in peak oil circles. Due to time limitations, I've selected two key parts of his presentation. Following talk of when Peak Oil might strike, Maxwell explains where our future oil might come from. Then I'll deliver his conclusion of "austerity and joy".

Unlike Jeff Rubin, Charlie Maxwell thinks we might adjust to a reasonable life consuming much less oil. He suggests we envision life in the 1950's, with that level of consumption.

Plus, people might enjoy things like gardening, even though they are forced into it just to have enough affordable food.

Happiness is not necessarily linked to consumption Maxwell says. In fact, he cites a study from Denmark, where people were healthiest during the last years of World War Two. They had little access to alcohol, tobacco, sugary foods, and over-eating. That "deprivation" led to better health, which is a fundamental for happiness.

First Maxwell treats us to an overview of who is producing more oil, and who will produce less. His goal, as an energy investment analyst, is to figure out what the maximum level of oil production is. Maxwell thinks we can go from our current ceiling of about 88 million barrels per day to about 95 mbpd. But that's it. No more.

His analysis of barriers to Russian expansion are interesting. The limits there are less geologic than social, and their approach to business, Maxwell says. On the other hand, if Columbia has really ended their civil war, that South American country may be able to increase production, like its neighbor Venezuela.

Mexico on the other hand, is in deep trouble, as oil production crashes at the main field at Cantarell. Maxwell treats us to an insight into the role of the asteroid which hit the Earth about 65 million years ago (causing a mass extinction) - and how that made a great oil field for Mexico (for a while).

It's rare we get a kind of private sitting with an oil insider like Charles Maxwell.

DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE 1 HOUR PRESENTATION WITH RUBIN AND MAXWELL

Here is the one hour talk by both men, including the Q and A, recorded by Gerri Williams, and presented by ASPO USA on November 4th, 2011 in Washington. You can choose from the CD Quality version (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB).

UGO BARDI

You'll notice neither Rubin or Maxwell mentioned climate change at all. They speak as though extreme weather damages and rising seas are not also major impacts on our economic prospects. As though the world will never limit fossil fuel production because we are wrecking the climate for all foresable time. Jeff Rubin, I know, does acknowledge climate change.

But it is absent here.

I've been following Peak Oil for years, interviewing people like Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler. Both of them have added climate change as a serious threat in recent years.

Of course I speak with climate scientists. But it's very seldom I find anyone to talk about both. Why is this?

Plus, we often wonder, which comes first, and which is worst: climate change or Peak Oil?

To help sort this out, we go to Italy, to talk with Ugo Bardi. He is a professor of Chemistry at the University of Firenze, - that is Florence.

Ugo is a rare bridge in two worlds. He is the Founder of ASPO Italy, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. Ugo is a contributor and member of the editorial board of the Oil Drum blog, and has published two books in Italian on oil depletion.

But Bardi is also a member of an association of Italian climatologists.

His latest book in English is "The Limits to Growth Revisited" published in 2011 by Springer.

In March 2009, Bardi wrote an important article in the Oil Drum blog called "Fire or Ice? The role of peak fossil fuels in climate change scenarios".

I highly recommend this article. Bardi goes through the very few scientific papers and articles which consider both Peak Oil and climate change together, up to 2009.

I'm going to quote just the first three paragraphs from that key article from the oildrum.com

"Until recently, most simulations of future climate have been run without taking into account "peaking" of the major fossil fuels. Concepts such as 'peak oil' are not discussed, and not even mentioned, in the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, with peak oil coming, or already arrived, the subject is starting to appear in scientific journals, blogs, and conferences. In a previous post , I reported about the 'Mission Earth' seminar held in Zurich in 2009 where climatologists and depletion experts gathered to exchange views. Here, I present a short review of the status of the field. There is a very small number of papers published in scientific journals on this subject and I think this summary includes them all. I also tried to include a number of less formal studies published on the web or presented at conferences.

Some early papers raised the question of the discrepancy of the standard IPCC scenarions and the peak oil projections. The first one was probably Jean Laherrere with a paper published in 2001. Later on Anders Sivertsson , Kjell Aleklett and Colin Campbell wrote in 2003 in 'The New Scientist' a paper titled 'Not enough oil for climate change'. They criticized the IPCC scenarios for being overoptimistic in terms of oil and gas reserves. These early papers didn't attempt to calculate the future concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Perhaps the earliest attempt to quantify the effects of CO2 on climate while taking depletion into account was the work by Pushker Kharecha and Jim Hansen who produced a paper titled 'Implications of "peak oil" for atmospheric CO2 and climate'. This study was published in 2008 but became available on line as a working paper in April 2007. In the first version of the paper, Kharecha and Hansen start from the premise that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere should not be allowed to exceed 450 ppm; later on they arrived to the conclusion that the dangerous limit is more likely to be around 350 ppm. So, they examine several scenarios that involve policy measures to force the reduction of emissions. They find that, if no such measures are taken, CO2 concentrations might rise to near 600 ppm by the end of the century, mainly as the result of coal combustion. Oil and gas would peak before 2030 in most of the scenarios considered and would give only a minor contribution to the total of the emissions."

Ugo Bardi began his Oil Drum article with an important point: climatologists, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assume we will fill the sky infinitely with carbon, as though the supplies will not run out. However, as we learned from Jeff Rubin's talk, and all the development of alternative ways to get oil, plus gas fracking - there seems to be more than enough carbon to wreck the atmosphere before supplies run out.

And the implications of climate damage are so severe, in our interview Ugo Bardi concludes climate change is the most pressing challenge of this century. Humans have lived for most centuries without fossil fuels he points out. We could do so again, perhaps with a much smaller population. But humans might not survive a radical shift in the climate very well.

It's a thoughtful interview from a thoughtful man and scholar. You may also want to check out his "Limits to Growth Revisited" book, the first update to that 1970's report written for The Club of Rome.

Find Ugo Bardi's blog "Cassandra's Legacy" here.

THANKS TO A LISTENER

I would like to thank Radio Ecoshock listener Barath Raghavan for suggesting this topic, and sending his helpful links. Find Barath's article on "Climate Change Vs. Peak Oil" here.

If you have suggestions for guests or topics, you can always write me, Alex Smith, at this address:

radio //at// ecoshock.org

FUKUSHIMA: TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:54:57 PST

COLD SHUTDOWN AT FUKUSHIMA - THE BIG LIE

In his infamous 1925 book "Mein Kamptf" Adolpf Hitler coined the term "the big lie". This lie, he said, should be so "colossal" that no once could believe anyone quote "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

This is Alex Smith. I am sorry to report the government of Japan, the Prime Minister of Japan, has resorted to the big lie, trying to cover up the on-going nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Number 1 nuclear power plant.

On December 16th, Prime Minister Noda announced all reactors at Fukushima had reached the safe and stable state of "cold shutdown". The accident is over, he said, and carry no further signficant danger to the public of Japan or the world.

We'll talk to nuclear industry expert Arnie Gunersen about this lie, and the truth of Fukushima.

I'll also interview Janette Sherman, co-author of a peer reviewed paper suggesting 14,000 Americans died due to the wave of radiation that swept over North America in March and April of 2011, after four massive explosions at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi site. That is an idea so shocking, we want to deny it immediately. Radio Ecoshock will investigate. Scroll down for that big story, which you won't see in any mainstream media.

You'll also hear a short clip from Japanese activist Kazuhiko Kobayashi, translated from his tour in Germany in October.

Kobayashi reveals the secret power structure of Japan, an explanation of how a government with a the sad history of nuclear bombing, could lie now about this horrible nuclear accident, costing still more lives in Japan.

The same infernal hidden Troika of power keeps nuclear power going in North America and Europe.

So much to hear, to absorb, to know deeply.

Here is the big lie, as carried on NHK English language TV from Japan.

"Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda says the crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have been successfully brought to a state of cold shutdown.

The state is a target in the second phase of a timetable established by the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company to bring the plant under control.

At a meeting of the government nuclear disaster task force on Friday, Noda declared that the reactors are now stable and that the second phase is complete.

He said radiation levels at the periphery of the plant site will remain low if another accident occurs."

In this Radio Ecoshock program I interview Arnie Gundersen, a long-time nuclear industry executive, who left the field after blowing the whistle on unsafe reactors. We talk about what "cold shutdown" means, and whether that applies to Fukushima.

MORE EXPLOSIONS AT FUKUSHIMA?

I also ask Arnie whether there is still a possibility of another explosion at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Gundersen explains the operator, TEPCO, must constantly pump nitrogen into the reactors, because there is a bubble of hydrogen at the top. The nitrogen is to keep out oxygen, which could lead to another massive explosion, and
more serious radiation. If that system fails, another reactor, or three reactors, could blow up again.

Gundersen has done calculations on the remaining mass of fuel, now called "corium" because it is a mixture of metals, mostly around 100 tons of hot uranium, but also all the metals used in the fuel rod containers and other inner parts of the reactor, which melted down together.

A serious question: could one of these three reactors experience a "China Syndrome"? That is where molten fuel melts through the last of the containment concrete, burning down to the water table below, and then suffering a massive radioactive steam explosion. Arnie calculates that a China Syndrome is unlikely now at Fukushima. There just isn't enough heat piled in the right way to burn all the way out, so long as water is circulated around it. Listen to the interview for his full explanation, and watch this video.

[Radio Ecoshock Arnie Gundersen interview - 22 minutes, audio only]

You have been listening to Arnie Gundersen, the nuclear industry executive who has become an expert witness and public voice on nuclear power safety. Find his videos at Fairewinds.com. Be sure and support their important work.

FUKUSHIMA: LIES UPON LIES

As you have heard, to paste the idea of "cold shutdown" into the triple melt-down at Fukushima Dai-ichi required a series of sub-lies. According to a report of the Japanese announcement by Tim Hornyak at CNET, TEPCO said "cold shutdown," meant, quoting Hornyak, "the reactors can be safely kept cool and that radiation exposure is limited to 1 millisievert per year at the site's boundary."

One millisievert per year at the Fukushima site boundary! The radiation leaking out into the sky and the sea is many, many times that right now, and every day. You have just heard Arnie Gundersen describing the on-going radiation leaks into the air, around Fukushima, and blown by the wind over Japan, and over the Pacific.

RADIATION LEAKS TO THE SEA "ZERO" JAPANESE AGENCY CLAIMS

During a real state of "cold shutdown" there should be no radioactive leaks into the sea either. Japan needs another big lie to make that possible. As our favorite Fukushima blogger at ex-skf.blogspot.com writes:

[the Japanese newspaper] "Tokyo Shinbun reports that NISA has decided to basically "nullify" the leaks of contaminated water from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in the past, and declare that there will be no leak in the future either, even if there is actually a leak or deliberate discharge. Why? Because NISA says so.

From Tokyo Shinbun [(via Asyura, so that the link doesn't disappear;][December 16, 2011] 12/16/2011):
[quote]
'NISA considers the amount of contaminated water into the ocean to be zero

There have been several leaks of water contaminated with radioactive materials from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. Tokyo Shinbun has found out through own investigation that the Nuclear and Industrial Safety

Agency under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has treated the amount of the leaks as "zero" from a legal [or regulatory] point of view, because it was a "state of emergency". The Agency has said it will treat the future leaks and deliberate discharges into the ocean the same way. The national government is scheduled to declare a "cold shutdown state" on December 16, but we are suspicious of the government's position that seems to ignore the suppression of the radioactive materials released from the plant, which is one of the important conditions [of the cold shutdown "state"].

Just the leak found April 2nd, 2011, from Reactor Number 2 at Fukushima released, quoting Tokyo Shinbun again"

"4,700 terabecquerels (according to TEPCO's estimate), already more than 20,000 times as much as the maximum amount allowed.

Both domestic and foreign research institutions have disputed TEPCO's estimate as 'too low'.

On December 4, the water that contained 26 billion becquerels of radioactive strontium was found leaking into the ocean from the apparatus that evaporates and condenses the treated water.

Furthermore, the storage tanks that are set up inside the compound are expected to become full in the first half of the next year. The water in these storage tanks also contains radioactive strontium. TEPCO is contemplating the discharge of the water into the ocean after further decontaminating it, but facing the protest from the fisheries associations the company has said it will postpone the discharge for now."

End quote from Tokyo Shinbun newspaper, as translated by the blogger ex-skf.

According to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbun "462 trillion becquerels of radioactive strontium have leaked to the Pacific Ocean since the March."

So Fukushima is still leaking tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific, even in December 2011, and plans more intentional dumping into the ocean, but declares their emissions to be "zero" due to the technicality of declaring it "a state of emergency".

It is hard to imagine a bigger lie.

The government has no guages to measure the escaped and melted nuclear fuel, dripping somewhere below the reactor. They don't know where it is, and cannot approach it with anything to find out.

WHY THE BIG LIE?

Lies piled upon lies. Why? The goverment announced a time-table shortly after the accident. Within 9 months they would reach a state of cold-shutdown. It is nine months, so it must be so.

Even the timid Japanese press isn't buying this latest announcement. For example the Asahi Shinbun newspaper ran a series of articles with titles like "Few believe assertion that Fukushima crisis is over" (December 17th). That article reveals some of the real reasons for saying Fukushima is over: the economy.

Quote: "A total of 44 nations and regions have restricted the imports of Japanese agricultural products and in the extreme case of Kuwait, all food products from every prefecture in Japan has been banned for import.

The negative publicity has also led to a sharp drop in the number of foreign tourists to Japan. In November, there were about 552,000 visitors, a decrease of 13.1 percent compared with November 2010."

Local mayors, in cities and towns still evacuated, expressed severe doubts about the government's announcement of "cold shutdown". Even Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato said ""The accident has not been brought under control..."

The German press Deutche Welle roasted the "cold shutdown" announcement, saying the reactors are "far from cold".

U.S. AND IAEA SUPPORT THE "COLD SHUTDOWN" ANNOUNCEMENT

But the nuclear power structure in Japan has important allies. US Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides was in Japan for the announcement. Nides said the U.S. is happy to hear about the "cold shut down" and congratulated Japan. Nides is part of an American business delegation seeking new contracts for decontamination. Of course, America doesn't like to officially discuss the weaknesses of the U.S. design for the Mark I General Electric reactors which blew up at Fukushima. Or the military personel exposed, and still exposed to radiation from this on-going disaster.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, also blessed the cold shutdown announcement.

Likewise Yukiya Amano of the International Atomic Energy Agency congratulated Japan on reaching cold shutdown. The IEA's Director Generla Amano was previously a Japanese bureaucrat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

THE TRIANGLE OF JAPANESE POWER

And that brings us to this snapshot of Japanese power from a business consultant turned nuclear critic named Kazuhiko Kobayashi. Kobayashi is fluent in German, and just went on a speaking tour for the anti-nuclear activist group The Association of Citizens' Environmental Protection, the OTP.

He also wrote an empassioned letter for the Foundation Ethics & Economics, as they awarded the International ethecon Black Planet Award 2011. That Black Planet award went to Tsunehisa Katsumata, Masataka Shimizu, Toshio Nishizawa, and other responsible executives and the major shareholders of the energy Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO.

His talk was titled ""German nuclear phase-out has given the world hope!" Find links to the video and audio below.

A German friend of Radio Ecoshock writes:

"In a recent speech at protests against the Gronau uranium enrichment facility, Japanese Germanist Kazuhiko Kobayashi spoke about his country traditionally being run by a sort of unofficial troika of influential state officials, prominent politicians and corporate managers. [There is] an organised fluctuation between the three groups to ensure connections, whose particular interests have hampered the disaster relief efforts time and again."

Keep in mind, Germany is attempting to lead the world out of nuclear power, with some back-sliding by politicians. Their struggle should be known by all the world, but that is another story.

Right now, we will hear Kazuhiko speaking to German activists, translated into English by our friend of Radio Ecoshock.

Kazuhiko Kobayashi:

"In our country, a case of high-ranking government officials is playing an enormous role.

Once it's members went through certain universities, and passed the [unknown word], they are on a free ride to certain positions and departments. And once they are there, their power is so enormous that they can do virtually everything without any inspection. So our government officials can take it all.

Once they retire, they are being put in executive posts in big corporations. They enjoy their time as Directors.

And during those five to ten years they act as agents of plutocrats corporate interests to the same government Ministries where they had been working before.

Now their successors are in their old positions and listen exactly why their former bosses are saying, because they know if they do what they are being told by the corporations, once they retire they will get the same fantastic posts. In their last decade they can make just as much money as in their entire career.

Nevertheless this pays off for the corporations, because it allows them to control the government and gives them a free ride. So this relationship is mutual.

Of course the career politicians join in as well, since they are being bribed by the corporations, as in many other countries. But in our country, the influence of the government of these officials is enormous.

Over a hundred years, since the end of the Samurai era, these three groups have been establishing this Troika. Time and again, together they represent political and economic power, for which they are ready to sacrifice everything. And to which the life of we the people does not matter.

This is the sad truth, and it became quite obvious in Fukushima."

That was Kazuhiko Kobayashi, translated from the German speech.

Find the audio of the full 42 minute Kobyashi speech (38.8 MB) in Gronau (10/20/2011) (in German) here.

A You tube video of his presentation, again in German, is here.

RADIO ECOSHOCK PART TWO

WERE 14,000 AMERICANS KILLED BY FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA?

Before we return to the fight to shut down unsafe nuclear power plants in the United States, and lessons from Japanese activists, I want to investigate the stunning new study claiming 14,000 Americans have already died from radiation floating over from the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan.

Two long-time American anti-nuclear activists, with decades of experience in the field, uncovered unsettling information even in the sparse announcements published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC.

Joseph J. Mangano, the Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project at radiation.org, co-founded by Dr. Ernest Sternglass. Mangano has published scholarly articles and books like "Low Level Radiation and Immune System Disorders: An Atomic Era Legacy", and "Radioactive Baby Teeth: The Cancer Link."

On December 19th, Joseph Mangano, with co-author Janette Sherman, issued a press release about their newest medical article titled "14,000 U.S. Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout".

This caused a storm of criticism and alarm.

I heard about Janette Sherman a couple of years ago, as a seasoned doctor and medical researcher. She was part of a study of thousands of baby teeth. The teeth showed higher levels of radioactive strontium-90 in children within 40 miles of any nuclear power plant. Sherman, as we will hear, was also the English editor of a large collection of papers on the impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear power accident in the Ukraine.

Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman published their peer-reviewed study in the December 2011th edition of the International Journal of Health Services.

Let's talk with Janette Sherman.

[Sherman interview]

Our guest has been toxicologist and internist Janette Sherman. She is adjunct professor, at Western Michigan University, and contributing editor of "Chernobyl - Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Download or read that huge report, consisting of translations from articles and reports from the Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe, here.

Janette is also the author of the book "Chemical Exposure and Disease and Life's Delicate Balance - Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer." Find out more here.

CAN THIS REALLY BE TRUE?

Did an extra 14,000 Americans dies from Fukushima?

The sub-title of the December 19th Press release reads "Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count."

This takes us into one of the most controversial areas of nuclear affairs. What is the safe level of radiation?

Study after study shows there is no safe level of radiation. More details below.

FUKUSHIMA FALLOUT MEASURED ACROSS THE U.S. (and Canada)

Reading further from the RPHP press release:

"Just six days after the disastrous meltdowns struck four reactors at Fukushima on March 11, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over American shores. Subsequent measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal across the U.S. The highest detected levels of Iodine-131 in precipitation in the U.S. were as follows (normal is about 2 picocuries I-131 per liter of water): Boise, ID (390); Kansas City (200); Salt Lake City (190); Jacksonville, FL (150); Olympia, WA (125); and Boston, MA (92)."

So there is no doubt elevated levels of radioation was measured by the American goverment all across the country, but especially on the West Coast.

Radio Ecoshock ran an interview in the Spring of 2011 with a Canadian scientist, Dr. Krzyztof Starosta at Simon Fraser University, who also measured elevated levels of radioactivity on Canada's West Coast. Hear that interview in this Radio Ecoshock program "Fear and Loathing in Fukushima" (1 hour 14 MB)

The RPHP press release says, quote:

"The CDC issues weekly reports on numbers of deaths for 122 U.S. cities with a population over 100,000, or about 25-30 percent of the U.S. In the 14 weeks after Fukushima fallout arrived in the U.S. (March 20 to June 25), deaths reported to the CDC rose 4.46 percent from the same period in 2010, compared to just 2.34 percent in the 14 weeks prior. Estimated excess deaths during this period for the entire U.S. is about 14,000."

The government reports an unusual rise in deaths, without any explanation. We know radiation hit North America, and can be harmful, especially to infants in the uterus, and up to one year of age. Janette Sherman says adults with compromised immune systems, perhaps after cancer treatment for example, are also vulnerable to more radiation as generated by Fukushima.

You can find the full journal article as a free .pdf file here.

The Radiation and Public Health Project also posted a 42 minute audio press conference with journalists. I note that no major news sources attended. Not Associated Press or Reuters. One journalist asked if there could be multiple causes beyond Fukushima for these excess deaths, and Joseph Mangano agreed there could be other causes as well. He called for more research.

THREE CASES WHERE LOW LEVE RADIATION RISKS WERE DENIED AND THEN ADMITTED

Mangano answered another doubt, with this explanation of three cases where low-level radiation impacts were denied, but then finally admitted by the government or the courts.

[Transcript by Alex Smith from Press Tele-Conference for journalists December 19th, 2011]

"This is Joseph Mangano... Any statement, such as the one you just mentioned, i.e. the levels of radiation exposure are too low to cause harm, are in conflict with the agreement of expert scientists.

I'll refer you to a report, a blue ribbon panel called BEIR 7, Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. They have produced seven reports over the years. And in their most recent one, 2005, they agreed that based on hundreds and hundreds of scientific articles, that even at low doses, there is risk to humans.

And I'll follow that by giving three examples of historically, where there were assumptions that low doses were not harmful to people only to have that belief overturned.

Number one is the practice of giving pregnant women abdominal x-rays. Which doctors did not to harm people, but simply for diagnostic purposes, to see, you know, how big the baby was and where the position was.

The first article that this raised childhood cancer risk to the foetus took place in the late 1950's. It was met by a huge wave of opposition by obsteticians, by radiologists, by the nuclear industry. More articles came out about that. And finally, in the late 1970's this practice was discontinued.

The second example was the fallout from atomic bomb tests in Nevada in the 1950's and 60's. For years years government officials declared no harm, until 1997, when the National Cancer Institute put out a report
estimating that up to 212,000 Americans developed thyroid cancer alone from the Iodine in bomb fallout.

The third one is the case of workers in nuclear weapons plants, which again for years the government measured their doses and declared that they were below 'safe and permissable limits'. In the year 2000 the
Energy Department put out a report stating that, it was based on dozens of articles, the workers were in fact susceptible to a variety of cancers. And now there is a program to compensate former workers with cancer.

In summary, there is a basic dynamic here which starts with an assumption of low doses being harmless - only to find out that after study, in fact the opposite is true.

So I think we must maintain an open mind here when studying Fukushima."

Find a .pdf of the BEIR 7 report here.

The Wiki article on ionizing radiation says this:

"The linear dose-response model suggests that any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk. The linear no-threshold model (LNT) hypothesis is accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the EPA and its validity has been reaffirmed by a National Academy of Sciences Committee (see the BEIR VII report, summarized in [8]). Under this model, about 1% of a population would develop cancer in their lifetime as a result of ionizing radiation from background levels of natural and man-made sources."

That does support what Mangano and Sherman are saying.

"MAY" HAVE KILLED 14,000 AMERICANS....

And here is a key statement by Joseph Mangano in that press tele-conference, namely that 14,000 MAY have been killed due to Fukushima, but the researchers cannot prove that actually happened.

[Transcript]

"Correction, we haven't said that Fukushima DID in fact cause these excess cancers, but MAY have caused. I want to make that quite clear. It's really a call, a clarion call, for more extensive research."

MY OPINION ON THIS STUDY

Given that doubt, I find the headline for the study press release misleading. We don't know Fukushima fallout caused 14,000 American deaths.

But the thrust of the study seems valid. A big impact of fallout over a large population is possible. It happened during atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and again after Chernobly. The American government has made no effort to find out why more people died after Fukushima. If they have an alternative cause, let's hear
it.

We also see how very weak government death reporting is. Thousands could die of radiation poisoning, or other causes, and we might never know it.

It seems biologically reasonable to me that many people in fragile states, whether infants or adults with medical problems, died following the blast of Fukushima radiation hitting North America, and Europe for that matter. When critics keep citing weak external radiation, you know they are dodging the real risk of ingesting
long-lived radioactive particles through food and water.

I would also expect more cancers to develop in the population during the coming decades, due to exposure to radioactive particles from the Fukushima nuclear accident. That is just common medical knowledge, as we learned from the Chernobly accident as well.

Because increased radioactivity stays with us for generations, even hundreds of years, and because it can alter genes for all subsequent generations, I feel nuclear power is far too dangerous for human use.

DID YOU SEE THIS ALL-STAR CONCERT FOR SAFE NUCLEAR-FREE ENERGY LAST SUMMER?

Fukushima teaches us to seek cleaner energy options.

Here is another message for Americans, and everyone still living in the shadows of nuclear disaster.

The setting was a concert at the Shoreline amphitheatre in Mountain View CA, on August 7, 2011. On stage Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Jason Mraz, The Doobie Brothers, Tom Morello, John Hall and many more.

Watch clips from this classic concert for clean non-nuclear energy on You tube here (42 minutes with all-star cast).

Listen for Eileen Miyoko Smith on stage. She is a Japanese activist who fought against using deadly plutonium as a fuel called MoX at the Fukushima reactors. Now she worries California reactors on quake fault lines, like Diablo Canyon and San Onofre could go the same way. They should be shut down.

And you also hear one of the original Americans fighting dangerous nuclear power, Harvey Wasserman. He started in New England in the early 19070's. Wasserman's latest book is "SOLARTOPIA: Our Green-Powered Earth, AD 2030", introduced by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and with the song "Solartopia" by Pete Seeger. Watch and listen to that Pete Seeger "Solartopia" song on You tube here.

Long-time folkie turned rocker Bonnie Rait was one of the MC's at the Musicians for Safe Energy concert.

I'm your host, Alex Smith.

Thank you for listening, and for caring about your world.

Green Music Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:05:31 PST

Blah blah blah. All those words fill our brain, and miss our hearts.

That is where the musicians step in, to move us along. I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to our annual best of green music show. You'll hear the songs of activism, despair, and love of Mother Earth.

This year we've added three songs for broken economy. You'll hear two new songs for the Occupy Movement.

We kick off with "Change Change" by the Canadian group Thistle, starring Debra Lee Halinda.

"Change Change" Thistle 2:43

More Thistle music on CD Baby.

Next up, some Frackin Good music from Australia, "My Water's On Fire Tonight" with David Holmes and Dean Bekker, from the album "Wholelottafracking Going On"

"My Water's On Fire Tonight" David Holmes & Dean Bekker 2:32

For those tired of the city, here is the Canadian hit group Mother Mother with "Dirty Town."

"Dirty Town" Mother Mother 2:28

Web site.

You are listening to the Radio Ecoshock green music special - eco activist songs from around the world.

From Germany, here is Michael Montecrossa with his Fukushima song, "Talkin End Game"

"Fukushima Song Talkin End Game" Michael Montecrossa 3:51

You tube video.

Michael's web site.

American singer-songwriter Neko Case is best known in the Canadian group "The New Pornographers" Here Neko solos with "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth"

"Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth" Neko Case 2:10

Let's dive back down under. We'll start with Australia's Combat Wombat from a benefit album to stop the destructive Lake Cowal gold mine proposed by Barrick. This song is called

"Alternative Energy" Combat Wombat (from the album "Water More Precious Than Gold").

The album isn't online any longer, but you can hear more tracks from it in this April 27th 2006 "Podcasting Nimbin" show.

From New Zealand, with a Polynesia flavor, here is the group Te Vaka, with the song "Our Ocean" written for Greenpeace New Zealand.

"Our Ocean" Te Vaka

Their web site is cool.

You are tuned to the Radio Ecoshock Green Music festival.

This is the Seattle Band, Million Dollar Nile with their song "Don't Kilowatt".

"Don't Kilowatt" Million Dollar Nile 4:10

Before we get to our set of new Occupy songs, let's remember what this Earth is all about.

We start with "Hallowed Be Thy Ground" by Casey Neill

You tube video of that song here (audio not as good as studio version).

That is followed by "Earth" by Imogen Heap, ....

Here is a You tube video about Imogen's film "Love the Earth"

And here is her web site.

Then: "Where We Going to Go" by Ellis Music Productions.

Watch it on You tube here. Written and sung by David Todds, who allows reproduction for non-profit use.

SONGS FOR A BROKEN ECONOMY

It's time to Occupy ourselves with the economic banking rip-off. In music of course, with Radio Ecoshock.

Whether you are talking consumer excess, the banking crash, or the fast-track to wrecking the environment, you can't beat this song:

"Run Away Train" by Texas singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson.

There are lots of You tube live versions of this song, but none beat the studio version in this program. Visit Eliza's web site for the latest.

"Runaway Train" Eliza Gilkyson 4:11

I was also struck by the Texas bravery of Gilkyson's 2008 song "Man of God" deep in George Bush country. (Not included in this show).

One of the suprise hits of the Occupy movement comes from Hawaii. Singer Makana was the official music for the APEC Summit leaders dinner. He sang "We Are the Many" - over and over for the surprised dignitaries of the 1 percent.

Makana "We Are The Many" 5:23

You tube video here.

His web site.

I first heard this David Rovics "Occupy Wall Street" song from an Iphone at the protests in New York City. David went into the studio, to make this one for the world.

"Occupy Wall Street (We're Going to Stay Right Here)" David Rovics 6:07

Official "Occupy Walls Street" song video here.

More about David Rovics at his web site.

In the hour-long non-stop version (and podcast) we hear one more quick one from David Rovics...

"When The Oil Runs Dry" David Rovics 2:03

We'll wrap up this Radio Ecoshock music special with our number one downloaded green tune. It's "Power from Above" by New England folkie Dan Berggren.

Power From Above Dan Berggren 2:49

Download the whole song here.

To book Dan for a performance, or just find out more, go here.

Sorry I didn't have time for this great song, "Good Planets Are Hard to Find" by American folk singer Steve Forbert.

You can always send your green music suggestions to: radio //at// ecoshock.org

I'm Alex smith. Thanks for listening. And have a good holiday.

CLIMATE DOWN IN DURBAN

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:41:21 PST

Diplomats from all over the world are returning home after a hard-won agreement in Durban, South Africa.

They agreed to do nothing to save our climate from disaster.

Our governments will talk until 2015, and then maybe do something serious about greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. By then, as Radio Ecoshock listeners know, we will be committed to at least 3 and a half degrees Centigrade hotter world in 2100, than our ancestors knew in 1750. It will only get hotter after that.

In this Radio Ecoshock special, we hear four reports.

From India, journalist, author and political analyst Praful Bidwai tells Stephen Leahy of IPS a failure in Durban would be better than what we got. We go outside the spin of Western media.

Then to San Francisco, to hear NASA's Dr. James Hansen at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. He describes our unique and dangerous path.

Back to South Africa, where Janet Redman has survived the gruelling Durban conference sessions, to give us the wrap up. What did and didn't happen, along with the American role.

We finish up with an interview with Dr. Michael Raupach from Australia's National Science Agency. He's part of the Global Carbon Project which just published the bad news about our "monstrous" increase in emissions.

New science, predictions of doom, and a world in paralysis - it's another Radio Ecoshock show.

THE VIEW AT THE DURBAN CLIMATE CONFERENCE - FROM INDIA

At the Durban COP-17 Climate conference, India was blamed for not going along with the game. We're going to hear from Praful Bidwai, the author of "The Politics of Climate Change and The Global Crisis" and a well-known Indian commentator. Praful was interviewed by Stephen Leahy of the Independent Press Service on Friday December 9th. The meeting was not over, but everything in the interview stands.

Praful agrees the Indian economy is growing fast - but all the profits are going to the upper 10 or 15 percent of the population. While 500 million people still don't have electricity, India can hardly be counted as a "developed" country.

Bidwai also talks about the bullying, and outright bribery of countries at these climate conferences. Small Island states, who may disappear with rising seas, are told to agree to offers from large polluters, or risk getting nothing at all. Other countries are threatened by the risk of withholding loans or investments.

The European Union wanted a legally binding treaty. They offered to extend the Kyoto Protocol, and meet their commitments within that. Russia and the United States didn't want to extend the Protocol. Canada came to the conference threatening to withdraw first, because Canada has no intention of meeting those emission reductions. Production from the Tar Sands comes first, and Canada is already at least 25% over what it promised in Kyoto.

The United States never ratified Kyoto, despite it's promotion by Al Gore.

India objected to being legally bound to reduce emissions, even before it produced electricity for its citizens. Why should they do without, while the West continues to reap the benefits, and waste even more?

In the end, as we hear from Janet Redman, the Durban conference agreed on something called an extention of Kyoto, but without any legally binding reductions until at least 2020.

Every other commitment was likewise hollowed out, becoming many steps backwards, says Praful Bidwai. Payments into the $100 billion a year climate adaptation fund are uncertain, and not coming any time soon. The whole idea of the West taking responsibility for climate change (due to long-term emissions) - or reducing quickly to allow developing countries their share of the atmosphere - all that is out the window. Bidwai says this is worse than Copenhagen, it should have been voted down. Failure would have been preferable.

Don't miss this insightful interview by Stephen Leahy, of the Independent Press Service (IPS).

Stephen Leahy immediately sent this interview to Radio Ecoshock. Stephen is one of the few all-out environmental journalists left anywhere. He needs your support to keep covering the world. I'm asking you to make a donation of any amount, at stephenleahy.net

Our Radio Ecoshock coverage of the Durban climate conference continues with a long-distance call to Africa. We talk with Janet Redman. She knows the ropes of international negotiations, the activist scene, and politics back home in Washington.

BUT FIRST, JAMES HANSEN AT THE AGU

Dr. James Hansen, from the Goddard Space Center at NASA, is possibly America's top climate scientist. He was certainly the first to warn Congress, back in 1988, that global warming threatened the world.

Hansen's papers are widely cited as ground-breaking research. His latest book "Storms of My Grandchildren" is popular.

As the Durban climate conference was meeting, on the other side of the world, in San Francisco, the American Geophysical Union was holding its annual conference. Some of the most important climate science of the year is presented and reported.

We only have time to give you a brief excerpt from an hour long press briefing on December 6th, 2011. It was a panel discussion between three of the leading lights. I'm going to focus on a few clips from NASA's Dr. James Hansen, plus a bit from Eelco Rohling, Professor of Ocean and Climate Change, Southampton University, U.K.

Watch the full 1 hour press briefing, which also includes Ken Caldeira, here.

Note all the other AGU 2011 videos that show up on the You tube page. And visit the AGU site.

The presentation is called "Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes".

Find a related NASA press release here.

It begins:

"In recent research, Hansen and co-author Makiko Sato, also of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, compared the climate of today, the Holocene, with previous similar 'interglacial' epochs – periods when polar ice caps existed but the world was not dominated by glaciers. In studying cores drilled from both ice sheets and deep ocean sediments, Hansen found that global mean temperatures during the Eemian period, which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 15,000 years, were less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. If temperatures were to rise 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, global mean temperature would far exceed that of the Eemian, when sea level was four to six meters higher than today, Hansen said.

'The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient,' Hansen said. 'It would be a prescription for disaster.'"

Find Briefing Materials

Related feature article by Hansen and Sato

JANET REDMAN OF INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES REPORTS FROM DURBAN

Reporting from South Africa, our guest is Janet Redman. She is Co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network, at the Institute for Policy Studies, in Washington D.C. Janet attended the 17th Conference of the Parties, known as COP-17. That United Nations climate conference wrapped up a day and a half late, in the wee hours of December 11th, 2011.

I'm not able to summarize everything in this detailed interview.

Janet expresses her disappointment with a "hollowed out" agreement. Nothing is binding, all is voluntary and unmonitored. Essentially, from now until 2020, it is a free-for-all where every country can emit as much as it wants.

The result for the climate will be a disaster. On our current course, with emissions rising by 3 to 6% every year, there is no way to avoid at least 3.5 degrees C global mean temperature rise by 2100, and it could go to 5 or 6 degrees. That will ruin the Earth for humans and most species.

Janet explains the role of the United States, and how American actions in Durban are tailored to the electoral cycle. America is not taking on its responsibility for being the biggest single cause of climate change. A combination of bullying and evasion replace that.

We talk about Canada, and the unusual role of China. China is now the world's largest emitter, although still far down the list of per capita consumption.

China is also a leader in renewable energy, partly due to government policies supporting it. But American labor unions, and the U.S. government, are taking legal action against China - because it supports renewable energy!

China is also the de facto head of the G-77 countries, and is expected to speak for the developing world, against the major Western powers and Japan, if needed.

At one point, China offered to take on binding reduction agreements, if the U.S would do the same. But the U.S. refused. Redman says other countries are very aware that President Obama is not the climate or environmental leader voters expected. She doesn't think he will even mention climate in his campaign next year. Janet thinks Americans will have to take personal action, and organize on other levels, since the federal government is either bought out or politically paralyzed, or both.

There is a lot more in this interview. If you want to know what really happened in Durban, give it a listen.

Find out more about the Institute for Policy Studies here.

My thanks to Daphne Wysham of Earthbeat Radio for helping arrange this interview.

AN ESTEEMED AUSTRALIAN CLIMATE SCIENTIST ON CARBON EMISSIONS

Now on to Australia, to get the latest on climate science and our ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is Australia's national science agency. Our guest Dr. Michael Raupach is a Research Scientist with CSIRO's Marine and Atmospheric Research Division.

Dr Raupach's achievements include:
CSIRO Fellow, 2010
Fellow, American Geophysical Union, 2010
Fellow, Australian Academy of Science, 2009

Back in 2006, Dr Raupach warned the amount of carbon dioxide produced by humans was on the rise. We've just seen that confirmed with another huge increase in 2010. For all the conferences, studies and reports, when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, we're just going backwards.

Michael also participated in research showing the "sinks" that help trap our carbon emissions are weakening. When we look at carbon respositories, like the soil, forests, and especially the ocean, science suggests these are taking up 20% less carbon than in 1970.

Find out more here. (with audio podcast 6 min)

That's a huge concern, since at least half of the greenhouse gases produced by humans have been hidden away in these sinks. If they take up less, we get more staying in the atmosphere, and if we want to survive, we have to burn much less than we thought.

We hear about the recently released report showing humans have managed to raise greenhouse gas emissions an astonishing 5.9 percent in 2010. All during the 2000's, greenhouse gas emissions were increasing around 3% every year, except 2009. In 2009, the economic downturn meant a lower increase.

But by 2010, and again this year we think, despite economic concerns, greenhouse gas emissions are roaring out of our tail-pipes, power plants, gas wells, and agriculture, to name a few.

All this is tracked by the ...

GLOBAL CARBON PROJECT

Quoting from Wikipedia: "The Global Carbon Project (GCP) was established in 2001. The organisation seeks to quantify global carbon emissions and their causes.

The main object of the group has been to fully understand the carbon cycle. The project has brought together emissions experts and economists to tackle the problem of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

The Global Carbon Project works collaboratively with the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the World Climate Programme, the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change and Diversitas, under the Earth System Science Partnership.

In late 2006 researchers from the project claimed that carbon dioxide emissions had dramatically increased to a rate of 3.2% annually from 2000. At the time, the chair of the group Dr Mike Raupach stated that 'This is a very worrying sign. It indicates that recent efforts to reduce emissions have had virtually no impact on emissions growth and that effective caps are urgently needed,'...

Their projections have indicated that we can expect greenhouse gas emissions to occur according to the IPCC's worst-case scenario, as CO2 emissions reach 500ppm in the 21 st century."

Find the main Global Carbon Project web site here.

Actually, Dr. Raupach told me about the 2010 increase in our interview, but asked me to wait for the paper publication this past week, before broadcasting our chat.

It was a rare opportunity to talk with one of Australia's preeminent climate scientists, especially when it comes to the carbon cycle. In a future show, I'll ask Dr. Raupach about using changes in agriculture to lower carbon, by putting it into the soil.

This week we learned about that carbon cycle, and our emissions.

I asked Michael Raupach about the priorities for climate research in Australia. Then I learned more about North America and Europe as well.

It seems "the sub-tropical ridge" of high pressure is dropping southward toward the Poles. The same ridge in northern latitutes is moving northward toward the Pole. The result is a massive change in weather patterns.

For Australia, and for the southern United States, this change means less rainfall, drought, and fires. Australia has seen plenty of all three, just like Texas and Oklahoma in 2011. Parts of the country are drying out, and may not recover.

Raupach says it is easy to predict a long term warming trend due to increasing carbon in the atmosphere. There will be more brush fires in the countryside, and more heat deaths in the cities, he says.

Here is the difficult subject that needs much more search, Raupach tells me: the impact of greenhouse gases on precipitation. Just as James Hansen told us at the AGU in San Francisco, our models are not yet good at predicting changes in rainfall. We can't say for sure which extreme rainfall events are aided by climate change.

Knowing the impact on rainfall, and therefore on agriculture, is critical for Australia and the world.

ENJOY LIFE WHILE YOU CAN

There you go. A full serving of science, doom and the human circus.

We don't have time to cover the simultaneous economic collapse. In his latest radio show and podcast, Max Keiser explains why Britain opted out of the European Union economic recovery plan - to keep the City of London as a world base for bankster piracy.

Download "The Truth About Markets" #1228 December 10, 2011 here. (1 hour)

Your new word for the week is "re-hypothication". Look it up, and find the link to a key article in the blog Zero Hedge which explains how money is magically expanded until it bursts.

This article is a bit hard going at the start, I found, but keep slogging along and you begin to get the drift of the game going on in London, and incidentally how Canadian banks are playing there...

A MODEST PROPOSAL

The politicians at Durban showed they are not willing to act to save the climate. Maybe a fast deep economic crash is our only hope of maintaining a livable climate for ourselves and our grandchildren.

With that happy thought, I thank you for listening. Download Radio Ecoshock programs free from our web site, ecoshock.org. You can find my blog and videos there as well.

I'm Alex Smith, saying "Remember, these are the good old days."

Enjoy your holidays.

Winter Gardening, Guerrilla Gardening

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:17:19 PST

http://bit.ly/w0fBnz Master winter gardener Eliot Coleman grows year round in Maine, USA. UK, guerrilla gardener Chris Tomlinson secretly plants food. "HumptyDumptyTribe" warns global famine from climate change comng soon. Winter greenhouse interview from "Locavore," with Martin Ronda at the U. of Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. Radio Ecoshock Show 111207 1 hour.

SHOW LINE UP - WITH INTERVIEW DOWNLOADS

1. "Winter Gardening with Eliot Coleman"

How to grow food in winter, even in Northern climates. Master gardener Eliot Coleman, from Four Seasons Farm in Bar Harbor Maine, grows (and sells) vegetables year-round, using inexpensive portable "hoop house" greenhouses, with no added heat source. Classic how-to interview, from Radio Ecoshock Show 111207 23 minutes 5 MB

2. "Guerrilla Gardening"

How to create an edible landscape on public and private lands. UK "Guerrilla of Love" Chris Tomlinson explains how he secretly plants food, perennials and trees, in waste lands, untended gardens, and even city streets. Fun interview on serious topic, as economy erodes. From Radio Ecoshock show 111207 9 minutes 2 MB

3. "Global Famine Starts in Texas"

From You tube, excellent rant and demonstration of Texas heat killing off ability of garden plants to set fruit. Above 85 degree F days, and without going below 68 F nights - no tomatoes, beans, mellons, nada. A portent of coming global famine as global warming develops, says this You tube poster "Humptydumptytribe". 9 minutes selected for Radio Ecoshock 111207 Global Famine Starts in Texas 2 MB

full video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AEESU4k2dA

4. "Locavore: Winter Gardening in Canada"

Nuts and bolts of how to grow vegetables even in a Canadian winter, with no extra heating. Walter Garrison, host of "Locavore" on CFRU Guelph, Ontario interviews Martin Ronda in greenhouse of Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. Excerpts for Radio Ecoshock 111207 18 minutes. 4 MB

EXTENDED SHOW NOTES:

1. "Winter Gardening with Eliot Coleman"

We want fresh, organic, local food. Now with a sour economy, and rising food prices, that all gets even better. But most of us buy agribusiness produce in the winter, when Nature doesn't exactly encourage growing our own.

Master gardener Eliot Coleman says we CAN grow food year-round - and you don't have to live in Florida or Southern California to do it. From his famous "Four Seasons Farm" in Harborside Maine, Eliot tells us how, in his "Winter Harvest Handbook".

A few notes from our interview:

1.1 Coleman uses a combination of plastic and fabric to keep plants from freezing in the Maine winters.

The first is UV-resistant greenhouse grade plastic over simple hoops made out of plastic piping. This outer "greenhouse" is light and portable. Later, Eliot explains why.

Inside, there is a second fabric cover over the rows of plants. This is "spun-bonded" fabric, sold by seed houses and other garden supply stores. It is easily moved off the plants during the daytime, to allow as much light as possible. But it retains the soil heat during the night, to keep crops alive.

2. There are no pots, and no tables. Everything is grown in the ground. See above.

3. The greenhouse is mobile because:

3.1 it can shelter warm weather crops, like tomatoes, to get the maximum, and then moved over the cold weather crops as needed

3.2 fixed greenhouses, Coleman says, tend to build up problems like insects or moulds. If the ground is exposed to the elements for part of the year, this is far less likely to happen.

4. Aside from heat, the critical element is light. Maine, he says, is on a similar latitude to Southern France. It gets as much light as northern Italy, where everyone expects fresh greens daily. There is enough light in the northern U.S., and southern Canada to grow through the winter. (See also the Guelph interview below). People have winter gardens in Norway and Sweden.

5. For sucess, select winter hardy vegetables. These include spinach, arugula, some lettuce varieties, carrot, beets, kale, scallions, swiss chard, and more.

6. Forget the focus on tomatoes! That is not what winter gardening is about.

7. Coleman used some extra heat for about 5 years, but found it was not necessary. Lately his greenhouses have no wood or fossil fuel heat at all.

8. Grow lights are too expensive to run, considering the value of the vegetables.

9. There is a commercial market for fresh winter veggies. They keep longer for restaurants, than those shipped from further South. The most important point is these cold-hardy vegetables respond to the challenge with excellent taste. People love the taste and freshness.

10. Eliot thinks vegetables from California and Florida will not stop coming. They are just so cheap, even if diesel fuel quadruples in price, it won't add all that much to a head of cauliflower.

11. Eliot lives with Barbara Damrosch, author of "The Garden Primer" and more. He started his "farm" in Bar Harbor, Maine in 1968. At that time, all he could afford was acreage with pine-type forest, not farming land at all. Over the years since, he has worked up the soil into prime shape, about 14 acres in production.

12. The new book "The Winter Harvest Handbook" is an update to his classic "Four Season Harvest" (still an excellent investment). The Handbook has more for commercial growers as well, if you hope to make some extra income from winter greens.

13. Coleman is fascinated by the Transition movement. He's glad to see it.

GUERRILLA GARDENING

All those public lands clothed in lawns and decorative trees, while people go hungry. Why haven't authorities clued into the rising cost of food and poverty?

We live in lost landscapes of the Victorian and Middle Class past. Chris Tomlinson and the "Guerillas of Love" are determined to change all that.

Actually, Chris confesses he is "the guerrillas of love". While there are lots of other guerrillas out there, Tomlinson needed a name to get a couple of grants to buy trees to plant. The Lush Cosmetics shops helped him with a few hundred pounds. Good on them.

So what is "guerrilla gardening"?

Chris looks for waste spaces to plant perennial food varieties. These may be close to where he is staying, so he can water them during the summer.

But his most successful plantings have popped up in people's front gardens, right on private property.

Chris also plants fruit trees in cities and towns. He may put on a jacket that suggests he is a city worker, as he puts in a new tree.

Occasionally, other city crew see them. A few got yanked out. Others were thought to be official, so they get mulched and maybe even get a railing or fence put around them. Success! More public food planted.

Since tree planting can be time intensive, Chris has also scheduled some activity "in the wee hours of the morning."

In Britain, the worst that can happen is a civil fine - no criminal offence. He's been rousted by a couple of cops. One of them was friendly, and had a garden in a community allotment himself.

Chris moves to different communities. He was in Nottingham for a while. Now he's moved on to places unmentioned.

Tomlinson said he became depressed, partly about the state of the world, a few years ago. "Gardening saved me" he says. Looking back, I think gardening might have saved me too, when I went back to the land (as polluting civilization drove me a bit crazy...)

Many, many people have found balance and satisfaction from gardening. Perhaps you would like to become a guerrilla gardener too? Try http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ for more info. That's Richard Reynold's site in the UK.

Our cities seem purposely hostile not just to nature, but to the citizens. We pave over as much as we can, to save maintenance costs. Then we plant the most boring ground cover, and trees with no possible help for the population. How did we get into such a situation?

When I was in Morocco, the avenues were lined with orange trees. Everyone had free oranges. When will we rethink the ban on creating an edible landscape?

As the economy tanks, Peak Oil kicks in, and climate spikes the food prices, I can see a new department of food and agriculture opening in every city.

With very tough economic times coming, we'll need the food, especially for the poor (which will be most of us). Plant now, and plant often.

GLOBAL FAMINE STARTS IN TEXAS

I was surfing You tube just this past week, and found a gem in the new uploads.

"Humptydumptytribe" (a.k.a. Hambone Littletail) says he is going to show us the first sign of the start of global famine, due to global warming.

He starts out with his frustration with the deniers in Austin Texas. Then I expect a tour of the dried out caked ground, maybe with dead cows, after the record drought in Texas.

Nope. Not about that. His camera stays on a lush green garden. Why?

On closer inspection, the plants grew big, there are lots of blooms, plenty of bees, and hardly any fruit.

For example, the first row of tomatoes planted in April grew tomatoes only on the very lowest branches, and nothing after that. The second row of about nine plants look grand, and have just ONE tomato.

Searching on the Net, for "poor fruit set on tomatoes" - he found out: if the daytime temperatures are above 85 degrees during the time of fruit set, and night temperatures stay hot (above 68 degrees) no fruit will be set.

This applied not just to tomatoes, but to his melons, and his pole beans. If Mr. Littletail needed this garden to survive, he would starve.

Austin, and all of Texas had the hottest spring and summer on record. This will be normal in the coming decades. Where these heat conditions apply, crops will fail in many parts of the world, becoming a global famine.

Countless scientific studies and food experts confirm and warn this is coming. In just one example, Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute, a recognized expert in grain crops, said rice is within one degree of its tolerance. If the rice growing areas go up one degree of average temperature, they may not set fruit. No rice, or greatly reduced rise equals mass starvation in Asia.

On our current course, various experts and institutes warn, we are headed for a global mean temperature rise of at least 3 degrees C., maybe 5 or 6 C.

In the You tube video, Humptydumptytribe wonders if the 2010 record increase in carbon dioxide emissions is responsible for the heat and drought in Texas this year. It isn't proved, he says, but it looks like good circumstantial evidence.

In any case, a lot of studies have shown the U.S. south will get around three months of days over 100 degrees every year, or every second year, within a decade or two. Texas almost got that this year. Maybe it has come already?

Check out the video. It's excellent.

Find his video channel here.

WINTER GREENHOUSE IN GUELPH, ONTARIO

We end with this excellent recording about the nitty-gritty of growing veggies in the winter, unheated, in souther Ontario, Canada.

Here is some information about the original program, from the host Walter Garrison's blog.

"I host a radio program called Locavore! on CFRU 93.3 FM, based out of Guelph, Ontario. On this show I talk to farmers, processors, restaranteurs, chefs, retailers, brewers, winemakers, researchers, nutritionists, politicians, pretty well anyone who has an impact on the food system as we experience it.

Fifteen years ago I grew fruits and vegetables for a local restaurant in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. Some people did not believe I could grow field tomatoes commercially in central Alberta. I did.

The Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming is located on-site of the University of Guelph. The farm provides a place for students from the university and the local school board to obtain practical experience in learning how to grow food. It is intended to be a trial garden for urban food production. Martha Gay Scroggins oversees this initiative. A few years ago, Dr. Ann Clark and a number of others on campus decided that they wanted an organic farm on campus. The university donated the northwest corner of the University of Guelph Arboretum for this project."

Martha Gay Scroggins at the University of Guelph has been one of the driving forces behind this experimental greenhouse.

The interview was posted on radio4all.net last winter, but now I can't find the original link. It was broadcast on CFRU on January 27th, 2011.

The guest is Martin Ronda. He laboriously dug up the compacted soil in the greenhouse, and hauled up many wheel-barrow loads of water from a stream, before a well was installed.

They get electricity from an extention cord from a nearby parking lot. The power runs two fans which blow air to inflate the two layers of plastic on the outside of the greenhouse. It is a fixed base building.

Like Coleman, Ronda uses a second sheet of row covering which can be drawn over the plants at night. Unlike Coleman, the Guelph crew use black water barrels to absorb heat during the day, and keep the temperature up at night.

Most of the same hardy vegetables are planted. There is good advice on timing in the interview. For example carrots and beets might be planted in late August, and then again in September, to give at least two crops. Planting of other vegetables might go on into mid-October.

During the winter, with less light, in fact during the 6 week around the Solstice, plants hardly grow at all. They need no watering at this stage. They they take off again as more light returns. You can still eat most of them right through the winter.

Ronda observes younger "teenage" veggies survive extreme cold better than mature plants.

There is a lot of down-to-earth knowledge passed on through this fine interview. Thank you Walter and Locovore for getting this info out.

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock

CLIMATE SOLUTION: FROM AIR TO SOIL

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:07:44 PST

READ THE NEW ALEX SMITH INTERVIEW IN GRIST MAGAZINE.

Please pass that link, or this short link http://bit.ly/rxc5lj to all your email contacts, or post it in blogs. Add it to comment sections. Help get the word out, so we can get more listeners and more stations. Radio Ecoshock is broadcast on over 50 stations now. I'm working on extending it further, with more news in coming weeks. If you pass around this Grist interview you can really help!

THIS WEEK'S PROGRAM: CLIMATE SOLUTION: FROM AIR TO SOIL

No this isn't another Radio Ecoshock program of doom! Instead, we are going to look at one of several large-scale solutions available. This new/old technology can grab carbon out of the air, and store it back in the soil.

Short Description:

"Desperately looking for a clean way to remove dangerous carbon from the atmosphere, Alex interviews Allan Savory of the Savory Institute. His project to capture carbon into the soil, using intelligent herd management in Zimbabwe, is on the short-list for the Virgin Earth Challenge. We follow up with Abe Collins, a carbon farming leader in Vermont, USA. Plus organizing for local food in North Carolina (even in hard times) - Aaron Newton at ASPO 2011. "

More detail, starting with ALLAN SAVORY AND THE SAVORY INSTITUTE

In 2007, billionaire Richard Branson announced the Virgin Earth Challenge. He offered a 25 million dollar prize to the best method to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, with no harmful impacts. Out of 2600 submissions, Allan Savory and the Savory Institute survived to the current short-list of 11 technolgies to do it.

We talk with Allan Savory, the 76 year old pioneer biologist and agriculturalist from Zimbabwe.

Savory is an fascinating interview. He also won the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, for a world-changing technology.

Plus, futurist Seth Itzkan (who went to Zimbabwe to see for his own eyes) tells me old Allan went out into the African night with a large rifle, to protect the camp from a pride of lions that had taken a big cow the night previous. That's character.

Seth's Africa blog here.

Wanna know what it's like to sit out in lion country without a gun? Check out this short video with Seth and "Knowledge the lion chaser."

Yet, as you hear in this interview, Savory absolutely insists we need all the predators, from lions through hyenas to wild dogs.

The behavior of herd animals changes when predators exist. The herd bunches up, fertilizes the ground and works it in with their hooves, and then move on in a tigher group. This benefits the land, as Savory shows repeatedly on his large experimental farm in Zimbabwe, near Victoria Falls. The vegetation roars back, where neighboring lands experience hard packed soil and desertification. Even the ground water comes back, with year-round ponds appearing. His knowledge could literally transform the landscape of the world, if applied.

Forget what you know about animals and land management. Desertification is not what you think. A very old relationship between animals and grass lands could reverse the damage.

It may even be a mega-solution for climate change. In a classic interview, I talk with a world-recognized pioneer in natural land management, Allan Savory, founder of the Savory Institute.

Allan Savory was born into white-ruled Rhodesia. He became a biologist, a game manager, a member of Parliament. Savory resigned and went into exile over the racist policies of that government. Now the country is called Zimbabwe, and Savory has returned often, to teach and to test his methods of restoring water, life, and carbon to the land.

His best known book is "Holistic Management: A New Decision Making Framework" written with his wife Jody Butterfield.

In 2003, Savory won the Banksia International Award, quote "to recognise extraordinary individuals or organisations that have made, or are making a significant contribution to improving our environment on a global level."

Allan Savory & the Africa Centre for Holistic Management was the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Winner. "Operation Hope" showed a way for permanent water and food security for millions of Africa's poor.

In November 2011, Allan Savory topped over 2500 others to place in the top 11 finalists in the Virgin Earth Challenge. His project not only reverses desertification, but offers a global technique to removed vast amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It may be a low-tech way to stop runaway climate change.

Here is the Savory Institute You tube channel.

But if you read or look at only one thing about Savory's plan for the soil and the climate, this short paper is it. "A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change" It opened my eyes.

In 2007, I spoke with Peter Donovan, the publisher of a book by the Australian author Allan J. Yeomans. That book is "Priority One, Together We Can Beat Global Warming." Peter Donovan is now on a road tour promoting the Soil Carbon Challenge. The idea is to get farmers to measure their current carbon in the soil, so they can know what works to capture and keep more of it.

Then I got an email from a remote outpost in Zimbabwe, in lion country. It's amazing to connect with someone so far back in the bush. That's the new world we live in.

It was none other than Massachussetts futurist Seth Itzkan. Seth is and analyst and advocate for sustainable economic development. He's the CEO & Founder Planet-TECH
Associates. Itzkan went to Zimbabwe to see Savory's claims with his own eyes.
Seth was amazed by what he found. As claimed new water sources were appearing where the Savory management technique was used. Properly managed land was rich with
vegetation, in an area generally blighted by on-going encourachment by the desert. Hard, hard soil with a few scrubby bushes can be converted back to moist rich grasslands by natural herd management. Savory mimiced nature to recapture the land, and the carbon from the sky. It works.

SURE, I HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS...

The limitations to this technique are several. The main problem: humans need to change their conceptions of agriculture, their opposition to herd management, and the inate social demand to rid the planet of dangerous animals. And we'd have to re-educate millions of poor farmers. I'll consult a leading climate expert on the role of soil carbon in a coming program.

I have to overcome personal resistance too. I've been taught, as millions have, that over-grazing by animals is turning the world into deserts. Now we learn that is due to our unnatural way of raising animals, and killing off predators and the wild spaces they require.

Personally, I'm trying hard to become a vegetarian. North American meat is poisoned with anti-biotics and other chemicals. Red meat is know to raise cancer risks, especially of the bowels. The feed-lot meat production chain is just a giant prison for animals and their suffering.

But that is not at all what Allan Savory, and our next guest, are promoting. Their solution to climate change does involve animals, and meat eating - but it is the most Nature-based geoengineering plan out there.

Here is what these new agriculturalists are telling us: we don't need to darken the Sun. We need to manage grasslands, to use cover crops when growing grains and vegetables, and we need the help of animals and their predators to restore the carbon cycle.

My thanks to Karl Thidemann for pushing me to learn about Savory and soil. Karl's been gently emailing me for years, telling me to look into it. It only took four or five years Karl! I just wasn't ready, or I'm a slow learner.

I'm just glad we got Allan Savory on the air on Radio Ecoshock. You can download or listen to that 24 minute Allan Savory interview here.

I should just add the importance of grass fires when it comes to climate change. In the interview, Savory clearly explains how damaging slash and burn agriculture is. All over Africa, and all over the world, subsistence farmers burn the fields over to clear them. This releases more carbon than millions of cars. Some of it is recaptured by new growth, but the overall
impact of the black carbon, and the burst of carbon during fire season, further damages both the climate and the soil. I haven't said it as well as Allan does. Please listen to the interview.

PRACTICING CARBON FARMING IN VERMONT - ABE COLLINS

Then to Abe Collins, a farmer in St. Albans, Vermont. He uses methods to capture carbon with agriculture. Collins started out working with the Navajo in Arizona, applying techniques learned from Allan Savory, to reverse the deterioration of Navajo land. They all learned together how to use animals to reclaim desert land, rather than creating more of it.

Collins returned to Vermont, and converted a former dairy farm to a beef operation. He measures soil depth, and carbon content, to see improvements as they develop.

It takes nature about one thousand years to create an inch of soil. The modern farmers hope to do it a lot faster, without using a lot of fossil fuels.

The extra soil also helps with flood control. Vermont surely needed that, when tropical storm Irene flooded towns and wiped out roads. We discuss how proper soil managment can help with extreme rainfall events accompanying climate change.

We also talk about the "Keyline" system developed by P.A. Yeomans in Australia. His son, Allan Yoemans published a book in 2007 on ways to save the climate using agriculture. It's called "Priority One". You can order the book, or download it from this site.

Collins was part of a crew, including Peter Donovan, who attempted to get "carbon farming" recognized in the New England carbon trading scheme. Why pay big companies to off-set emissions, or even worse, fake green geoengineering, when farmers can capture carbon - AND feed us sustainably?

At the end of October 2011, Abe Collins kicked off "the Soil Carbon Challenge" in Vermont. Video here.

Or check out this: Part One of a five part You tube presentation by Abe Collins: "Presentations from the Quivira Coalition's 9th Annual Conference, November 10-12, 2010, in Albuquerque, NM "The Carbon Ranch: Using Food and Stewardship to Build Soil and Fight Climate Change". The rest of the talk will pop up on the right side of the You tube screen.

To keep up with the whole discussion of carbon farming, Abe recommends this site: managingwholes.com

Download the Abe Collins interview (17 minutes) here.

A MODEL FOR LOCALIZING FOOD, AARON NEWTON FROM NORTH CAROLINA

The program wraps up with a new presentation from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas conference in Washington D.C. in November 2011.

Aaron Newton is the Local Food System Program Coordinator for Cabarrus County, North Carolina. He tells us how to develop your local food-shed, even in hard times. And why the most important crop may be... new farmers.

It's a really helpful short presentation from Aaron. The ways the County used the tax structure to both keep farmers, and to fund community organizing around local food. Lots of good tips for localizing your own community. The Newton talk is dead-on for how to create a local food-shed getting ready for Peak Oil.

Our D.C. correspondent Gerri Williams was at the ASPO conference, and sends this recording. My thanks to ASPO USA for sharing the audio, and for getting localization on the Peak Oil menu.

Listen to/download the Radio Ecoshock broadcast of Aaron Newton at ASPO 2011 here.

------------------

We'll be doing a second show on sequestering carbon in the soil in two weeks time. Next week, we look into a different sort of growing: winter gardening (and why extreme climate change may make you do it...)

Alex
Radio Ecoshock
http://www.ecoshock.org

Fracking Gas = Climate Crash

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:34:50 PST

MUSIC CREDIT: the theme music this week is "My Water's on Fire Tonight" written and performed by David Holmes, Andrew Bean, Niel Bekker. Australian compilation album: "Whole Lotta Frackin' Going On"

Recording credit: Robert Howarth speech at ASPO recorded by Carl Etnier of Equal Time Radio, Vermont. Speech courtesy of ASPO USA.

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

For years, governments, industry, and TV ads told us natural gas is the safe bridge fuel while we move away from dirty coal and oil.

Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth wondered "Is that true?". When Howarth found no science to back up big claims for the gas industry, he and a team from Cornell went to work.

The results are startling. In the short-term, escaped methane from gas fracking threaten to tip us into catastrophic climate change. The total impact of the shale gas industry may be worse than coal. In the United States, where thousands and thousands of new gas wells are drilled, almost half of all greenhouse gas emissions may come from methane. The "natural" gas industry is the largest single source of methane emissions.

The frackers vent loads of gases for the first two weeks after drilling, before connecting pipes. They could collect (and sell) this "waste" methane (read "climate killer") but don't bother. Natural gas storage facilities also vent methane as part of their designed operation. Old leaking gas delivery systems complete the job.

Methane is rising in the atmosphere. New science from Dr. Drew Shindell shows in the first 20 years, methane is 105 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.

Even at 100 years, Shindell finds methane is combining with other air pollution to generate an impact 33 times more powerful than CO2. Not 21, as determined in the 1990's by the IPCC. That old figure is still being used by industry and governments. Expect a change as Shindell becomes the new lead author of this section in the upcoming IPCC.

You must hear Dr. Robert Howarth explain the importance of new science on methane. he is the expert, I am not.

The industry insists we only calculate methane over a 100 year period. But the latest report from the International Energy Agency (generally a conservative source) says our climate future will be determined in the next 5 years. More new science suspects the burst of methane helped tip us into a mass extinction 250 million years ago.

The 20 year time frame for methane could be the jolt that tips other systems into positive feedback loops. Like igniting the peat in the Arctic. Or warming shallow seas enough to release frozen methane clathrates from the bottom (which started to happen last year). If either of those go, we are toast.

Robert Howarth has taken a lot of abuse for even daring to assemble a comprehensive look at the total greenhouse gas impact of the gas fracking industry, whether it is coal bed gas or shale gas. And we haven't even discussed the fact fracking is now known to cause earthquakes, uses incredible amounts of fresh water, and risks polluting whole watersheds with a single leak of the mass toxic chemicals pumped underground.

The United Kingdom may be next. With gas production from the North Sea fields down by 25 percent, there is a public relations push to get lots of gas fracking in the UK. This may be the next big environmental battle there.

Fracking mania has hit Canada and Australia as well. Everyone needs to know what the latest science says.

Program includes 27 minute speech by Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell at ASPO USA 2011, November 2nd in Washington D.C. Recorded by Carl Etnier of Equal Time Radio, Vermont. My thanks to ASOP USA for this fine presentation.

Then a follow-up interview this week with Robert Howarth, to fill in his hurried climax of the speech - that methane emissions, when calculated over 20 years, using the new higher rate discovered by Drew Shindell - could add up to at least 44% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States! We discuss this, and the importance of a 2006 paper by Dr. James Hansen of NASA, on the importance of controlling methane emissions.

I covered that in 2006 here for blog entry, or download the audio here.

In 2006, I also put out a "Methane Primer" which is still helpful. Blog for that primer is here, and the audio for download here.

But now I'll have to revisit that piece, since like the IPCC, I was told methane was only 21 times more powerful than CO2. The science moves so fast, it is already outdated just 5 years later.

Essentially, if we cannot control methane, we still lose the climate known over millenia, even if we could limit carbon dioxide emissions. Methane alone can tip us.

The natural gas industry, Howarth says, is the single largest source of methane in the U.S. Shale gas fracking makes that much, much worse.

RIPPING OFF THE CARBON MARKETS AND CONSUMERS

We add an interview promised last week, with Samuel Labudde, about the billion dollar scam ripping off carbon credits.

Companies in China are threatening to release powerful greenhouse gases, unless these fake credits are continued. Ratepayers in Europe are being blackmailed.

LaBudde, a noted wildlife biologist, is also covering the climate beat for the Environmental Investigation Agency for the American branch of the organization.

To honor the craziness of gas fracking in Australia, the theme music this week is "My Water's on Fire Tonight" written and performed by David Holmes, Andrew Bean, Niel Bekker. Australian compilation album: "Whole Lotta Frackin' Going On"

The lyrics in "My Water's On Fire Tonight" is a product of Studio 20 NYU (bit.ly/hzGRYP) in collaboration with ProPublica.org (bit.ly/5tJN). The song is based on ProPublica's investigation on hydraulic fractured gas drilling (read the full investigation here: bit.ly/15sib6).

5 Years to Climate Hell

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:48:24 PST

NOTES FOR RADIO STATIONS:
SONG CLIP "Five Years" by David Bowie, album Ziggie Stardust & the Spiders from Mars (1972)
SONG CLIP: "We Are The Many" by Makana (no album yet)
TELECONFERENCE with Lester Brown by Earth Policy Institute (recorded by Alex Smith)
Download full conference in CD quality (22 minutes) here.

Welcome. This week we have a show packed with good news, horrible news, and crazy news - all about the coming climate shift.

Here is a quick show overview, with more notes below.

Yes, those greenie extremists say we have only five fossil polluting years left before Planet Earth is thown on an unstoppable path toward extreme climate change. Oh wait, this warning comes from the conservative voice of 28 major countries, the International Energy Agency. It's the most depressing news yet.

Lester Brown of the Earth-Policy Institute has at least a dribble of good news. U.S. greenhouse gas emisisons are starting to drop. And it's not just because Americans are broke with no manufacturing left. I hate to talk good news against a tsunami of evil tidings, but you will hear some of what Lester told the world press in a news teleconference.

Diana Bronson is the Program Manager for an international organization called the ETCGroup, with offices in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and the Philippines. Their latest book is "Earth Grab, Geopiracy, the new Biomassters, and Capturing Climate Genes."

Haven't heard about that? We'll also talk about synthetic biology, geoengineering and other risky projects your mother never told you about.

We speak to Emily James, executive producer of "The Age of Stupid". Her new film, "Just Do It" follows the climate camps which foreshadowed the whole Occupy movement, and the young activists who won't take climate wrecking lying down. "Just Do It" is a tool for activist training. It's already being shown in Occupy camps around the world.

We wrap up with a short clip from the Occupy song "We Are the Many" which Hawaiian singer Makana snuck into the APEC summit dinner. Despite record security, Makana sang to the assembled powers about the rage of the many left out. It's hard to keep out all of the people all of the time.

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

The big International Energy Agency, the IEA, which hasn't given a hoot about climate change for decades, suddenly issued a stark warning.

As the Guardian newspaper headline says: "If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change."

"The door is closing" says IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol, and if we can't change our energy infrastructure in the next five years, quote, "The door will be closed forever."

If we add up all the fossil fuels we could still burn, and stay below the 450 parts per million thought to keep us below 2 degrees of global warming - and keep the Greenland Ice sheet - we only have a little left. In fact, the IEA study calculates we will have burned at least 90% of that last reserve by 2015. By 2017, if we want a habitable climate for our descendents, we have to stop burning all fossil fuels, and prevent other human-made greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.

In 2010, we tossed a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, about 6% more than the year before.

Quoting from the report, the International Energy Agency says:

"On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”

“… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]…. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

A global average warming of 6 degrees Centigrade, or 11 degrees Fahrenheit is the disaster that British scientist Sir James Lovelock warned us about years ago. Scientists calculate that around 11 or 12 degrees Fahrenheit, mammals can no longer cool themselves with sweat.

And these are global average increases. Some places, like the Arctic may go up 25 degrees or more, to become tropical rainforests. Most of Africa, the United States, and large parts of Asia would be uninhabitable. And we haven't even talked about the total disruption of rainfall patterns - like drought, floods, fires - on land. Or the stratification of the ocean which can lead to a shift in species, leading to dead zones, or even dead seas.

Here is what Joe Romm, expert blogger at thinkprogress.org, writes, quote:

"The IEA report deserves the label 'bombshell,' though, because for most of the past two decades, the IEA was the source of bland, conservative, business-as-usual analysis. When I was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, no one at DOE paid much attention to IEA reports. And that perspective continued through most of the 2000s.

But in just the last few years they have woken up to the risks posed to peak oil — see IEA top economist warns [in August of 2009]: 'We have to leave oil before oil leaves us' — and especially climate change. In releasing its 2009 WEO, the IEA warned, 'The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.'

Now the IEA has done the calculation a different way, concluding, 'Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.' Those who counsel waiting for breakthrough technologies are urging us on a path that is unsustainable, irreversible, potentially catastrophic, and economically indefensible, according to the IEA....

The new analysis shows that because of soaring emissions, we are running out of time for the '450 Scenario.' We are at risk of irreversibly 'locking in' dangerous warming."

Thank you Joe Romm, for leading us through the latest climate news.

As I told Ecoshock listeners previously, climate scientists are still figuring out why we haven't already heated more according to the emissions we release. Sure, we've seen record floods, fires, storms, and the Russian heat wave of 2010. But it could be hotter already.

The always worth-while podcast "The Climate Show" (#20)from New Zealand offers a good summary of current thought. There are three known cooling factors operating.

One: aerosols from a wave of new Asian coal plants pumps sulphates into the atmosphere which reflect sunlight back into space. That's a limited time offer.

Second: the sun has been in a quiet perioid, with few Sun Spots, and solar flares. That may be ending, as NASA reported a "monster" solar flare on November 4th. That particular flare was not facing the Earth, so we didn't get hit. But it may indicate the period of solar quiet is over, which could add slightly to our warming.

Third, and the largest factor, is ocean mixing. The ocean absorbs somewhere between 80 and 90 percent off all the excess energy in a greenhouse atmosphere. The seas mix this down. Recent research shows even the very deepest parts of the ocean are warming slightly. All this heat will come back out eventually, guaranteeing warming for centuries, if not millennia.

In the last two years, the cooler waters are coming up, in the phenomenon known as La Nina. Another recent study has shown the ocean cycle called "ENSO" has not been affected by climate change. So the warmer water phenomenon, the "El Nino" which gave us the record hot year of 1998, should return in the next year or two. When it does, expect record heat waves.

Even with all those cooling factors, NASA still named 2010 as the hottest year on record. It is frightening to imagine the coming climate disasters, as we ramp up. And according to the IEA, and a series of national Academies around the world, we have just 5 years to drastically cut all our greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, all countries, all the players like the U.S., Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Japan - intend to do nothing at the next climate conference in Durban at the end of November 2011. The American Congress continues to deny global warming is even happening. Presidential Candidates promise they will get rid of any environmental laws, and the Environmental Proteciton agency.

Our future is not looking good. At times, I fear the remainder of humanity will end up in Northern Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, Patagonia, New Zealand, and Tasmania. The rest of the world will be wrecked and uninhabitable.

To fend off this ultimate pessimism, I can only offer two bits of good news. First, we'll look at a few patterns in the original big polluter, the United States, where greenhouse emissions are going down, no matter what the politicians do or say. Lester Brown explains that.

And don't forget, we're going to wrap up with a tasty interview and new film on how to get out there and make some noise before we all go down in flames.

But first, an interview on the cutting edge. Synthetic biology. Capturing climate genes, and fending off crazy last-ditch ideas to shade out the sun. Check this out.

Diana Bronson is the Program Manager for an international organization called the ETCGroup, with offices in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and the Philippines. Their latest book is "Earth Grab, Geopiracy, the new Biomassters, and Capturing Climate Genes."

20 minute Diana Bronson interview listen/download in CD quality here.
20 minute Diana Bronson interview listen/download in Lo-Fi (faster download) here.

You can do somthing about this! Go to handsoffmotherearth.org and participate by sending your photo to world leaders. Tell them, when they gather at Rio + 20 to ban geoengineering. Don't let a few scientists or corporations alter the Sun (or turn the sky milky white instead of blue...)

I promised you a bit of good news. Yes, I know, it goes against Radio Ecoshock Show policy, but I trust this source. Lester Brown founded the World Watch Institute, and then his own Earth Policy Institute. He's a man for numbers and facts, and trusted by greens, industry, and governments - rare these days.

In the radio program I run selections from the Lester Brown press teleconference November 2nd. You'll also hear Lester's response to a couple of doubts I raised on your behalf. Is it just because all the manufacturing has moved to China? Or the Tar Sands emissions for American oil are burned off in Canadian production?

Lester agrees there are problems with the numbers. He says we need a way to calculate the emissions in products, in the countries where they are consumed. If that were done, America's emissions would be higher, and China's far lower...

Download/listen to the Lester Brown teleconference here.

Yes, it's good news that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have gone down. Although I am just now investigating new science showing the total American greenhouse gas emission might have gone UP, when we count in all the methane leaking out of gas fracking operations and gas pipelines. Expect to hear more about that.

There are some mitigating factors which Brown raises. Like the bulge of population, the Baby Boomers, are starting to retire. When they don't have to commute to work, miles traveled drops. More city youth are turning to bikes and mass transit, as the car is no longer such a status symbol. The U.S. auto fleet is more fuel efficient.

And campaigns to stop coal plant construction, and close old ones, are becoming more successful. It's hard to believe, but in July 2011 New York Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg donated $50 million to the Sierra Club anti-coal campaign!

But even if official statistics say American emissions are going down, it's kind of like saying 6% fewer women were raped this year. Not really all that much to cheer about, as more gigatonnes of emissions continue to pour out of American smokestacks and tailpipes.

We also have to remember that North Americans are responsible for about half of all the greenhouse gases already in the sky. We never want to admit that. It's like that famous scene where from the TV program Sienfeld. Elaine complains she doesn't want to be responsible for the loss of Joe Mayo's coat, even though she was the one who tossed it out the window.

We don't see why we should be held responsible, even though we are. That's what the rest of the developing countries are complaining about. That is why they want the climate compensation fund promised to them by Hilary Clinton, and expect to get it at the upcoming Durban Climate Conference. It won't happen, even though it should.

Maybe we can make something happen. Maybe we can still force our fossil leaders to try to save the climate for the coming generations.

Download the CD Quality 19 minute interview with Emily James, film maker of Just "Do It" or get the faster downloading Lo-Fi version here.

Speaking of actions, a Hawaiian singer named Makana was brave enough to sing his new Occupy movement song to all the assembled world leaders at the APEC summit in mid-November in Honululu. While other Occupiers protested outside, Makana serenaded the Saturday night diners inside with his song about the people's rage.

Find a the whole song, with lyrics, on You tube.

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock
Now on 50 stations, on 3 continents.

Plane Justice - Banned In America

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:12:04 PST

BONUS AUDIO THIS WEEK: The complete interview with Dan Glass, the famous "Plane Stupid" campaigner from the UK. The crazy actions that highlighted the serious impacts of expanding airports and air travel. 32 minutes Lo-Fi 7 MB.

Rockin' out with the Steve Miller Band, this is Radio Ecoshock. Big old jet airliner, the magic of flying, we can fly! Humans love those roaring jets so much, we hardly notice the 5 percent boost to greenhouse gases from all the jet fuel burned.

You may not love them so much if you live within 12 miles of any airport, where the cancer, heart deaths, sleepless nights and wrecked lives grow. It's not just the noise. Cancer-causing chemicals fly from the exhaust and drop into communities all over the world.

As the world economy peaks in growth, and starts to shrink in resources, the airline industry and their government boosters still plan on a mad burst of expansion. Over 3,000 American airports plan new runways, like runway number eight at O'Hare in Chicago, or JFK in New York.

Victims under the flight paths are blamed by the industry, and abandoned by major environmental groups in the U.S. and Canada.

Not so in the UK. British and Scottish green groups boosted public awareness. 3,000 camped out to stop the expansion of Heathrow airport in London. They killed the third runway. We'll talk to leader John Stewart in Britain. Although John has no criminal record, he's been banned from America in a horrible loss for free speech, and airport protest groups.

In this program, you will hear what Stewart planned to say on the recent Aviation Justice Tour in the U.S. and Canada.

Then we'll hear from one of the most experienced airport expansion campaigners in the U.S. Debi Wagner has been fighting off pollution from SeaTac airport in Seattle for decades. She knows where the cancer grows.

I'll squeeze in a bit from British "Plane Stupid" campaigner Dan Glass, the man who super-glued his hand to the Prime Minister's sleeve. He too got a visit from one of Obama's top FBI agents.

I'm Alex Smith. The dream of mass flight for humans is killing the planet, and wrecking the lands below. Get ready for a hard landing.

Live From the Occupy Oakland General Strike!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:56:18 PDT

Remember this?

The chaotic scene in Oakland, California on the night of October 25th. Former Marine Scott Olsen received serious head injuries after being shot at very close range by police clearing the Occupy Oakland site and streets.

An investigation has been called into police actions. The Mayor apologized. The injury to Olsen invigorated Occupy Wall St protesters and others around the country.

The ugly violence, played out on TV's around the world, also caused other Mayors to reconsider, and let their Occupy protesters stay.

By November 2nd, activists called for a General Strike in Oakland. The results were mixed with some unions cooperating. But the transit system, most institutions, and the big shipping port of Oakland remained open.

Until the evening, when the crowd of a few thousand grew upwards to 5,000 or much more. They marched to the Port gates and forced operations to shut down, at one of America's biggest shipping zones.

Late that evening I received emails (and audio) from several Oakland protesters and media activists who were satisifed with the peaceful occupation of the city.

Occupy Oakland went from police brutality to widespread public engagement,with hardly any police around.

But later that night, in the early hours, with a dwindling crowd, there were a few break-ins, window smashing, and more confrontations with police.

The next morning, November 4th, the tent city called a meeting to discuss the "destructive anarchists" as one blog called them. Occupy Oakland campers considered an apology, and a work-crew to clean up broken glass downtown. The assembled group re-affirmed their non-violence.

This is just one of the divisions and challenges in the midst of the Occupy movement. The majority favor non-violence. A minority want to go much further, into violent revolution if need be.

Meanwhile, a Radio Ecoshock correspondent from the Bay Area, long time media activist Karen Nyhus, sent us a series of short on-the-scene recordings of another big topic in the Occupy movement: the role of the 99% opposing governments dominated by fossil fuel billionaires, intent on profiting from damage to our climate. They want justice.

Here we go - actuality from the Occupy Oakland protesters, November 2nd, the day of the general strike. You hear a fascinating set of interviews, from activists to the down-but-not-out.

You'll hear cat-calls from corporate media. Would you believe Rupert Murdoch's Wall St. Journal keeps writing headlines that it's all over, or the protesters are just drug-addicted bums? What a surprise!

Big TV interviews all the Mayors and Chiefs of Police.

We interview the people who were there.

All recordings are by media activist Karen Nyhus, thank you Karen - keep it up!

If you have audio for Ecoshock, use yousendit.com to send your mp3 file to this address: radio at ecoshock.org

Please send an email first, asking if your audio idea will work for our program.

I'm Alex Smith, thank you for listening.

DURBAN Conference of the Polluters - The Show

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:20:12 PDT

This week is our first broadcast in the UK. Join us every Tuesday Noon on Resonance 104.4 FM, London. Radio Ecoshock is now carried by 48 stations on 3 continents.

This program is about the upcoming "Conference of the Polluters" in Durban, South Africa. After the disappointments of Copenhagen and Cancun, does anyone really care?

Do we the luxury of despair, as rising greenhouse gases threaten everything we know, and coming generations?

The real show at Durban, offically known as COP-17, the United Nations Conference of the Parties (to the Kyodo Protocol) - is the what happens outside the gathering of world leaders and their industrial supporters. In this show you hear those other voices.

Directly from South Africa, Professor Patrick Bond lays out the awful truth, where climate talks have gone into the dead zone. The climate justice movement strives to change all that.

I ask Dr. Bond: "Will it be safe to protest in Durban?" That's not a given, considering South African police have shot some protesters in recent years. But it may not be any worse than Copenhagen, where Danish police forced up to a thousand people into a "Kettle" and kept them penned up in bitter sub-zero cold. That's what you get for giving a damn.

Don't miss this interview with Patrick. It's so loaded with good points, I've written a special blog with notes here - and that doesn't touch the surface of all the up-to-date activist info this very plugged-in man brings up in our wide-ranging talk on climate. You can download/listen to the 23 minute Patrick Bond interview separately.

Through a UK-based organization called the World Development Movement, you hear two more voices from Durban. Bandile Mdlalose is general secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack-dwellers' movement in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

And from the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, campaigner Bongani Mthembu explains what everyone from Occupy London knows, what you already know, about corporate control of our governments. I've chosen the best short clips from a video of Bandile and a video of Bongani on the WDM site.

Bongani seems right in touch with the Occupy London protesters in St. Paul's and around the world. He knows what you know: big corporations have taken over our governments.

We need to understand: Durban is already "occupied". Like most African cities, and in fact most countries of the world, there is a large community of people living in shacks. Most have no services. No electricity, no sewage, no safe running water. The police only arrive to evict them.

World Development brought Bandile, from the Shack Dwellers movement, for an 8 city tour of the UK this Fall, to help raise awareness of the realities of Durban, as the COP-17 climate talks fast approach.

From London, I chat with Murray Worthy, a policy analyst for the World Develpment Movement. Murray explains the recent Durban activist tour, and expectations for the coming climate conference. Listen/to download the whole WDM segment (18 minutes) here.

Learning from the exclusion of activists in Copenhagen, environnment groups are working to empower youth from developing countries, using new media. In San Francisco, I find Madeline Kovacs of Project Survival Media. Along with Shadia Fayne Wood, Madeline is helping to empowert youth media teams coming to Durban, from India, Kenya and more.

Those teams will create fresh reports, from outside the walls of power and pollution.

Again, you can download or listen to the Madeline Kovacs interview (15 minutes) here.

We leave with a song for the Occupy Movement, "Change Change" by the Canadian singer known only as "Thistle". I hope to post it soon on our "Music" page, in the Audio on Demand menu at ecoshock.org. Change Change doesn't have an album or a web site, but it could easily be an anthem for the Occupy movement around the world.

I found this song at the end of this powerful video of Dr. David Suzuki speaking at the Occupy Vancouver Camp in late October 2011.

Suzuki is a world-famous biologist and television host ("The Nature of Things"). He really unwinds for the 99% in this speech. I'll post the audio on my site, and thanks to "Keepemstraight" for being the video conscience of Vancouver. Visit his You tube channel.

My thanks to Daphne Wysham, host of Earthbeat radio, for her guest suggestions, and to Phil England, former host of "Climate Radio" in England. We need both of these green radio hosts back on the air. Koch Brothers are you listening? Green radio producers need just a measly million dollars to keep the truth coming out!

This is your planet. Tune into the climate underground, soon to erupt into the mainstream, with Radio Ecoshock.

Durban Climate Talks - Professor Patrick Bond

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:42:33 PDT

When I spoke to Patrick Bond, it was very hot in Durban. But it was 36 degrees C in neighboring Zimbabwe. Bond predicts another wave of "heat refugees" will flee Zimbabwe into South Africa.

Durban is the site of the next Conference of the Parties, known as COP-17, starting November 28th, 2011. It is the grand gathering of the countries of the world, under the United Nations, trying to prevent serious climate damage on Planet Earth.

Thank heavens the Copenhagen climate conference failed! That's the view of our Radio Ecoshock guest, Patrick Bond. He is a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and director of the Centre for Civil Society there.

Dr. Bond has worked for the South African government, especially in the Reconstruction program. He advises several international journals, and has a history of civil rights activism. Patrick just returned to Durban from a European conference and lecture tour.

Before we get to the upcoming Durban climate meeting, known as COP-17 - let's handle some previous business. In late 2009, many climate activists in Europe and North America were crushed by the failure to find a meaningful agreement, at the Copenhagen climate conference.

Bond says there are really two streams of environmental thought and action regarding the ongoing United Nations climate talks, known as the "Conference of the Parties" (to the Kyoto Protocol).

The first, like Climate Action Network, really hoped the industrial countries and the developing world could use climate financing and market mechanisms (like carbon trading) to work towards a lower emissions world.

The second, now more widely known as the "Climate Justice Movement" - rejects actors like The World Bank, and capitalist intervention using tools like carbon trading. They also question the REDD agreement banking carbon credits in forests, especially tropical forests - because it takes rights away from the indigenous inhabitants.

Dr. Bond wrote a short paper where he summarizes the objections of the Bolivian negotiating team to the proposals at Cancun, Mexico after Copenhagen:

"The Bolivian delegation was the only sensible insider team, and they summed up the summit’s eight shortcomings:

• Effectively kills the only binding agreement, Kyoto Protocol, in favour of a completely inadequate bottom-up voluntary approach.

• Increases loopholes and flexibilities that allow developed countries to avoid action via an expansion of offsets and continued existence of ‘surplus allowances’ of carbon after 2012 by countries such as Ukraine and Russia, which effectively cancel out any other reductions.

• Finance commitments weakened: commitments to ‘provide new and additional financial resources’ to developing countries have been diluted to talking more vaguely about ‘mobilising [resources] jointly’, with expectation that this will mainly be provided by carbon markets.

• The World Bank is made trustee of the new Green Climate Fund, which has been strongly opposed by many civil society groups due to the undemocratic make-up of the Bank and its poor environmental record.

• No discussion of intellectual property rights, repeatedly raised by many countries, as current rules obstruct transfer of key climate-related technologies to developing countries.

• Constant assumption in favour of market mechanisms to resolve climate change even though this perspective is not shared by a number of countries, particularly in Latin America.

• Green light given for the controversial Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) programme, which often ends up perversely rewarding those responsible for deforestation, while dispossessing indigenous and forest dwellers of their land.

• Systematic exclusion of proposals that came from the historic World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change, including proposals for a Climate Justice Tribunal, full recognition of indigenous rights and rights for nature."

That ends a quote from Dr. Patrick Bond.

This is Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith with Professor Patrick Bond from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Patrick Bond predicts failure at COP-17, and explains why in the interview.

In addition to the problems above, he adds intellectual property limitations on transferring renewable technology to developing countries.

Bond compares the climate emergency to the case of HIV/AIDS medicine for Africa. With the big pharmaceutical companies charging $15,000 a year for treatment, it was a death sentence for Africa. Bond says 55% of South Africans test positive for the HIV virus.

In response, with support from some large countries, the World Trade Organization, at it's DOHA round in 2001, made an exception for these drugs, allowing the production of generic versions, vastly cheaper.

Patrick Bond suggests the same sort of emergency action for solar, wind, and other technologies are now required to save our climate.

For example, China and the U.S. are now engaged in a "Solar War" over intellectual property rights.

The second major road-block is the developed country use of environmentally damaging technologies to cover their energy short-falls. Bond includes such things as the Tar Sands, Shale Frackin, and especially dangerous geo-engineering schemes. He notes the latest experiment with British scientists to test injecting pollution into clouds has been delayed.

WHAT ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA?

The host of the Durban Climate Talks coming up at the end of November has been very quiet about them. Unlike the World Cup soccer, which was promoted as an international event four years previous, few South Africans know a conference that could determine their fate is being held in Durban.

I ask Professor Bond whether NGOs and interested individuals will be able to protest freely and safely in Durban. That is an open question, as there have been recent instances where South African police have shot protesters. I'm not talking about rubber bullets. Shot them.

Bond and others have been pressing the South African authorities to recognize the long tradition of non-violence established there by Gandhi, when the Mahatma lived in S.A. up until 1914, and developed his methods. But we can't be sure.

South Africa is set to release it's own climate action plan at the Durban conference. But the COP-17 host has little to brag about. Through the largest ever World Bank loan, worth several billion dollars, South Africa has constructed the world's third and fourth largest coal plants. Emissions are climbing rapidly with no end in sight.

Further confusing the situation, the big mining and industrial companies, like BHP Billiton and Anglo American (which were begun in South Africa, but now reside in Australia and the UK respectively) - arranged a sweet-heart electricity price as part of the negotiations to end Apartheid.

While these big corporations get power for pennies, sometimes as cheap as 2 cents a Kilowatt hour, poor South Africans on a pension pays as much as 28 cents a KWH. If they can get power at all. A reported 40% of South African homes have no electricity.

There have been angry protests as poor South Africans have been disconnected from electrical services, and the big corporations get a virtually free ride.

Two of the country's biggest polluters, Sasol and Eskom, are on South Africa’s COP17 negotiation committee. The South African environmental group Earthlife is protesting their inclusion.

As we all know, the European Union is under tremendous financial stress. Europe is considered a leader in renewable energy, and funding safe energy in developing countries. Now that all seems in doubt. We discuss the impact of the economic crash on climate negotiations.

Bond considers the $100 billion offered by Hilary Clinton at Copenhagen for a climate fund - is likely dead.

Yet he notes there was plenty of money to bribe and blackmail country delegations in the Denmark talks, as revealed by the Wikileaks U.S. State Department cables. The cables say $50 million was paid to the Maldives to get their support, while millions were yanked from Ecuador and Bolivia when they refused to sign the weak "voluntary" Copenhagen Accord.

Speaking at a climate justice seminar in Johannesburg South Africa last week, Bernarditas Muller, the chief negotiator for the G77 developing countries said, quote "Durban will not be the burial ground of the Kyoto Protocol".

Professor Bond says Kyoto will likely pass away in 2012, except for the emissions trading schemes which capitalists can use for profit.

ALEX SMITH OPINION - DESPAIR A LUXURY WE CANNOT AFFORD

Despite doubts about any worthwhile agreement at COP-17, and I agree a real solution looks hopeless at this time, I still see two positive reasons to give a damn about the Durban climate conference.

The first goes back to those NGO's and youth organizations who will attend. I think a lot of networking and drive will come out of the Durban meet-up, even as the politicians dodge their responsibilities. The real show is the side show.

My second reason for refusing to let hope die, is this: we have no other choice. Eventually, driven by horrible climate events, humans will have to meet, agree, and act - or go extinct.

Remember the decades required by many movements. The fight against slavery and apartheid took generations. Nobody had the luxury of giving up.

FINAL NOTE/CORRECTION

During the interview, Patrick talks about a new book from the ETC Group on Geoengineering. He calls it "Land Grab" but the actual title is "Earth Grab - Geopiracy, the New Biomassters and Capturing Climate Genes"

Listen to this wide-ranging 23 minute interview with Professor Patrick Bond.

HOMELESS - A Tour of Four Cities

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:05:04 PDT

Some of the people camped out in Occupy Wall Street have no where else to go.

As reported by Associated Press, Occupy encampments from Portland, Oregon through L.A. to Atlanta are finding homeless people moving into tent cities set up by protesters.

Some Occupy sites are finding bylaws written to send away the homeless are being used to prevent Consitutional rights to Freedom of Assembly and expression.

Polls show millions of Americans are just one paycheck away from losing their homes. Many more are already in foreclosure, being evicted, or already out on the street. Lots of us worry, could I be next? Could you handle it, the way things are now?

Maybe the rights of the homeless will matter to you, down the line.

Radio Ecoshock is going to take you on a quick tour of homelessness in North America. We'll visit New York City, where 36,000 school children have no home. San Francisco, where it is illegal to sit or lie on the sidewalk. Even in the capital, in Washington D.C. we'll find the homeless next to the limousines and lobbyists. In Canada, there is a little progress in Vancouver, with street-sleepers reduced by 80%.

There are somewhere between 600,000 and a million homeless people in America. The wild thing is: America is flooded with empty houses. One in ten homes in the United States is vacant. That's about 18 million homes.

If we guestimate there are as many as 500,000 families needing a home, there are 36 empty homes for every homeless family in America!

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, all housing was owned by the government. As Dmitry Orlov has told us on Radio Ecoshock, people just stayed where they were. So there was no wave of homelessness in Russia or it's member states.

But America is stuck. Houses sit empty. Sometimes the banks even tear them down. But people - many of them families with young children - keep getting foreclosed, evicted, kicked out into the street. Apparently Capitalism just can't handle de-growth.

As winter approaches, and the economy heads into the dumpster, homelessness is growing in New York City. The nasty surprise is that both the State and City appear to be slashing help for the homeless in their hour of greatest need.

Radio Ecoshock visits the Big Apple with Gisell Routhier, Policy Analyst for the NYC Coalition for the Homeless.

New York is setting new records for homeless people, and for homeless families. See this and this.

We talk with Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. Why has this formerly welcoming city gone into a media orgy of bashing the poor?

We'll go on to Washington, D.C. to speak with Michael Ferrell, Executive Director of the District’s Coalition for the Homeless, to see what is going on there.

Our last stop is Vancouver, Canada - with famous anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson of the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP), and author of the book "Poor Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion".

This ain't no social cause. Homelessness in a land of wealth is a national disgrace.

In San Francisco we learn the city has stopped counting the number of homeless people found dead on the streets every year. The average is at least one hundred dead. In just one city.

An estimated 37,000 homeless Americans die every year.

About 155 of them murdered, some as hate crimes, for fun or out of a desire to kill someone vulnerable.

More data here.

You won't see this on TV, but there is a National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day on December 21, 2011, to remember those victims of a system that just didn't care.

World Homeless Day this year was on October 10th. Remember that? All the news specials and coverage that got? Didn't think so.

Let's look at just a few things our guests had to say.

A FOUR CITY POLL ON THE RIGHTS OF THE HOMELESS

First of all, I ran a quick poll trying to compare the rights of the homeless in each city.

Here are the results:

Is it legal for a homeless person to sit on the sidewalk?

New York Yes, as long as not blocking traffic
San Francisco No, not between 7 a.m and 11 pm
Washington, D.C. Yes
Vancouver Yes

Is it legal for a homeless family to sleep in a public place?

New York Not in parks. Are found under bridges, in laundromats. etc
San Francisco No
Washington No
Vancouver Children would be apprehended (by social services)

Is there anywhere homeless people can legally pitch a tent to live in?

New York Not sure, but not likely. All parks have curfews.
San Francisco No
Washington No
Vancouver No

Is it legal to sleep in a car or camper in your city?

New York Yes. But finding legal parking a nightmare.
San Francisco No
Washington Camper Yes, Car No
Vancouver Probably, not sure.

Does your city have public washrooms accessible to the homeless?

New York Not asked.
San Francisco Some, very limited
Washington Yes, a few
Vancouver Very, very few

Do we know how many homeless citizens are found dead on the streets each winter?

New York Information not available
San Francisco Usually 100 or more
Washington 2 to 4 people
Vancouver At least 2 last year

Can a homeless person vote in elections?

New York Yes
San Francisco Yes
Washington Yes, but not convicted felons
Vancouver Yes, but registering difficult

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the city police, if 10 is where officers protect the homeless, and 1 is the homeless are generally harassed and beaten by police. Your rating of the police?

New York 5
San Francisco 3 or 4
Washington 5
Vancouver 2 or 3

A FEW POINTS, CITY BY CITY

NEW YORK

The New York City Department of Homeless Services reports 8,000 school aged children have no home. The Federal government says it is more like 40,000 homeless kids.

The difference, Routhier says, comes from the way the homeless are counted. New York City only considers children actually in their shelters. The Feds look wider, at families doubled up, people who are moving around from one place to another, the couch-surfers, and so on.

Rocker Cindy Lauper has recently thrown the spotlight on the number of Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender youth on the streets of New York. Some of them were heartlessly kicked out by their parents, and now live in a risky environment. A special shelter for LGBT kids has been set up in NYC, but Routhier says they are a hard community to serve. Many kids stay out on the rough streets anyway.

Read more about the LGBT homeless problem here.

See also this article on State budget cuts and at-risk youth in New York.

And this video on homeless youth in New York City.

We'll find the same problem in San Francisco.

The New York Times reports one in five New Yorkers are living below the poverty line. Other news reports show the general welfare rate in New York City has fallen by 4 %, - but welfare numbers are skyrocketing in surrounding areas, like Long Island.

Read about the welfare surge around New York.

I wondered if NYC is exporting it's homeless to the suburbs, but Gisell Routhier doubts that is a major movement.

Read about the growing poverty in New York here.

The real place to look in New York City in my opinion is the wild growth of homeless school children there.

Gisell tells us that the homeless of New York have a special problem: their Mayor! Republican Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg started turning down federal funding for supportive housing around 2005. That was free money that could have helped build more permanent homes for the city's poorest people.

Instead, Bloomberg has launched a number of City initiatives, which generally provide temporary housing, lasting up to two years. NYC is seeing a number of families homeless AGAIN after their two year limit is up. Bloomberg seems to be standing in the way of a longer term solution for these people, even though it would cost the city nothing.

Listen to the interview with Gisell Routhier. Her organization, the New York Coalition for the Homeless is one of the oldest such institutions in the country.
Again, here is their web site.

SAN FRANCISCO

I start off asking Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness - about the connections between Occupy San Francisco, and homelessness. It turns out more than a few of the protesters are homeless.

That is happening to Occupy movement sites around the country. Sometimes there is a conflict between lifestyles, whethere is is alcohol or drug use.

The bottom line: the rights of the lowest 1 percent of the population are becoming the rights of all.

So... laws written against the homeless in San Francisco are being used against OccupySF as well.

Not to mention the police-state style eviction of the Occupy Oakland camp! My God, the police assembled hundreds of officers from more than a dozen jurisdictions. They stormed in with full riot gear, into the peaceful campers. Many were arrested, with some injuries.

When the crowd used social media to re-assemble later that day, the police opened fire with not just stun grenades, not just multiple blasts of tear gas - but rubber bullets! One veteran was seriously injured, with a rubber bullet to the head. Find the video, and be amazed.

It turns out the homeless have become a political football in San Francisco elections. Conservatives drive up voters with the boogeyman of pan-handling (which hasn't really increased).

San Francisco voters just passed a law to make it illegal to sit or sleep on a sidewalk in daylight hours. Imagine, some old fellow with a heart problem dares to sit down - and beep, he gets a pricey ticket. Good revenue for the city. On second offence, he or she goes to jail!

We go over the civil rights abuses, and how the very banks and real estate interests that foreclosed on so many people (making some homeless) - backed and funded more laws against the homeless.

It's a revealing interview.

WASHINGTON

Washington, the District of Columbia, is really two cities. One part is pretty wealthy, with a lot of power. The other half is broke, really poor, often homeless.

It surprises no one to find that up to 95% of the homeless in D.C. are African Americans. Nothing racist mind you. Just the millionaires are mostly white, and the homeless mostly black.

Our guide Michael Ferrell, Executive Director of the District’s Coalition for the Homeless, says the number of homeless people in the Capital hasn't really gone up much. In fact, the number of homeless single people went down, due to Federal Stimulus money creating some housing.

In their place, the number of homeless families in D.C. has gone up.

We talk about emergency medical care for homeless people, and the hypothermia vans that try to keep the street people alive for another winter night.

VANCOUVER, CANADA

I had a short talk with with famous anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson of the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP), and author of the book "Poor Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion".

There is good news and bad news.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced this week that the number of homeless people on the streets of Vancouver (not the suburbs, just the city of Vancouver) has gone way down: from 800 last year, to just 145 this year.

That is good news, and it shows around the city, with fewer bodies under tarps behind the trash bins.

However, Jean Swanson points out part of the "success" is providing more shelter beds, under Robertson's administration. The number of homeless people in Vancouver has actually gone up, Swanson says, but more people are in shelters.

This year Vancouver also opened three new buildings, out of a planned 14, to provide affordable housing for it's poorest citizens. There has been a bit of a fight about who should get a home first. Should it be people coming out of drug treatment programs or jail? Or people directly on the street right now. But everybody agrees more housing is good.

Jean Swanson says that program is late, with many more to build, while people wait. Plus, the City of Vancouver is supposed to buy one new property a year in the Downtown East Side, and hasn't for three years.

Swanson's group is demanding the city buy 5 properties a year for the next five years at least.

Meanwhile, the number of former hotels available for the poor (called "SRO's for Single Room Occupancy) is going down rapidly, faster than the government can build new housing. It turns out the city is also encouraging developers to upgrade properties, which are then too expensive for local residents. Gentrification threates to kill off the culture of the Downtown East Side.

One more plus for Vancouver: unlike the United States, in Canada a person does not need to have children to get welfare, including a housing allowance. The helps reduce homelessness. Others get disability pensions.

We didn't talk about harm reduction in Vancouver, such as Insite - the legal place to shoot up heroin or other injection drugs, with a medically trained person available. This helps prevent deaths from overdose, or street-drug poisoning.

It all adds up to a slight improvement in street homelessness. But the sky-rocketting prices of real estate in Vancouver, added to it's relatively warm climate (for Canada) - means the number of people without a home will continue to grow.

The Provincial government, just announced they will not fund 160 beds that were available last year. Yes, it's always good to slash social support for the poorest people, when they need it most...

HATING THE MOBILE HOMELESS

I didn't have time to cover the hate affair local government have for people forced to sleep in their car, van, or old RV.

Mind you, I did ask whether sleeping in a car was legal in each of the four cities. See the results above.

But it's wild to see the last of the Middle Class demanding some of their former neighbors, foreclosed and now living in their vehicles - get out of town.

The California city of Santa Monica at least had the decency and sanity to arrange un-used parking lots for the mobile homeless overnight. You can park your whatever there, with a security guard around, but need the gas money to get out at 7 am.

Next door, Venice California is posting big signs prohibiting anyone from sleeping in a car or RV. Even across from empty lots where the economic crash prevented some new subdivision from going up.

Check out my tips for living in a car, in this Radio Ecoshock feature.

Here are some more great links to follow up on the story of homelessness in America.

HOMELESS IN AMERICA - Barbara Ehrenreich

Tent City - The Nation

CRIMINALIZATION OF THE HOMELESS IN VARIOUS US CITIES

more info at nationalhomeless.org

To find out what homeless living is like, check out this video. Every day, approximately 10,000 people in Minnesota will sleep outside or in temporary shelter. This video allows us a chance to see the world from their eyes. For more information, please visit www.voicesofthestreets.org

If the economic situation in Europe, and America, and China is as bad as I think it is, many of us will experience at least a period of homelessness in the next few years.

It can happen quickly - maybe from a flood, storm, electrical blackout, or social unrest.

People write about being evicted with no chance to get their belongings after a marital complaint. Check out this dude's complaint, and his tips for "How to Be Homeless"

Maybe in America, it's better to say you are addicted to hard drugs, even if you are not. That might help you get shelter, the writer says.

I know an old Greek man whose little food stall in a local mall failed. He was tired, alone, 66 years old, and just went home. Two months later the mall lawyers seized his paid-off home, and all his possessions. Bingo, homeless.

In the U.S., a medical emergency can do the same thing.

We all need to pay attention to the rights and care of the homeless. That may be the bottom line of the civil rights we can expect.

"A society is ultimately judged by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members."
Anonymous

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock
http://www.ecoshock.org
Now broadcast by 48 radio stations.

From Occupied Territory

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:27:08 PDT

Happy Birthday humans! At the end of October 2011, the 7th billion person will be born on Earth. With over a billion humans already going to bed hungry every night, this may not be a blessed event.

Just twelve years after we hit the 6 billion mark in 1999, it's going to a be a lot harder to look after the new arrivals.

The extra billion people will find an unstable climate, declining energy and resources, and a host of other challenges.

To help us sort out what it means, and what can be done, we are joined by Robert Walker, Executive Vice President of the Population Institute in Washington. He's the author of a new report "From 6 Billion to 7 Billion: How Population Growth is Changing and Challenging Our World."

Read more (and find a link to download/listen to this interview as a separate 21 minute piece).

THE RENEWABLE ENERGY HANDBOOK - RADIO WORKSHOP

The dream and the need for renewable energy just keeps getting stronger.

You want to help avoid drastic climate change. You want to be independent, even if the system goes down.

Perhaps you want to live outside the gird, in a home or camper. Maybe you just want to save money, as electricity and fuel prices keep rising.

Everybody talks about it. But how can we really do it?

In this program, We get a fast work-shop of ideas and techniques. My guest has the best how-to guide on the market. It's called "The Renewable Energy Handbook", written by William H. Kemp, and published by Aztext Press.

Here are three other resources you might find handy related to this subject:

Lo-Tech magazine (useful online blog)

No-Tech magazine (check it out)

And this edition of a bright new podcast called "The Extra Environmentalist". Here is their web site, but right now I'm recommending Podcast Episode 21 "When Technology Fails". It's a useful interview with engineer and author Mat Stein about his first book "When Technology Fails" - a huge Bible of alternative ways of doing things without high tech. Anybody expecting collapse may want to get that book.

I found it poignant that Stein is under financial stress himself, after getting ripped off by the publisher, and then finding himself in foreclosure (along with a million or more other Americans).

Stein is bringing out a new one "When Disaster Strikes". Really. Listen to this podcast.

In Spring 2011 we talked with Aztext publisher Cam Mather, about his adventures living off-grid in Ontario, Canada. We shared a lot, since I also lived on a homestead without electricity for 10 years. And I've lived for months on solar power.

(Download or listen to that June program "Your Renewable Energy Path Now" here.)

In the new radio interview, we learn about the home built by Bill Kemp and his wife with the aim of energy self-sufficiency. As a person with technical training and experience, Kemp has spent the past 20 years experimenting with living with renewables.

First, the Kemps are not living without electricity! They have most of the usual kitchen and home appliances. But they chose those appliances carefully, checking labels to find ones using the least electric load. Bill Kemp stresses this point: if you hope to use renewable energy, step one is to greatly reduce your energy demands. The extra power wasted costs a lot of money.

Kemp has both a wind generator, and 2700 watts of installed solar power. The solar panels are mounted on "trackers" that aim the solar most directly at the available sun, moving throughout the day and seasons.

The hundred foot wind tower also doubles as an antenna location for local cell service (which provides a small extra income).

TELEPHONE CONNECTIONS WITH NO LINES

I was surprised to find out our whole telephone interview was happening with no wires. Kemp describes a system where he has wireless amplifiers that make remote telephone service work with no connection to any telephone lines.

The other big challenge for people going off-grid, especially in rural locations, is to avoid propane. After all, propane is another fossil fuel, and it keeps costing more money all the time.

SAVING ON YOUR HOT WATER HEATER

Both Cam Mather and Bill Kemp say a solar hot water heater may be the place to start, rather than solar panels, as a first step. Water heaters can account for up to 30% of your energy bill. Most new homes in Mexico have solar hot water tanks visible on their roof tops.

There are various types of solar hot water heat, one which even works in the winter (without freezing). But in places like Canada, there will not be enough Sun from November to February to provide all the heat needed.

One answer is to get hot water heat from a copper pipe wrapped around a wood-stove chimney pipe. Or those people with wind power (which is often strong in the winter) can use an electric hot water heater.

Kemp advises saving energy by installing a timer switch on your hot water heater (wherever you live). Run it during the night time, especially in places which offer a lower off-peak rate, get the hot water showers in the morning, and then turn off the heat. A well-insulated hot water tank will hold it's heat through the day. You can add common insulation wrapped around any hot water tank, to save money on your bill.

UNPLUG THE PHANTOM LOAD

Kemp devotes a whole segment of his Renewable Energy Handbook to getting rid of the "phantom load". This is the constant use of electricity by all sorts of appliances and accessories, even when you aren't using them at all.

The television/DVD player complex is a famous case. They are never really off, and draw significant power even in "sleep mode". That is easy to solve: put all such devices on a power bar, and turn off the power bar. Electric use stops. Europe has already legislated that all TV's etc sold there must have a true OFF function, without drawing phantom power. North America has hardly heard about this energy waste.

Even the common door-bell is a prime example of wasted energy. It uses power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just waiting for the few seconds someone might push it. Use a door-knocker.

Then we have all the "wall warts" as Kemp calls them. The black charger boxes for the IPOD, Cell phone, maybe even a small handi-Vac. These are still using electricity if plugged into the wall. Unplug them, or use a power bar to turn them off.

Kemp estimates that phantom power accounts for the production of about 3 or 4 extra coal-burning power plants in North America alone.

BATTERIES, KETTLES, YOU NAME IT

We talk about batteries, and using solar power at your cottage or in a Recreational vehicle. I slightly disagree with Bill's claim that cheap ($150) deep cycle batteries (sometimes called "marine batteries") will only last 5 years. Mine last ten years. That may result from the fact my solar panel is always keeping their charge up. Other people let their RV batteries go flat over the winter, and the helps kill them.

Kemp says the new commercial-grade batteries for off-grid homes (which cost hundreds of dollars) will last 20 to 25 years. This is great news. Good-quality solar panels are also guaranteed for 25 years (and really do last that long). That means you can guarantee your own source of power, no matter what happens with peak oil, or
skyrocketting utility bills, for 25 years. That's peace of mind.

For RV use, I recommend batteries that DO NOT have lids that open to access the cells. I like closed top batteries, because they don't slop during travel. Look closely, and you will find metal parts near batteries are the first part to rust out in older campers. Remember, batteries need to be vented. You cannot ever keep a battery inside your home or vehicle (unless the battery is enclosed in an air-tight container, and vented to the outside).

One other quibble with Bill: he tells us to use a counter-top kettle to boil water. They use half the energy of a standard electric stove. Agreed, BUT don't use a plastic kettle! I've talked to two toxicologists who both say the plastic kettle is a major source of plasticizers (like gender-benders and carcinogenic materials) into the tea or coffee you drink. Find a (more expensive) kettle with a stainless steel interior, to protect your health.

That is why in the interview I recommended my method to cut electric power in half for making tea or coffee: use a thermos. You can make two or more cups of your favorite brew, with just one kettle boiling session. A decent thermos keeps the drink hot up to 8 hours. The thermos also makes a better cup of tea, since it works better than a tea cozy to keep the water hot enough when "steeping".

HIGH-FIVE FOR THIS BOOK - I'M KEEPING MY COPY TO USE IT

The Renewable Energy Handbook is simply the best book on the subject I have ever seen. It's almost like the "Whole Earth Catalog" style, in the sense that it's loaded with useful charts, comparisons, bullet-point info, real hands-on tech, illustrations. So many books these days don't take the time to be a real manual. This one does, on a whole lot of subjects. There is even a bit on generators, and a whole chapter on home-made biofuels.

There is lots more in this extended Radio Ecoshock interview. I hope it will inspire you to get going in renewable energy - not waiting for a big utility - but doing it yourself.

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock
http://www.ecoshock.org

Bastards of a Dying World

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:07:36 PDT

RADIO STATION - MUSIC CREDITS:

music clips from new anti-frackin album from Australia
http://www.wholelottafrackingoingon.com

"Act Locally, Think Globally" by MC shea & the Awesomes

"My Water Is On Fire Tonight" by David Holmes & Dean Becker
==================

Welcome to another packed show from Radio Ecoshock.

This week we cover:

* behind-the-scenes panic over reports of methane blowing out of the sea-bed in the Eastern Arctic. This could dramatically increase global warming.

* activist resistance against a wave of gas frackin in Australia - with a new album of great songs

* a feature interview (you heard it here first) with Craig Rosebraugh on his new film about the oil giants: "Dirty Lying Bastards"

* second feature interview with Peter F. Sale. He's the coral expert (20% of coral dead in last two decades) who looks at the "Holocene Mass Extinction Event" (going on right now)

To start you off, here are some links for this program (with more in the articles below)

"Whole Lotta Frackin Going On" album. Some green music sucks. These songs shine. Check them out, listen for free, download cheap, help the cause.

Albums from world music master Ariel Kalma, now living in Australia. He was a pioneer in ambient music, nature sounds, and trance. Now showcasing artists from around the world, especially India and Afria.

Film trailer for "Greedy Lying Bastards"

Book site for "Our Dying Planet" by Peter F. Sale

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

RUSHED EXPEDITION FINDS "METHANE TORCHES" IN THE ARCTIC

The research ship RV Polarstern has returned to Bremerhaven, Germany with it's crew of scientists from six countries. They travelled almost 12,000 nautical miles on the 26th Arctic expedition, measuring ice in the polar seas.

The verdict: Arctic sea ice is young and very thin. For centuries, the polar seas have been covered by a thick layer of ice built up over many years. America designed a nuclear submarine capable of breaching up through thick tough ice. Now it's weak, with much less mass - the first step toward losing the Arctic Ice cap due to global warming.

The Greenpeace ice-breaker "Arctic Sunrise" is just now returning to Amsterdam, after a two month expedition with scientists from Cambridge studying ice thickness.
The news is alarming, as the Earth's new dark seascape in the Summer Arctic will pump more heat into the oceans, and add to long-term climate change. Scientist Wieslaw Maslowski's team predict the Arctic Ice cap could disappear in Summer as early as 2016.

There is worse - and you won't hear this in the mainstream media at all.

Behind the scenes, officials and scientists in various governments went into panic mode this September. The problem: a big increase in methane gas has been discovered in the Eastern Arctic.

If frozen methane gas under the sea, technically called "clathrates", melt in quantity, we are on the road to a dramatic climate shift beyond imagination.

It happened before, around 56 million years ago. In less than a hundred years the temperature of the Arctic seas rose several degrees, reaching almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 Centigrade.

Here is what we know. On September 2nd, the Russian news service RIA Novosti announced, quote:

"A group of Russian and U.S. scientists will leave the port of Vladivostok on Friday on board a Russian research ship to study methane emissions in the eastern part of the Arctic.

'This expedition was organized on a short notice by the Russian Fund of Fundamental Research and the U.S. National Science Foundation following the discovery of a dramatic

increase in the leakage of methane gas from the seabed in the eastern part of the Arctic,' said Professor Igor Semiletov, the head of the expedition.

The group consists of 27 scientists who would attempt to measure the scale of methane emissions and clarify the nature of the process.

The 45-day expedition will focus on the sea shelf of the Laptev Sea, the East Siberian Sea and the Russian part of the Chukotsk Sea, where 90% of underwater permafrost is located.

'We assume that the leakage of methane results from the degradation of underwater permafrost...A massive release of such a powerful greenhouse gas may accelerate global warming,' Semiletov said."

End quote from the Russian press, September 2nd.

Methane is generally said to be 20 times more powerful than CO2 when it comes to trapping solar heat. That is really just an average, because when it first emerges, methane can be as much as 75 times more powerful. It degrades more quickly than C02, becoming less potent in 10 years. But methane degrades into CO2, continuing the greenhouse gases for up to 100,000 years, according to Dr. David Archer.

So what did this hurry-up research find?

We go with a report September 29th from the Russian news agency Itar-Tass: "Heavy methane emissions found in Arctic Eastern sector."

In the northern sector of the Laptev and Bering seas, the Chief of the expedition, Igor Semiletov reported by phone that "methane torches" (his words) are coming from the ocean sea bed into the atmosphere. Also on board were scientists from Alaska Fairbanks Scientific Research Center and Georgia University.

I can only conclude that as the Arctic sea ice melts back every summer, and seas warm, methane from either deep in the ground, or from clathrates on the shallower sea beds, are starting to melt. The Russians, and scientists from the National Oceanography Center in the UK, has found methane is leaking up from fissures deep inside the Earth. So we have both frozen methane on shallow sea beds, and geological methane, coming up.

Read more.

That the Americans and Russians sent a ship into the Arctic on such short notice tells you how serious it is. Keep in mind, there is no over-all way to monitor methane emissions from the Arctic, although scientists do monitor global average methane content in the atmosphere. According to my limited research, the amounts coming out of the Arctic so far are smaller than emissions from rice paddies.

We haven't seen anything like a giant increase in methane globally yet. But we are seeing the start of a methane source that could, if it grows, easily tip the planet into a new greenhouse world. Keep your eye on the Arctic methane news.

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

FRACKIN GAS - WE MUST POISON THE EARTH MILES BELOW US!

We open the show with "Act Locally Think Globally" by MC Shea Jasmine and the Awesomes. It's from a whole album of 14 anti-fracking songs called Whole Lotta Frackin' Going On.

That's right. We humans aren't satisfied polluting the atmosphere with toxic guck, radioactive particles and greenhouse gases. Nope. Not finished with spreading all our poisons over the surface of every continent.

We just can't rest until we manage to take the most toxic chemical crap we've got, and injecting it at least a mile underground. All to get some more carbon trapping gases to burn out the climate. It's the last frontier, the deep underground, and we'll poison the last fresh water and blow out the coal seams if we can.

The frackers are hitting Australia right now. Their drilling rigs will set up, blow up the deep, and then move on endlessly, till there's nothing left.

Get ready in Britain for more of the same, now that the North Sea gas field production is 25 percent down. They'll tell you it's "green" - much cleaner than coal! Green all the way down to a wrecked planet with more fossil fuels.

Just wait for the Marcellus gas frackin field in New York State to leak into the watershed for millions of people. Oooops. The roving drill companies will fold into their corporate shells and evaporate, leaving the groundwater poisoned for centuries.

Here are the details on the new album, from singer/activist Laura-Doe:

"Australian musicians create CD to warn of dangers of coal seam gas mining

They may not have big advertising budgets like the mining companies, but a group of Australian musicians opposed to coal seam gas (CSG) mining are using the power of song to spread their message.

‘Whole Lotta Frackin’ Going On', (www.wholelottafrackingoingon.com) is a compilation album featuring 14 songs, in a range of genres, from musicians keen to alert Australians about the dangers of ‘fracking’—a process used in CSG extractions where water and chemicals are injected into the rock bed.

The CD is the brainchild of singer/comedienne, educator and women's sexual health activist Laura-Doe. Laura-Doe said she was inspired to write a song, 'Lock The Gate', after seeing the documentary ‘Gasland’ about Coal Seam Gas mining using hydraulic fracturing in the USA.

'There are hundreds of documented cases of water contamination from CSG mining in the USA,” Laura-Doe said. “The fracking process has not been adequately tested with none of the chemicals used assessed by Australia's industrial chemicals regulator'.

'As big budget advertising is not an option for the people being affected by CSG we wanted to use the power of music to get our side of the story across.'

Laura-Doe said she and her producer, Anando Bharti, put a call out for songs via Facebook and email, and through the campaign groups B.S.A.N.E. (Byron Saving Australia's Natural Environment) and Lock the Gate Alliance.

Most submissions came from artists in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales—next on the mining companies’ exploration agenda in Australia.

'Within two weeks we had over 20 songs submitted. I think this says something about the depth of feeling on the topic amongst the people we reached.'

'Each song on the album conveys a different artist's perspective on the issues involved and they all provide information in an accessible way.'

All songs on the album were donated by the artists for use in this project and the CD was mastered voluntarily by Byron Bay engineer Paul Gomersall. Mullumbimby-based online distributor Music-Mosaic.com have sponsored placing the songs on iTunes and other music sites. Pressing of the CD was funded by the owners of the Crystal Castle at Mullumbimby and online women's web magazine www.yOni.com.

The CD will be offered at cost as a funds and awareness raiser to environmental groups opposing CSG mining.

You can hear and purchase tracks online at www.wholelottafrackingoingon.com and also on iTunes. "
- report from Laura-Doe.
==================

BIG OIL: GREEDY LYING BASTARDS

Soon or later, we see the black dragon behind our oil addiction. These are the megacorporations who span the world. They have private armies of security men, and the biggest military in the world behind them. They own politicians, private jets, and maybe a few countries.

But the most potent weapon in the arsenal of Big Oil is the river of money available for public relations. Advertising soothes us, movie placements make us want more, the oil industry is the subtle pusher, who keeps us addicted, keeps us coming back to the pumps, keeps us buying plastic products, and oil-based foods.

If only someone could tell it like it is.

That would be Craig Rosebraugh. Don't be fooled by the technical sounding name of his upcoming film. "Greedy Lying Bastards" is no puff piece for the industry.

Craig Rosebraugh - film maker, academic, writer, and activist. Craig is highly educated, Masters and has Law Degree. The Co-writer is Patrick Gambuti Jr.

He is the film-maker, director, and occasional actor in the new film "Greedy Lying Bastards" to be released in 2012. A rough cut has just been submitted to the Sun Dance film festival.

This is a no-holds barred film about "the power and dominance of the fossil fuel industry." The project started two and a half years ago, going to 14 countries on 5 continents. It covers the poisonous results of spills, corruption, and climate change caused by oil burning.

Some of the locations are Tuvalu (which will disappear as a country due to rising seas), to Uganda (now plagued by droughts and floods), and Peru (where melting glaciers threaten the only water supply for millions). There is also the Niger Delta, where children swim in the goo from oil pollution, and a prominant activist was murdered.

Craig covers a lot of the damage from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.

He finds people who cannot get medical care because Gulf doctors are so dependent on oil company business. Many businesses were wrecked. A group of four Florida tourists became sick swimming in oil and chemical dispersants. One died. A lot of Gulf coverage.

We hear about BP claims processing problems, after the big PR campaign by BP. Initial payouts of $5000 per person. Interim payments have been the problem, as losses continued. Only 16% of interim claims have been paid out so far.

Case: Steven Aguanaga, went to Fla Gulf Coast at beachfront hotel in summer of 2010. No sign of contamination. Hotel told them beach was safe, went swimming one afternoon - came back covered with an orange goo. All four in party felt ill. Steven's friend went back in, felt sick, Merrick Valian died within three weeks. Aguanaga continues to have symptoms of chemical exposure.

Case: Mississipi Shirley Tillman and husband very ill after a direct hit of dispersant, out on a boat helping to clean up the oil. Although they protected their grandson Gavin, no beaches for him, no water contact, but got sicker than rest of family. Got it likely from the air.

Case: Clayton Mathern, Louisiana. Clayton out on water half a mile from the rig when it exploded, on a supply ship. In addition to smoke from burning rig, Clayton was covered in dispersant sprayed from the air. Hospitalized several times. During Craig's interview, he was rushed to the hospital. Diagnosed with paralysis in one of his legs.

Few doctors will treat this toxicity. Some doctors turned away patients when BP chemicals were found to be the source of the problem. Doctors themselves are dependent on the industry and it's suppliers. They also fear the litigation, with the huge legal budget BP has.

BP is not paying the medical costs of ongoing toxic health problems. The company made an announcement in November 2010 that they would not pay for medical treatments
resulting from the spill. They didn't want to acknowledge there was a problem.

The only option left is to try and sue BP - but these are lower income and poor people with no money for lawyers.

Craig interviews people like Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General; Henry Waxman Congressman from California; former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Witman; top scientists from all over the world; and individuals impacted from communities around the world.

He also includes some statements by climate change sceptics.

What emerges is the cost of our deep addiction to fossil fuels and a hope to inspire people to change.

TESTING POLLUTED SEA FOOD

Film makers did their own tests about safety of seafood. They tested shrimp, sand and water. Shrimp was 10 times higher than levels set by Fed Government and BP after the spill.

Oil pollution in Gulf shrimp was found ten times higher than allowed by the EPA. But it is still sold nationally.

At time of Exxon Valdez spill safe level was set at 11 parts per billion in seafood. Then gov't and BP raised "safety" level 45,000 times higher to 500 parts per million, after the BP Deep Water Horizon spill.

Sea food buyers are relying only on smell tests(!) done by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Scientists used their noses to smell levels of hydrocarbons in fish.

"Gulf seafood is still contaminated and ending up in our U.S. food supply." -Craig Rosebraugh said.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Why so many sceptics shown in the film? So many pseudo debates on whether climate change is happening, despite majority of Academies say argument is over.

The fossil fuel industry is the force behind deniers, buying deniers, media, and scientists. They want to create confusion and doubt.

Deniers are buried by their own voices. "Greedy Lying Bastards" covers the industry's PR campaign. Two of worst are ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. In last decade each spent nearly 25 million dollars just funding climate denial campaigns.

HOW CAN WE CHANGE

Forming a new economy. Even the energy companies could convert and make money, but don't. Big oil companies have showcase projects to use in advertisments, but don't plow the investments into making it real. This film shows their investments in renewables are miniscule compared to what they spend on finding and developing more oil.

@greedylyingbast is Twitter url The film is also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/greedylyingbastards

The oil industry will not/can not regulate itself. Profits are too big a draw. The industry needs an outside government agency. Will Congress do anything?

Plus: we must change ourselves.

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

OUR DYING WORLD WITH PETER F. SALE

Here on Radio Ecoshock, you've heard speakers like Dr. Daniel Pauly lament that humans are stripping the oceans bare of species. Blog entry on Pauly here.

His 47 minute speech (45 MB) on the death of the oceans here.

I've played you a clip of Dr. Wes Jackson, on the possibility of a mass extinction event in the seas. And paleoclimatologist Peter Ward told us up to 90% of ocean life was killed, in a big extinction event many millions of years ago.

I took all this in mind, when I got a new book from Peter F. Sale. He works with the United Nations University, and he is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Windsor, Ontario.

The title of his new book through me off at first. It's called "Our Dying Planet, An ecologist's view of the crisis we face." Sometimes I'm called extreme - why would he say the planet is "Dying"?

I'd say Sale was were exagerating, but a new study published in the journal Nature found 75 percent of all mammal species are at risk of extinction within 300 years...

Nature: climate change leads to 67-84 percent intraspecific biodiversity loss by 2080 – Holocene Mass Extinction within this century

"... A Nature study earlier this year has looked at marine and terrestrial biodiversity threats combined – and found for instance 75 percent of all mammal species to be at risk of extinction within 300 years, and defined such a massive loss of biodiversity as establishing the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event.

That would mean the combined effort of a couple of billion human beings, relentlessly producing and consuming over a couple of centuries time, would somehow have very creatively managed to outweigh the impact of the PETM methane clathrate bomb."

And check out this item: "Climate change will lead to far more extinctions than previously thought..."

We start out the interview with Peter Sale's 40 years in studying coral reefs - how they live, and how they die. I found his description of what coral is, how it works, really kept me going.

We discuss the wonders of coral. Did you know even the sand around coral reefs is biotic, created by the coral?

About 25% of all marine species inhabit coral reefs at some part of their lives. Not all would go extinct without coral, but a lot would.

Since the first major reported mass coral bleaching event in 1983, there have been waves of coral deaths. Sale estimates about 20% of all coral living in the 1970's is now dead.

The main cause is "coral bleaching". This is directly connected to climate change, and heating of the oceans. When there is a hot spell, generally during an El Nino event, global warming adds just enough more to make the corals eject the algae which they use to live. These algae give the coral reefs their color. So the dead reefs are white, instead of a rainbow of bright colors.

Like many species (and crops) coral is already at the top of it's temperature tolerance. Just a little more warming, and we'll lose them all. That will have profound effects, because the coral reefs hold more different types of species (phyla) than even the rainforest. The rainforests have more species overall, because they have so many varied insects. But coral reefs have more different KINDS of animals.

Sale tells us coral reefs also protect the mainland from storms, which will be more important as the seas rise. And they provide billions of dollars of tourist revenues to Australia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. About 50% of all Gross Domestic Product in the Caribbean is derived from the sea coast. Even if tourists don't visit coral reefs, they lie on beaches created and maintained by coral.

The reasons for coral decline are complex. It is more than raw temperature. Ships break up coral with their anchors. Overfishing deprives the reefs of many key species need to maintain that ecosystem. Peter Sale worries that the environment movement will concentrate on small parts of the puzzle, rather than being able to see the big picture complexity.

Humans are also not very good at understanding exponential change. Listen to the interview for his explanation of why that matters.

Finally, Peter Sale concludes both the book and the interview with his four projections of where this disintegrating ecosystem and economy could go:

1. Belvedere world (the rich countries withdraw into fortresses, and then the rich within those countries go into armed communities, while extinctions continue, and a Mad Max society is left for the rest of us) This is seen as most likely to Sale, the way we are going.

2. Woodstock world (almost hippie-like, humans withdraw into simpler old technology, with less complexity)

3. The third possible future is called "Technopolis". Technology will save us, we withdraw from Nature into a separate tech world. Unlikely says Sale, but some engineers and scientists actually believe this is possible.

4. "New Atlantis" - Sale's vision of how a sustainable but still civilized world might continue. This option is very hard, perhaps unlikely, but a worthwhile goal.

I haven't done justice to the depth of any of these four projections. Get more from our interview, and the longer descriptions in the book "Our Dying Planet".

I thought the book could have been laid out better, with more charts and illustrations. In places Sale tries to approach people unfamiliar with ecology, so Ecoshock listeners might skip those. But there are strong points in the book, and the work on coral shines.

You should get a lot out of the interview, where we took our time to go into depth.

That's it for this week.

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock
http://www.ecoshock.org

SUDDEN & ABRUPT CHANGE

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:57:59 PDT

It's a fine time for bad news bears. World floods continue, this time in Asia. The Arctic has an ozone hole. Oh yeah, the global financial system is on the edge of bankruptcy.

The economic system and the ecosphere are at risk of massive and abrupt change.

From the popular financial blog "The Automatic Earth" writer "Ilagi" on the European banking mess, and blowback to America.

Boston Globe journalist Dianne Dumanowski reads from book "The End of the Long Summer" (our former stable climate).

Two part interview of Alder Stone Fuller on the risk of abrupt and violent climate change. It's not just James Lovelock. Dozens of major scientists warn heating could rise up to 8 degrees C. in a decade, with extreme weather all through. It has happened before. Time to "shock-proof" our basic system.

Radio Ecoshock 111005 1 hour.

CREDITS

Ilargi courtesy of theautomaticearth.blogpspot.com

Author Dianne Dumanoski reads from her book "The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth "

Alder Stone Philip from alderstone3.com

Economy news mashup courtesy KaputtRadio

Some background music by Vastmandana at soundclick.com

Small slice from "Blame It on The Boogie" by Michael Jackson

--------------

All eyes and ears are on the rumblings of a financial crash in the European banking system. Our correspondent from "The Automatic Earth" (one of the top 3 finance blogs) reports from Europe.

Ilargi says Greece is a distraction from the bankruptcy of American banks and governments. He also says more debt cannot solve too much debt. The Ponzi scheme (which holds our pensions and savings as well) has to end somewhere.

With a nod to OccupyWallSt.

Greens need to pay attention, Ilargi says, because any money needed for things like solar conversion, mass transit, new energy grid, are being tossed away right now to the black holes of banking and derivative debt. We will leave our children no options. They may fight for bare survival, eating up the last of the Earth.

Whatever happens financially, our second guest, Alder Stone Fuller, says massive climate change can no longer be avoided.

The IPCC shows slow steady growth of heat and rising seas. Alder Stone says reality is nothing like that. We will go through a long period of extreme weather, and possibly a sudden jump of more than 8 degrees in a decade.

Listeners and readers, I want you to know the idea of rapid climate change is not fringe science. On January 2010, I interviewed Dr. Michael MacCracken, one of America's leading scientists. He was a principle author of a collection of papers called "Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change".

Earlier, in December 2007, I interviewed a specialist in ancient plant life, Dr. Bob Spicer of Open University in the UK. He described previous greenhouse worlds for us. We know the world climate can change to very different states.

Such wild swings in climate have happened many times in Earth's past. We can find them in the geological record. The last 10,000 years were abnormally stable.

Alder Stone taught advanced climate theory in his own academy in Eugene Oregon, and has now moved to New England. He's doing roving workshops, and setting up an online course, to learn about "Type II" climate shift, and Gaia theory.

The Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC has given us loads of graphs showing a gradual rise of heating and sea level. That is "Type I" climate change. In this program, you hear what experts fear, and the media never talks about, "Type II" climate shifts.

After giving us the bad news, Alder Stone Fuller talks about coping skills, and the need to keep going as survivors. In addition to "The End of the Long Summer" by Dianne Dumanowski, Alder strongly recommends we read two more books:

1. "With Speed and Violence" by UK journalist Fred Pearce, and
2. "Deep Survival" by Lawrence Gonzalez (and his sequel "Everyday Survival")

The survival books look at humans who have lived through incredible problems, accidents and challenges - to find the traits that helped them survive when others don't. "Everyday Survival" goes further, describing ways we might all need as the economy, climate and other problems go out of control.

Fred Pearce, who has also been a guest on Radio Ecoshock, interviewed dozens of top scientists on the possibility of an abrupt climate shift. Everybody should know this, especially government planners. But they won't read it, unless you do, and tell them to get with the real program.

If a sudden shift of climate is possible, we must learn "adaptability" skills, and shock-proof our basic systems (water, food) as Dianne Dumanoski wrote in her book "The End of the Long Summer". Dianne was a journalist for the Boston Globe for several decades. She reads several short passages, just for this program.

You must hear the audio interviews in this Radio Ecoshock show, to get the big picture.

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock

How A Far Away Island Can Rock Your World

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:21:58 PDT

FAR AWAY PLACES WILL ROCK YOUR WORLD

I'm hoping my bank will still be open next Monday. Most of us are trying to get through the next week. Half of us can't live without the next paycheck.

Will Europe survive? Despite the smiling faces of banking experts on TV, too many signs say "Wecome to the Great Depression". And some 1930's-style slowdown isn't the worst that could happen.

In the constant drum-beat of beat-down times, it's pretty hard to care what is happening somewhere else, in places we don't ever hear about. That climate stuff, that's years away too, except for the weird weather this year.

This is Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith. I'm going to convince you that a relatively small island on the other side of your world can break the climate wide open.

BURNING UP INTO THE ATMOSPHERE

Strange fires in Asia helped start the hottest year on record, before 2010. They are burning again right now, blanketing South East Asia with acrid smoke. And loading up the atmosphere with a new burst of carbon, possibly as large as the exhaust from every car on Earth.

The tropical forest blaze, larger than Amazon fires, is on Sumatra, which is part of Indonesia. What happens there, could determine whether we make it, as a civilization, or eventually, as a species.

We'll hear from Dr. Florian Siegert in Munich Germany, who can see it all from space.

Indonesia is also the world's second largest coal exporter. That feeds the second largest coal power race on the planet: India. 173 new coal-fired plants have been approved this year alone. It's a mania that is already failing, even while it destroys so much.

Peasants and fishermen have been killed by police protecting coal plant sites from protests. The scale of ecological damage is amazing. The threat to our climate frightening.

We don't hear anything about this, as we pray our jobs will keep going, or worry we'll never get another one.

But we'll talk with Indian electricity expert Shankar Sharma to get the real picture. You'll hear the sounds of protests, and learn how this global coal resistance is hooking up Indian peasants to the poorest people in Appalachia, USA.

GLOBAL DIMMING HIDES THE BAD NEWS

We won't have to wait until 2050 to find out what happens if the coal rush plays out. As Steve Connor, the Science Editor for Britain's "Independent" newpaper wrote July 5th, pollution from the one-new-one-a-week Chinese coal plants has hidden the true warming impact in a phenomenon known as global dimming. We started covering global dimming in this Radio Ecoshock show in 2006.

The new Indian coal plants, growing like mushrooms along the coast, will do the same. For a few years. But that protective smog lasts only a few years at most, and could clear in less than a month, if production suddenly stopped. Perhaps after a solar flare. Or a really big economic break-down. Or riots.

When the "wisp of smoke", as James Lovelock called it, is washed out of the atmosphere, we could experience a severe heating event. This could manifest locally, or globally. No one knows.

I asked Dr. Florian Seigert about this, but that was not his specialty.

We did discuss whether the peat fires of Indonesia in 1997 helped power the planet into the record-breaking heat of 1998.

[Siegert interview in audio]

Learn about peat fires and Professor Florian Siegert's work in this article.

These are my conclusions, based on Dr. Siegert's interview, but also on talks with other scientists.

* Indonesia is burning off tropical forests faster than anywhere else on Earth, including the Amazon. This releases vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

* even so, the carbon emissions from Indonesian peat fires is even greater.

* scientists calculated Indonesian peat fires amounted to 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity in 1997. A huge burst of carbon, that was measured immediately at the Hawaii measuring station. The rate of increase of CO2 doubled at the Manu Loa station that year.

* 1998 was the hottest year on record until 2010.

* this single "peat fire bomb" may have triggered the continuing increase of global warming gases around the world from other natural sources.

* research at the University of Exeter, led by Dr. Sebastian Wieczorek and Professor Peter Ashwin suggests that as global temperatures rise, peat can spontaneously catch fire, like an overheated compost pile. We don't know when that will happen.

* although up to a third of our carbon dioxide emissions has been sequestered by the ocean, the impact of carbon bursts from peat fires is more or less immediate. The greenhouse effect does not wait for years or decades. The existing carbon raises temperatures immediately, except for any temporary cooling effects from smoke.

* there is more tropical peat in the Amazon of South America, and in Africa. But we think Indonesia has the most by volume - up to 50 meters, or 164 feet deep.

* if the peat in the northern Permafrost thaws, dries, and then burns, a major extinction event is inevitable.

* more carbon is being released from forest fires in Indonesia and South East Asia than in the Amazon. Hardly anyone knows this. There is no campaign comparable to saving the Amazon.

INDONESIAN PALM OIL - THE GREEN FUEL SCAM

According to Dr. Siegert, the biggest releases from Indonesian peat fires are caused by corporations and foreign investors.

Some peat forests have been drained and burned for palm oil plantations. That is supposed to create a so-called "green' biofuel, some sold in Europe, claiming to help the climate.

In reality, when we remember Indonesia, palm oil from peat lands is among the most climate damaging fuels on Earth. Palm oil biofuel taken from cleared peat lands releases 5 to 10 times more carbon dioxide than the fuel burned in the final car or power plant. This project is dangerously insane.

THE PEAT FIRES ARE BACK

The peat fires are back in 2011. In mid-September, the Indonsian government acknowledged 1200 "hot spots" on their island of Sumatra. Thick smoke blankets Sumatra, and pollutes Singapore and Malaysia to the East. In desperation, Indonesia is trying to create rain. There is no other way to put the peat fires out.

Hundreds more fires have broken out on the nearby Kalimantan, which is Indonesia's part of Borneo.

That's a new name to learn: Kalimantan. Forests are being burned there to clear the land for more and more open pit coal mines.

A World Bank study in 2007 claimed Indonesia is the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

The government of Indonesia disputes and protest this. Since there is no true country-by-country measurement of emissions, beyond untrustworthy figures given by national governments, we don't really know.

We do know this: on top of those humungous peat fires, and record breaking burning of other tropical forests and deforestation, Indonesia provides enough coal carbon to reach a high rating among world polluters.

This is information you need to know.

If the latest flooding from extreme precipication events missed your area, lucky you. Maybe drought hasn't burned away your local agriculture. Maybe the freaky summer beach weather in early fall is fun.

But we are only part way there. I still hope to pursuade everyone that on this small planet, no matter what the headlines about the economic break-down may be, events in Asia are set to destabilize the climate for thousands of years.

INDONESIA SECOND LARGEST EXPORTER OF COAL IN THE WORLD

Indonesia is the second largest exporter of coal in the world, following only Australia. Russia trails far behind at number three, with half the coal exports of Indonesia.

In 1985, Indonesia mined 2 million tons of coal. By the year 2000, that was 233 million tons. In 2010 it was 320 million tons, with 380 million projected for 2011.
Source here and here.

Indonesia depends on coal to power it's growing industrial base. In 2008, Indonesia burned 79 million tons of coal, mostly to produce electricity, and exported 160 million tons - twice domestic consumption.

The country's lower grade coal is only suitable for burning in power stations, so it is called "thermal coal". Indonesia is the world's largest provider of seaborne coal to power stations.

NO PLAN TO SAVE THE CLIMATE

The government of Indonesia does not plan to cut back it's carbon emissions to save the climate.

Locally, Indonesia intends to expand coal as a source of energy from 17% to 33% by 2025. That includes replacing oil by liquifying coal, a horrible dirty way to get energy.
The country has 35 new coal-fired power plants planned, but only about half of them are being built so far, according to Greenpeace.

Greenpeace has released a report on the heavy impacts of this coal mining and transportation scheme on Indonesians. (In English) (In Indonesian)

The national energy policy is to double coal exports. Indonesia has mostly lower grade coal, which burns less efficently, and is used almost exclusively to fire electricity generating plants.

While there are plenty of coal ships running from Indonesia to China, Japan, and every Asian country, the biggest customer is India. India will drink up the coal of Indonesia, in a wild national dream to build hundreds more coal plants. Really, it's a dark nightmare. If the Indian coal plants become reality, life as we know it seems doomed.

INDIA'S MAD RUSH TOWARD COAL-FIRED ELECTRICITY

This is Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith. Let us learn about India and electricity, with our next guest. I'll follow that with more coal activist news in India, our biggest hope at the moment.

[exclusive interview with Shankar Sharma in audio only]

I would like to thank Justin Guay of Sierra Club India for arranging this interview. This Justin Guay article in a Sierra Club blog has all the links to take you into the wild world of the Indian Coal Rush.

Pay special attention to this article from livemint.com - associated with the Wall Street Journal. Big Indian banks are at risk, could even go under, due to the massive growth of loans to coal plant builders. More on that below.

Never mind that a political dispute on one Indian coal mining region (Telangana, formerly Hydrabad) has caused hours long blackouts in nearby States. Even the tech services out of Bangalore are threatened with blackouts due to lack of coal. There goes your tech support.

INDONESIA AND INDIA - THE COAL CONNECTION

Let's get back to Indonesia, as the biggest provider of India's coal, and the CO2 emissions. Indoensia has big coal reserves on the tropical island of Sumatra. These are undeveloped so far. Most of their big mines are in Kalimantan, their part of the island of Borneo.

The Indonsian government owns the biggest mines. Some they run directly, others they contract out. The largest private coal miner is Bumi Resources. That company has two subsidiaries: Pt Artumin Indonesia, and PT Kalmin Prima Coal, called "KPC".

India's biggest corporate conglomerate, Tata, has purchased 30% of both these Indonesian coal mining subsidiaries. Tata has big coal-fired plants with more under construction.

The mad rush to build coal plants for India would blow the mind of any misinformed Western person. Because India is long past it's own peak coal production, the country must import from countries like Indonesia and Australia.

Coal plants require whole rivers worth of water for cooling, in those big towers. But India, as we heard from Shankar Sharma, is already parched for drinking water. The only solution is to buiild new power plants near the ocean. Part of the electricity generated would be used to power desalinization plants, just to get cooling water from the ocean. That uses a lot of energy, emitting still more carbon, before any power hits the transmission lines.

Take the single state of Andhra Pradesh, along the Eastern sea coast. Sixty three coal fired power plants, 8 times current production, 56 Gigawatts of coal powered electricity is planned.

FIGHTING BACK AGAINST COAL IN INDIA

In a country famous for corruption, environmental reviews and the rights of people already living in the area are thrown out the window. Seeing themselves thrown off, their agriculture and fisheries ruined, these poor people are fighting off the coal rush as best they can.

See this article, "The Struggle Against India’s Coal Rush" by Mary Anne Hitt in Grist.

Or listen to audio of the protest battles in this week's Radio Ecoshock show.

[clip from NDTV]
That report was from NDTV. Here is a bit more:

[more from the protests]

The coal companies claim to occupy waste land, but really it is thousands of acres of wetlands with villages and fisheries ages-old, being devastated.

INDIA'S COAL PONZI SCHEME

Meanwhile, Indoensia decided to raise their coal prices to meet international market prices. Suddenly, the cheap coal supplies for India are not so cheap. As we heard, on mega-project has stopped dead in mid-construction. Another is only partly operating.

The coal builders want to raise electricity rates, breaking promises. Consumers are up in arms, the government is dithering.

There are signs this Indian coal plant building was a kind of real estate ponzi scheme. With set-backs from public protests, court rulings and escalating coal costs, some projects are heading toward bankruptcy. This could damage or break some banks in India, whose loans to power companies rose 47% since 2009. Bank loans doubled. Another banking scandal is brewing in India. Will they ask for a government bail-out as well?

BETTER OPTIONS FOR INDIA

Most of Indian power generation comes from State government owned operations. They will likely continue to try to satisfy public demand for more power. If they keep on with coal-fired electricity, we may all be fried by greenhouse gases.

As we heard from Shankar Sharma, there are plenty of other options for India. Solar power alone has a much greater potential than all India needs.

Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute was on Radio Ecoshock discussing the problems of crop tolerance for climate change. Rice, he said, was already at the top of it's temperature range. Just two degrees added heating could threaten or end the Indian rice crop.

India is also dependent on the monsoon rains, which can be changed along with the climate. Northern India, and Pakistan, depend on the regular melting of glaciers. If those glaciers melt too fast, first floods, then an ever-lasting famine strike almost a billion people in the future.

India depends upon our climate of the past millenia, as much as well do. Coal cannot be the answer.

OUR PLAN IS TO WATCH THE PLANET DO DOWN?

People in the West need to expand their view, to see a global problem. There is no part of the world which doesn't matter. Not now.

When I visited India, trains in the South were still running on coal.

When I landed in Jakarta, the capital and mega-city of Indonesia, there was a new reef. It was formed of all the human-power rickshaws grabbed by the government, and tossed into the sea. That was modernization under the dictatorship of the early 90's.

There were two roads into central Jakarta. One was a new toll freeway, almost empty except for the odd Mercedes. Below it, a constant traffic jam of the real Indonesia, on the pot-holed free road. At that time, there was a Western-style mall downtown. Inside there was everything you might find in Dallas, including a MacDonalds.

Outside, there were army men with machine guns to keep out undersirables, most of the people.

There has been a big change since then. Indonesia threw off the worst of it's censorship. The hated Dictator was replaced with a Democracy.

But Indonesia apparently cannot control the peat fires sending dangerous burst of carbon into the world atmosphere. Cannot control world-record destruction of their tropical forest.

Indonesia plans to flood the world air with even more coal and carbon, by increasing coal mining, exports, and local burning. That is their national plan.

What is our plan, to deal with it?

Global environment organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club have recognized the danger of just letting countries like Indonesia and India plunge into a coal-based economy. Both write reports you should read. Both help organize protests, and work to empower the local people displaced and polluted to death by the coal industry. Sierra Club has organized a workshop to connect coal protesters in India with coal victims in Appalachia.

We must support their work.

But really, our plan so far is to remain ignorant. To pretend that what happens on one part of the Earth will not affect us here. To pretend there is nothing we can do about it.

Is that our game? To wait, to hold conferences, to make rules nobody follows, until the climate is wrecked for all generations?

I hope we can do better than that. We have the all the renewable tools we need - to forget coal, to leave it in the ground forever.

Please join, become aware, become active, care, and act on your caring.

Feel free to visit our web site at ecoshock.org. Download our programs and send them far and wide.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for participating in Radio Ecoshock.

CORRUPTION OR TRUE ENERGY?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:35:16 PDT

In this week's show, we hear about another huge rain disaster in Pakistan, Dengue fever panic, and how that tropical disease is coming to America, thanks to climate change. I've included a few survival tips for you.

Then a full 45 minute speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the long-time "green Kennedy" and former host of the "Ring of Fire" show on the Air America network. Whether he's talking the evils of coal, or the stranglehold of corporate media on our news, Kennedy pulls no punches. It's a raw speech, delivered at the Commonwealth Club of California last June. I thought you should hear it.

"EXTREME PRECIPITATION EVENTS" - OR CALL IT RECORD-BREAKING RAIN

The team of hurricanes and tropical storms working up the East Coast set a bunch of records.

Binghamton New York had an extreme rainfall event higher than ever recorded. The whole Susquehanna River flooded all the way down through Pennsylvania into Maryland. Spring floods? Sure we expect that. Now we have fall floods?

A couple of weeks ago, it was wet, wet, wet all around the D.C. area. As the Chief Meterorologist for the Capital Weather gang reported, the rain in the first and second week of September was just off the charts.

How about September 8th, at Fort Belvoir, the Army base in Fairfax County, Virginia. The National Weather Service reported 7 inches of rain in 3 hours, quote "off the charts above a 1000-year rainfall."

There was a one in 50 to 100 year rainfall near Elliott City, Maryland. 5.47 inches in 3 hours near Franconia in Virginia - a once in 500 years rainfall event. The whole DC Baltimore metro area rainfall hit levels that might be expected every 10 to 25 years.

Joe Romm at the Climate Progress blog reminds us of Nashville's "Katrina" - the one in 1000 year crazy flooding there last year. And Coastal North Caronlina experienced a second one in 500 year
rainfall, two in just the last 11 years!

Don't forget that deadly flood that hit Queensland Australia in January 2011 - after a long, long drought. People, cars, and buildings were washed away. The barely reported floods in China this year. And record flooding in Rio de Jainero last year. I've already mentioned one fifth of Pakistan went under water in 2010 flooding.

These are called "extreme precipitation events". We need a better popular name. How about "drowners"?

We have changed the atmosphere. Globally warmer air now holds 4% more water vapor. That doesn't sound like much, until it falls on your head and home.

Likely it's a similar amount to the entire contents of the Mediterranean Sea being added to the atmosphere. That's not a scientific statement, just a wild example from me, trying to wrap my head around what 4 percent more water in the air means. And it will keep going up, as the atmosphere warms. Maybe it won't be rising seas that drown civilization first - it could be rain falling from the sky.

If the local weather is cold enough, the extreme moisture falls as snow. Not that anybody on the East Coast and Washington would remember last winter's unusually heavy dump. Only the idiots who deny climate science thought it was a sure sign of "global cooling".

We'll hear the truth from someone living it in Pakistan.

But first, a little blast from the past, as Radio Ecoshock reaches back to a program called "The Unknown Climate" on April 9th, 2010 warning listeners about "global wetting" - the new hard rains predicted by science. In fact, as you'll hear, we asked American climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh about extreme precipitation way back in 2007.

From the 2007 Radio Ecoshock show "Hard Rain Gonna Fall":

Alex Smith: "And in 2005, your team released one of the most detailed climate predictions for North America. Can you tell us about that?"

Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh: "We found that elevated greenhouse gas concentrations substantially increase the frequency of extreme precipitation events, and also the contribution of those events to the total annual precipitation.

So, not only do the heaviest events become more frequent, as greenhouse gas concentrations rise, but they also represent a larger fraction of the total precipitation that comes during the year."

Maybe you saw Dr. Diffenbaugh on Al Gore's "24 Hours of Reality" broadcast last week. If you missed that, just go to climaterealityproject.org.

Now that many Americans have been washed out, and a few drowned, by extreme rainfall - it's a good time to understand this under-reported story coming out of Pakistan. And yes, there is plenty to learn about what can happen here or anywhere.

You remember the TV footage from 2010, when about one fifth of Pakistan simply went underwater, and stayed that way for over a month? Over 2,000 people died. About 20 million of the poorest people on Earth were left homeless. Aid was difficult and slow. The country has not really recovered even yet.

There are still an estimated 800,000 people homeless from that flood.

Now it is happening again. Monsoon rains, pumped up by climate change, have flooded the Southern part of the country, the Sindh area, next door to India's Punjab.

I didn't really hear about this in the mainstream media. It broke into an email discussion I was having with a Radio Ecoshock listener in Karachi, the port city at the very south of Pakistan. Thanks to the magic of podcast and download, we have listeners all over the world.

FROM MANGROVES TO THE DELUGE

Eco-activist Khalid Hasan wrote me about a new documentary, the first green documentary released in Pakistan. It is called "Murder of Mystic", and shows another disaster: the fast disappearing Mangroves.

As in most places of the world, the weathly people, and the top Middle Class, want to build new houses on oceanfront. So they chop down the Mangrove "swamps" to create a clear view and maybe some beach front.

The land grabbers in Pakistan just hack down these low-lying trees of many roots, which are the spawning grounds of loads of marine life, including the fish supporting some of Pakistan's poorest people.

Mangroves also deflect the first signs of rising seas, because they buffer the coast. They help hold the coastline intact during storm surges.

A mangrove forest does a much better job protecting the shore than somebody's lawn and palatial home. The irony is: millionaires, (who produce so much more carbon emissions than the rest of us), will lose all that valuable oceanfront first, as the sea rises.

In the film "Murder of Mystic" by Outfield Productions, we also learn that Mangroves are very tough to replace. After the real estate moguls hack it down, along come well-meaning environment groups to "replace" them. There was even a contest in the Sindh area of Pakistan, and nearby India, to replant the most number of Mangroves, for the Guinness Book of World Records.

Few of those plantings survived. Mangroves take years to establish themselves, and Nature is complex. Mangrove forests cannot be easily "replaced". The best way is to save what exists. But that kind of anti-real estate activism can be dangerous in Pakistan. We need to keep a careful eye on the
safety of those who speak out.

Find a few brief clips from the film "Murder of Mystic" on You tube.

A HARD RAIN'S GONNA FALL

While Khalid and I discussed this, he wrote with amazing news: the streets of Karachi were flooding as never before! Sure, it is common for some flooding during Monsoon Season. But this was something else.

The whole Southern state of Sindh was just coming off a punishing twelve month drought. The Monsoons were hoped for as a relief.

Torrential rains started in August, and got worse in September. On September 14th rains beyond belief descended.

Hundreds drowned. At least two million people are homeless in Sindh and Baluchistan provinces. The United Nations is again appealing for aid, even as 800,000 people remain homeless from last year's floods.

Karachi is Pakistan's largest city, with somewhere around 25 million people in the greater metropolitan area. It was more or less shut-down by flooding. Schools and government buildings closed, along with the shops. The lights went out in many places. Transit stopped.

Then the refugees from the drowned rural areas came in a human flood toward the city.

Find the latest news at www.dawn.com

IT IS CLIMATE CHANGE, SCIENTISTS SAY

Pakistan's greatest weather and climate scientists have no doubt this latest extreme flooding is another result of climate change.

We find this quote from an article September 18th, by M. Waqar Bhatti.

"'Rains in Sindh are the highest ever recorded monsoon rains during the four weeks’ period. Sindh this year received 270 percent and 1,170 percent above-normal monsoon rains, respectively in August and September,' he said, adding that in just four weeks, the otherwise dry, arid region received rainfall which was close to what it got normally in five years.

'Though sometimes it is difficult to relate extreme weather events to climate change, if we look at the frequency and the trend of the extreme weather events happening in Pakistan during the last two decades, it is easy to find its connection with climate change,' said Dr Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, Adviser Climate Affairs and Vice-President of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), Asia Region, on Thursday."

DENGUE FEVER AND YOU

And now the kicker, which warns everyone of the many nasty side-effects of climate change. Dengue Fever has hit the flood victims of Pakistan.

You may not know about Dengue Fever. This formerly tropical disease is hovering around the Southern United States. There have been 12 cases this year in Florida and a few more in Texas. The Bahamas has an outbreak of Dengue Fever right now.

If you need a dose of celebrity news, singer Rihanna's father was just hospitalized with Dengue Fever, picked up at Rihanna's home in Barbados.

On September 15th, the Los Angeles Times reported the tropical mosquito that can carry Dengue Fever, (as well as West Nile Virus and Yellow Fever), - was found in the San Garbriel Valley, right near Los Angeles, California.

You might want to take a minute to learn to recognize this bug. The scientific name is "Aedes albopictus". Most people call it the "Asian Tiger Mosquito". It's a "Tiger" because the more you swat it, the more it attacks. And this one bites in the middle of the day, not in the early morning or evening as most Northern mosquitos do.

Those are two of the signs: aggressive, and bites in the daytime.

This insect is easy to identify. It is a smaller mosquito, but the legs and body are black with white patches or stripes. If you see little white markings on the legs of a mosquito, you've found it.

In the recent Pakistan floods, in Karachi and all around, extending even to Lahore, there is panic now that Dengue Fever has set in. Trying to cut down the mosquitos, the government has ordered all public fountains and swimming pools to be emptied. But with flood waters all around, it's a hopeless task.

That's a disease you'll want to learn about, as our climate heats up.

Dengue fever has been called "bone-break" fever. It hits very hard. People feel like they are dying.

So they flock toward medical help, toward the hospitals.

Here is a short news clip from Al Jezeera September 15th, on the Dengue panic in Pakistan.

[news clip][hundreds flooding a Lahore hospital, fearing they have Dengue fever. The rumor in the country was that thousands were dying from it. Only 17 out of over a hundred patients tested had it.

The hospital was overloaded, and perhaps could not handle other injuries....]

Part of the point is most victims do NOT die of Dengue fever. Although you can die, most people survive, after a violent illness. Keeping hydrated, lowering the temperature with Apirin or Tylenol, that is the treatment.

Remember, antibiotics do not work on a virus, only on diseases caused by bacteria.

We can expect a similar panic if Dengue fever breaks out for real in North America or Southern Europe, where people are fearful of this unknown tropical disease.

If there are mosquitos in the hospital itself, as happens in some less developed countries, then those flocking to hospitals may be at greater risk.

IT ONLY TRAVELS THROUGH MOSQUITOS - DOESN'T PASS DIRECTLY THROUGH PEOPLE

Dengue fever is transfered by mosquito bites, and cannot otherwise pass from person to person.

Close the windows, or put up screens, and you are safe to treat your loved one.

Learn to recognize the mosquito and the disease. Avoid panic.

The real solution, is to limit the amount of climate change we cause. Maybe we can prevent tropical diseases from arriving. That is our goal at Radio Ecoshock - to limit the climate crisis.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. - BLOCKBUSTER SPEECH

Did you know your body is already toxic with mercury from coal plants? why doesn't the media tell you the truth about climate change? Get ready for a blockbuster speech from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., courtesy of the Climate One project at the Commonwealth Club of California.

Find more at commonwealthclub.org.

The Commonwealth Club of California invites special guests and let's them speak their minds. Check out their Climate One series, it's excellent. In this talk from June 16, 2011, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulls no punches about the dirty coal industry, and the outright failure of corporate media to inform the public about the dangers of climate change.

But he does have a vision to get us into a sustainable future.

Here are just a few quick quotes from the speech (which is packed full of notable quotes):

"Coal claims to be cheap, but actually it's probably the most catastrophically expensive way to boil a pot of water that has ever been devised."

He describes his 6 week jury trial in West Virginia on mountain top removal mining. He won "the biggest judgement in the history of the state." Of course that's in Appeal now.

Just one of those costs: many roads in West Virginia have 22 inches of asphalt - the taxpayers have to build super roads to support all the heavy coal trucks, which weigh 90,000 pounds.

COAL POISONS FRESHWATER FISH IN AMERICA - and ALL THE PEOPLE TOO!

RFK Jr.: "Last year the National Academy of Sciences said that - a ten year study that they completed showed that every single fresh water fish in America now has dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh.

That mercury is coming from coal-burning power plants.

One out of every six American women now have so much mercury in her womb, from eating those fish, and from other vectors, that her children are at a grim risk for a grim inventory of diseases - autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, and kidney disease.

I have so much mercury in my body, I got my levels tested recently. I fish a lot, I eat the fish. My levels are ten times what EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency] considers safe.

I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is a national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children with cognitive impairment, with permanent brain injury.

Today, according to the Center for Disease Control, there are 647,000 children born into this country every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother's womb.

That a cost on our country, that they don't tell you about when they say 'Oh, it's just 11 cents a kilowatt hour.'"

MOUNTAIN TOP REMOVAL MINING

RFK Jr.: "They've flattened an area of Appalachia larger than the state of Delaware.

If you filled twenty five feet of a Hudson River stream, we would put you in jail. If you blew up a mountain in the Sierras, or in Utah, or in Colorado, or the Berkshires, or in Appalachia, you would go to jail, or you'd be put in some place for the criminally insane.

But in Appalachia, they are able to cut down five hundred mountains, and it's all illegal.

They are able to bury not 25 feet of stream, but 2500 miles of rivers and streams. And they do it by subverting Democracy... and by hiding what they're doing from the public."

There's much more on coal.

OTHER COUNTRIES GOING AHEAD WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY

R.F. Kennedy Jr. takes us on a tour of other countries who are developing sustainable energy rapidly.

They will leave America behind, he thinks, since once these plants are built, there is no need to buy dangerous and poisonous energy, like coal and oil.

Fossil fuels, he argues, only continue in America because of the huge subsidies still given to the coal and oil industry (and gas as well). That keeps going, because RFK says fossil fuels, along with the nuclear industry (he calls all these old fuel corporations "the incumbents") - have openly bought off both the Congress and the Senate. Corruption is keeping America polluted and backward, Kennedy tells his audience at the Commonwealth Club of California.

Otherwise, the U.S. would invest in a new energy grid, and renewables on a massive scale. Kennedy outlines how this could be done, even in very tough economic times. Instead of wasting trillions on foreign wars, build a new green energy system at home - and create millions of jobs.

Even though major investors want to build wind farms in North Dakota, there is no efficient way to get that power to the Mid-West (where it could replace coal), Kennedy says. That is just one reason a new national power grid is needed.

The new grid could also avoid the most expensive part of power, supply during peak demand periods.

A smart grid could cycle off millions of hot water heaters, for just 15 minutes, and save building a peak demand coal plant, for example. It would also democratize power development, since even you and I could mount solar panels and sell the excess electricity into the grid.

Kennedy is an investor and a principal at one of America's biggest green investment companies, Vantage Point Capital Parners.

Among other things, they are promoting a big solar thermal plant in California, through investments in a company called Brightsource Energy.

However, I have since read in the news that the solar thermal idea is being dropped, because new photovoltaic cells are coming in much cheaper now (especially from China). So the project may become a solar panel farm. I'm not sure where it stands.

Kennedy also mentions an online service called "Cha Cha" which lets mobile phone users dial just those letters, ask any question, and get an answer within one minute.

He thinks this is an example of how information has become rapidly free and democratized. He says energy will go the same way, being virtually "free forever" from the Sun, wind and geothermal - instead of making wealthy oligarchs who pervert our politics and our media.

I'm not going to try and cover the rest of the speech, which is loaded with a combination of bitterness and hope, in my opinion.

Kennedy is very critical of current politicians, saying they have been bought off, that Democracy is on it's last legs, especially after the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to pour millions into politics. That was the "Citizens United" case. "...corporate wealth is now flooding into the political
process, and is going to dictate the direction of this country..." Kennedy says.

THE CHALLENGE OF PROGRESSIVE RADIO

From a radio perspective, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was co-host on a popular show called "Ring of Fire" on the lefty Air America network. He says that network went broke not because they couldn't draw an audience (their ratings were good, even in the Republican strong-hold of San Diego for example) - but because the network could not get any major corporations to advertise.

Air America was more or less boycotted by big companies, leaving the lowest type of advertising as the only option. This reminds me of Betsy Rosenberg, the former host of "Ecotalk" having to hawk "green" kitty litter, trying to save one of America's few environment radio shows.

It gets worse.

Kennedy notes that Canada has a law prohibiting lying on television news. He says that is why there is no Fox News in Canada (and why Canada did not join in the Iraq war).

BIG PHARMA CONTROLS YOUR NEWS

Kennedy: "The pharmaceutical industry has under its control all the news organizations. Seventy percent of advertising on network news now comes from pharmaceutical companies.

Do you think that they are going to support something that damages their interests?

The rest of advertising is coming from the automobile industry and the oil industry."

My comment: funny, I have noticed all those pills for ills I never suspected I had. And the big trucks with even bigger motors. That's why I seldom watch network propaganda, - I mean "news".

LET US ENTERTAIN YOU (while the world goes to Hell)

RFK: "They are now serving their shareholders' interests. They do that not by telling us the issues that we need to understand to make rational decisions in a Democracy, but rather by entertaining us.

By appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian part of our brains for sex and celebrity gossip. So we know a lot about Charlie Sheen. And we know a lot about Brittany Spears gradual emotional decline.

But we know very little about what's happening in Appalachia, or about global warming, or about the things we need to know.

We're the best entertained, least informed, people on the face of the Earth.

We cannot keep our international leadership, or our Democracy, if we don't have an informed public that is capable of recognizing all the milestones of tyranny, and capable of telling the truth from fiction."

That is just part of this speech from Robert F. Kennedy Junior, at the Commonwealth Club. My thanks to their Climate One project for permission to rebroadcast it. Find a longer version, with audience questions, at their site, by clicking on the "Play Now" button under "Related Podcasts".

Please note that just because I run a speech, that doesn't mean I agree with everything in it. Our guests and presenters speak for themselves. Still, I found it refreshing to hear a member of the wealthy class speak so candidly about the corruption and killing of the Earth.

Over and out, from me, Alex Smith.

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Fighting Fossil Goo

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:19:37 PDT

Radio Stations: includes brief clips from song "Beds Are Burning" by Midnight Oil.

To get the full blog for this show, check http://www.ecoshock.info on Thursday.

This program features environmental activists and action.

We begin with iconic anti-globalist author Naomi Klein, interviewed by Daphne Wysham from Earthbeat Radio. Naomi was outside the White House, September 2nd, on the Indigenous Peoples day of protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline proposed to carry dirty Tar Sands oil to refineries in Texas.

Klein outlines the long-standing plot by the Canadian government and the Tar Sands oil companies to export oil to Europe. The Europeans are discussing whether this will be allowed.

But Americans are being sold on the project as boosting "energy independence" and "security" as though the Tar Sands are good for everyone. People are not being told the heavy oil sands product will be turned into diesel fuel to be sold to Europe (with Italy a major buyer) and to South America. It has nothing to do with replacing oil from more dangerous sources in the Middle East.

You must hear the analysis put forward by Naomi Klein.

Then I interview Tzeporah Berman, one of the more famous environmentalists produced by North America. She rose to international attention as a primary spokeswoman at Clayoquot Sound, trying to prevent clear cutting of that ancient temperate rainforest. Over 700 Canadians were arrested at Clayoquot.

Berman was hit with 857 counts of assisting in criminal action. Her lawyer argued her rights to free speech, and won.

After a key position in the environmental group Forest Ethics, and a long battle to help save the Great Bear Rainforest, Tzeporah Berman is now the co-director of the Climate and Energy Campaign for Greenpeace International.

After our in-depth interview, on how and why someone becomes an activist - I play you a clip recorded at the launch in Vancouver of her new book "This Crazy Time". On stage, Berman was questioned by the editor of the online magazine "The Tyee" - David Beers.

You hear about the new campaigns Greenpeace is developing. For example, Volkswagen, through a business lobby in Europe, is stalling on new fuel efficiency regulations. Using a parody of their successful advertising video, Greenpeace calls on VW to come back from the Dark Side.

There is also a campaign on Facebook against.... Facebook. Unlike Microsoft, which just opened a new server farm in Ireland powered by wind, Facebook uses tremendous amounts of coal-powered electricity. It's all in the Greenpeace report "Dirty Data" which is available free online.

We learn that the electricity required to keep one personal Avatar going is equal to the power consumed by the average family in Brazil. Even this blog is creating climate emissions, no doubt.

Following that book launch clip, we go back to Daphne Wysham and the Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, Tom Goldtooth - speaking outside the White House. He asks President Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, and to stop the poisoning of the land and its people.

At the end, there are more passionate please from aboriginal speakers, including those Cree people who live right next door to the Tar Sands. Many of them have cancer at a young age. It's a sad story that needs to be told, before this fossil madness goes further.

Again, my thanks to Daphne Wysham, the long-time host of Earthbeat Radio, for this special contribution. She never gives up on the cause.

I'll write more in my blog tomorrow, at ecoshock.info. Meanwhile, those radio stations who receive Radio Ecoshock by podcast will get this feed. We are up to 41 stations now - thanks to many long-time listeners who have recommended us to local non-profit radio stations.

Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock.

Growing Through The Storm

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:20:18 PDT

What can we learn from the storms and fires? Will gardening still be possible if the climate is disrupted? Where will fertilizer come from after Peak Oil?

In this Fall 2011 Kick-off show, we have three interviews.

LEARNING FROM HURRICANE IRENE

"Peak Oil Shrink" psychologist Kathy McMahon starts out. Watching the TV reports, and being kind of a "prepper" - Kathy got caught in Hurricane Irene in Vermont.

As the roads washed out, making a strange journey home, Kathy learned to watch what is developing in the actual emergency around you, rather than going by TV forecasts. What wasn't predicted: the real problem in New England was not high hurricane winds, but the extreme rainfall event.

You've heard Vermont was very hard hit. Not just the mountain roads, but even parts of the Interstate system were flooded out, along with bridges. The Interstate is supposed to be built for the "100 year flood". I guess we just had that.

Kathy has a lot more to tell us about our psychology in an emergency, how we handle ourselves in stressful times. I think this is a really useful interview.

GROWING YOUR FOOD ON A CITY LOT

Jules Dervaes and his family started growing food on their standard city lot (1/10th of an acre) in Pasadena, California - because they needed the food. That was about 10 years ago.

Now they produce record "crops" from their home garden, over 7 tons of produce in 2010. They did it even with the usual asphalt driveway, and even a bunch of cement in the back yard.

You will hear how container gardening can be mixed with in-ground to find just the right conditions for each plant. How to save water and weeding by the way you plant. Some tips on keeping the garden alive during high heat waves. That is surely necessary knowledge as global warming develops.

In fact, this year of 2011 was a real challenge for Jules and his three adult children. There was a long period of heat and poor growing conditions in California, and even experienced gardeners are struggling. The Dervaes family will still feed itself handsomely, but they may not have the extra income they hoped for selling the extras to organic restaurants. Nature is always teaching us how to adapt.

Jules has a wealth of knowledge, which the family freely shares on their various web sites.

Start out with their main page at: urbanhomestead.org

Read the family daily blog at: littlehomesteadinthecity.org

The Dervaes family also runs a store at: urbanhomesteadsupply.com

Or find people in your area through the social network at:
freedomgardens.org

And finally, for those who want to talk about raising chickens, bees, or larger animals in the city, try: barnyardsandbackyards.org

Lots to chew on there! Everybody should hear this interview with Jules, to know your prospects for feeding yourself or family, should the need arise. Self-sufficiency is coming to the city.

THE END OF GROWTH

Richard Heinberg is one of our favorite guests. He's the Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, and author of so many seminal books. Find his web site here.

Richard is also featured on a news site I check daily, the really helpful Energy Bulletin. Bookmark that.

I really "grokked" Peak Oil by reading Heinberg's book "The Party's Over." He made the case that our energy supplies are limited, and what that means for society.

We last talked to Richard on Radio Ecoshock about his book "Blackout". That one is kind of a sleeper, I think. Not that it puts you to sleep! Not at all.

The book is mostly about coal. You have been told over and over we have enough coal to last a thousand years, or at least 250 years. Now they are saying 80 years, and Heinberg says we'll feel the coal pinch much sooner than that.

The real kicker in "Blackout" (and the reason for the title) - there is no other mass power option waiting, to provide electricity to the world. Unless we can get a solar and wind revolution going now - civilization could "blackout", perhaps in 40 or 50 years. Lights out?

In his new book "The End of Growth, Adapting to Our New Economic Reality" (which follows his previous "Peak Everything") - Richard Heinberg looks at all the lies our politicians and economists tell us: "we'll get back to growing jobs and the economy any day now..."

No, this "recession" is not a temporary blip. The whole model of endless growth was a Ponzi scheme from the start. It is bound to fall into bankruptcy, unless we provide some new models for living.

Richard did a lot of radio interviews about the book. I tried to pick up on three things the others did not cover, that should interest you.

First: it turns out a vital nutrient for all agriculture is also very limited: phosphorus. We minded out half of central Florida to get it. And stripped the South Pacific Island of Nauru until it looked like a moonscape. Now we are getting phosphates from North Africa (what could go wrong there?!)

Heinberg explains how peak phosphates could prevent the world from feeding our current billions, and lead to social unrest.

One solution is self-sufficiency, developed in a network of people who care about one another (also known as "community".) The trouble is, we are just recovering from a pattern of corporate job-moving. A huge number of North Americans have moved around, some every few years, as part of their jobs. That breaks up community.

The extended family has also suffered, for reasons you know well.

People in cities and small towns are now looking to rebuild community, outside the former institutions like the family (or even the church). The Transition Movement is certainly part of that.

In his book "The End of Growth" Richard Heinberg also gives some good solutions, including the "Common Security Clubs" (which are now renamed as "Resilience Circles". Google either of those to find out more. They are frameworks to help one another in difficult times.

In the interview Heinberg gives us a lot of other clues and tools about what we need to do, to survive better in climate disruption, energy decline, and social upheaval.

Three interviews this week - and a lot more to come! My inbox is already filling with interview requests. As usual, I'm also out looking for new things you'll want to hear.

Radio Ecoshock is now broadcast on 41 stations (we just added another college station from Canada this week, CKUW 95.9fm at the University of Winnipeg. We'll be continuing on WPFW "Jazz and Justice" radio in Washington D.C., a long-time 50,000 Watt station I want to support.

Please check out our list of radio stations here, and turn your friends, co-workers, even your family (if you dare) to Radio Ecoshock on a local station. If we are not in your area, and you like this program, I need your help to write or call the nearest community or college station to get deep green radio on the air.

Thanks to all our listeners.

And a special "hello" to Khalid and friends in Pakistan. I will cover the Mangrove problem there. We also have a special guest from India coming up. If we learn anything from the environment this year, it is: the whole world matters.

Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock
http://www.ecoshock.org