Replies to post #180318 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

1 in 5 Americans Admit to Choosing No Religion

It looks like Hell is going to get mighty crowded. According to the Pew Research Center, 19 percent of Americans identify as either atheist, agnostic, or believe in nothing in particular.

Come to the dark side, my idolatrous brothers and sisters. We have cookies and great sex.

The uptick in “the Nones” has been kind of staggering. In 1990, only 6 percent of adults in the United States did not identify with a religion. That number jumped to 15 percent in 2008. It’s conventional wisdom that young people are the godless heathens who are destroying society, but it looks like the picture is more complicated than that. According to USA Today:

Barry Kosmin, co-author of three American Religious Identification Surveys, theorizes why None has become the “default category.” He says, “Young people are resistant to the authority of institutional religion, older people are turned off by the politicization of religion, and people are simply less into theology than ever before.”

So it’s young people, yes. But it’s also older people and a general disinterest over all. Hey Boomers! Stop making God hate us! You just can’t let your kids do anything on their own, can you?

The growth of the Nones could well be mitigated by immigration from religious countries. (Soon we may discover who conservative Republicans hate the most: brown people or atheists.) What is really interesting, though, is the number of people who are brought up in a religious tradition who then leave. This is the primary way the Nones grow, and the number is surprisingly large.

But the chief way the category grows is by “switchers.” A 2009 Pew Forum look at “switching” found more than 10% of American adults became Nones after growing up within a religious group.

I had to do a double-take. Ten percent of American adults leave a religious faith and become Nones. Where were all those adults when I left my faith in high school? They could have been helpful.

But no matter. There is a growing opportunity for children who question the existence of God to get the support they need. For example, the Secular Student Alliance is an organization that has been growing at a staggering speed.

This trend toward the irreligious is a definite win for society at large. Religion is one of the more obvious examples of uncritical thinking in society today. Worse yet, this type of unquestioning acceptance of ancient stories fosters a culture of ignorance that bleeds into other aspects of our lives. Abandoning religion isn’t sufficient to combat all of combat all non-evidence based beliefs we are bombarded with on a regular basis, but it’s a start. If we can abandon a particular irrationality that was previously so important, then surely we can dismiss the ridiculous claims made by anti-vaccination activists and psychics.

I’m especially encouraged by the number of “switchers.” People are not simply accepting the atheism of their parents. They are thinking for themselves, and thinking is something I can have faith in.
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/1-in-5-americans-admit-to-choosing-no-religion.html#ixzz21brYN6fB

[fuagf]

Dr. Matthieu Ricard sounds like he has it down pretty cool .. we've said it many times here, too, that you don't
need good Christian ideas to be a decent chappie, Jesus wasn't the first to espouse similar thoughts to 'put
yourselves into others' shoes .. we know Socrates, for one, had the right idea some few years before ..

[F6]

Destroying the Commons

How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

By Noam Chomsky
Posted: 07/23/2012 9:58 am

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175571/ ].

Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.

That should be a matter of serious immediate concern. What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event. It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist -- not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It was not an easy task. There was no good text available. As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats” -- a comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished.

Blackstone’s edition actually includes two charters. It was entitled The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest. The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognized to be the foundation of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples -- or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.” Churchill was referring specifically to the reaffirmation of the Charter by Parliament in the Petition of Right, imploring King Charles to recognize that the law is sovereign, not the King. Charles agreed briefly, but soon violated his pledge, setting the stage for the murderous Civil War.

After a bitter conflict between King and Parliament, the power of royalty in the person of Charles II was restored. In defeat, Magna Carta was not forgotten. One of the leaders of Parliament, Henry Vane, was beheaded. On the scaffold, he tried to read a speech denouncing the sentence as a violation of Magna Carta, but was drowned out by trumpets to ensure that such scandalous words would not be heard by the cheering crowds. His major crime had been to draft a petition calling the people “the original of all just power” in civil society -- not the King, not even God. That was the position that had been strongly advocated by Roger Williams, the founder of the first free society in what is now the state of Rhode Island. His heretical views influenced Milton and Locke, though Williams went much farther, founding the modern doctrine of separation of church and state, still much contested even in the liberal democracies.

As often is the case, apparent defeat nevertheless carried the struggle for freedom and rights forward. Shortly after Vane’s execution, King Charles granted a Royal Charter to the Rhode Island plantations, declaring that “the form of government is Democratical,” and furthermore that the government could affirm freedom of conscience for Papists, atheists, Jews, Turks -- even Quakers, one of the most feared and brutalized of the many sects that were appearing in those turbulent days. All of this was astonishing in the climate of the times.

A few years later, the Charter of Liberties was enriched by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, formally entitled “an Act for the better securing the liberty of the subject, and for prevention of imprisonment beyond the seas.” The U.S. Constitution, borrowing from English common law, affirms that “the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended” except in case of rebellion or invasion. In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the rights guaranteed by this Act were “[c]onsidered by the Founders [of the American Republic] as the highest safeguard of liberty.” All of these words should resonate today.

The Second Charter and the Commons

The significance of the companion charter, the Charter of the Forest, is no less profound and perhaps even more pertinent today -- as explored in depth by Peter Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating history [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520260007 ] of Magna Carta and its later trajectory. The Charter of the Forest demanded protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population: their fuel, their food, their construction materials, whatever was essential for life. The forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully developed over generations, maintained in common, its riches available to all, and preserved for future generations -- practices found today primarily in traditional societies that are under threat throughout the world.

The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization. The Robin Hood myths capture the essence of its concerns (and it is not too surprising that the popular TV series of the 1950s, “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” was written anonymously [ http://monthlyreview.org/2012/05/01/a-red-robin ] by Hollywood screenwriters blacklisted for leftist convictions). By the seventeenth century, however, this Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.

With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility. In Bolivia, the attempt to privatize water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history. The World Bank has just ruled [ http://www.ips-dc.org/pressroom/world_bank_tribunal_ruling_in_el_salvador_mining_case_undermines_democracy ] that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with a case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.” And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world, some involving extreme violence, as in the Eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cell phones and other uses, and of course ample profits.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived. The prevailing view today is captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential argument [ http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html ] that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,” the famous “tragedy of the commons”: what is not owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.

An international counterpart was the concept of terra nullius, employed to justify the expulsion of indigenous populations in the settler-colonial societies of the Anglosphere, or their “extermination,” as the founding fathers of the American Republic described what they were doing, sometimes with remorse, after the fact. According to this useful doctrine, the Indians had no property rights since they were just wanderers in an untamed wilderness. And the hard-working colonists could create value where there was none by turning that same wilderness to commercial use.

In reality, the colonists knew better and there were elaborate procedures of purchase and ratification by crown and parliament, later annulled by force when the evil creatures resisted extermination. The doctrine is often attributed to John Locke, but that is dubious. As a colonial administrator, he understood what was happening, and there is no basis for the attribution in his writings, as contemporary scholarship has shown convincingly, notably the work of the Australian scholar Paul Corcoran. (It was in Australia, in fact, that the doctrine has been most brutally employed.)

The grim forecasts of the tragedy of the commons are not without challenge. The late Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her work showing the superiority of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins. But the conventional doctrine has force if we accept its unstated premise: that humans are blindly driven by what American workers, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, bitterly called “the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self.”

Like peasants and workers in England before them, American workers denounced this New Spirit, which was being imposed upon them, regarding it as demeaning and destructive, an assault on the very nature of free men and women. And I stress women; among those most active and vocal in condemning the destruction of the rights and dignity of free people by the capitalist industrial system were the “factory girls,” young women from the farms. They, too, were driven into the regime of supervised and controlled wage labor, which was regarded at the time as different from chattel slavery only in that it was temporary. That stand was considered so natural that it became a slogan of the Republican Party, and a banner under which northern workers carried arms during the American Civil War.

Controlling the Desire for Democracy

That was 150 years ago -- in England earlier. Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are devoted to the task: public relations, advertising, marketing generally, all of which add up to a very large component of the Gross Domestic Product. They are dedicated to what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating wants.” In the words of business leaders themselves, the task is to direct people to “the superficial things” of life, like “fashionable consumption.” That way people can be atomized, separated from one another, seeking personal gain alone, diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves and challenge authority.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the “engineering of consent” by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays. He was a respected Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy progressive, much like his contemporary, journalist Walter Lippmann, the most prominent public intellectual of twentieth century America, who praised “the manufacture of consent” as a “new art” in the practice of democracy.

Both recognized that the public must be “put in its place,” marginalized and controlled -- for their own interests of course. They were too “stupid and ignorant” to be allowed to run their own affairs. That task was to be left to the “intelligent minority,” who must be protected from “the trampling and the roar of [the] bewildered herd,” the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” -- the “rascal multitude” as they were termed by their seventeenth century predecessors. The role of the general population was to be “spectators,” not “participants in action,” in a properly functioning democratic society.

And the spectators must not be allowed to see too much. President Obama has set new standards in safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more whistleblowers [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175500/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_in_washington,_fear_the_silence,_not_the_noise/ ] than all previous presidents combined, a real achievement for an administration that came to office promising transparency. WikiLeaks is only the most famous case, with British cooperation.

Among the many topics that are not the business of the bewildered herd is foreign affairs. Anyone who has studied declassified secret documents will have discovered that, to a large extent, their classification was meant to protect public officials from public scrutiny. Domestically, the rabble should not hear the advice given by the courts to major corporations: that they should devote some highly visible efforts to good works, so that an “aroused public” will not discover the enormous benefits provided to them by the nanny state. More generally the U.S. public should not learn that “state policies are overwhelmingly regressive, thus reinforcing and expanding social inequality,” though designed in ways that lead “people to think that the government helps only the undeserving poor, allowing politicians to mobilize and exploit anti-government rhetoric and values even as they continue to funnel support to their better-off constituents” -- I’m quoting [ http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137418/desmond-king/americas-hidden-government ] from the main establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, not from some radical rag.

Over time, as societies became freer and the resort to state violence more constrained, the urge to devise sophisticated methods of control of attitudes and opinion has only grown. It is natural that the immense PR industry should have been created in the most free of societies, the United States and Great Britain. The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as “to direct the thought of most of the world” -- primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.

Its U.S. counterpart, the Committee on Public Information, was formed by Woodrow Wilson to drive a pacifist population to violent hatred of all things German -- with remarkable success. American commercial advertising deeply impressed others. Goebbels admired it and adapted it to Nazi propaganda, all too successfully. The Bolshevik leaders tried as well, but their efforts were clumsy and ineffective.

A primary domestic task has always been “to keep [the public] from our throats,” as essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson described the concerns of political leaders when the threat of democracy was becoming harder to suppress in the mid-nineteenth century. More recently, the activism of the 1960s elicited elite concerns about “excessive democracy,” and calls for measures to impose “more moderation” in democracy.

One particular concern was to introduce better controls over the institutions “responsible for the indoctrination of the young”: the schools, the universities, the churches, which were seen as failing that essential task. I’m quoting reactions from the left-liberal end of the mainstream spectrum, the liberal internationalists who later staffed the Carter administration, and their counterparts in other industrial societies. The right wing was much harsher. One of many manifestations of this urge has been the sharp rise in college tuition, not on economic grounds, as is easily shown. The device does, however, trap and control young people by debt, often for the rest of their lives, thus contributing to more effective indoctrination.

The Three-Fifths People

Pursuing these important topics further, we see that the destruction of the Charter of the Forest, and its obliteration from memory, relates rather closely to the continuing efforts to constrain the promise of the Charter of Liberties. The “New Spirit of the Age” cannot tolerate the pre-capitalist conception of the Forest as the shared endowment of the community at large, cared for communally for its own use and for future generations, protected from privatization, from transfer to the hands of private power for service to wealth, not needs. Inculcating the New Spirit is an essential prerequisite for achieving this end, and for preventing the Charter of Liberties from being misused to enable free citizens to determine their own fate.

Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go and there is often regression. Right now, in fact.

The most famous part of the Charter of Liberties is Article 39, which declares that “no free man” shall be punished in any way, “nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.”

Through many years of struggle, the principle has come to hold more broadly. The U.S. Constitution provides that no “person [shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [and] a speedy and public trial” by peers. The basic principle is “presumption of innocence” -- what legal historians describe as “the seed of contemporary Anglo-American freedom,” referring to Article 39; and with the Nuremberg Tribunal in mind, a “particularly American brand of legalism: punishment only for those who could be proved to be guilty through a fair trial with a panoply of procedural protections” -- even if their guilt for some of the worst crimes in history is not in doubt.

The founders of course did not intend the term “person” to apply to all persons. Native Americans were not persons. Their rights were virtually nil. Women were scarcely persons. Wives were understood to be “covered” under the civil identity of their husbands in much the same way as children were subject to their parents. Blackstone’s principles held that “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” Women are thus the property of their fathers or husbands. These principles remain up to very recent years. Until a Supreme Court decision of 1975 [ http://www.mass.gov/courts/sjc/jury-system-e.html ], women did not even have a legal right to serve on juries. They were not peers. Just two weeks ago, Republican opposition blocked [ ] the Fairness Paycheck Act guaranteeing women equal pay for equal work. And it goes far beyond.

Slaves, of course, were not persons. They were in fact three-fifths human [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise ] under the Constitution, so as to grant their owners greater voting power. Protection of slavery was no slight concern to the founders: it was one factor leading to the American revolution. In the 1772 Somerset case, Lord Mansfield determined that slavery is so “odious” that it cannot be tolerated in England, though it continued in British possessions for many years. American slave-owners could see the handwriting on the wall if the colonies remained under British rule. And it should be recalled that the slave states, including Virginia, had the greatest power and influence in the colonies. One can easily appreciate Dr. Johnson’s famous quip that “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.”

Post-Civil War amendments extended the concept person to African-Americans, ending slavery. In theory, at least. After about a decade of relative freedom, a condition akin to slavery was reintroduced by a North-South compact permitting the effective criminalization of black life. A black male standing on a street corner could be arrested for vagrancy, or for attempted rape if accused of looking at a white woman the wrong way. And once imprisoned he had few chances of ever escaping the system of “slavery by another name,” the term used by then-Wall Street Journal bureau chief Douglas Blackmon in an arresting study [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385722702 ].

This new version of the “peculiar institution” provided much of the basis for the American industrial revolution, with a perfect work force for the steel industry and mining, along with agricultural production in the famous chain gangs [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175531/ ]: docile, obedient, no strikes, and no need for employers even to sustain their workers, an improvement over slavery. The system lasted in large measure until World War II, when free labor was needed for war production.

The postwar boom offered employment. A black man could get a job in a unionized auto plant, earn a decent salary, buy a house, and maybe send his children to college. That lasted for about 20 years, until the 1970s, when the economy was radically redesigned [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175539/noam_chomsky_plutonomy_and_the_precariat ] on newly dominant neoliberal principles, with rapid growth of financialization and the offshoring of production. The black population, now largely superfluous, has been recriminalized [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175520/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_michelle_alexander,_the_age_of_obama_as_a_racial_nightmare/ ].

Until Ronald Reagan’s presidency, incarceration in the U.S. was within the spectrum of industrial societies. By now it is far beyond others [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html ]. It targets primarily black males, increasingly also black women and Hispanics, largely guilty of victimless crimes under the fraudulent “drug wars.” Meanwhile, the wealth of African-American families has been virtually obliterated [ http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2069/housing-bubble-subprime-mortgages-hispanics-blacks-household-wealth-disparity ] by the latest financial crisis, in no small measure thanks to criminal behavior of financial institutions, with impunity for the perpetrators, now richer than ever.

Looking over the history of African-Americans from the first arrival of slaves almost 500 years ago to the present, they have enjoyed the status of authentic persons for only a few decades. There is a long way to go to realize the promise of Magna Carta.

Sacred Persons and Undone Process

The post-Civil War fourteenth amendment [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text ] granted the rights of persons to former slaves, though mostly in theory. At the same time, it created a new category of persons with rights: corporations. In fact, almost all the cases brought to the courts under the fourteenth amendment had to do with corporate rights, and by a century ago, they had determined that these collectivist legal fictions, established and sustained by state power, had the full rights of persons of flesh and blood; in fact, far greater rights, thanks to their scale, immortality, and protections of limited liability. Their rights by now far transcend those of mere humans. Under the “free trade agreements,” Pacific Rim can, for example, sue El Salvador for seeking to protect the environment; individuals cannot do the same. General Motors can claim national rights in Mexico. There is no need to dwell on what would happen if a Mexican demanded national rights in the United States.

Domestically, recent Supreme Court rulings [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/supreme-courts-montana-decision-strengthens-citizens-united/2012/06/25/gJQA8Vln1V_blog.html ] greatly enhance the already enormous political power of corporations and the super-rich, striking further blows against the tottering relics of functioning political democracy.

Meanwhile Magna Carta is under more direct assault. Recall the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which barred “imprisonment beyond the seas,” and certainly the far more vicious procedure of imprisonment abroad for the purpose of torture -- what is now more politely called “rendition [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/7789/tom_engelhardt_dolce-vita ],” as when Tony Blair rendered [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/08/special-report-britain-rendition-libya ] Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, now a leader of the rebellion, to the mercies of Qaddafi; or when U.S. authorities deported [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2010/06/nowhere_to_hide.html ] Canadian citizen Maher Arar to his native Syria, for imprisonment and torture, only later conceding that there was never any case against him. And many others, often through Shannon Airport, leading to courageous protests in Ireland.

The concept of due process [ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/30/awlaki_6/ ] has been extended under the Obama administration’s international assassination campaign in a way that renders this core element of the Charter of Liberties (and the Constitution) null and void. The Justice Department explained that the constitutional guarantee of due process, tracing to Magna Carta, is now satisfied by internal deliberations [id.] in the executive branch alone. The constitutional lawyer in the White House agreed. King John might have nodded with satisfaction.

The issue arose after the presidentially ordered assassination-by-drone of Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of inciting jihad in speech, writing, and unspecified actions. A headline [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/middleeast/as-the-west-celebrates-awlakis-death-the-mideast-shrugs.html ] in the New York Times captured the general elite reaction when he was murdered in a drone attack, along with the usual collateral damage. It read: “The West celebrates a cleric’s death.” Some eyebrows were lifted, however, because he was an American citizen, which raised questions about due process -- considered irrelevant when non-citizens are murdered at the whim of the chief executive. And irrelevant for citizens, too, under Obama administration due-process legal innovations.

Presumption of innocence has also been given a new and useful interpretation. As the New York Times reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html ], “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” So post-assassination determination of innocence maintains the sacred principle of presumption of innocence.

It would be ungracious to recall the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of modern humanitarian law: they bar “the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

The most famous recent case of executive assassination was Osama bin Laden, murdered after he was apprehended by 79 Navy seals, defenseless, accompanied only by his wife, his body reportedly dumped at sea without autopsy. Whatever one thinks of him, he was a suspect and nothing more than that. Even the FBI agreed.

Celebration [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175388/engelhardt_Osama_dead_and_alive ] in this case was overwhelming, but there were a few questions raised about the bland rejection of the principle of presumption of innocence, particularly when trial was hardly impossible. These were met with harsh condemnations. The most interesting was by a respected left-liberal political commentator, Matthew Yglesias, who explained [ http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/05/13/200961/international-law-is-made-by-powerful-states/ ] that “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers,” so it is “amazingly naïve” to suggest that the U.S. should obey international law or other conditions that we righteously demand of the weak.

Only tactical objections can be raised to aggression, assassination, cyberwar [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html ], or other actions that the Holy State undertakes in the service of mankind. If the traditional victims see matters somewhat differently, that merely reveals their moral and intellectual backwardness. And the occasional Western critic who fails to comprehend these fundamental truths can be dismissed as “silly,” Yglesias explains -- incidentally, referring specifically to me, and I cheerfully confess my guilt.

Executive Terrorist Lists

Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holder_v._Humanitarian_Law_Project ]. The Project was condemned for providing “material assistance” to the guerrilla organization PKK, which has fought for Kurdish rights in Turkey for many years and is listed as a terrorist group by the state executive. The “material assistance” was legal advice. The wording of the ruling would appear to apply quite broadly, for example, to discussions and research inquiry, even advice to the PKK to keep to nonviolent means. Again, there was a marginal fringe of criticism, but even those accepted the legitimacy of the state terrorist list -- arbitrary decisions by the executive, with no recourse.

The record of the terrorist list is of some interest. For example, in 1988 the Reagan administration declared Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to be one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” so that Reagan could continue his support for the Apartheid regime and its murderous depredations in South Africa and in neighboring countries, as part of his “war on terror.” Twenty years later Mandela was finally removed [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7484517.stm ] from the terrorist list, and can now travel to the U.S. without a special waiver.

Another interesting case is Saddam Hussein, removed from the terrorist list in 1982 so that the Reagan administration could provide him with support for his invasion of Iran. The support continued well after the war ended. In 1989, President Bush I even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production -- more information that must be kept from the eyes of the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.”

One of the ugliest examples of the use of the terrorist list has to do with the tortured people of Somalia. Immediately after September 11th, the United States closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the "war on terror." In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice.

Al-Barakaat was responsible for about half the $500 million in remittances to Somalia, “more than it earns from any other economic sector and 10 times the amount of foreign aid [Somalia] receives” a U.N. review determined. The charity also ran major businesses in Somalia, all destroyed. The leading academic scholar of Bush’s “financial war on terror,” Ibrahim Warde, concludes [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520258150 ] that apart from devastating the economy, this frivolous attack on a very fragile society “may have played a role in the rise... of Islamic fundamentalists,” another familiar consequence of the “war on terror.”

The very idea that the state should have the authority to make such judgments is a serious offense against the Charter of Liberties, as is the fact that it is considered uncontentious. If the Charter’s fall from grace continues on the path of the past few years, the future of rights and liberties looks dim.

Who Will Have the Last Laugh?

A few final words on the fate of the Charter of the Forest. Its goal was to protect the source of sustenance for the population, the commons, from external power -- in the early days, royalty; over the years, enclosures and other forms of privatization by predatory corporations and the state authorities who cooperate with them, have only accelerated and are properly rewarded. The damage is very broad.

If we listen to voices from the South today we can learn that “the conversion of public goods into private property through the privatization of our otherwise commonly held natural environment is one way neoliberal institutions remove the fragile threads that hold African nations together. Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments, communities, and a nation. This is one of the benefits that structural adjustment programmes inflicted on the continent -- the enthronement of corruption.” I’m quoting Nigerian poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, in his searing expose of the ravaging of Africa’s wealth, To Cook a Continent [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1906387532 ], the latest phase of the Western torture of Africa.

Torture that has always been planned at the highest level, it should be recognized. At the end of World War II, the U.S. held a position of unprecedented global power. Not surprisingly, careful and sophisticated plans were developed about how to organize the world. Each region was assigned its “function” by State Department planners, headed by the distinguished diplomat George Kennan. He determined that the U.S. had no special interest in Africa, so it should be handed over to Europe to “exploit” -- his word -- for its reconstruction. In the light of history, one might have imagined a different relation between Europe and Africa, but there is no indication that that was ever considered.

More recently, the U.S. has recognized that it, too, must join the game of exploiting Africa, along with new entries like China, which is busily at work compiling one of the worst records in destruction of the environment and oppression of the hapless victims.

It should be unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed by one central element of the predatory obsessions that are producing calamities all over the world: the reliance on fossil fuels, which courts global disaster, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. Details may be debated, but there is little serious doubt that the problems are serious, if not awesome, and that the longer we delay in addressing them, the more awful will be the legacy left to generations to come. There are some efforts to face reality, but they are far too minimal. The recent Rio+20 Conference opened with meager aspirations and derisory outcomes.

Meanwhile, power concentrations are charging in the opposite direction, led by the richest and most powerful country in world history. Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today’s political scene. The major business lobbies openly announce their propaganda campaigns to convince the public that there is no need for undue concern -- with some effect, as polls show.

The media cooperate by not even reporting the increasingly dire forecasts of international agencies and even the U.S. Department of Energy. The standard presentation is a debate between alarmists and skeptics: on one side virtually all qualified scientists, on the other a few holdouts. Not part of the debate are a very large number of experts, including the climate change program [ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html ] at MIT among others, who criticize the scientific consensus because it is too conservative and cautious, arguing that the truth when it comes to climate change is far more dire. Not surprisingly, the public is confused.

In his State of the Union speech [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/state-of-the-union-2012-obama-speech-excerpts/2012/01/24/gIQA9D3QOQ_story.html ] in January, President Obama hailed the bright prospects of a century of energy self-sufficiency, thanks to new technologies that permit extraction of hydrocarbons from Canadian tar sands [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175417/bill_mckibben_the_great_american_carbon_bomb ], shale [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175492/ellen_cantarow_shale-shocked ], and other previously inaccessible sources. Others agree. The Financial Times forecasts a century of energy independence for the U.S. The report does mention the destructive local impact of the new methods. Unasked in these optimistic forecasts is the question what kind of a world will survive [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175523/michael_klare_a_new_energy_third_world ] the rapacious onslaught.

In the lead in confronting the crisis throughout the world are indigenous communities, those who have always upheld the Charter of the Forests. The strongest stand has been taken by the one country they govern, Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and for centuries a victim of western destruction of the rich resources of one of the most advanced of the developed societies in the hemisphere, pre-Columbus.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organized a People’s Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries -- not just representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists. It produced a People’s Agreement, which called for very sharp reduction in emissions, and a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth [ http://climateandcapitalism.com/2010/04/27/universal-declaration-of-the-rights-of-mother-earth/ ]. That is a key demand of indigenous communities all over the world. It is ridiculed by sophisticated westerners, but unless we can acquire some of their sensibility, they are likely to have the last laugh -- a laugh of grim despair.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175503/noam_chomsky_the_imperial_way ], he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1931859965/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20 ], Making the Future [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872865371/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20 ], and Occupy [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1884519016/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20 ]. This is the full text of a speech he gave recently at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His web site is http://www.chomsky.info . To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Chomsky discusses the recent shredding of the principles of the Magna Carta, click here [ http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2012/07/carte-blanche.html ] or download it to your iPod here [ http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=j0SS4Al/iVI&subid=&offerid=146261.1&type=10&tmpid=5573&RD_PARM1=http%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Ftomcast-from-tomdispatch-com%2Fid357095817 ].

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook [ ], and check out the latest TD book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0086EF89K ].

Copyright 2012 Noam Chomsky (emphasis in original)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noam-chomsky/magna-carta_b_1694443.html [with comments]


===


Frackers Fund University Research That Proves Their Case


A Patterson-UTI Energy Inc. drilling rig sits on a natural gas pad in Chartiers Township, Pennsylvania, in 2010. Companies are spending billions to dislodge natural gas from a band of shale-sedimentary rock called the Marcellus shale that underlies Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York.
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

By Jim Efstathiou Jr. - Jul 23, 2012 10:52 AM CT

Pennsylvania remains the largest U.S. state without a tax on natural gas production, thanks in part to a study released under the banner of the Pennsylvania State University.

The 2009 report predicted drillers would shun Pennsylvania if new taxes were imposed, and lawmakers cited it the following year when they rejected a 5 percent tax proposed by then- Governor Ed Rendell.

“As an advocacy tool, it worked,” Michael Wood [ http://pennbpc.org/staff-bio-michael-wood-research-director ], research director with the non-profit Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center [ http://pennbpc.org/about-pbpc ] in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said in an interview. “If people wanted to find a reason to vote against having the industry taxed in that way, that gave them reason to do it.”

What the study didn’t do was note that it was sponsored by gas drillers and led by an economist, now at the University of Wyoming, with a history of producing industry-friendly research on economic and energy issues. The researcher, Tim Considine [ http://www.uwyo.edu/econfin/facultystaff-directory/timothy-considine.html ], said his analysis was sound and not biased by industry funding.

As the U.S. enjoys a natural-gas boom from a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, producers are taking a page from the tobacco industry playbook: funding research at established universities that arrives at conclusions that counter concerns raised by critics.

Buying Prestige

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, who made the tobacco analogy, said companies and their trade associations are “buying the prestige” of universities that are sometimes not transparent about funding nor vigilant enough to prevent financial interests from shaping research findings.

The Penn State report is not the only example.

A professor at the University of Texas at Austin led a February study [ http://energy.utexas.edu/images/ei_shale_gas_regulation120215.pdf ] that found no evidence of ground-water contamination from fracking. He did not reveal that he is a member of the board of a gas producer. Company filings examined by Bloomberg indicate that in 2011, he received more than $400,000 in compensation from the company, which has fracking operations in Texas.

A May report on shale gas from the State University of New York at Buffalo contained errors and did not acknowledge “extensive ties” by its authors to the gas industry, according to a watchdog group. One of the authors was Considine, the same economist who wrote the Penn State study.

Growing Problem

“It’s a growing problem across academia,” Mark Partridge, a professor of rural-urban policy at the Ohio State University, said in an interview. “Universities are so short of money, professors are under a lot of pressure to raise research funding in any manner possible.”

In 2008, private sources provided about 6 percent of all academic research funding, according to a June report [ http://www.aaup.org/industryall.pdf ] from the Washington-based AAUP. The figure excludes gifts, endowments for new faculty appointments, consulting or speaking fees, honoraria, seats on company boards, commercial licensing revenue, or equity in startups.

Controversy has followed when research too closely supports a corporate agenda. Litigation against tobacco companies helped reveal a decades-long effort that relied on academic research to suppress the dangers of smoking. Today, schools of public health at Columbia University, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and others ban tobacco funding, according to the association’s report.

Inside Job

More recently, the 2010 documentary film “Inside Job [ http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/ ],” reported that the financial-services industry paid university economists to testify in Congress and in antitrust cases, serve on boards of directors, and give speeches to the companies and industries they study, without disclosing the inherent conflicts of interest.

As questions have arisen about the environmental and economic implications of fracking, the same pattern is appearing.

Fracking, in which millions of gallons of chemically treated water and sand are forced underground to break shale rock and free trapped gas, has lowered energy prices, created jobs, and enhanced national security, according to a task force formed by President Barack Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu. It is displacing coal, lowering U.S. output of pollution blamed for global warming.

Earthquake Links

Critics say the benefits may not outweigh the environmental and health risks. Fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination in Pennsylvania, high ozone levels in Wyoming and to headaches, sore throats and difficulty breathing for people living close to wells in Colorado. Burying wastewater from drilling has been linked to earthquakes in Ohio, Arkansas and other states.

Some of the controversies on fracking research center on the Marcellus Shale, a gas-rich geological formation which stretches from New York to Tennessee.

In 2009, with drilling interest on the rise in Pennsylvania’s share of the Marcellus, Rendell proposed a severance tax similar to one in West Virginia - a 5 percent levy on the value of gas produced plus 4.7 cents for every 1,000 cubic feet. The tax would have generated about $100 million in its first year. Opponents cited the Penn State study, which found that drilling would decline by more than 30 percent under the tax. Considine, a former professor of energy and environmental economics at Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, was the lead author.

Drew Complaints

“The high level of drilling activity in Pennsylvania is a function of relatively lower taxes,” according to the report. “This competitive advantage should be maintained.”

The study drew complaints prompting William Easterling, dean of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, to investigate.

The section on a severance tax “should be more scholarly and less advocacy-minded,” he wrote in a June 9, 2010 letter to the Responsible Drilling Alliance [ http://responsibledrillingalliance.org/index.php/about ], a Williamsport, Pennsylvania, group that supports a tax. Considine’s treatment of the issue may have “crossed the line between policy analysis and policy advocacy,” Easterling wrote.

“We appeared to them as an institution to be saying that we support fracking,” Easterling said in an interview. “So we just needed to clarify that. Once we did they weren’t completely happy campers, but at least they knew that we weren’t for sale.”

‘Clear Error’

Easterling also cited as a “clear error” the failure to disclose industry funding in the initial July 24, 2009 report. An Aug. 5 version identified the sponsor, Marcellus Shale Coalition, which provided a grant of about $100,000. News reports referred to the work as a Penn State study.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition [ http://marcelluscoalition.org/ ], represents about 300 companies and provides information to policy makers, regulators and media on the “positive impacts” of gas development, according to its website.

“The gas industry is free to put out the facts the way they see them, but it’s different when it masquerades behind an academic institution,” Myron Arnowitt, Pennsylvania state director for the environmental group Clean Water Action, said in an interview.

“We would agree that whether or not this study came out with a Penn State seal on it or not, that it’s not appropriate to call it a Penn State study,” Easterling said. “The implication is that Penn State as an institution has done a study that has the imprimatur of Penn State.”

Legislative Debate

At the statehouse in 2010, State Representative William Adolph, a Republican from Springfield, Pennsylvania, cited Considine’s work during a debate over the proposed drilling tax. Imposing the tax would slow the growth of shale gas and threaten new jobs, Adolph said.

The study, Adolph said, revealed that the industry had created tens of thousands of jobs. “They predict another 110,000 in the next 2 years,” he said.

Adolph did not reply to a request for comment from Bloomberg News.

Representative Brian Ellis, a Republican from Butler, and then co-chair of the house Natural Gas Caucus, formally released the study at a July 27, 2009 press conference.

Butler, about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, is seeing the benefits of gas drilling in new jobs and more business for restaurants and hotels. Gas drillers already pay state corporate taxes, Ellis said.

Impact Fee

“The ultimate question is do you believe that the folks doing the study are credible or not, and generally speaking, I have a lot of faith in the studies that have come out of Penn State,” Ellis said in an interview.

Rendell eventually dropped the severance-tax proposal, and Pennsylvania remains the largest gas-producing state without one, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Instead, the state this year approved a fee on drillers that municipalities can elect to charge to cover road damage and other impacts.

The impact fee will bring in about $85 million this year compared to $200 million under a 5 percent tax, assuming a gas price of $2.50 per thousand cubic feet, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a non-partisan research group that provided analysis on state tax and budget issues. The fee will peak at about $200 million a year, while the tax could have reached $500 million in 2015 if gas prices rebound to $4.50.

Found ‘Troubling’

“I myself was taken aback by Penn State’s being used by the drilling industry to support their opinion here,” Representative Greg Vitali, a Haverford, Pennsylvania, Democrat, said in an interview. “I found it troubling.”

Considine said he had left Penn State for the University of Wyoming while the report was being produced and did not know why it was initially released without disclosing its industry sponsor.

“There are so many opponents of shale gas drilling in that region that they see anything that’s funded by industry, in their view it’s biased,” Considine said in an interview. “I disagree.”

Considine, who received a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, has also worked as an economist at Bank of America, and as the lead analyst for natural gas deregulation on the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, according to his University of Wyoming profile.

Economic Impact

In a 2011 study [ http://www.msetc.org/docs/EconomicImpactFINALAugust28_000.pdf ] of the economic impacts of the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, Timothy Kelsey [ http://aese.psu.edu/directory/twk2 ], professor of agriculture economics at Penn State, found that drilling created as many as 23,884 jobs in 2009, less than half the number in Considine’s report. Considine assumed that landowners who got money from drillers live in Pennsylvania -- according to Kelsey 7.7 percent live out of state -- and that they would spend windfall bonus payments from leasing their property as they would ordinary income, Kelsey said.

“What we found out by surveying folks is they’re saving half of those dollars,” Kelsey said. “Because of that, the economic impact in any one year is going to be a lot less.”

A 2012 update of Considine’s economic analysis for Pennsylvania will assume that half the money going to landowners is spent and half saved, a shift from earlier reports that assumed 80 percent would be spent, according to Kathryn Klaber, president of the Pittsburgh-based Marcellus Shale Coalition.

“Is it materially going to affect the results?” Klaber said in an interview. “Absolutely not. The fact that new information is being taken into account by Considine to continuously improve the assumptions, that’s exactly what we want him to be doing.”

Industry Expertise

“We want somebody who’s got expertise in the industry to run standardized models and be able to interpret them with expertise,” Klaber added. “I think we got it right. To have an independent institution run the analysis to give all stakeholders a sense of the order of magnitude of what kind of jobs and economic impacts it’s brought with it.”

In Texas, Charles Groat, associate director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas and former Director of the U.S. Geological Survey, proposed a study to help state regulators manage shale gas issues. He selected the researchers, edited its summary and presented it to the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 16.

Plains Exploration

Groat also sits on the board of Plains Exploration & Production Co. (PXP), a relationship he didn’t disclose in the report, to his boss, or at the Feb. 16 meeting. As a board member, Groat receives 10,000 shares of restricted stock each year, according to company reports. His holdings as of March 29 totaled 40,138 shares, worth $1.6 million at the July 19 closing price. He also receives an annual fee, which was $58,500 in 2011. Houston-based Plains Exploration is fracking in shale formations in Texas, company spokesman Ed Memi said in an e-mail.

Raymond Orbach, director of the Texas university’s Energy Institute, said he learned of the connection from a Bloomberg reporter’s inquiry.

The report concludes that while there have been surface spills of fracking wastewater, there is no evidence of groundwater contamination from fluids injected thousands of feet below the surface.

Press Release

That produced the headline on the university’s press release that got news media attention:

“New Study Shows No Evidence of Groundwater Contamination from Hydraulic Fracturing,” according to the university’s Feb. 16 press release [ http://energy.utexas.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=154:study-shows-no-evidence-of-groundwater-contamination-from-hydraulic-fracturing&catid=34:press-releases&Itemid=54 ]. The study cost about $270,000, none of which came from industry sources, according to university spokesman Gary Rasp.

“This report got more traction with the media because it was framed as independent,” Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative [ http://public-accountability.org/ ], a Buffalo non-profit that focuses on corruption in business and government, said in an interview. Connor’s group, which today released a report [ http://public-accountability.org/2012/07/contaminated-inquiry/ ] on the Groat study, receives funding from organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation [ http://sunlightfoundation.com/about/grants/ ] and United Republic [ http://unitedrepublic.org/about/ ], which favor greater transparency in government.

The report can’t be viewed as industry friendly because it includes negative impacts of fracking, Orbach, a former under secretary at the U.S. Energy Department, said. Still, Groat’s failure to disclose his ties to Plains Exploration was an “issue,” Orbach said.

‘No Idea’

“To be honest, we had no idea,” Orbach said in an interview. “In the future we should have an asterisk or something that would indicate his presence on the board.”

In a subsequent e-mail, Orbach added, “while I believe this should have been disclosed when the study was released, I do not believe his service on the board had any impact at all on the findings.”

Sections of the report dealing with the regulation of fracking were written by Hannah Wiseman, assistant professor at Florida State University College of Law. Wiseman said she knew of Groat’s industry ties yet felt no pressure to deliver industry-friendly findings.

In her section of the report, Wiseman found “significant gaps” in state oversight of fracking.

Groat offered a more enthusiastic endorsement of state efforts when he presented the report Feb. 16.

“We conclude that there isn’t the need for pervasive new regulatory frameworks,” Groat said. “There’s a need for some supplementing within the states that regulate most of this, but by and large they’re doing a decent job.”

No Modifications

Wiseman, who called states’ efforts to improve regulation “spotty,” continues to work on studies for the Texas institute.

“States need to improve many of their regulations,” Wiseman said in an interview. “It’s hard for me to comment on my boss’s characterizing.”

Groat said he did not try to lead the researchers to industry-friendly conclusions.

“The study results were determined by the individual investigators,” Groat said in an e-mail. “I made no modifications or alterations of their findings, some of which were not particularly pleasing to the shale-gas industry. Disclosing my Plains board position would not have served any meaningful purpose relevant to this study.”

Nelson, of the American Association of University Professors, said the university needs to go further.

‘Obvious Conflict’

“It’s more than an asterisk,” Nelson said in an interview. “They should be thinking about having regulations in place that would prevent someone with an obvious conflict of interest from playing certain roles.”

Considine is now a professor of economics in the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming. The school and the university rely heavily on funding from the state’s oil, gas and coal producers.

“You can’t quantify how important minerals are to the state and to the University of Wyoming,” Renny MacKay, a spokesman for Republican Governor Matthew Mead, said in an interview. “You’re looking at a state with no income tax, no corporate tax. We’re all 100 percent reliant on minerals here in Wyoming.”

Wyoming collects a 6 percent severance tax on oil and natural gas production.

In addition to state funding, the School of Energy Resources last year received about $5.75 million in gifts from energy companies, according to its director Mark Northam.

Marathon Oil

In April, Houston-based Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO) announced a $1 million gift to the university. The contribution “is consistent with Marathon Oil’s focus on supporting key educational initiatives in communities where we operate,” Jim Bowzer, vice president of Marathon’s north American production, said in a statement.

Calgary-based Encana Corp. (ECA) which operates gas wells in Wyoming’s Jonah field, has given $7 million dollars to the university over the past six years to better train students for the oil and gas sector, according to Encana spokesman Doug Hock.

Corporate gifts are used for buildings, research equipment, scholarships or fellowships and help foster “a better educated student because we train their work force,” Northam said. Research priorities at the school are set by a council appointed by the governor that in 2011 included representatives from Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC), Arch Coal Inc. (ACI), Rio Tinto Group, the world’s third-largest mining company, General Electric Co. (GE), and Denver-based gas producer QEP Resources Inc. (QEP)

Corporate Generosity

The corporate generosity has some worried about the impact on academic independence.

“There’s no question that the oil and gas industry is approaching the University of Wyoming with a great deal of walking-around money and directly funding some of these departments with the apparent agenda of influence peddling, and it seems to be working very well for them,” Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist with the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance [ http://www.voiceforthewild.org/ ] in Laramie, Wyoming, said in an interview.

Hock of Encana rejected such characterizations of corporate involvement in research.

“It is unfortunate and there’s nothing we can do about that,” Hock said in an interview. “We want good science and we want to build a a skilled workforce.”

Considine has conducted contract research for industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute and the Wyoming Mining Association. In a 2009 report [ http://www.wma-minelife.com/coal/Powder_River_Basin_Coal/PRB_Coal.pdf ] for the mining group, Considine said Wyoming coal would lower U.S. energy costs by $280 billion a year. Global warming emissions from burning coal could be reduced by planting trees and using technology still in development to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks, he said in the report.

Marcellus Shale

In a 2010 report [ http://www.anga.us/media/44750/api%20economic%20impacts%20marcellus%20shale.pdf ] for the Washington-based petroleum group, Considine said Marcellus Shale gas in New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia would generate $16 billion in economic output and 184,000 jobs. The project, which relied on the same computer model used in the Penn State report, was done “during the summer when he not obligated to the university, so in a way it’s consulting,” the School of Energy Resource’s Northam said.

Last year, Considine co-wrote a report [ http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eper_09.htm ] for the free-market Manhattan Institute that said gas drilling in New York would trigger $11.4 billion in economic output and create 90,000 jobs. In a 2011 year-end message to donors, the institutes’s president, Lawrence Mone, called its work crucial as “record federal spending and a seemingly endless stream of job- destroying policies continue to undermine economic recovery.”

WildEarth Guardians

“He’s definitely someone that we would just consider to be an industry propagandist,” Jeremy Nichols, director of the climate program at the conservation group WildEarth Guardians, said in an interview. “There’s not even an air of objectivity to it.”

“This whole ideal of industry funding biasing research is preposterous,” Considine said. “You look at universities all around the country. There are billions of dollars flowing from companies to do basic R&D.”

Regulators in New York have been weighing environmental rules on fracking since 2008. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is considering a plan that would allow fracking in five counties near the Pennsylvania border.

In April, the newly formed Shale Resources and Society Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo found that drillers in Pennsylvania had reduced by half the rate of blowouts, spills and water contamination since 2008. Potential environmental problems could be “entirely avoided or mitigated” under New York’s proposed rules, according to the shale institute’s report. Considine was the lead author.

Public Accountability

Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative sees similarities to Considine’s Penn State reports.

“You’ve got the authority of a public research university being used to publish research by individuals with a strong bias to the natural-gas industry,” Connor said. “It almost appears that work for this report had already been done and the University of Buffalo label just applied to it.”

Meanwhile, the shale resources institute is soliciting corporate partners, seeking $1.14 million to launch a “landmark effort to leverage the safe, sustainable, economic development of shale gas,” according to a document Connor said he downloaded from the group’s website.

“One of the amazing things about this institute is that it does not mention the words public health as something that will be considered,” Jim Holstun, an English professor and one of about 20 members of the newly formed University at Buffalo Coalition for Leading Ethically in Academic Research, a group formed in response to the drilling report, said in an interview.

Environmental Accidents

Contrary to the report’s central finding, the rate of major environmental accidents in Pennsylvania has increased since 2008, according to an analysis by Connor’s group.

In a May 16 blog post [ http://blogs.edf.org/energyexchange/2012/05/16/university-at-buffalos-shale-resources-and-society-institute%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98environmental-impacts-during-shale-gas-drilling%E2%80%99-report/ ], Scott Anderson, senior policy adviser for the Environmental Defense Fund in Austin, Texas, called the report’s omission of administrative violations that had yet to cause environmental damage “questionable.”

The report, which identifies Considine by his title at the University of Wyoming, doesn’t disclose his prior work for industry groups. Considine said he did the study as part of his responsibilities at University of Wyoming. It was cited by Michael Krancer, Secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, in his May 31 testimony at a House hearing on the impacts of new federal regulations on fracking.

“There is a compelling case that Pennsylvania state oversight of oil and gas regulation has been effective,” Krancer said in prepared remarks referring to the University at Buffalo study.

History Lacking

Nelson of the American Association of University Professors said he is planning to update the group’s June report with a section on fracking.

“In the case of the Buffalo fracking report, it’s that history that’s lacking,” Nelson said. “They were able to brag this didn’t have any industry support.”

The idea for the shale resources institute came from faculty members following a series of seminars last year on fracking, according to E. Bruce Pitman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo. The University at Buffalo is an “honest broker” in the state-wide debate about gas drilling, he said.

“There is a debate going on here but the fact of the matter is that nothing was hidden,” Pitman said in an interview. “Everybody knows where all the authors come from. All the data that’s used in the report was absolutely out there. People can then make up their minds.”

New York

Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club say fracking in New York threatens drinking water sources, including the reservoir that supplies New York City with 1.3 billion gallons (4.9 billion liters) a day.

Industry-funded studies may be double counting the effects of drilling activities and using unrealistic assumptions about spending and hiring, according to Partridge of the Ohio State University. A 2011 report from the industry-funded Ohio Oil & Gas Energy Education Program [ http://www.oogeep.org/default.htm ] found that drilling may “create and support” more than 200,000 jobs in Ohio over four years, 10 times more than Patridge’s estimate in a study [ http://aede.osu.edu/sites/drupal-aede.web/files/Economic%20Value%20of%20Shale%20Dec%202011.pdf ] he co-wrote in the same year.

“We need a lot more disinterested research than we’re getting,” Nelson said. “We ought to be making policy on the basis of truly independent research. Not research where people have a reason to want to please the funder.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at [e-mail]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at [e-mail]

©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-23/frackers-fund-university-research-that-proves-their-case.html [with comments]


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Industry money and questionable ethics contaminate UT Austin fracking study

By David Wogan | July 24, 2012

Remember that study out of The University of Texas last February that concluded there wasn’t a direct link between fracking and groundwater contamination [ http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/02/17/reading-beyond-the-headlines-fracking-and-water-contamination/ ]? It caught flack for seeming to being too easy on the fracking industry by suggesting that there wasn’t a direct link between cracking shale and groundwater contamination. The study was great news for an industry fighting a PR battle over a politically-charged issue.

However, financial ties to the fracking industry were never mentioned in all of the announcements about the study, and not known until a new study put out Monday by the Public Accountability Initiative. The study’s leader, Dr. Charles “Chip” Groat [ http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/directory/faculty/charles-groat ] has significant financial ties to the fracking industry, to the tune of a couple of million dollars. From State Impact Texas [ http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/07/23/fracking-company-paid-texas-professor-behind-water-contamination-study/ ]:

Groat, a former Director of the U.S. Geological Survey and professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, also sits on the board of Plains Exploration and Production Company, a Houston-based company that conducts drilling and fracking in Texas and other parts of the country. According to the new report (and a review of the company’s financial reports by Bloomberg) Groat received more than $400,000 from the drilling company last year alone, more than double his salary at the University. And one of the shales examined in Groat’s fracking study is currently being drilled by the company, the report says.

Since 2007, Groat has received over $1.5 million in cash and stock awards from the company, and he currently holds over $1.6 million in company stock, according to the PAI report.

It’s hard for me to read this news because I have taken courses from Dr. Groat and value his wealth of experience. But this is damaging to himself and the University.

The purpose of research institutions is to help push the human race forward by making breakthroughs and advancements that benefit everyone, not just a select few with financial interests. At least that’s what I think.

Scientists already have a hard enough time keeping up a good reputation, with the Climategate nonsense or the Solyndra theatrics. Isn’t this news just one more data point that reinforces the ridiculous view that researchers are fabricating issues (like climate change!) in elaborate campaigns for research grants that fund the luxurious lives of tenure track professors? Give me a break. But try telling that to someone at a political rally, let alone at a School Board meeting in Texas. But I digress.

Ties to industry are common at research universities. It’s common in the engineering disciplines for research to be funded by an industry partner. That relationship is an explicit contract that the university offers some additional brainpower and expertise to overcome some technical challenge, or perform some fundamental science, and is in turn rewarded by funding several grad students for a couple of years.

But this differs because there is an appearance that financial gain was to be had. I don’t think it matters, as Dr. Groat has said, that the research was paid for with university funds. Over a million dollar in stocks constitutes a conflict of interest. What does this say for the integrity of The University of Texas and other universities and labs as research institutions? The University’s ethics policy [ http://www.utexas.edu/compliance/wp-content/uploads/guide.pdf ] specifically draws attention to research:

It is the policy of the University of Texas that research is conducted with integrity and free from any actual or apparent institutional or personal conflict of interest. An employee of the University who applies for grants or cooperative agreements from the federal government for research or other educational activities or who otherwise submits a proposal for sponsored research funding from any entity must insure that there is no reasonable expectation that the design, conduct, and reporting of the research will be biased by any significant financial interest of an investigator responsible for the research or other educational activity.

Shouldn’t these ties have been disclosed to the public? Where was the University’s due diligence? Did they not know a prominent faculty member was pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? At the very least, Dr. Groat should have removed himself from the study.

Private industry brings a lot of knowledge, experience, and funding, all things that are useful in research. And it is reasonable to expect that leading researchers will have contacts in industry, or serve on boards or on advisory positions because of their knowledge. But where do you draw the line and distinguish between an appropriate relationship, and one that one that compromises the goal of providing unbiased research?

Update: Statement from UT Austin:

The most important asset we have as an institution is the public’s trust. If that is in question, then that is something we need to address. We will identify a group of outside experts to review the Energy Institute’s report on the effects of hydraulic fracturing. We hope to have that group identified and the results back within a few weeks. We believe that the research meets our standards, but it is important to let an outside group of experts take an independent look.

Dr. Groat has been reminded of his obligations to report all outside employment per university policy. If the university had known about Dr. Groat’s board involvement, the Energy Institute would have included that information in the report.

I’ll check back in on this in a couple of weeks when we hear the results of the external review.

© 2012 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/07/24/industry-money-and-questionable-ethics-contaminate-ut-austin-fracking-study/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/university-of-texas-fracking-study_n_1699391.html (with comments)]


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New York Fracking Laws: Environmental Activists Call On Governor Cuomo To Reject Drilling Proposal

AP | By MARY ESCH
Posted: 06/21/2012 9:44 am Updated: 06/21/2012 3:04 pm

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Community organizers from New York's Southern Tier joined health and environmental groups Wednesday at a rally calling on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to reject any demonstration project for shale gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking."

A coalition of more than 100 groups issued a statement in response to a report last week in the New York Times that the Cuomo administration was considering allowing fracking in limited areas where towns welcomed it in five Southern Tier counties near the Pennsylvania border.

In the statement, the coalition noted that the Department of Environmental Conservation is still working on its environmental review, and said any decision on drilling should wait until health, environmental, and community impacts are assessed.

The coalition includes Catskill Mountainkeeper, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, the Broome County Medical Society and other state and local organizations.

New York hasn't permitted fracking since the DEC began its environmental impact review in 2008 amid concerns that the technology, which injects chemically treated water at high pressure into a well to fracture shale and release gas, could threaten drinking water supplies and have other adverse impacts.

The New York Times last week quoted administration sources as saying Cuomo was considering allowing a limited number of fracked shale gas wells in parts of Broome, Chemung, Chenango, Steuben and Tioga counties, and only in communities that expressed support for it. Numerous communities have passed bans or moratoriums on drilling, but none are in the targeted area.

"We do not want to be the sacrifice zone for fracking," Sue Rapp, of the Broome County town of Vestal, said at the demonstration Wednesday in the Capitol's ornately carved stone Great Western Staircase. Rapp heads a community group that has gathered more than 2,000 signatures on a petition asking the Vestal Town Board to enact a fracking ban. A group of pro-drilling landowners is pressuring the board to pass a resolution welcoming the industry.

Participants in the rally held signs with messages such as, "Children are in your target zones."

"If true, the governor's proposal to only drill in economically disadvantaged areas of New York is a cynical departure from Cuomo's original promise to base his fracking decisions on science, not emotion," said Roger Downs of the Sierra Club-Atlantic Chapter.

Cuomo has not confirmed the Times report and had no comment on Wednesday's rally.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/new-york-fracking-laws_n_1615249.html [with comments]


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David Letterman On Fracking: 'We're Screwed' (VIDEO)

Posted: 07/20/2012 11:23 am

On Wednesday night's "Late Show," host David Letterman took several minutes to share his thoughts on fracking. Scolding the "greedy oil and gas companies of this country," Letterman said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're screwed."

Letterman drew attention to his concerns about water contamination as a result of fracking, saying, "The Delaware Water Gap has been ruined. The Hudson Valley has been ruined. Most of Pennsylvania has been ruined. Virginia, West Virginia has been ruined. Colorado has been ruined. New Mexico has been ruined."

Fracking [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/fracking ], also known as hydraulic fracturing, is a controversial drilling method for extracting natural gas. It has spread throughout the U.S. in recent years, despite growing acknowledgement of the risks involved. Nationwide Insurance recently became the first major U.S. insurer to announce that it would not cover damage related to fracking [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/13/nationwide-insurance-fracking_n_1669775.html ]. According to AP, Nationwide said in an internal memo, "We have determined that the exposures presented by hydraulic fracturing are too great to ignore."

Fracking is currently in the spotlight in New York, where activists are calling on Governor Andrew Cuomo to reject the drilling practice [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/new-york-fracking-laws_n_1615249.html ]. Despite a ban since 2008, reports suggest that Cuomo may consider permitting fracking in several counties of the Empire State's Southern Tier.

"Late Night" host Jimmy Fallon also recently addressed fracking on his show, joining Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono in a song called "Don't frack my mother [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/17/yoko-ono-jimmy-fallon-sean-lennon-frack-mother_n_1680464.html ]."

Watch a clip of Letterman's rant above and watch the entire July 18 "Late Show" episode at CBS.com [ http://www.cbs.com/late_night/late_show/video/?pid=3gL2O99nNHw6wJIelsmE_VSvi3YaGP5h&nrd=1 ].

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/david-letterman-fracking-screwed_n_1687028.html [with embedded video, and comments]


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In Tiny Bean, India’s Dirt-Poor Farmers Strike Gas-Drilling Gold


Rawat Singh and his son Sohan, rear, in the family’s new home in Lordi, India, built with profits from guar farming. Their old mud hut is now used by goats.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times


Farmers waited this month to receive free guar seeds from an Indian company.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times


A powdered form of the bean, shown dehusked, is now widely used to thicken ice cream.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times


The New York Times

By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: July 16, 2012

LORDI, India — Sohan Singh’s shoeless children have spent most of their lives hungry, dirty and hot. A farmer in a desert land, Mr. Singh could not afford anything better than a mud hut and a barely adequate diet for his family.

But it just so happens that when the hard little bean that Mr. Singh grows is ground up, it becomes an essential ingredient for mining oil and natural gas in a process called hydraulic fracturing.

Halfway around the world, earnings are down for an oil services giant, Halliburton, because prices have risen for guar, the bean that Mr. Singh and his fellow farmers raise.

Halliburton’s loss was, in a rather significant way, Mr. Singh’s gain — a rare victory for the littlest of the little guys in global trade. The increase in guar prices is helping to transform this part of the state of Rajasthan in northwestern India, one of the world’s poorest places. Tractor sales are soaring, land prices are increasing and weddings have grown even more colorful.

“Now we have enough food, and we have a house made of stone,” Mr. Singh said proudly while his rail-thin children stared in awe.

Guar, a modest bean so hard that it can crack teeth, has become an unlikely global player, and dirt-poor farmers like Mr. Singh have suddenly become a crucial link in the energy production of the United States.

For centuries, farmers here used guar to feed their families and their cattle. There are better sources of nutrition, but few that grow in the Rajasthani desert, a land rich in culture but poor in rain. Broader commercial interest in guar first developed when food companies found that it absorbs water like a souped-up cornstarch, and a powdered form of the bean is now widely used to thicken ice cream and keep pastries crisp.

But much more important to farmers here was the recent discovery that guar could stiffen water so much that a mixture is able to carry sand sideways into wells drilled by horizontal fracturing, also known as fracking.

The fracking boom in the United States has led to a surge in natural gas production, a decline in oil imports and a gradual transition away from coal-fired power plants. Fracking may also have spoiled some rural water supplies and caused environmental damage in parts of the United States, but it is hard to find anyone in Rajasthan who sees fracking as anything but a blessing.

“Without guar, you cannot have fracturing fluids,” said Michael J. Economides, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston who is a fracking expert. “And what everybody is worried about is that there is virtually no guar out there now.”

India produces about 85 percent of the world’s guar. As worries rose about the prospects for this year’s monsoon, which is vital for an adequate crop, speculation over guar production built to a frenzy. Trading in guar futures was even suspended, and with the monsoon still behind schedule, it remains postponed. Ramesh Abhishek, India’s chief commodities market regulator, said guar trading would resume when supplies proved adequate.

“If the physical market doesn’t provide enough supplies, then the futures market causes more harm than good,” Mr. Abhishek said.

Now, an international effort is under way to ensure that guar supplies come closer to meeting the soaring demand, and hundreds of thousands of small farmers here have been recruited in the effort. Leading the way is Vikas WSP, an Indian company that specializes in the production of guar powders.

Many farmers sold their seed stock last year when prices shot up, so Vikas has held rallies in small towns to pass out free seeds, including new high-production hybrids. The company persuaded farmers with irrigated land in the state of Punjab, north of Rajasthan, to plant guar in the spring instead of cotton. That crop is now coming to market.

And Vikas signed contracts with farmers guaranteeing a return of nearly $800 per acre if they planted guar, no matter what this year’s monsoon brought.

“Whatever they produce, we will buy,” said Sanjay Pareek, a Vikas vice president.

Anticipating a heavy crop, Vikas is more than doubling its processing capacity by building two new plants in Jodhpur, the second-largest city in Rajasthan. By next year, the company will be able to produce 86,400 tons of guar powder each day, it said. Smaller producers are taking similar steps.

“Last year was an extraordinary year,” said S. K. Sharma, managing director of Lotus Gums and Chemicals in Jodhpur. “In 35 years in this business, I’ve never seen that.”

Mr. Sharma said his company would soon open a second plant dedicated entirely to serving gas companies, adding that he was cautiously optimistic that guar prices would remain robust. “But we know there are efforts to grow guar in China, Australia, California and elsewhere, and it has us worried,” he said.

Despite the expanding supply, many analysts believe that guar prices will remain high for the foreseeable future. Neil Beveridge, an oil analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said demand for fracking services should continue to grow rapidly as the industry expanded outside North America. “We’re already starting to see a big increase in Eastern Europe, Argentina, Australia, China and India itself,” he said.

Susan L. Sakmar, an energy analyst in San Francisco, cautioned that the fracking boom could slow and that guar alternatives could be developed. But Mr. Economides, the Houston fracking expert, dismissed such talk. “There are no easy or cheap alternatives to guar,” he said.

That is good news for guar producers. Farmers, traders and processors around Jodhpur admitted fulfilling some long-held dreams with the profits they made last year. Some took trips to Europe; some bought gold; others got married.

At a Massey Ferguson tractor dealership in Jodhpur, where sales have doubled in recent years, Nathu Parjapat of Haripura was buying a tractor for his father-in-law, whose own profits from farming guar allowed him to provide a dowry of 12 grams of gold and half a kilogram of silver when Mr. Parjapat married his daughter.

“So now I’m buying a tractor for him,” Mr. Parjapat said as his father-in-law stood next to him, nodding with grave approval.

Mr. Singh, the farmer with the new house, said he would plant his entire field with guar this year instead of spreading his risk among other crops. His family is able to sleep on the stone roof, where a constant breeze keeps them cool. His old mud house, now occupied by goats, has a roof made of sticks that did not allow such a luxury.

Mr. Singh’s sister, Issa Rathore, showed off a silver ankle bracelet and a toe ring, both bought with guar profits. But her smile quickly vanished when she was asked whether she expected a similar windfall in the coming months. She glanced at the sky, and the children around her grew hushed. “Will the monsoon be enough this year?” she asked. “Who knows?”

Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting.

*

Related

India Ink: My Big Fat Guar Wedding (July 17, 2012)
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/a-desert-bean-spawns-hope-for-opulent-indian-weddings/

Times Topic: India
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/india/index.html

Related in Opinion

Latitude: India’s Next Top Man (July 17, 2012)
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/pranab-mukherjee-is-the-wrong-man-to-be-indias-next-president/

*

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/world/asia/fracking-in-us-lifts-guar-farmers-in-india.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/world/asia/fracking-in-us-lifts-guar-farmers-in-india.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]


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Global Warming's Terrifying New Math


Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is

By Bill McKibben
July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

*

The First Number: 2° Celsius

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever."

In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.

The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.

Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target – indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius – it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.

*

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)

This idea of a global "carbon budget" emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since we've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we're currently less than halfway to the target. But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.

How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they're exact, but few dispute that they're generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We're just fine-tuning things. I don't think much has changed over the last decade." William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar," he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system."

We're not getting any free lunch from the world's economies, either. With only a single year's lull in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, we've continued to pour record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, year after year. In late May, the International Energy Agency published its latest figures – CO2 emissions last year rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before. America had a warm winter and converted more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, so its emissions fell slightly; China kept booming, so its carbon output (which recently surpassed the U.S.) rose 9.3 percent; the Japanese shut down their fleet of nukes post-Fukushima, so their emissions edged up 2.4 percent. "There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects have been marginal." In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from high school. "The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he continued, "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.

So, new data in hand, everyone at the Rio conference renewed their ritual calls for serious international action to move us back to a two-degree trajectory. The charade will continue in November, when the next Conference of the Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change convenes in Qatar. This will be COP 18 – COP 1 was held in Berlin in 1995, and since then the process has accomplished essentially nothing. Even scientists, who are notoriously reluctant to speak out, are slowly overcoming their natural preference to simply provide data. "The message has been consistent for close to 30 years now," Collins says with a wry laugh, "and we have the instrumentation and the computer power required to present the evidence in detail. If we choose to continue on our present course of action, it should be done with a full evaluation of the evidence the scientific community has presented." He pauses, suddenly conscious of being on the record. "I should say, a fuller evaluation of the evidence."

So far, though, such calls have had little effect. We're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the rule. One senior scientist told me, "You know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have something like that."

*

The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative – led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers – combed through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers aren't perfect – they don't fully reflect the recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends.

*

So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one of the only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its energy mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. That's a small miracle – and it demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our problems. But we lack the will. So far, Germany's the exception; the rule is ever more carbon.

This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself – it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.

People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll found that "while recycling is widespread in America and 73 percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and only three percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter – but time is precisely what we lack.

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited success. They've patiently lobbied leaders, trying to convince them of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the warnings. Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance, campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president before him – the night he won the nomination, he told supporters that his election would mark the moment "the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal." And he has achieved one significant change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light of the numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start indeed.

At this point, effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the speed at which it's burned. And there the president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill, baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine. His secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin contains some 67.5 gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent of the available atmospheric space). He's doing the same thing with Arctic and offshore drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump in March, "You have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can... That's a commitment that I make." The next day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of unburned carbon.

Sometimes the irony is almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the Arctic.

Almost every government with deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the same divide. Canada, for instance, is a liberal democracy renowned for its internationalism – no wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012. But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta economically attractive – and since, as NASA climatologist James Hansen pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or almost half of the available space if we take the 565 limit seriously), that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.

The same kind of hypocrisy applies across the ideological board: In his speech to the Copenhagen conference, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," insisting that "climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating environmental problem of this century." But the next spring, in the Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an agreement with a consortium of international players to develop the vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant engine for a comprehensive development of the entire territory and Venezuelan population." The Orinoco deposits are larger than Alberta's – taken together, they'd fill up the whole available atmospheric space.

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So: the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, "The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what climate change has lacked.

But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do."

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it.

They're clearly cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the world's best scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons – in early March, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.

There's not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson. Late last month, on the same day the Colorado fires reached their height, he told a New York audience that global warming is real, but dismissed it as an "engineering problem" that has "engineering solutions." Such as? "Changes to weather patterns that move crop-production areas around – we'll adapt to that." This in a week when Kentucky farmers were reporting that corn kernels were "aborting" in record heat, threatening a spike in global food prices. "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say, 'We just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Tillerson said. Of course not – if he did accept it, he'd have to keep his reserves in the ground. Which would cost him money. It's not an engineering problem, in other words – it's a greed problem.

You could argue that this is simply in the nature of these companies – that having found a profitable vein, they're compelled to keep mining it, more like efficient automatons than people with free will. But as the Supreme Court has made clear, they are people of a sort. In fact, thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far more free will than the rest of us. These companies don't simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill – they help create the boundaries of that world.

Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices. The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

Environmentalists, understandably, have been loath to make the fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its political power and hoping instead to convince these giants that they should turn away from coal, oil and gas and transform themselves more broadly into "energy companies." Sometimes that strategy appeared to be working – emphasis on appeared. Around the turn of the century, for instance, BP made a brief attempt to restyle itself as "Beyond Petroleum," adapting a logo that looked like the sun and sticking solar panels on some of its gas stations. But its investments in alternative energy were never more than a tiny fraction of its budget for hydrocarbon exploration, and after a few years, many of those were wound down as new CEOs insisted on returning to the company's "core business." In December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium – there's simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams.

Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.

If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel – every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens – a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.

There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground." The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless. The fight, in the end, is about whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.

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It's not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal – they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the stock prices of energy companies. Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. Suddenly those Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the stock would tank. Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report warned investors to lessen their exposure, hedge it with some big plays in alternative energy.

"The regular process of economic evolution is that businesses are left with stranded assets all the time," says Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think of film cameras, or typewriters. The question is not whether this will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this." Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the best analyst – that they'll go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when everyone else goes over."

So pure self-interest probably won't spark a transformative challenge to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just might – and that's the real meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give rise to a real movement.

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime. "The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially from "the divestment movement of the 1980s."

The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that's when their members will "enjoy their retirement.") "Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective," says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change – now."

Movements rarely have predictable outcomes. But any campaign that weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political standing clearly increases the chances of retiring its special breaks. Consider President Obama's signal achievement in the climate fight, the large increase he won in mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until Detroit came under severe financial pressure, it was politically powerful enough to fend them off. If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth – that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet's physical systems – it might weaken it enough to matter politically. Exxon and their ilk might drop their opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even decide to become true energy companies, this time for real.

Even if such a campaign is possible, however, we may have waited too long to start it. To make a real difference – to keep us under a temperature increase of two degrees – you'd need to change carbon pricing in Washington, and then use that victory to leverage similar shifts around the world. At this point, what happens in the U.S. is most important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions are growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that China has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent.) The three numbers I've described are daunting – they may define an essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more. Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.

Meanwhile the tide of numbers continues. The week after the Rio conference limped to its conclusion, Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level ever recorded for that date. Last month, on a single weekend, Tropical Storm Debby dumped more than 20 inches of rain on Florida – the earliest the season's fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived. At the same time, the largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in Colorado Springs – breaking a record set the week before in Fort Collins. This month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global warming has dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and drought – days after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this year's harvest. You want a big number? In the course of this month, a quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the grain belt, something they can't do if temperatures remain off the charts. Just like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now leaving... in the dust.

This story is from the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

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Related

Al Gore: Science and Truth Vs. the Merchants of Poison
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-of-denial-20110622

Climate Change and the End of Australia
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003 [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67725592 and preceding and following]

As the World Burns: Why Big Oil Is Winning on Climate Change
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/as-the-world-burns-20100106

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Copyright ©2012 Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 [with comments]


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The Endless Summer

By MARK BITTMAN
July 18, 2012, 9:32 pm

Here’s what American exceptionalism means now: on a per-capita basis, we either lead or come close to leading the world in consumption of resources, production of pollutants and a profound unwillingness to do anything about it. We may look back upon this year as the one in which climate change began to wreak serious havoc, yet we hear almost no conversation about changing policy or behavior. President Obama has done nicely in raising fuel averages for automobiles, but he came into office promising much more, and Mitt Romney promises even less [ http://grist.org/election-2012/2012-01-04-mitt-romney-climate-change-energy/ ]. (There was a time he supported cap and trade.)

It has been well over 100 years since the phenomenon called the greenhouse effect [ http://climate.nasa.gov/kids/bigQuestions/greenhouseEffect/ ] was identified, 24 years since the steamy summer of ’88 [ http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/16/us/drought-stricken-areas-find-relief-after-rains.html ], when many of us first took notice, and, incredibly, 15 years since the Kyoto Protocol [ http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php/ ]. That agreement stipulated that signatories would annually reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases and was ratified (and even acted upon) by almost every country in the world, including every industrialized nation but one. That would be the United States. Now that’s exceptionalism. (Bill Clinton signed Kyoto; George W. Bush, despite an election pledge, repudiated it.)

The climate has changed, and the only remaining questions may well be: a) how bad will things get, and b) how long will it be before we wake up to it. The only sane people who don’t see this as a problem are those whose profitability depends on the status quo, people of money and power like Romney (“we don’t know what’s causing climate change [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/28/mitt-romney-embraces-climate-change-denial_n_1063905.html ]”), most of his party, and Rex Tillerson, the Exxon chairman, who called the effects of climate change “manageable [ http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2012/06/bloomberg-exxon-ceo-rex-tillerson-calls-effects-of-global-warming-manageable.html/ ].”

Which I suppose they are, as long as you’re wealthy and able to move around at will. But it’s not manageable to the corn farmers losing their crops (many are just chopping them down), the ranchers selling off their cattle, the thousands of people in Colorado burned out of their homes in fires caused by the worst drought since 1956 or those who will lose their homes or jobs to fire, flood, drought or whatever in coming years. How will they “manage”?

All of this is the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is, of course, melting. As Bill McKibben [ http://www.rollingstone.com/contributor/bill-mckibben ] points out in a piece to be published in Rolling Stone on Friday [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 (just above)], not only was May the warmest on record [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/14/499800/noaa-second-hottest-may-on-record-globally-hottest-for-northern-hemisphere/ ] for the Northern Hemisphere, not only was it “the 327th consecutive month [ http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/image/2012/global-land-temperature-in-may-2012-is-warmest-on-record ] in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average,” but it was also followed by a June in which some 3,200 heat records were broken in the United States.

The first page alone of the Rolling Stone article will scare the pants off you, but the chorus needs to grow bigger, louder and stronger. That’s why the forthcoming book (due July 24) from Climate Central, “Global Weirdness [ http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/no-average-year-no-average-book-global-weirdness/ ],” is so welcome. “Global Weirdness,” which explains climate change in simple, easy-to-understand language and ultrashort chapters, is intentionally calm because, says Michael Lemonick [ http://www.climatecentral.org/about/people-bio/michael_lemonick/ ], one of the authors: “Some people respond well to ‘Big trouble is coming and we must do something immediately,’ but others are overwhelmed and just turn off. We believe that if you look at all the available evidence it’s clear we’re pushing the earth into a regime where it hasn’t been before, and the effects could well be disastrous.”

The time to avoid calamitous effects has likely passed. This doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless, but the longer we wait to curb emissions, the worse and longer-lasting the effects. Climate Central’s projections show that the biggest cities in Florida, and a great deal of the Northeast coastline (including New York City), will be underwater by 2100 [ http://io9.com/5894452/find-out-if-your-house-will-be-underwater-by-2100 ], when almost everyone now alive will have “managed” to leave the scene. Of course, the calamities won’t be limited to North America, nor is 2100 some magical expiration date; the end isn’t in sight.

Only reducing carbon emissions can keep matters from becoming worse. Thus the argument for a tax on carbon has never been stronger, but neither has the power of the energy companies to compel legislative paralysis on this issue. The way to a carbon tax is through Congress and the White House, but installing a responsible Congress means campaign-finance reform, another challenge of which Americans are aware but clueless about how to address. But feelings of helplessness are practically un-American: we have the opportunity to demand principled and independent leadership, if we will only try.

It was just about a year ago that we saw the beginnings of what is now called the Occupy movement. And although income inequality has hardly been “solved,” it’s a bigger part of the conversation now, and that may well spell Romney’s downfall. A similar movement — one that, as McKibben told me, “identifies the fossil fuel industry as the real enemy in the climate fight, which is ultimately a moral battle” — could possibly get things moving. If we can force our next president to turn his attention to a problem that may well dwarf the economy in scale, perhaps American exceptionalism will come to mean leadership in the right direction.

Please visit my blog [ http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/ ] and join me on Facebook [ http://www.facebook.com/MarkBittman ] or follow me on Twitter [ http://twitter.com/bittman ].

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Related Posts from Opinionator

Weather Bane
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/weather-bane/

Are Americans Cooling on Global Warming?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/weekend-opinionator-are-americans-cooling-on-global-warming/

Waxman-Markey: As Good As It Gets
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/waxman-markey-as-good-as-it-gets/

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© 2012 The New York Times Company (emphasis in original)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/the-endless-summer/ [with comments]


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Global carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase in 2011

July 18, 2012
Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main cause of global warming – increased by 3 per cent last year, reaching an all-time high of 34 billion tonnes in 2011.
In China, the world’s most populous country, average emissions of CO2 increased by 9 per cent to 7.2 tonnes per capita. China is now within the range of 6 to 19 tonnes per capita emissions of the major industrialised countries.
In the European Union, CO2 emissions dropped by 3 per cent to 7.5 tonnes per capita. The United States remain one of the largest emitters of CO2, with 17.3 tones per capita, despite a decline due to the recession in 2008-2009, high oil prices and an increased share of natural gas.
These are the main findings of the annual report ‘Trends in global CO2 emissions’, released today by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL).
[...]
http://www.engineerlive.com/Design-Engineer/Interview_Opinion/Global__carbon_dioxide_emissions_continue_to_increase_in_2011/24380/


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Average Chinese person's carbon footprint now equals European's


China became the largest national emitter of CO2 in 2006, though its emissions per person have always been lower than those in developed countries such as Europe.
Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

The per capita emissions of the world's largest national emitter is almost on a par with the European average, new figures show

Duncan Clark
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 July 2012 11.21 EDT

The average Chinese person's carbon footprint is now almost on a par with the average European's, figures released on Wednesday reveal.

China became the largest national emitter of CO2 in 2006 [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jun/19/china.usnews ], though its emissions per person have always been lower than those in developed countries such as Europe.

But today's report [ http://www.pbl.nl/en/news/newsitems/2012/per-capita-co2-emissions-in-china-reached-european-level ], which only covers emissions from energy, by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the European commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) show that per capita emissions in China increased by 9% in 2011 to reach 7.2 tonnes per person, only a fraction lower than the EU average of 7.5 tonnes.

The figure for the US is still much higher – at 17.3 tonnes – though total Chinese CO2 emissions are now around 80% higher than those of America. This widening gap reflects a 9% increase in total emissions in China in 2011, driven mainly by rising coal use, compared with a 2% decline in the US.

Total emissions in Europe and Japan also fell last year, by 3% and 2% respectively. But emissions rose across much of the developing world, including India, which saw a 6% increase. As a result, OECD nations now account for only around a third of the global total.

The figures published on Wednesday – like most official data on carbon emissions [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/carbon-emissions ] – are based on where fossil fuels are burned. A recent UK select committee report [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/18/britain-outsourcing-carbon-emissions-china ] argued that it was also important to consider the import and export of goods when considering national responsibility for climate change [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change ]. This would affect today's data, because previous studies have suggested [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2011/apr/28/carbon-emissions-imports-exports-trade ] that almost a fifth of Chinese emissions are caused by the production of goods for export.

In addition, the new county data exclude international travel, which accounts for 3% of the global total and is likely to be heavily weighted towards richer countries. Non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also excluded.

For these reasons, the total carbon footprint of the average European most likely remains substantially higher than that of the average Chinese person. In addition, Europe, the US and other developed countries have contributed a disproportionate share of the historical emissions that have caused the warming to date and will remain in the atmosphere for decades or centuries to come.

But a recent study [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/dec/06/poorer-rich-consumption-carbon-footprint ] showed that even when imports and international travel are taken into account, the developed world now accounts for less than half of current global emissions. Moreover, China's emissions may be even higher than reported today according to another study showing [ http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/06/10/us-china-emissions-idUKBRE8590AD20120610 ] that the country's official energy statistics were as much as 20% lower than they should be.

Owing to factors such as these, precise national emissions figures will remain the subject of debate. Globally, however, the picture is clear. Total emissions from fossil fuels and cement increased by 3%, leaving global emissions at a record 34bn tonnes of CO2. That is less than the rise in 2010, when emissions shot up by 5% as the world economy bounced back from recession, but higher than the average annual increase for the past decade, which stands at 2.7%. This suggests that efforts to curb global emissions have so far failed to make any impact.

The continued steep rise in global carbon emissions will make it even more difficult for the world's nations to fulfil their stated aim of limiting temperature rise to 2C, considered a danger threshold after which the risks of irreversible climate change increase.

According to the report, if global emissions continue on their current trend, the world will commit itself to 2C of warming within two decades.

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/18/china-average-europe-carbon-footprint [with comments]


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Can You Guess the World's Fastest Growing Economy? (No, It's Not China)


A tourist stands at Sükhbaatar Square, in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator.
(Wikimedia)


A miner looks over Oyu Tolgoi mine, a mark in the Gobi Desert that produces $5 billion in coal every year.
(Reuters)


Children play with a balloon in front of the Mongolian capital's gleaming Parliament building.
(AP)

By Max Fisher
Jul 16 2012, 1:13 PM ET

If you can make your way into the VIP room on the second floor of the Louis Vuitton outlet [ http://www.luluscouture.com/lulus-fashion/louis-vuitton-enters-mongolia/ ] in Ulan Bator -- it's near the Burberry store, but the Burberry in Central Tower and not the one at the forthcoming [ http://www.shangri-la.com/corporate/press-room/press-releases/shangri-las-first-mongolia-hotel-to-open-2013/ ] Shangri La resort hotel -- you'll be handed a glass of champagne and asked to gaze upon a special, gem-encrusted saddle [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/fashion/06iht-rshop.html ] made just for this store. It symbolizes "the fusion of the brand's travel heritage and Mongolia's tradition of expert horseback riding," according to a Louis Vuitton press release [ http://www.mad-mongolia.com/ulaanbaatar-city-guide/louis-vuitton-1170/ ], and it includes a special container for carrying caviar across the same Mongolian steppe that bred Genghis Khan.

This is the new Mongolia, and it doesn't always look like the old Mongolia. The ancient ways are still here [ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2009/06/tasting-history-in-mongolian-spring/19071/ ] -- though the yurt-like gers that have littered the steppe for centuries now sometimes carry satellite dishes and solar panels -- and why shouldn't they be? Neither Chinese nor Soviet dominance could change Mongolia's famously nomadic, individualistic culture. But, now that it has the world's fastest growing economy, according to NPR [ http://m.npr.org/news/front/152683549?singlePage=true ], no one is quite sure if Mongolia's breakneck transformation [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/world/asia/in-mongolias-boom-town-hope-and-fear.html?_r=1&ref=global-home ] will prove for the better.

Mongolia's rise is about Mongolia, but it's also about an otherwise minor global player that has been pushed and pulled with the fates its two powerhouse neighbors -- China to the south and Russia north -- and rises or falls along with them. Mongolia was a dictatorial, underdeveloped disaster in its 70 years behind the Iron Curtain. Finally democratic and free market, it was perfectly positioned to join China's ascent, but also China's risks.

Mongolia has vast natural resources -- copper, gold, uranium, and perhaps most importantly coal -- and few citizens among whom to divide the spoils. Though it's over three and a half times the size of California, it has a population of only 2.7 million people, fewer than live in just the urban center of Fuzhou, China's 30th largest city.

With China's increasingly insatiable appetite for exactly the minerals that its norther neighbor boasts in abundance [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/could-mongolia-be-the-next-dubai/248136/ ], Mongolia is joining a small class of once-impoverished Asian nations that are getting rich by selling to Beijing. Kazakhstan, which was never as Borat portrayed it but wasn't exactly Vienna either, has financed a gleaming glass capital and a nationwide modernization by feeding Chinese energy demands [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/the-next-5-emerging-economies-that-will-change-the-world/253463/#slide3 ].

Countries like Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan [ http://www.rferl.org/content/kyrgyz-president-pushes-china-uzbek-rail-link/24590625.html ] are building their economies on China's import market. It's hard not to think of the Persian Gulf states that sold enough oil to the West to transform themselves, in only 50 years, from heavily nomadic and illiterate societies into countries so rich that they have a problem with too many Ferraris on their streets [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/10/why-are-dubai-and-abu-dhabis-roads-some-of-the-worlds-most-dangerous/246816/ ].

The problem is that Mongolia's wealth is not sustainable. If the Chinese economy takes a sudden downturn, as it might, the Mongolian economy could shut down almost overnight. Even if that doesn't happen, there's no question that one day, maybe in 50 years or maybe in 20, the coal mines will empty.

Now that so many Mongolians have abandoned their rural, from-the-land lifestyles to crowd into the rapidly growing capital city [ http://degruben.com/opinions/1420/is-it-still-worth-investing-in-ulaanbaatar-property/ ], they're dependent on the mineral economy. Many of them may not have an old way to return to should the new way fail them. And with inflation so high [ http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/02/10/bit-of-a-squeeze-in-ulan-bator/ ], a hard landing could be severely painful.

So, if Mongolia is profiting off of a Chinese version of the same model that made Middle Eastern oil exporters so rich, then it faces a similar challenge: to invest that money into more sustainable industries [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/oilrich-abu-dhabi-we-are-the-real-winner-of-the-oscars/253668/ ] so that it will have something to fall back on when the buyers go away or the resources run out. There's nothing wrong with Mongolians enjoying the fruits of their new success, but if they put all of their money into gem-covered saddles, then Mongolia's first golden age in centuries could be short-lived.

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/can-you-guess-the-worlds-fastest-growing-economy-no-its-not-china/259877/ [with comments]


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Loading the Climate Dice

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 22, 2012

A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.

And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate catastrophe, in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day to day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in average temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme events — like the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland — that do vast damage.

On the first point: Even with the best will in the world, it would be hard for most people to stay focused on the big picture in the face of short-run fluctuations. When the mercury is high and the crops are withering, everyone talks about it, and some make the connection to global warming. But let the days grow a bit cooler and the rains fall, and inevitably people’s attention turns to other matters.

Making things much worse, of course, is the role of players who don’t have the best will in the world. Climate change denial is a major industry, lavishly financed by Exxon, the Koch brothers and others with a financial stake in the continued burning of fossil fuels. And exploiting variability is one of the key tricks of that industry’s trade. Applications range from the Fox News perennial — “It’s cold outside! Al Gore was wrong!” — to the constant claims that we’re experiencing global cooling, not warming, because it’s not as hot right now as it was a few years back.

How should we think about the relationship between climate change and day-to-day experience? Almost a quarter of a century ago James Hansen, the NASA scientist who did more than anyone to put climate change on the agenda, suggested the analogy of loaded dice. Imagine, he and his associates suggested, representing the probabilities of a hot, average or cold summer by historical standards as a die with two faces painted red, two white and two blue. By the early 21st century, they predicted, it would be as if four of the faces were red, one white and one blue. Hot summers would become much more frequent, but there would still be cold summers now and then.

And so it has proved. As documented in a new paper by Dr. Hansen and others, cold summers by historical standards still happen, but rarely, while hot summers have in fact become roughly twice as prevalent. And 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.

But that’s not all: really extreme high temperatures, the kind of thing that used to happen very rarely in the past, have now become fairly common. Think of it as rolling two sixes, which happens less than 3 percent of the time with fair dice, but more often when the dice are loaded. And this rising incidence of extreme events, reflecting the same variability of weather that can obscure the reality of climate change, means that the costs of climate change aren’t a distant prospect, decades in the future. On the contrary, they’re already here, even though so far global temperatures are only about 1 degree Fahrenheit above their historical norms, a small fraction of their eventual rise if we don’t act.

The great Midwestern drought is a case in point. This drought has already sent corn prices to their highest level ever. If it continues, it could cause a global food crisis, because the U.S. heartland is still the world’s breadbasket. And yes, the drought is linked to climate change: such events have happened before, but they’re much more likely now than they used to be.

Now, maybe this drought will break in time to avoid the worst. But there will be more events like this. Joseph Romm, the influential climate blogger, has coined the term “Dust-Bowlification” for the prospect of extended periods of extreme drought in formerly productive agricultural areas. He has been arguing for some time that this phenomenon, with its disastrous effects on food security, is likely to be the leading edge of damage from climate change, taking place over the next few decades; the drowning of Florida by rising sea levels and all that will come later.

And here it comes.

Will the current drought finally lead to serious climate action? History isn’t encouraging. The deniers will surely keep on denying, especially because conceding at this point that the science they’ve trashed was right all along would be to admit their own culpability for the looming disaster. And the public is all too likely to lose interest again the next time the die comes up white or blue.

But let’s hope that this time is different. For large-scale damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening now.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/krugman-loading-the-climate-dice.html [with comments]


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We’re All Climate-Change Idiots


Andrew Holder

By BETH GARDINER
Published: July 21, 2012

CLIMATE CHANGE is staring us in the face. The science is clear, and the need to reduce planet-warming emissions has grown urgent. So why, collectively, are we doing so little about it?

Yes, there are political and economic barriers, as well as some strong ideological opposition, to going green. But researchers in the burgeoning field of climate psychology have identified another obstacle, one rooted in the very ways our brains work. The mental habits that help us navigate the local, practical demands of day-to-day life, they say, make it difficult to engage with the more abstract, global dangers posed by climate change.

Robert Gifford, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who studies the behavioral barriers to combating climate change, calls these habits of mind “dragons of inaction.” We have trouble imagining a future drastically different from the present. We block out complex problems that lack simple solutions. We dislike delayed benefits and so are reluctant to sacrifice today for future gains. And we find it harder to confront problems that creep up on us than emergencies that hit quickly.

“You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Sometimes, when forming our opinions, we grasp at whatever information presents itself, no matter how irrelevant. A new study by the psychologist Nicolas Guéguen, published in last month’s Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that participants seated in a room with a ficus tree lacking foliage were considerably more likely to say that global warming was real than were those in a room with a ficus tree that had foliage.

We also tend to pay attention to information that reinforces what we already believe and dismiss evidence that would require us to change our minds, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Dan M. Kahan, a Yale Law School professor who studies risk and science communication, says this is crucial to understanding the intense political polarization on climate change. He and his research colleagues have found that people with more hierarchical, individualistic worldviews (generally conservatives) sense that accepting climate science would lead to restraints on commerce, something they highly value, so they often dismiss evidence of the risk. Those with a more egalitarian, community-oriented mind-set (generally liberals) are likely to be suspicious of industry and very ready to credit the idea that it is harming the environment.

There are ways to overcome such prejudices. Professor Kahan has shown that how climate change solutions are framed can affect our views of the problem. In one study, not yet published, he and his colleagues asked people to assess a scientific paper reporting that the climate was changing faster than expected. Beforehand, one group was asked to read an article calling for tighter carbon caps (i.e., a regulatory solution); a second group read an article urging work on geoengineering, the manipulation of atmospheric conditions (i.e., a technological solution); and a control group read an unrelated story on traffic lights. All three groups included hierarchical individualists and egalitarian communitarians.

In all cases, the individualists were, as expected, less likely than the communitarians to say the scientific paper seemed valid. But the gap was 29 percent smaller among those who had first been exposed to the geoengineering idea than among those who had been prompted to think about regulating carbon, and 14 percent smaller than in the traffic light group. Thinking about climate change as a technological challenge rather than as a regulatory problem, it seems, made individualists more ready to credit the scientific claim about the climate.

Research also suggests public health is an effective frame: few people care passionately about polar bears, but if you argue that closing coal-burning plants will reduce problems like asthma, you’re more likely to find a receptive audience, says the American University communications professor Matthew Nisbet.

Smaller “nudges,” similarly sensitive to our psychological quirks, can also spur change. Taking advantage of our preference for immediate gratification, energy monitors that displayed consumption levels in real-time cut energy use by an average of 7 percent, according to a study in the journal Energy in 2010. Telling heavy energy users how much less power their neighbors consumed prompted them to cut their own use, according to a 2007 study in Psychological Science. And trading on our innate laziness, default settings have also conserved resources: when Rutgers University changed its printers’ settings to double-sided, it saved more than seven million sheets of paper in one semester in 2007.

Simply presenting climate science more clearly is unlikely to change attitudes. But a better understanding of our minds’ strange workings may help save us from ourselves.

Beth Gardiner is a freelance journalist.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/were-all-climate-change-idiots.html


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There’s Still Hope for the Planet

July 21, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/sunday-review/a-ray-of-hope-on-climate-change.html


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The Ecology of Disease


Olaf Hajek


Sources: EcoHealth Alliance; Nature; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; World Health Organization

By JIM ROBBINS
Published: July 14, 2012

THERE’S a term biologists and economists use these days — ecosystem services — which refers to the many ways nature supports the human endeavor. Forests filter the water we drink, for example, and birds and bees pollinate crops, both of which have substantial economic as well as biological value.

If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades — don’t just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.

Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.

Teams of veterinarians and conservation biologists are in the midst of a global effort with medical doctors and epidemiologists to understand the “ecology of disease.” It is part of a project called Predict, which is financed by the United States Agency for International Development. Experts are trying to figure out, based on how people alter the landscape — with a new farm or road, for example — where the next diseases are likely to spill over into humans and how to spot them when they do emerge, before they can spread. They are gathering blood, saliva and other samples from high-risk wildlife species to create a library of viruses so that if one does infect humans, it can be more quickly identified. And they are studying ways of managing forests, wildlife and livestock to prevent diseases from leaving the woods and becoming the next pandemic.

It isn’t only a public health issue, but an economic one. The World Bank has estimated that a severe influenza pandemic, for example, could cost the world economy $3 trillion.

The problem is exacerbated by how livestock are kept in poor countries, which can magnify diseases borne by wild animals. A study released earlier this month [ http://www.ilri.org/ilrinews/index.php/archives/tag/dfid ] by the International Livestock Research Institute found that more than two million people a year are killed by diseases that spread to humans from wild and domestic animals.

The Nipah virus in South Asia, and the closely related Hendra virus in Australia, both in the genus of henipah viruses, are the most urgent examples of how disrupting an ecosystem can cause disease. The viruses originated with flying foxes, Pteropus vampyrus, also known as fruit bats. They are messy eaters, no small matter in this scenario. They often hang upside down, looking like Dracula wrapped tightly in their membranous wings, and eat fruit by masticating the pulp and then spitting out the juices and seeds.

The bats have evolved with henipah over millions of years, and because of this co-evolution, they experience little more from it than the fruit bat equivalent of a cold. But once the virus breaks out of the bats and into species that haven’t evolved with it, a horror show can occur, as one did in 1999 in rural Malaysia. It is likely that a bat dropped a piece of chewed fruit into a piggery in a forest. The pigs became infected with the virus, and amplified it, and it jumped to humans. It was startling in its lethality. Out of 276 people infected in Malaysia, 106 died, and many others suffered permanent and crippling neurological disorders. There is no cure or vaccine. Since then there have been 12 smaller outbreaks in South Asia.

In Australia, where four people and dozens of horses have died of Hendra, the scenario was different: suburbanization lured infected bats that were once forest-dwellers into backyards and pastures. If a henipah virus evolves to be transmitted readily through casual contact, the concern is that it could leave the jungle and spread throughout Asia or the world. “Nipah is spilling over, and we are observing these small clusters of cases — and it’s a matter of time that the right strain will come along and efficiently spread among people,” says Jonathan Epstein [ http://www.ecohealthalliance.org/about/experts/10-epstein ], a veterinarian with EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based organization that studies the ecological causes of disease.

That’s why experts say it’s critical to understand underlying causes. “Any emerging disease in the last 30 or 40 years has come about as a result of encroachment into wild lands and changes in demography,” says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth.

Emerging infectious diseases are either new types of pathogens or old ones that have mutated to become novel, as the flu does every year. AIDS, for example, crossed into humans from chimpanzees [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/health/18aids.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all ] in the 1920s when bush-meat hunters in Africa killed and butchered them.

Diseases have always come out of the woods and wildlife and found their way into human populations — the plague and malaria are two examples. But emerging diseases have quadrupled in the last half-century, experts say, largely because of increasing human encroachment into habitat, especially in disease “hot spots” around the globe, mostly in tropical regions. And with modern air travel and a robust market in wildlife trafficking, the potential for a serious outbreak in large population centers is enormous.

The key to forecasting and preventing the next pandemic, experts say, is understanding what they call the “protective effects” of nature intact. In the Amazon, for example, one study showed an increase in deforestation by some 4 percent increased the incidence of malaria by nearly 50 percent, because mosquitoes, which transmit the disease, thrive in the right mix of sunlight and water in recently deforested areas. Developing the forest in the wrong way can be like opening Pandora’s box. These are the kinds of connections the new teams are unraveling.

Public health experts have begun to factor ecology into their models. Australia, for example, has just announced a multimillion-dollar effort to understand the ecology of the Hendra virus and bats.

*

IT’S not just the invasion of intact tropical landscapes that can cause disease. The West Nile virus came to the United States from Africa but spread here because one of its favored hosts is the American robin, which thrives in a world of lawns and agricultural fields. And mosquitoes, which spread the disease, find robins especially appealing. “The virus has had an important impact on human health in the United States because it took advantage of species that do well around people,” says Marm Kilpatrick, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The pivotal role of the robin in West Nile [ http://news.ucsc.edu/2011/10/west-nile-virus.html ] has earned it the title “super spreader.”

And Lyme disease, the East Coast scourge, is very much a product of human changes to the environment: the reduction and fragmentation of large contiguous forests. Development chased off predators — wolves, foxes, owls and hawks. That has resulted in a fivefold increase in white-footed mice, which are great “reservoirs” for the Lyme bacteria, probably because they have poor immune systems. And they are terrible groomers. When possums or gray squirrels groom, they remove 90 percent of the larval ticks that spread the disease, while mice kill just half. “So mice are producing huge numbers of infected nymphs,” says the Lyme disease researcher Richard Ostfeld.

“When we do things in an ecosystem that erode biodiversity — we chop forests into bits or replace habitat with agricultural fields — we tend to get rid of species that serve a protective role,” Dr. Ostfeld told me. “There are a few species that are reservoirs and a lot of species that are not. The ones we encourage are the ones that play reservoir roles.”

Dr. Ostfeld has seen two emerging diseases — babesiosis and anaplasmosis — that affect humans in the ticks he studies, and he has raised the alarm about the possibility of their spread.

The best way to prevent the next outbreak in humans, specialists say, is with what they call the One Health Initiative [ http://www.onehealthinitiative.com/ ] — a worldwide program, involving more than 600 scientists and other professionals, that advances the idea that human, animal and ecological health are inextricably linked and need to be studied and managed holistically.

“It’s not about keeping pristine forest pristine and free of people,” says Simon Anthony, a molecular virologist at the Center for Infection and Immunity [ http://cii.columbia.edu/ ] at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “It’s learning how to do things sustainably. If you can get a handle on what it is that drives the emergence of a disease, then you can learn to modify environments sustainably.”

The scope of the problem is huge and complex. Just an estimated 1 percent of wildlife viruses are known. Another major factor is the immunology of wildlife, a science in its infancy. Raina K. Plowright, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University who studies the ecology of disease, found that outbreaks of the Hendra virus in flying foxes in rural areas were rare but were much higher in urban and suburban animals. She hypothesizes that urbanized bats are sedentary and miss the frequent exposure to the virus they used to get in the wild, which kept the infection at low levels. That means more bats — whether from poor nutrition, loss of habitat or other factors — become infected and shed more of the virus into backyards.

*

THE fate of the next pandemic may be riding on the work of Predict. EcoHealth and its partners — the University of California at Davis, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Smithsonian Institution and Global Viral Forecasting — are looking at wildlife-borne viruses across the tropics, building a virus library. Most of the work focuses on primates, rats and bats, which are most likely to carry diseases that affect people.

Most critically, Predict researchers are watching the interface where deadly viruses are known to exist and where people are breaking open the forest, as they are along the new highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the Andes in Brazil and Peru. “By mapping encroachment into the forest you can predict where the next disease could emerge,” Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth’s president, says. “So we’re going to the edge of villages, we’re going to places where mines have just opened up, areas where new roads are being built. We are going to talk to people who live within these zones and saying, ‘what you are doing is potentially a risk.’ ”

It might mean talking to people about how they butcher and eat bush meat or to those who are building a feed lot in bat habitat. In Bangladesh, where Nipah broke out several times, the disease was traced to bats that were raiding containers that collected date palm sap, which people drank. The disease source was eliminated by placing bamboo screens (which cost 8 cents each) over the collectors.

EcoHealth also scans luggage and packages at airports, looking for imported wildlife likely to be carrying deadly viruses. And they have a program called PetWatch [ http://www.petwatch.net/about/ ] to warn consumers about exotic pets that are pulled out of the forest in disease hot spots and shipped to market.

All in all, the knowledge gained in the last couple of years about emerging diseases should allow us to sleep a little easier, says Dr. Epstein, the EcoHealth veterinarian. “For the first time,” he said, “there is a coordinated effort in 20 countries to develop an early warning system for emerging zoonotic outbreaks.”

Jim Robbins [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/jim_robbins/index.html ] is a frequent contributor to the Science section of The New York Times.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 22, 2012

An earlier version of this article described imprecisely the affiliation of Simon Anthony, a molecular virologist. While he works with [ http://www.ecohealthalliance.org/about/experts/34-anthony ] EcoHealth, an organization of scientists devoted to wildlife conservation, his primary affiliation is as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Infection and Immunity [ http://cii.columbia.edu/ ] at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-ecology-of-disease.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-ecology-of-disease.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]


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In Caribbean Reefs, Social Shrimp Disappear

A sand bores reef in the Caribbean. Most of the eusocial shrimp, that the scientists wanted to study in the reefs of Carrie Bow Cay, have disappeared.
July 24, 2012
http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/in-caribbean-reefs-social-shrimp-disappear/ [with comments]


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A Clue in Lobster Mystery


Bart Mansi, owner of Guilford Lobster Pound and one of Connecticut's last full-time lobstermen.
Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal


A lobster is held by Bart Mansi, owner of Guilford Lobster Pound.
Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal

By JOSEPH DE AVILA
July 22, 2012, 9:10 p.m. ET

GUILFORD, Conn.—As the number of lobsters hauled into this and other port towns from the Long Island Sound has dwindled, the fishing industry has largely blamed a single culprit: mosquito pesticides.

The industry's claims hadn't been supported until a state study this month found traces of pesticides in Long Island Sound lobsters for the first time. The report isn't definitive, and its authors at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said more studies are needed.

But the findings have drawn new attention to the plight of Connecticut's lobstermen, who have watched their catch drop from 3.7 million pounds in 1998 to a record-low of 142,000 in 2011. The decline began with a historic lobster die-off in 1999 that the federal government declared a natural-resources disaster.

Lobstermen said the study should be used as a catalyst to reduce pollutants such as methoprene, a pesticide used to kill mosquito larva by state and local governments since the late 1990s when West Nile virus emerged.

Government researchers said there still isn't enough evidence to point the finger at mosquito pesticides, which enter the Sound from rainwater runoff. They said new studies would use more sensitive technology.

"Just because there is something there doesn't mean it's harmful," said David Simpson, director of the marine fisheries division for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. He said Long Island Sound lobsters are still safe to eat. "We need to evaluate that much more fully."

Besides mosquito spraying, other culprits could include an increase in predators like striped bass and black sea bass, Mr. Simpson said. The Long Island Sound's temperature been rising, frequently exceeding the 68 degree threshold that is healthy for lobsters. Bacterial or parasitic infection is another possibility.

It is difficult to determine which factor is having the most impact, said Sylvain De Guise, director Connecticut Sea Grant, a research partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Connecticut.

"It is very hard to objectively quantify the effects of each when they are put together," Mr. De Guise said.

Connecticut lobstermen said the time for research is over and are pushing for bans on mosquito pesticides.

"This is redundancy at its best. It's a waste of taxpayer money," said Nicholas Crismale, who has fished the Long Island Sound for 40 years and is president of the Connecticut Commercial Lobstermen's Association. He recently gave up lobstering for clamming because it is more lucrative.

"This is not going to bring back the lobster industry," Mr. Crismale said.

Connecticut's lobster industry has nearly vanished since 1999, when the catch plummeted by 1.2 million pounds. It fell the same amount in 2000, to just 1.3 million pounds, and hasn't come close to its former levels since.

Bart Mansi, one of Connecticut's last full-time lobstermen, owns a restaurant and market called the Lobster Pound here in Guilford. On an average day, he and his son pull up about 100 pounds of lobster out of the Long Island Sound.

"We used to catch that in an hour," said Mr. Mansi, 54 years old, who has been fishing these waters since he was 13. "Now we got to work all day."

Since the 1999 die-off, Connecticut state scientists have launched several studies that have produced no firm answers. In 2007, the state began paying lobstermen to mark female lobsters with the letter "V" and return them to the Sound in an effort to give them more time to breed. The program's funding ran out in 2009.

Meanwhile, a glut of Maine lobsters has been driving down retail prices there to about $2.75 to $3.75 a pound. But in Connecticut, lobsters are selling for about $5.50 to $6 a pound because there are fewer and they are in higher demand.

Connecticut lobstermen are also bracing for new regulations from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which governs the industry along the coast. The new rules would eliminate fishing for lobsters in the Long Island Sound during the fall months starting in 2013.

"I don't know what we are going to do," Mr. Mansi said. "Just stop for 2½ months; how do you do that?"

Connecticut officials are also pushing for a 25% reduction in the number of lobster traps that fishermen can use.

"That is a controllable source of mortality," said Mr. Simpson. "Clearly we are reaching a point in the western and central Sound where frankly we are running out of time."

Lobstermen say they are being treated as scapegoats.

"They are just grasping at straws trying to manage the fishery through us when they should be trying to reduce the pollutants," said Mike Grimshaw, president of the Southern New England Fishermen and Lobstermen's Association.

In May, Connecticut's House of Representatives passed a bill to curb the use of methoprene. But it wasn't voted on in the Senate. Lobstermen hope the bill is revived in the next legislative session.

Most Connecticut fishermen have given up on harvesting lobsters.

The Long Island Sound industry used to bring in about $40 million a year and employ more than 300 full-time lobstermen. Now the industry earns less than $1 million a year. Only about 20 full-time lobstermen ply the waters.

"Why we are not on the endangered species list is beyond me," Mr. Mansi said.

Mr. Crismale said he worries that he won't be able to take his grandchildren fishing for lobster—as he did with his children—because "there is no fishery."

"When you think about it," he said, "it's kind of sad."

Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444330904577539333360407516.html [with comments]


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'Lucky Larry,' 17-Pound Lobster, Released Into Long Island Sound

AP
Posted: 07/25/2012 8:00 am Updated: 07/25/2012 11:35 am

WATERFORD, Conn. (AP) — A Connecticut man purchased a 17-pound lobster at a Waterford restaurant, then released the crustacean back into Long Island Sound.

Don MacKenzie of Niantic tells The Day of New London [ http://theday.com/article/20120724/NWS01/120729886/1017 ( http://bit.ly/MGvGHb )] he knew the lobster, nicknamed "Lucky Larry" by local children, would have to be about 80-years-old to reach his current size and felt it deserved to live.

MacKenzie won't say how much he paid The Dock restaurant to take Larry off the menu.

He took the lobster back to sea Tuesday, releasing it in a secret location.

MacKenzie received a send-off from a group of children chanting "Let Larry Live" and the lobster was given a salute from the Niantic River Bridge operator who sounded the lift bridge's siren as the boat carrying it headed back to sea.

Information from: The Day, http://www.theday.com

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/lucky-larry-lobster-released_n_1701172.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Native American Communities Affected by Climate Change Plan for the Future

Native Americans from Maine to Washington state convened for a conference this week at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Their goal: To discuss the effects of climate change on tribal communities. Hari Sreenivasan reports.

AIR DATE: July 19, 2012

Transcript

JEFFREY BROWN: There's another big meeting taking place in Washington this week. Native populations from around the U.S. convened at a conference on the impacts of climate change.

Hari Sreenivasan has that story.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Our series on Coping With Climate Change has included multiple examples of how Native American populations are feeling the impacts and adapting.

We took you to coastal Louisiana [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/climate-change/jan-june12/louisianacoast_05-30.html ], where tribal people are experiencing relative sea level rise in a very personal way. Their islands are shrinking and their burial grounds will soon be underwater.

The Quileute Tribe in Washington State [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/science/july-dec12/quileute_07-05.html ], whose reservation was down to its last square mile, until they recently won rights to move to higher ground in the nearby national park.

Last night, we showed you how the Swinomish Tribe is trying to plan ahead [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/climate-change/july-dec12/salmon_07-18.html ] and adapt to faster glacial snowmelts, higher stream temperatures, and changes in fishing grounds.

Changes are being felt by Native peoples throughout the country, and it was the reason for the First Stewards conference at the Smithsonian Museum.

We sat down with a few representatives.

Joining me here at the National Museum of the American Indian to tell us how their communities are coping with climate change are Micah McCarty from the Makah Tribe in Washington, Kitty Simonds from Hawaii, Mike Williams from the Akiak Native Community in Alaska, and Jeff Mears from the Oneida Tribe in Wisconsin.

Thanks so much for joining us.

MIKE WILLIAMS, Akiak Native Community: Thank you.

JEFF MEARS, Oneida Nation: Thank you.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, in your lifetimes, what have you seen change, perhaps in the areas that you have grown up? What's something that you can point to and say that this is what it used to be when I was a child and here's what the situation is today?

KITTY SIMONDS, Western Pacific Regional Fishery Council: I guess for me, growing up in Hawaii, the changes were really with the fish population.

We used to have much larger fish, different species. They seem to have changed. And I'm not sure whether it's climate change or the visitors feeding our fish food that they shouldn't be feeding them. So, for me, it's that, because we always ate fish at least three or four times a week.

So that has been a large change. And the fishermen have to go farther and farther out to catch fish, in fact outside the 200-mile zone. And we have fewer fish around the coral reefs. Those actually were the best eating fish for us. We would love to -- they were small, and we would fry them up, and they were delicious. Well, there are very few of those left.

MICAH MCCARTY, Makah Nation: OK, I'm 41 years old. And I have probably been to at least 39 Makah Days. Makah Days is our celebration annually at the end of summer.

And it always rained on Sunday. And one year, in 2006, in my first term on council, we had a drought that lasted towards the end of October. And we had to declare a state of emergency. But what the real concern was, was the watershed that supports the salmon hatchery.

And we had some very serious concerns with our biologists that the eggs in the returning runs might not be viable by the time the rains came. And that was the first time I had ever heard of something like that happening.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Mike Williams, you have been through more than, what, a dozen Iditarods, 14 Iditarods. You have literally seen Alaska in a way that probably most humans will never get a chance to see. What are the differences that you have seen in your lifetime?

MIKE WILLIAMS: In 50 years of my observation, I have seen a lot of changes, from cold winters that -- and ice that was very safe into thinning of ice.

And we had to move in some cases further north. Our hunters are going out further. Like, in Shishmaref, they are having to go 90 miles out to find ice to get their walrus and their seals. And they're having to risk more going out further into the sea. And when the weather hits and then that's where the loss of life occurs.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Jeff Mears, you're sort of representing all of those inland nations and inland communities that might not have these same sort of fishing or coastal problems, but what are some of the impacts on climate change in an inland tribe such as yours?

JEFF MEARS: So, since I have been here, the stories that we hear in Alaska, it's immediate and heartbreaking, what they're going through.

What we're looking at is planning for the future. So the tribe, the Oneida Tribe in Wisconsin, like any other government, provides a lot of services. We have a police department, a school, a health center. We have a wastewater treatment plant.

Like most governments, we have to learn to plan to design our infrastructure to withstand the impacts of climate change. In our case, it's going to be similar to the weather we have seen lately, with increased hot weather events, precipitation much heavier in shorter periods of time.

And we have seen what can happen in Duluth recently, where actually a seal was flushed right out of the zoo. There's 10 to 12 animals that drowned at the zoo because of a 10-inch rain event that happened over two days. Short-term rain events can be as powerful as hurricanes. And that's what we will be looking at, to design our infrastructure to withstand those things.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Micah, speaking of a little bit about that adaptation, how are coastal communities along -- in Washington state or on the West Coast preparing and adapting? How are they trying to synchronize some of what they have already known for hundreds of years with modern-day science?

MICAH MCCARTY: Well, I think one of the biggest challenges is just realizing what's happening, because our tribal communities and our natural resource divisions that do co-management with the state and the feds.

As Wisconsin is working to adapt, it's like we have to come up for air and look around on how we're going to start strategizing our adaptation. But my concern is, looking forward into the future, what can we do about ocean acidification? What can we do to really create a safe haven and integrate some of the technologies that are replicated around the world and become perhaps a model that other coastal communities worldwide can continue to depend on the ocean?

HARI SREENIVASAN: Kitty Simonds, you probably know about ocean acidification and coral reef bleaching and perhaps even the introduction of foreign species and what sort of interplay that has.

KITTY SIMONDS: Yes, in terms of the coral reefs, you know, you can replant them. And that's the -- you know, because of the coral bleaching, they're going to have to think of ways of replanting the coral someplace else around the island.

And they do thrive. So that is one of the solutions in terms of the coral reefs. They're very important to the islanders because of -- the fish that live around the coral reefs are the fish that the islanders eat. So, once that goes away, the fish goes away, they lose their culture.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Mike Williams, so some of these tribes are able to move inland. But that's not a cheap proposition to try and pick up your entire village or your way of life and move inland. What happens to these communities when there isn't that money? Do these tribal people scatter?

MIKE WILLIAMS: The village of Newtok (ph) is beginning to move.

And it's a slow process. And the communities are having mixed feelings about moving from where they were born. And where I was born, our old house was on the river, and it fell in. But we're having to move further inland. And the infrastructure is very expensive.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Jeff Mears, help put this in some economic perspective. For a tribe like yours, trying to plan for these changes to the climate, as it changes and the types of things that you have to plan for in your community, what does that cost you? And ultimately what does that cost the local state or federal governments?

JEFF MEARS: So, some of the stuff we have talked about is obviously the infrastructure.

There will be a certain cost that is going to make sure, for example, our wastewater treatment plant is designed -- it's already in place now -- to make sure that we protect it from water that could wipe it out. There's examples of infrastructure like wastewater treatment plants being inundated with water, cryptosporidium outbreaks on public health.

The costs just keep getting escalated if you don't do anything. So the up-front costs I think are far less than what it will be if we don't do anything.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Jeff Mears from Wisconsin, Mike Williams from Alaska, Kitty Simonds from Hawaii, and Micah McCarty from Washington state, thanks so much for joining us.

MICAH MCCARTY: Thank you.

MIKE WILLIAMS: Thank you.

JEFF MEARS: Thank you.

KITTY SIMONDS: Thank you, and aloha.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you can find all our climate reports on the Coping With Climate Change page on our website [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/topic/climate-change/ ].

Copyright © 2012 MacNeil/Lehrer Productions

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/climate-change/july-dec12/tribes_07-19.html [with embedded video, and comments]


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A cave new world: Amazing underground rock formations that look like an alien world seen for the first time

By Mark Prigg
PUBLISHED: 06:03 EST, 19 July 2012 | UPDATED: 13:37 EST, 19 July 2012

With towering rock formations and stunning light effects, it could easily be mistaken for an alien world.

In this amazing set of images, the experts are dwarfed by towering rock formations rarely ever seen.

The amazing caves are in Obir Tropfsteinh in Eastern Austria.


Scientific instruments measure dripping water inside a small grotto in an astonishing new cave system in Eastern Austria.

Explorations into the cavernous caves hundreds of feet beneath the surface have begun in a bid to uncover information that may help solve issues surrounding climate change.

The scientists are also painstakingly mapping the movement of water through billions of years of rocks in the Alps of Austria.

They use a fluorescent dye which can be traced through the underground reservoirs to the source.


Dr Gina Moseley ascends a rope pitch inside Glocken Schacht, one of many cold caves in Tirol, Austria.

British photographer Robbie Shone plunged hundreds of feet into the ground to accompany the scientists as they navigated the maze of giant crystals and rock formations.

Robbie, 32, from Manchester, said: 'Caves are difficult, unforgiving and arduous environment. The cave is black with no light so you have to mind where you step.'

Despite the dangers, Robbie crawled through cracks int he caves to capture the stunning images.

He added: 'People are amazed at the pictures because the majority can never imagine themselves going down into a cave themselves and are gobsmacked when they see what lies beneath their feet.

'Caves are very rarely seen in this way as the cave explorer only uses a small head torch to illuminate the way ahead, not the big flash lights we use to make the pictures.'


Lush green vegetation engulfs the entrance as Dr Gina Moseley climbs a rope out of the cave in Austria.


Unique marble inside Spannagel, a cave on the Hintertux Glacier above Mayrhofen, Austria.


Pure untouched formations inhabit crystal clear waters inside Katerloch cave Eastern Austria.


The Katerloch cave in Eastern Austria.


PhD student Susanne Brandstutter admires the unique marble inside Spannagel, a marble cave up on the Hintertux Glacier above Mayrhofen, Austria.

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More...

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Caves, turtles and, er, albinos
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-1369752/Cave-Forgotten-Dreams-Caves-turtles-er-albinos.html

British explorers discover world's largest cave deep in Vietnamese jungle
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1175430/British-explorers-discover-worlds-largest-cave-deep-Vietnamese-jungle.html

Reindeer carved into wall of cave in Wales is Britain's oldest artwork - cut with a flint tool 14,500 years ago
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2167647/Reindeer-carved-wall-cave-Wales-Britains-oldest-cave-art--cut-flint-tool-14-500-years-ago.html

*

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2175880/A-cave-new-world-amazing-underground-rock-formations-photographed-time.html


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What 40 Years Have Wrought: The Earth Since 1972
Jul 23 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/what-40-years-have-wrought-the-earth-since-1972/260192/ [with comment]

*

Landsat’s Most Historically Significant Images of Earth From Space
July 23, 2012
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/landsat-40-significant-images/ [with comments]

*

Google releases gorgeous Landsat imagery
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Landsat, Google releases time-lapse video and live surface imagery. Watching Vegas expand, as its own Lake Mead shrinks, makes for fascinating viewing.
July 23, 2012
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57478131-71/google-releases-gorgeous-landsat-imagery/ [with comments]


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Photos: Dumping Iron in Ocean & 6 More Extreme Climate Fixes
July 19, 2012
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/pictures/120719-iron-fertilization-carbon-dioxide-ocean-dumping-global-warming-climate-nature-science/ [with comments]


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The man living alone in the woods to escape Wi-Fi and mobile phones

Phil Inkley outside his caravan in the woods.
Phil Inkley has fled civilisation to escape electromagnetic fields, which he believes cause nosebleeds, headaches, convulsions and blackouts. Laura Page meets him and investigates the condition known as 'electromagnetic hypersensitivity'
20 July 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jul/20/man-living-alone-woods-escape-wifi-mobiles [with comments]


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[F6]

From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader


Unbeliever Jerry DeWitt, converted atheist, in a church where he once preached in DeRidder, La.
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: August 22, 2012

Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five years. Her brother had been in a bad motorcycle accident, she said, and he might not survive.

DeWitt knew what she wanted: for him to pray for her brother. It was the kind of call he had taken many times during his 25 years in the ministry. But now he found that the words would not come. He comforted her as best he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to invoke God’s help. Sensing her disappointment, he put the phone down and found himself sobbing. He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.

As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project [ http://clergyproject.org/ ], created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.

DeWitt began e-mailing with dozens of fellow apostates every day and eventually joined another new network called Recovering From Religion [ http://recoveringfromreligion.org/ ], intended to help people extricate themselves from evangelical Christianity. Atheists, he discovered, were starting to reach out to one another not just in the urban North but also in states across the South and West, in the kinds of places­ DeWitt had spent much of his career as a traveling preacher. After a few months he took to the road again, this time as the newest of a new breed of celebrity, the atheist convert. They have their own apostles (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and their own language, a glossary borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bible and gay liberation (you always “come out” of the atheist closet).

DeWitt quickly repurposed his preacherly techniques, sharing his reverse-conversion story and his thoughts on “the five stages of disbelief” to packed crowds at “Freethinker” gatherings across the Bible Belt, in places like Little Rock and Houston. As his profile rose in the movement this spring, his Facebook and Twitter accounts began to fill with earnest requests for guidance from religious doubters in small towns across America. “It’s sort of a brand-new industry,” DeWitt told me. “There isn’t a lot of money in it, but there’s a lot of momentum.”

Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”

The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people with no religious affiliation are the country’s fastest-growing religious category. When asked about religious affiliation in a Pew poll published this summer, nearly 20 percent of Americans chose “none,” the highest number the center has recorded. Many of those people would not call themselves atheists; “agnostic,” which technically refers to people who believe that the existence of a higher being can’t be known by the human mind, remains the safer option. The godless are now younger and more diverse than in the past, with blacks and Hispanics — once vanishingly rare — starting to appear in the ranks of national groups like the United Coalition of Reason [ http://unitedcor.org/national/page/home ] and the Secular Student Alliance [ http://www.secularstudents.org/ ].

The movement has also begun cultivating a new breed of guru in men like DeWitt and Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, the leader of Westboro Baptist Church, which pickets military funerals and gay-pride events with signs declaring “God Hates Fags.” Nate Phelps, a big, barrel-chested man who delivers fierce rebuttals of his father’s theology and narrates the agonies of his fundamentalist upbringing, has become a star speaker at atheist rallies and gay-pride events around the country. At the Reason Rally, crowds cheered as he declared that the Sept. 11 attacks played a critical role in blasting away his lingering belief in any sort of deity.

Because they started out as fervent Christians, unlike Dawkins and Hitchens and company, Phelps and DeWitt are seen as heroes within the movement. They tend to live and work in the country’s most Bible-soaked places. “I think what’s happening is that nontheists are realizing we can’t just leave this cause to Ivy Leaguers and intellectuals,” DeWitt told me. “We’ve got to convey the secular worldview in a more emotional way.”

At the same time, DeWitt is something of a reality check for many atheists, whose principles rarely cost them more than the price of “The God Delusion” in paperback. DeWitt refuses to leave DeRidder, a place where religion, politics and family pride are indivisible. Six months after he was “outed” as an atheist he lost his job and his wife — both, he says, as a direct consequence. Only a handful of his 100-plus relatives from DeRidder still speak to him. When I visited him, in late June, his house was in foreclosure, and he was contemplating moving into his 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser. This is the kind of environment where godlessness remains a real struggle and raises questions that could ramify across the rest of the country. Is the “new atheism” part of a much broader secularizing trend, like the one that started emptying out the churches in European towns and villages a century ago? Or is it just a ticket out of town?

DeRidder is a four-hour drive northwest of New Orleans, near the Texas border. It is a tiny place, surrounded by thick forests of long-leaf pine, where many of the 10,000-odd residents have known one another all their lives. There is one major commercial strip lined with fast-food restaurants and chain stores, and in the rest of town it is difficult to drive a block without passing a church. Many of them are Pentecostals, part of the revivalist Christian movement in which worshipers often speak in tongues — babbling in what is thought to be a sacred language — sometimes while writhing on the floor. In the local Walmart, it’s easy to recognize the more conservative Pentecostal women, who wear modest, long dresses in a high-waisted style, their hair, which they do not cut, pulled neatly into buns.

When I first met Jerry DeWitt, I half expected a provincial contrarian hungry for attention. Instead, he was mild and apologetic, a short, baby-faced man with a gentle smile and a neatly trimmed dark beard. He was earnest and warm, and I soon discovered that many of his fellow townspeople cannot help liking him, no matter how much they dislike his atheism. He appears to have reached his conclusions about God with reluctance, and with remorse for the pain he has caused his friends and family. He seems to bear no grudge toward them. “At every atheist event I go to, there’s always someone who’s been hurt by religion, who wants me to tell him all preachers are charlatans,” DeWitt told me, soon after we met. “I always have to disappoint them. The ones I know are mostly very good people.”

DeWitt is a native son in every way, and this must make his apostasy all the more difficult for others to make sense of and to accept. He is descended from a long line of preachers on both sides of the family. His paternal grandfather helped establish at least 16 different churches­ in Louisiana, including one in DeRidder, he told me. (I found 69 churches in the town directory, though some may be inactive.) DeWitt grew up in the church, but it was only at 17, after being “saved” during a weekend visit to Jimmy Swaggart’s church in Baton Rouge, that he became a passionate Christian. Weeks later he spoke in tongues for the first time. Soon after that, sitting in church, he heard his pastor call on him to deliver a homily. Terrified, he asked if he could have a few minutes to pray for guidance. He stepped to the pulpit with his finger on a passage from the Gospel of Mark, and spoke for 15 minutes on the “seed of David.” The crowd loved it. “It was the biggest high I’d ever had,” he told me. “I knew right then that preaching was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” He married a local girl at age 20, and two weeks after the wedding, he received an invitation to speak at a camp meeting in Lucedale, Miss. There he preached to overflow crowds of whooping Pentecostals who were speaking in tongues.

He and his wife began touring the South, building a reputation for the power of his sermons. It was a tremendous ego charge, especially for a short, chubby young man with dyslexia. For the first time, he was treated with respect, even awe. “I had this whole prophet persona going on. I wouldn’t really mix with people before the sermon,” he told me. “All kinds of people were seeing miracles, and I believed it 100 percent.”

For the next few years, DeWitt preached across the South, doing itinerant jobs to pay the bills. In 2004 he became a full-time preacher at a church near DeRidder. By that time, though, he had drifted away from the literal claims of Pentecostal doctrine and espoused a more liberal Christianity. He had begun reading more widely (he never got a college degree), starting with Carl Sagan’s books on science and moving on to Joseph Campbell and others. But equally, he told me, he found it unbearable to promote beliefs that only seemed to sow confusion and self-blame. He recalled how one middle-aged woman in his church who was suffering from heart disease asked him anxiously: “How am I going to believe for salvation when I can’t believe enough to heal?”

Finally he began to feel that his rationalist impulses were alienating and hurting his flock, and he resigned — reluctantly, he said, because he loved the human side of being a pastor, “playing Mr. Fix-It for the community.” He continued preaching part time for a while, invoking an ever more misty and ethereal God. By now he had also read Dawkins and Hitchens, and even weak-tea Christianity was becoming hard to swallow. He preached his last sermon in April 2011, in the town of Cut and Shoot, Tex. A month later, Natosha Davis called, and DeWitt found himself unable to pray at all.

DeWitt never meant to go public with his unbelief. He figured he could “stay under the radar,” he said, and continue working as a buildings inspector in DeRidder, where, over the years, he had gained a reputation as a community champion and was talked about as a future mayor. But when he heard that Richard Dawkins would be attending a Freethinkers gathering in Houston, he couldn’t resist. He took a day off, without telling his boss where he was going. He got a picture taken of himself and his son Paul (who was then 19 and who has never been religious) with Dawkins. DeWitt posted the photograph on his Facebook page, assuming that “nobody in DeRidder knew who Dawkins was.” He also, perhaps unwisely, updated the “religious views” box on his Facebook page to read “secular humanist.”

It was his grandmother’s cousin, an 84-year-old woman he knew as Aunt Grace, who saw that page and outed him. Word spread quickly. On Dec. 1, his boss asked to meet him at a diner in town. Sitting at the table, the man took out two printouts from secular Web sites with DeWitt’s name on it. “He told me: ‘The Pentecostals who run the parish are not happy, and something’s got to be done,’ ”DeWitt recalled. “Half an hour later I was out of a job.” (His former boss did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.)

Almost at once, DeWitt became a pariah in DeRidder. His wife found herself ostracized in turn, and the marriage suffered. She moved out in June. He received a constant stream of hate messages — some threatening — and still does, more than seven months later. He played me a recent one he had saved on his cellphone as we ate lunch at a diner in town. “It’s just sickening to hear you try to turn people atheist,” a guttural voice intoned. It went on and on, telling DeWitt to go to hell in various ways. “I’m not going to sit around while you turn people against God,” the voice said at one point.

But DeWitt also hurled himself into his new role as a faith healer in reverse. He became the first “graduate” of the Clergy Project, discarding his anonymity and giving the clandestine preachers’ group its first dash of publicity. It was formed in early 2011 with a few dozen members, mostly recruited through Dan Barker, a former pastor who is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and through Linda LaScola, who in 2010 co-conducted a study of nonbelieving pastors with Daniel Dennett, the atheist philosopher. The project now has more than 300 members, with about 80 applicants awaiting clearance (the group is very careful about admissions, to secure the members’ privacy).

DeWitt also became the executive director of Recovering From Religion, formed in 2009 by Darrel Ray, a Kansas-based atheist proselytizer. The group grew quickly under DeWitt’s leadership and now includes at least 100 local chapters scattered across the country, each one typically with 10 to 12 participants. Like other public figures in the movement, DeWitt also serves as a one-man clearinghouse for religious doubters via Facebook and e-mail. During the four days I spent with him in DeRidder, he was almost constantly checking his cellphone and tapping out messages.

There is more involved in this work than sympathy. The transition away from faith may start with an intellectual epiphany, but it runs through a difficult reinterpretation of your own past. For believers, this often involves what DeWitt calls a “hook,” or a miraculous story that helps anchor your faith. He gave me an example: he was born again in Jimmy Swaggart’s church thanks to his former elementary-school teacher, who persuaded him to come along with her to Baton Rouge. He later discovered that his teacher almost died while she was being born, and that she had emerged safely from the womb only after a preacher from a neighboring town was roused from sleep to offer a blessing in the delivery room. That preacher was DeWitt’s paternal grandfather. This coincidence had seemed providential to DeWitt, a sign that he was meant to be a preacher himself.

“This story has kept you feeling that God has a destiny for you,” DeWitt said. “So now how do you reconcile that? How do you make sense of your life? It’s not easy.”

I heard parallel stories from a number of other participants in post-religion networks. “People have a really difficult time making decisions after they’ve lost their faith,” said Amanda Schneider, who organized a local Recovering From Religion group in Santa Fe (and also helps manage the broader organization). “They used to always base it on ‘What is God’s plan for me?’ They are still looking for something miraculous to guide them.”

One former pastor named Teresa MacBain told me that when she began doubting her faith last year, she ran through her list of friends and acquaintances and realized that every single one of them was religious. With no one to confide in, she began recording her thoughts into her iPhone when she was alone in the car. “It was a huge encouragement when I finally found other people to talk to online,” she told me. Like DeWitt, MacBain joined the Clergy Project. Then, earlier this year, she resigned from her pastor’s position in Tallahassee and went public as an atheist. She was promptly defriended (in the literal and Facebook sense) by almost everyone she knew. But like DeWitt, she has begun receiving frequent messages from doubting pastors and churchgoers, seeking her help in making the leap away from God. “It’s all new friends now,” she said.

That kind of abrupt excommunication is a fairly common experience, and many atheist networks — including hundreds on college campuses — become replacement communities and de facto dating services for many people involved. “Community is a huge problem for people wanting to leave religion,” DeWitt told me as we drove through DeRidder. He pointed to a church as we passed, then another, and another, and another. “How do you escape it?” he said. “It’s not like you can avoid driving past the church every day.”

In late June, Jerry DeWitt allowed me to accompany him to church in DeRidder. It was the first time he had attended since his apostasy became public, and he half-jokingly predicted that we would be attacked, or that the service would turn into a prayer session for our wayward souls. But he also made clear that he had no desire to hold religious doctrine up for ridicule. He wanted me to witness the emotional power of the ceremony and the music. He wanted me to understand why people are drawn to church, not just why they leave it. The church we attended — known as Grace — was one of the most liberal in town, multiracial and less orthodox than hard-line Pentecostals. He had delivered sermons there himself, and he was known by many, perhaps most of the parishioners.

As we arrived outside the church’s white porticos on a hot June morning, I could tell DeWitt’s fears were unfounded. “I’m praying for him” is the refrain when his name comes up, his mother had told me. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Sure enough, everyone we met was gracious, though there was often an undercurrent of unease. The service, by my own etiolated WASP standards, was an orgy of religious passion: people of all ages praised themselves hoarse as a high-decibel gospel band and choir shook the walls with heartfelt rhythm and blues. The preacher then delivered a homily about the risks of being a “catch-and-release Christian,” and I couldn’t help wondering if this was aimed at DeWitt.

Afterward, we met with the church’s founding pastor in an elegantly appointed office adjoining the main auditorium. He was a 79-year-old man named George Glass, with a wrinkled face and a magnificent deep voice full of warmth and gravitas. He hugged us both as we came in, chiding DeWitt for having stayed away for so long. We sat down, and over the course of an hour, he spoke movingly about his own struggles as a younger man, when he lost his first ministry and had to start from scratch. He reassured DeWitt that he understood his doubts and did not think any less of him. As we said our goodbyes at the door, Glass spoke again in his slow, Southern cadence, fixing DeWitt with his gaze. “The thing of it is,” he said, and we all waited as he allowed a weighty pause to fill the air — “you’ve just got to keep your mouth shut.”

Everyone laughed. But I did later wonder if all the public atheism had done DeWitt more harm than good. Couldn’t he have remained a nominal Christian, as so many others have? Even the old pastor, George Glass, acknowledged that others in the church had had problems with literalist claims about the Bible, and prefer not to talk about it. It is easy to see why. Open confrontation with faith, some would say, just provokes angry gestures from the faithful. In DeWitt’s case, those gestures had taken a wrecking ball to the life he spent 42 years building. He was once seen as a potential mayor of DeRidder. He helped clean up some of the town’s uglier spots when he worked at City Hall, and he knew the insides of almost every building in town; he knew and cared about most of the residents. Now many of them, he was told, believed he was a Satanist. During my short stay in DeRidder, I heard him take a call from the lawyer handling the foreclosure of his house, and I saw his wife’s moving boxes on their living-room floor. She’d had enough.

Was it possible, I wondered, that he was doing this deliberately? DeWitt is an intensely curious man, a homegrown intellectual who seems a little stifled in DeRidder. Was this a way of moving on? Would he really still want to be mayor of DeRidder someday, if it were possible?

“I’m so entrenched in this community, I feel like I’d be lost if I went anywhere else,” he said. “As for being mayor, who knows, stranger things have happened. I’d like to stay.” The town had changed a lot since his childhood, he explained. The old Pentecostalism had mostly softened into a more open, tolerant Christianity. He said he’d been amazed by the number of quiet atheists he discovered in towns throughout the South, looking for congenial voices online. Perhaps his community would one day welcome atheists, too.

DeWitt stood thinking as we waited in a stone garden outside the church (he said he wanted to make sure Glass and his wife got off safely in their car before he left). He said he admired the Glasses­, and the congregation, and many aspects of the church itself: its good works, the beauty of the music, the community it fostered. “Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church,” he said. “I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn’t stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race.”

Robert F. Worth is a staff writer for the magazine. He last wrote about militias in Libya [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/in-libya-the-captors-have-become-the-captive.html ].

Editor: Joel Lovell

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/magazine/from-bible-belt-pastor-to-atheist-leader.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/magazine/from-bible-belt-pastor-to-atheist-leader.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]

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[F6]

Taylor Santos, [top-achieving 15-year-old] Texas High School Student, Left 'Burned And Blistered' After Male Vice Principal Spanked Her (VIDEO)

Spanked: Springtown High School student Taylor Santos, pictured, was walloped by a male teacher after allegedly letting another student copy her work [which she denied, said didn't know about it]

Angry: Anna Jorgensen, pictured, said she 'came unglued' when she saw the welts on her daughter's bottom and found out that a man was responsible
[pix/captions from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2207337/Taylor-Santos-spanking-Texas-school-girl-left-bruised-blistered-MALE-vice-principal-spanks-cheating.html )
09/23/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/23/taylor-santos-spanking-burned-blistered-male-vice-principal_n_1907325.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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( http://funnydemotivationalposters.com/eqx2cnmqk5/SPANKER )


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