Re: [Biofuel] Climate Change Is Happening Now - A Carbon Price Must Follow
And more. They just keep getting hammered: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/12/03-5 On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 8:52 PM, Keith Addison ke...@journeytoforever.orgwrote: Climate Experts To World: Act Boldly Now, or Pay Severely Later There is still time to avert worst impacts of climate change, but that means serious action and less talk Published on Friday, November 30, 2012 by Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/**headline/2012/11/30-3http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/11/30-3 It's Not Just That Corporations Are Ignoring Global Warming, They Are Profiting From It Friday, 30 November 2012 http://www.truth-out.org/**buzzflash/commentary/item/** 17666-it-s-not-just-that-**corporations-are-ignoring-** global-warming-they-are-**profiting-from-ithttp://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17666-it-s-not-just-that-corporations-are-ignoring-global-warming-they-are-profiting-from-it Doha climate talks deadlocked December 3 2012 http://www.iol.co.za/news/**world/doha-climate-talks-** deadlocked-1.1434990http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/doha-climate-talks-deadlocked-1.1434990 --0-- http://www.commondreams.org/**view/2012/11/30http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/30 Published on Friday, November 30, 2012 by The Guardian/UK Climate Change Is Happening Now - A Carbon Price Must Follow The extreme weather events of 2012 are what we have been warning of for 25 years, but the answer is plain to see by James Hansen Will our short attention span be the end of us? Just a month after the second storm of a century in two years, the media moves on to the latest scandal with barely a retrospective glance at the implications of the extreme climate anomalies we have seen. Hurricane Sandy was not just a storm. It was a stark illustration of the power that climate change can deliver - today - to our doorsteps. Ask the homeowners along the New Jersey and New York shores still homeless. Ask the local governments struggling weeks later to turn on power to their cold, darkened towns and cities. Ask the entire north-east coast, reeling from a catastrophe whose cost is estimated at $50bn and rising. (I am not brave enough to ask those who've lost husbands or wives, children or grandparents). I bring up these facts sadly, as one who has urged us to heed the scientific evidence on climate change for the past 25 years. The science is clear: climate change is here, now. Superstorm Sandy is not the first storm, and certainly won't be the last. Still, it is hard for us as individual human beings to connect the dots. That's where observation, data and scientific analysis help us see. No credible scientist disputes that we have warmed our climate by almost 1.5C over land areas in the past century, most of that in the past 30 years. As my colleagues and I demonstrated in a peer-reviewed study published this summer, climate extremes are already occurring much more frequently in the world we have warmed through our reliance on fossil fuels. Our analysis showed that extreme summer heat anomalies used to be infrequent: covering only 0.1-0.2% of the globe in any given summer during the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. During the past decade, as the average global temperature rose, such extremes have covered 10% of the land. Extreme temperatures deliver more than heat. The water cycle is especially sensitive to rising temperatures. Increased heat speeds up evaporation, causing more extreme droughts, like the $5bn (and counting) drought in Texas and Oklahoma. It is linked to an expanding wildfire season and an increase by several fold in the frequency of large fires in the American west. The heat also leads to more extreme sea surface temperatures - a key culprit behind Sandy's devastating force. The latent heat in atmospheric water vapor is the fuel that powers tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. Stepping up evaporation with warmer temperatures is like stepping on the gas: More energy-rich vapor condenses into water drops, releasing more latent heat as it does so, causing more powerful storms, increased rainfall and more extreme flooding. This is not a matter of belief. This is high-school science class. The chances of getting a late October hurricane in New York without the help of global warming are extremely small. In that sense, you can blame Sandy on global warming. Sandy was the strongest recorded storm, measured by barometric pressure, to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, eclipsing the hurricane of 1938. But this fixation on determining the blame for a particular storm, or disputing the causal link between climate change and this or that storm, is misguided. A better path forward means listening to the growing chorus - Sandy, extreme droughts and wildfires, intense rainstorms, record-breaking melting of Arctic sea ice - and taking action. Think of it like taking out an insurance policy for the
[Biofuel] Bipartisan Group in US Congress Promotes Drone Killings
NYT Undercounts Drone Deaths in Pakistan By Peter Hart November 30, 2012 http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/11/30/nyt-undercounts-drone-deaths-in-pakistan/ Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You BY SPENCER ACKERMAN 11.26.12 http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/human-robot-kill/ Top Gun meets Terminator: Autonomous US stealth drone completes 1st test launch 30 November, 2012 https://rt.com/usa/news/us-drone-launch-autonomous-986/ Anti-drone protesters knocked off course by broad restraining order Demonstrators who have gathered at New York air base for years say their constitutional right to protest has been compromised after colonel granted strict order of protection Karen McVeigh in New York guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 November 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/28/drone-protesters-escalation-charges/print --0-- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33202.htm Bipartisan Group in US Congress Promotes Drone Killings By Patrick Martin World Socialist Web Site December 02, 2012 Information Clearing House - A large bipartisan group in Congress is promoting the building and use of drones, according to an investigative report published November 25 in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle. The report was made public the same day that the New York Times reported that drone strikes ordered by President Obama have killed more than 2,500 people over the past four years, and that the Obama administration was moving ahead to codify and formalize the procedure for targeting individuals and groups for deadly violence by CIA and Pentagon drone operators. The report by the Center for Responsive Politics and Hearst newspapers examined the flow of campaign contributions from corporations engaged in building and arming drones to Democratic and Republican congressmen and senators. The biggest donors include General Atomics, which makes the Predator, the number one remote killer for the CIA and Pentagon; BAE Systems, which makes the Mantis and Taranis drones; Boeing Co., maker of the hydrogen-fueled Phantom Eye; Honeywell International, which makes the RQ-16 T-Hawk; Lockheed Martin, which makes the RQ-170 Sentinel; and Raytheon Co., maker of the Cobra. More than $8 million in campaign contributions from drone manufacturers and operators has flowed into the coffers of the 60 members of the House Unmanned Systems Caucus. The majority of the House members are from California, Texas, Virginia and New York, including the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard Buck McKeown, a California Republican, and Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who lost a primary election and leaves Congress at the end of the year. The Senate group of drone promoters comprises eight members, including liberal Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and is co-chaired by Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The very existence of what the CRP/Hearst report calls the drone caucus is an indication of the profound degeneration of American democracy. It was not so long ago, in the 1970s, that leading Democrat Henry Jackson became notorious as the senator from Boeing. Now an entire caucus has been formed of promoters of weapons of mass murder. What is next: The napalm caucus? The poison gas caucus? According to the CRP/Hearst report, the principal activity of the drone caucus has been to promote the use of these weapons within the United States, including passage of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, signed into law by President Obama on February 14, which requires the FAA to complete the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the national airspace by September 2015. Drones have become big business for US police agencies, beginning with the federal Department of Homeland Security, which recently signed a $443 million deal with General Atomics to increase its fleet of Predator drones-capable of firing missiles as well as surveillance-from 10 to 24. The FAA projects that 30,000 drones could be flying in US airspace within 20 years, operated by local, state and national police and security agencies, as well as private corporations. The US buildup has sparked a global arms race in drone building and deployment. More than 50 countries operate surveillance drones, and many of these are beginning to fit their drones with weapons. According to a Pentagon study, enemy drones could be a very serious threat to US aircraft carriers and other large ships, and to supply convoys and other combat support assets which have not had to deal with an airborne threat in generations. While the US has 8,000 drones deployed and plans to spend $37 billion on drone warfare over the next eight years, a recent report by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board noted with considerable worry, For UAVs, the US currently has limited dedicated defensive capabilities other than fighters or surface-to-air missiles, giving the
[Biofuel] Meet the Climate Denial Machine
Rich states' fossil-fuel breaks top climate aid Bloomberg Rich countries spend five times more on fossil-fuel subsidies than on aid to help developing nations cut their emissions and protect against the effects of climate change, the campaign group Oil Change International said. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/print/nb20121204n1.html --0-- http://truth-out.org/news/item/13083-meet-the-climate-denial-machine Meet the Climate Denial Machine Saturday, 01 December 2012 10:12 By Jill Fitzsimmons, Media Matters | News Analysis Despite the overwhelming consensus among climate experts that human activity is contributing to rising global temperatures, 66 percent of Americans incorrectly believe there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening. The conservative media has fueled this confusion by distorting scientific research, hyping faux-scandals, and giving voice to groups funded by industries that have a financial interest in blocking action on climate change. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets have shied away from the controversy over climate change and have failed to press U.S. policymakers on how they will address this global threat. When climate change is discussed, mainstream outlets sometimes strive for a false balance that elevates marginal voices and enables them to sow doubt about the science even in the face of mounting evidence. Here, Media Matters looks at how conservative media outlets give industry-funded experts a platform, creating a polarized misunderstanding of climate science. Heartland Institute And James Taylor The Economist has called the libertarian Heartland Institute the world's most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change. Every year, Heartland hosts an International Conference on Climate Change, bringing together a small group of contrarians (mostly non-scientists) who deny that manmade climate change is a serious problem. To promote its most recent conference, Heartland launched a short-lived billboard campaign associating acceptance of climate science with murderers, tyrants, and madmen including Ted Kaczynski, Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Facing backlash from corporate donors and even some of its own staff, Heartland removed the billboard, but refused to apologize for the experiment. Heartland does not disclose its donors, but internal documents obtained in February reveal that Heartland received $25,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2011 and anticipated $200,000 in additional funding in 2012. Charles Koch is CEO and co-owner of Koch Industries, a corporation with major oil interests. Along with his brother David Koch, he has donated millions to groups that spread climate misinformation. Heartland also receives funding from some corporations with a financial interest in confusing the public on climate science. ExxonMobil contributed over $600,000 to Heartland between 1998 and 2006, but has since pledged to stop funding groups that cast doubt on climate change. Despite their industry ties and lack of scientific expertise, Heartland Institute fellows are often given a media platform to promote their marginal views on climate change. Most visible is James Taylor, a lawyer with no climate science background who heads Heartland's environmental initiative. Taylor dismisses alarmist propaganda that global warming is a human-caused problem that needs to be addressed, and suggests that taking action to reduce emissions could cause a return to the the Little Ice Age and the Black Death. But that hasn't stopped Forbes from publishing his weekly column, which he uses to spout climate misinformation and accuse scientists of doctoring temperature data to fabricate a warming trend. It also hasn't stopped Fox News from promoting his misinformation. Competitive Enterprise Institute The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute has sponsored paid advertisements, op-eds, and blogs that misrepresent scientific research to downplay the threat of climate change. CEI's director of energy and global warming policy Myron Ebell shed light on their motivation to muddle the science on the PBS Frontline special Climate of Doubt: We felt that if you concede the science is settled and that there's a consensus, you cannot -- the moral high ground has been ceded to the alarmists. By dismissing the scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to climate change as phony, CEI can justify standing in the way of government action to reduce emissions. To make its case, CEI dispatches its experts -- many of which have no scientific background -- to do media appearances and op-ed pieces casting doubt on climate science and opposing any potential solutions. Ebell has been cited by Fox News, Forbes and even CNN as an energy and environmental policy expert. Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis Jr. has written in Forbes, National Review and the
[Biofuel] Bradley Manning: A Tale Of Liberty Lost In America
Manning Testifies About His Torture; Was It Aimed at Turning Him on Assange? Saturday, 01 December 2012 11:08 By Paul Jay, The Real News Network | Interview and Video http://truth-out.org/news/item/13086-manning-testifies-about-his-torture-was-it-aimed-at-turning-him-on-assange Bradley Manning: Prisoners of Conscience NYT and AP Launch Operation Amnesia By Chris Floyd December 02, 2012 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33192.htm --0-- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33193.htm Bradley Manning: A Tale Of Liberty Lost In America The US does nothing to punish those guilty of war crimes or Wall Street fraud, yet demonises the whistleblower By Glenn Greenwald December 01, 2012 The Guardian -- Over the past two and a half years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed on Thursday, when the 23-year-old US army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks testified at his court martial proceeding about the conditions of his detention. The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures to which he was subjected, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced those conditions as cruel and inhuman. President Obama's state department spokesman, retired air force colonel PJ Crowley, resigned after publicly condemning Manning's treatment. A prison psychologist testified this week that Manning's conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantánamo Bay. Still, hearing the accused whistleblower's description of this abuse in his own words viscerally conveyed its horror. Reporting from the hearing, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington quoted Manning: If I needed toilet paper I would stand to attention and shout: 'Detainee Manning requests toilet paper!' And: I was authorised to have 20 minutes sunshine, in chains, every 24 hours. Early in his detention, Manning recalled, I had pretty much given up. I thought I was going to die in this eight by eight animal cage. The repressive treatment of Bradley Manning is one of the disgraces of Obama's first term, and highlights many of the dynamics shaping his presidency. The president not only defended Manning's treatment but also, as commander-in-chief of the court martial judges, improperly decreed Manning's guilt when he asserted in an interview that he broke the law. Worse, Manning is charged not only with disclosing classified information, but also the capital offence of aiding the enemy, for which the death penalty can be imposed (military prosecutors are requesting only life in prison). The government's radical theory is that, although Manning had no intent to do so, the leaked information could have helped al-Qaida, a theory that essentially equates any disclosure of classified information - by any whistleblower, or a newspaper - with treason. Whatever one thinks of Manning's alleged acts, he appears the classic whistleblower. This information could have been sold for substantial sums to a foreign government or a terror group. Instead he apparently knowingly risked his liberty to show them to the world because - he said when he believed he was speaking in private - he wanted to trigger worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. Compare this aggressive prosecution of Manning to the Obama administration's vigorous efforts to shield Bush-era war crimes and massive Wall Street fraud from all forms of legal accountability. Not a single perpetrator of those genuine crimes has faced court under Obama, a comparison that reflects the priorities and values of US justice. Then there's the behaviour of Obama's loyalists. Ever since I first reported the conditions of Manning's detention in December 2010, many of them not only cheered that abuse but grotesquely ridiculed concerns about it. Joy-Ann Reid, a former Obama press aide and now a contributor on the progressive network MSNBC, spouted sadistic mockery in response to the report: Bradley Manning has no pillow? With that, she echoed one of the most extreme rightwing websites, RedState, which identically mocked the report: Give Bradley Manning his pillow and blankie back. As usual, the US establishment journalists have enabled the government every step of the way. Despite holding themselves out as adversarial watchdogs, nothing provokes their animosity more than someone who effectively challenges government actions. Typifying this mentality was a CNN interview on Thursday night with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange conducted by Erin Burnett. It was to focus on newly released documents revealing secret efforts by US officials to pressure financial institutions to block WikiLeaks' funding after the group published classified documents allegedly leaked by Manning, a form of extra-legal punishment that should concern
[Biofuel] Nuke Power's Collapse Gets Ever More Dangerous
http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17667-nuke-power-s-collapse-gets-ever-more-dangerous Saturday, 01 December 2012 14:06 Nuke Power's Collapse Gets Ever More Dangerous HARVEY WASSERMAN FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT In the wake of this fall's election, the disintegration of America's rust bucket reactor fleet is fast approaching critical mass. Unless our No Nukes movement can get the worst of them shut soon, Barack Obama may be very lucky to get through his second term without a major reactor disaster. All 104 licensed US reactors were designed before 1975---a third of a century ago. All but one went on line in the 1980s or earlier. Plunging natural gas prices (due largely to ecologically disastrous fracking) are dumping even fully-amortized US reactors into deep red ink. Wisconsin's Kewaunee will close next year because nobody wants to buy it. A reactor at Clinton, Illinois, may join it. Should gas prices stay low, the trickle of shut-downs will turn into a flood. But more disturbing are the structural problems, made ever-more dangerous by slashed maintenance budgets. * San Onofre Units One and Two, near major earthquake faults on the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, have been shut for more than nine months by core breakdowns in their newly refurbished steam generators. A fix could exceed a half-billion dollars. A bitter public battle now rages over shutting them both. * The containment dome at North Florida's Crystal River was seriously damaged during repair efforts that could take $2 billion to correct. It will probably never reopen. * NRC inspections of Nebraska's Fort Calhoun, damaged during recent flooding, have unearthed a wide range of structural problems that could shut it forever, and that may have been illegally covered-up. As many as three dozen US reactors may be vulnerable to flooding from upstream dams. * Ohio's Davis-Besse has structural containment cracks that should have forced it down years ago and others have been found at South Carolina's V.C. Summer reactor pressure vessel. * Intense public pressure at Vermont Yankee, at two reactors at New York's Indian Point, and at New Jersey's Oyster Creek (damaged in Hurricane Sandy) could bring them all down. Projected completion of a second unit at Watts Bar, Tennessee, where construction began in the 1960s, has been pushed back to April, 2015. If finished at all, building this reactor may span a half-century. Two new reactors under preliminary construction in South Carolina have been plagued by delays and cost overruns. Faulty components and concrete have marred two more under construction at Vogtle, Georgia, where builders may soon ask for a new delay on consideration of proposed federal loan guarantees. This fall's defeat of the very pro-nuclear Mitt Romney is an industry set-back. The return of Harry Reid (D-NV) as Senate Majority Leader means the failed Yucca Mountain waste dump will stay dead. A number of new Congressionals are notably pro-green, in line with Obama's strong rhetorical support. The move toward renewables has been boosted by Germany's shut-down of eight reactors and huge investments in wind, solar and other renewables, which are exceeding financial and ecological expectations. Despite pro-nuke nay-sayers,Germany's energy supply of energy has risen while prices have fallen. The Department of Energy has confirmed that US solar power continues to drop in price. US employment in the solar industry has surged past 118,000, a rise of more than 13% over last year. Despite a wide range of financial problems, including uncertainty over renewal of the Production Tax Credit, the green energy industry continues to expand. Along with marijuana, Colorado has now legalized industrial hemp, opening the door for a major bio-fuel that will have strong agricultural support. At some near-term tipping point, the financial and political clout of the green energy industry will fly past that of atomic power. But at Fukushima, a spent fuel pool crammed with some 1500 hugely radioactive rods still sits atop a deteriorating shell that could collapse with the inevitable upcoming earthquake. As the Earth hangs in the balance, the pool may or may not be emptied this coming year, depending on the dubious technical and financial capabilities of its owners, who are in a deep fiscal crater. Meanwhile, fish irradiated by the huge quantities of Fukushima emissions are being consumed here in the US. Overall, the nuclear renaissance is in shambles. So is an industry now defined by a rust-bucket fleet of decayed reactors in serious decline. Solartopians everywhere can celebrate an election that seemed to show some progress toward saving our beleaguered planet. But our survival still depends on shutting ALL these old reactors before the next Fukushima contaminates us with far more than just radioactive fish.
[Biofuel] Assange to RT: Entire nations intercepted online, key turned to totalitarian rule
http://rt.com/news/assange-internet-control-totalitarian-943/ Assange to RT: Entire nations intercepted online, key turned to totalitarian rule Published: 30 November, 2012 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says all the necessary physical infrastructure for absolute totalitarianism through the internet is ready. He told RT that the question now is whether the turnkey process that already started will go all the way. RT: So you've written this book 'Cypherpunks. Freedom and the Future of the Internet' based on one of the programs that you've made for RT. In it, you say that the internet can enslave us. I don't really get that, because the internet it's a thing, it's a soulless thing. Who are the actual enslavers behind it? Julian Assange: The people who control the interception of the internet and, to some degree also, physically control the big data warehouses and the international fiber-optic lines. We all think of the internet as some kind of Platonic Realm where we can throw out ideas and communications and web pages and books and they exist somewhere out there. Actually, they exist on web servers in New York or Nairobi or Beijing, and information comes to us through satellite connections or through fiber-optic cables. So whoever physically controls this controls the realm of our ideas and communications. And whoever is able to sit on those communications channels, can intercept entire nations, and that's the new game in town, as far as state spying is concerned - intercepting entire nations, not individuals. 'intercepting entire nations, not individuals' RT: This sounds like a futuristic scenario, but you are saying that the future is already here. JA: The US National Security Agency has been doing this for some 20-30 years. But it has now spread to mid-size nations, even Gaddafi's Libya was employing the EAGLE system, which is produced by French company AMESYS, pushed there in 2009, advertised in its international documentation as a nationwide interception system. So what's happened over the last 10 years is the ever-decreasing cost of intercepting each individual now to the degree where it is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon. 'It is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon' RT: And what's the alternative, the sort of utopian alternative that you would put forward? JA: The utopian alternative is to try and gain independence for the internet, for it to sort of declare independence versus the rest of the world. And that's really quite important because if you think what is human civilization, what is it that makes it quintessentially human and civilized, it is our shared knowledge about how the world works, how we deal with each other, how we deal with the environment, which institutions are corrupt, which ones are good, what are the least dumb ways of doing things. And that intellectual knowledge is something that we are all putting on to the internet - and so if we can try and decouple that from the brute nature of states and their cronies, then I think we really have hope for a global civilization. If, on the other hand, the mere security guards, you know, the people who control the guns, are able to take control of our intellectual life, take control of all the ways in which we communicate to each other, then of course you can see how dreadful the outcome will be. Because it won't happen to just one nation, it will happen to every nation at once. It is happening to every nation at once as far as spying is concerned, because now every nation is merging its society with internet infrastructure. RT: And in what way are we, as sort of naïve internet users, if you like (and I exclude you from that, obviously), kind of willingly collaborating with these collectors of personal data? You know, we all have a Facebook account, we all have telephones which can be tracked. JA: Right. People think, well, yeah, I use Facebook, and maybe the FBI if they made a request, could come and get it, and everyone is much more aware of that because of Petraeus. But that's not the problem. The problem is that all the time nearly everything people do on the internet is permanently recorded, every web search. Do you know what you were thinking one year, two days, three months ago? No, you don't know, but Google knows, it remembers. 'Google knows, it remembers' The National Security Agency who intercepts the request if it flowed over the US border, it knows. So by just communicating to our friends, by emailing each other, by updating Facebook profiles, we are informing on our friends. 'by updating Facebook profiles, we are informing on our friends' And friends don't inform on friends. You know, the Stasi had a 10 per cent penetration of East German society, with up to 1 in 10 people being informants at some time in
