Energy Policy

Oh yeah...Remembering the War and Other National and Global Crises

dlindorff — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:25:56 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, to which Barack
Obama owes his presidential election victory, is no small thing, to be
sure. It also presents us on the left with a lot of openings to press
for progressive change.

We saw how the Republican attempt to derail Obama by labeling him a
“socialist” actually backfired—especially when people were reminded
that a fundamental premise of socialism is “income redistribution,” in
which some of the wealth of the rich is taken away through taxation,
and transferred through federal programs to those who are less wealthy.
Joe the Plumber was outraged, but when most Americans who were having
trouble paying for gas or making their next mortgage payment, or who
were worried that their jobs might be about to vanish, thought about
that for longer than a sound-bite, it turns out that, not surprisingly,
they decided socialism and redistribution didn’t sound like a bad or
scary idea at all.

The same can be said of labor unions. In good times, many Americans
have bought the argument that unions are just out to grab dues payments
from their paychecks. But as job security vanishes and wages languish,
people are waking up to the idea that they are simply expendable
“inputs” to employers, and that a union can help them stand up to
abusive, uncaring management. Republican propaganda about the sanctity
of “secret ballot” union elections—ironic given the GOP’s simultaneous
assault all over the country on the right to vote—fell on deaf ears.

Government itself, long a dirty word thanks to years of
conservative propaganda, aped and spread through the corporate media,
is coming back into favor, now that people see that they cannot count
on either themselves or their employers to pull them through hard
times. The idea that government can step in with things like extended
unemployment insurance benefits, food stamps, and even renegotiated
mortgages, makes people who once mocked “big government” view things a
little differently.

But this unprecedented economic crisis also poses dangers.

Because we are so obsessed with the ongoing collapse of the economy
and the gathering storm of debt, unemployment and loss of retirement
savings that it entails, it’s easy for all of us to lose sight of other
crises that demand our urgent attention and action.

Chief among these are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing threat of climate change.

The wars are not going away on their own. The Iraq puppet
government of Nouri al Maliki is close to approving a deadline for the
removal of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. That is more than
three years from now—nearly as long as the US was involved in World War
II! It’s longer, even, than the absurd 16 months that Obama said it
would take for him to end the US war and occupation of Iraq during his
campaign, which was bad enough. (In the case of Afghanistan, it
represents a decade of war—as long as the Vietnam War!) The danger is
that Obama will allow that status of troops agreement with Iraq to
become his timetable for withdrawal. We have to say “No!” The Iraq War
must be ended immediately.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, is in a meltdown, and every day that US
forces operate there, the opposition to US occupation grows, simply
strengthening the Taliban. Similarly, the more the US tries to attack
Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in neighboring Pakistan, the more
opposition grows to the US in Pakistan. If we opponents of the war
allow Obama to go ahead with his plans for a larger US military force
in Afghanistan, we will end up with an even bigger and wider war in the
Middle East and Asia, with more terrorist recruits, and with whatever
remains of US funds for important domestic initiatives swallowed up by
the Pentagon and the secret intelligence budget.

Let me put this simply: Nothing progressive that has been proposed
by the Obama campaign can be achieved while the US is engaged in these
two criminal wars. No health care reform, no increase in education
loans, no early childhood education, no public works jobs programs,
Nothing.

And then there is climate change. The Obama campaign promised to
finally end eight years of a new Dark Ages, when government simply
denied science or actively attacked science, and to start taking
serious action to reduce America’s role in spewing out carbon into the
atmosphere. But you don’t hear much about that anymore. That’s because
reducing America’s carbon footprint costs serious money—money for
research into non-carbon energy sources, money for a power transmission
system to serve wind generation farms, money to develop a new
generation of non-polluting vehicles and to rebuild light rail and
inter-city rail systems. And once again, with the economy in a crisis,
and with the two wars sucking up all available tax revenues that aren’t
being given away to banks and Wall Street financial firms and insurance
companies, none of that is going to happen either, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, while the progressive folks who put their all into the
Obama campaign are reveling in his and their Election Night success,
and are now taking a breather, the forces of darkness that control the
Democratic Party (think Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Rahm
Emanuel and the whole Democratic Leadership Council), are grabbing
control of the new administration, filling the incoming Obama cabinet
with carryover hacks from the Clinton administration, even including
the Clintons themselves, and, in some cases, the outgoing Bush
administration).

This is, in other words, no time to sit back and relax, reveling in
the admittedly hard-to-believe prospect of an African-American moving
into the White House. It is a time for action and then more action.

When Barack Obama makes that dramatic walk from his Inauguration
Day speech at the Capitol building to the White House, the streets need
to be lined with protestors holding up signs calling for an immediate
end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the new Congress tries to vote for a $50 –billion or
$150-billion bail-out of the US auto industry, we need to be packing
the halls shouting it down. That money should be going only into
development of zero-emission automobiles, and it should be in the form
of voting-share equity in those companies.

Here, for what it’s worth, are my top 10 demands for action by the new Democratic government iin Washington:

1. US forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Immediately! Shift the
funds saved to reconstruction aid for those two countries and to
veterans benefits, with any extra savings going to help fund education
in poor school districts in the US.

2. Slash military spending by closing most or all overseas military
bases, by dramatically reducing nuclear forces to near zero, by
reducing the number of men and women in uniform, and by closing bases
in the US. Savings should go to shoring up the Social Security and
Medicare Trust Fund.

3. Open up the secret intelligence budget, currently running at over
$40 billion a year, and cut it, for starters, by half. Savings should
also go to the Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund. (Along the way,
ban all spying on Americans, and revive the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act in full as originally written.)

4. Break up the banking and automobile industry, as well as any
other industry in which any player is so large it is able to extort
money out of the government by threatening that its failure would cause
a national economic crisis. “Too big to fail” needs to mean “too big to
be permitted to exist.”

5. Join the Kyoto Treaty, and pledge to immediately begin a campaign
to reduce US carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 or better, 2030.
Establish a crash national research program to develop carbon-free
energy sources, and provide funding for households to convert to
passive geo-thermal heating and cooling systems. Funds can come from
the unused $350-billion portion of the Paulson/Bernacke Wall Street
bailout fund. (Talk about a job-creation program, not to mention a big
whack at imported oil!)

6. Pass the Employer Free Choice Act, requiring employers to
recognize a labor union wherever a majority of the workers have signed
cards saying they want a union, and requiring those employers to
negotiate and reach an initial contract agreement within 90 days, or
under mandatory mediation.

7. Reassert the Constitutionally mandated authority of Congress by
rescinding all Bush/Cheney-era signing statements and executive orders
and declaring them, by Presidental declaration and by Joint Resolution
of the Congress, to have been invalid and unconstitutional.

8. Order the US Justice Department to investigate the actions of the
prior administration and, where crimes are discovered, to prosecute
offenders, up to and including the former president, to the full extent
of the law. This would include obstruction of justice, abuse of power,
commission of war crimes, conspiracy, fraud, bribery, war profiteering
and criminal negligence.

9. Appoint Ralph Nader as new chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, with a powerful mandate take the necessary steps to restore
competition and fairness to the nation’s media. (My pet proposal:
Establish a government loan fund to allow workers at failing newspapers
to buy their publications from the owners and to operate them as
employee-owned enterprises, on a tax-free basis.)

10. Enact a national health care program that provides health
insurance for every person in America. My choice here would be a
single-payer system—essentially an expansion of Medicare to cover
everyone, funded by progressive taxation. Failing that, a system in
which the government has an insurance program operating in competition
with the private sector, should eventually lead to a single-payer plan.
One idea: dispatch a public-citizen commission to Canada to study the
Canadian health system and report back to Congress and the White House
in 90 days.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Auto Industry Bailout

music8200 — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:54:07 -0500

Congress will take up the Auto Industry Bailout when they re-convene this week. There is no better time than this moment to PUSH for concessions from the Auto Industry. Time is short. Democrat.com, can you help us act NOW? Here's a copy of a letter I just mailed to Speaker Pelosi: Dear Madam Speaker,

Please make the FLEXFUEL component a MANDATORY requirement for any Auto Industry bailout.
IT ONLY COSTS $100 to install this component on a vehicle during the manufacturing process. The only EPA approved retrofit costs $1300. All cars sold in Brazil are flexfuel ready. All cars that GM sells in Brazil are flexfuel compatible. There is no excuse and there should be no delay in making all cars sold in America flexfuel capable.
THIS IS THE QUICKEST CHEAPEST EASIEST WAY to make rapid reductions in our foreign oil imports.
If ALL cars sold in the US were Flexfuel compatible, alternative fuel manufacturers would gear up without the need for incentives because they would know they have a market for their fuel products.
THEN please help remove the $0.54 a gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That would allow foreign ethanol products to compete in the American market. The American consumer would benefit. We could even lift the economies of Third World Countries by contracting them to grow switchgrass or sugarcane for ethanol fuel.
Ultimately, let's provide incentives for the production of flexfuel plug-in hybrids. These cars would get 500 MILES ON A GALLON OF GASOLINE! We would never need OPEC oil ever again! Perhaps no imported oil at all.
PLEASE PLEASE make the flexfuel component a MANDATORY part of any Automobile Industry Bailout.
If you want good references on this topic, read the testimony of Anne Korin (of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security) before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of May 22, 2008:http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/kor052208.htm(see in particular the section entitled "17x17")
read R. James Woolsey (former director of the CIA) and Anne Korin's article in the National Review:http://energy.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlmMjFjYWRjOWI3ZGI0MzUxZDJjYTBlMmUzOTc2Mzc=
or watch Anne Korin's lecture on CSPAN:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MVwL2PcCG8(highly recommended)
watch Robert Zubrin's FEW Keynote Address:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0O2YZwSkgM
Thank you and your staff for your time and attention,Scott Lawrence

Perfora Cariño, Perfora!

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:44:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s going to be interesting to see how much longer the vicious
decades-long US embargo of Cuba lasts, whichever person wins the White
House this November.

The main reason the US has stubbornly refused to trade with Cuba,
and has used sanctions to bully other nations into refusing to trade
with Cuba, while enthusiastically trading with and investing in China,
Vietnam and other communist regimes, is that Cuba has had little to
offer the US, either in terms of products or markets.

That’s all about to change dramatically, with word that the
Communist island just 90 miles to the south of Florida may possess oil
reserves equal to or greater than all the oil reserves left in the
United States.

According to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian,
Cuba may be sitting on some 20 billion barrels of oil, located in Cuban
territory under the Gulf of Mexico. If the reports from Cuban, Spanish
and other geologists are correct, Cuba, which currently only produces
60,000 barrels of oil per day (about half the country’s domestic
demand), is on the verge of joining the ranks of the world’s exporting
nations.
20 billion barrels of reserves would place the little country in the top 20 nations in the world in terms of reserves.

The Republican crowds who are greeting presidential candidate John
McCain and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin with rowdy chants of
“Drill Baby, Drill!” my have to start shouting “Perfora Cariño, Perfora!”
while watching Raul Castro joining meetings of OPEC.

After all, most experts say that a lot of the offshore drilling
being planned in US coastal waters is likely to lead to dry holes,
while drilling in Cuban waters by the country’s national oil company
Cubapetroleo, or Cupet, and by a consortium led by Spain’s Repsol,
which is set to begin with punching some test wells early next year,
are likely to produce gushers.

If the oil starts flowing, how long will it be before the US starts
clamoring to buy it? How long will it be, for that matter, before US
oil companies start using their lobbying clout to get the US embargo
lifted, so they can get a chance to join the drilling party? After all,
if the US companies are kept out by vestigial anti-Communist ideology,
the investment opportunities will be left wide open for European,
Middle Eastern and Venezuelan interests.

For the long-suffering Cuban people, who have been forced to eke
out a national economy virtually barred from the global marketplace,
this oil find is an astonishingly lucky break, particularly coming at a
time that existing oil reserves are beginning to run out, and that
prices for crude are soaring.

It’s going to be fun to watch the rationalizations coming out of
Washington, particularly from the hard Right, for whom Fidel Castro’s
Cuba has for several generations served as a prime bogeyman in the Cold
War pantheon of villains. Just as Corporate America has since the 1970s
been hypocritically singing the praises of Communist China, and has
been justifying economic trade and investment with that nation on the
grounds that “economic engagement” will bring democracy (all the while
calling for a boycott of all things Cuban), we will soon be hearing
such songs about virtues of economic engagement with Cuba.

This new oil bonanza may not be great news for the
environment—either the waters of the Gulf or for the carbon-sogged
atmosphere of the earth—but for the Cuban people, at least for the
short term, it’s an amazing turn of events.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

We're a Nation of Lemmings

dlindorff — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:27:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day,
and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost
all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some
kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse
about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60
percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and
how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all
the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property
development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the
release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most
radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants,
factories and automobiles.

There are also credible, well-researched reports
that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions
of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and
release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen
clathrates for millennia—the release of which would cause global
temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane
is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of
Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost
line moves north.

Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on
important stories like Britney Spears’ return to the stage and on the
latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been
very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in
progress that could end humanity’s run on the planet (along with
exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that
said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed
enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth’s
climate, to know that something scary is going on.

And yet, people are not just going about their business as
usual—they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the
lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative
and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government
funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy
solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are
clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!

Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when
gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No
such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don’t get
any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that
massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.

Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely
sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that’s
what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!

There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce
carbon emissions—as individuals and as a nation. Turning off
air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by
central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day
if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the
upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There’s no need to
occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most
Americans’ homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much
room, use it when it doesn’t require all that extra energy to heat and
cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in
unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I’d
go down and light a fire in the living room where we’d be during the
day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for
long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of
on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have
yet to see, on my own bike rides in town or when driving anywhere,
someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand—carrying a load in
a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed
like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What’s the matter
with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?

I’m not trying to criticize, or to say I’m more ecologically
virtuous. I’m looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is
dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery
and maybe even catastrophe. If I don’t take serious action—and I don’t
just mean individual life changes, but political action—to try and save
their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.

What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?

Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in
order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially
when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason
nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their
collective future. This makes no sense.

And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation,
as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think
about the need to act in our own and our children’s interest.

Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai,
China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had
been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not
just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town
that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a
dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand,
with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep
the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off
the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the
project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their
shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many
people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very
friendly—just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We
began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who
had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt.
They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring
their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable,
which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous
one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The
winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant
running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant
would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then
he’d be off down the hill to collect more dirt.

What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these
thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the
collective good that year.

I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine it.

Now we’re in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.

No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the
insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We
need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to
fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction
of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation’s imperialist
policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war
to saving the planet from ourselves.

A good start would be seeing that people “get it.” That would mean
communities starting to organize around improving mass transit,
arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our
political leaders.

I’m not optimistic.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Paul Krugman and Blindness About the War and the Economy

dlindorff — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:36:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In a New York Times column on Monday (“Behind the Bush
Bust”), economics columnist Paul Krugman mused on whether President
George Bush could be blamed for the nation’s economic crisis. His
conclusion was that, yes, to some extent the crisis was Bush’s fault,
but he largely lets the current administration off the hook, instead
blaming Republican policies dating back 10-15 years.

Oddly, Krugman does say that a key cause of economic problems has
been rising energy prices, but he then attributes these to “growing
demand from China and other emerging economies,” and suggests that
prices might have been at least a bit lower had the US, after 9/11,
adopted “higher gas taxes and fuel efficiency standards,” a failing he
attributes to Bush.

The gaping hole in Krugman’s logic is the Iraq War, which the
columnist, incredibly, doesn’t even mention. Yet clearly, the invasion
and subsequent war and occupation of Iraq which was purely the result
of Bush/Cheney machinations, has been a major, if not the major cause
of oil price increases.

By destroying Iraq’s oil production, and by hindering much of
Iran’s production (Iran, seen as an enemy by the US, has been frozen
out of capital markets, blocking it from being able to modernize and
even maintain its own huge oil infrastructure), and putting even
Kuwait’s and Saudi Arabia’s production at risk, the US war in Iraq has
jeopardized about one-third of the world’s oil capacity—a fact not lost
on oil speculators. Every rumor of a longer occupation or a wider war
in the Middle East—especially a possible attack by the US on Iran--has
pushed up oil prices further, as has every attack on a pipeline.

It is no secret why crude oil, over the course of five years, has
soared four or five times in price. Demand has certainly not gone up by
that amount. It hasn’t even doubled. What has happened is that the
Middle East has been thoroughly destabilized by American military
action.

The rise in oil prices has been the major cause of the US dollar’s
stunning collapse, which in turn has limited the hand of the Federal
Reserve, which cannot risk lowering interest rates as much as it would
like to stimulate economic growth, for fear of further undermining the
dollar. This in turn has allowed the mortgage crisis to fester and grow
worse.

At the same time, the massive amount of industrial production that
has gone into the war effort—the building of planes, tanks, armored
cars, etc.—while perhaps producing some jobs, has been wholly
inflationary in its effect, since this is production that cannot add to
available goods and services in the civilian economy. That means that
there are more people with wages and salaries, chasing the same number
of things to buy—a sure-fire recipe for higher prices. Add to that the
huge war budget, all funded by debt, and you have even more downward
pressure on the dollar.

Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq has been, it should be clear, a
huge catastrophe for the US economy, and yet somehow Prof. Krugman
managed to miss it completely. You could read his column and not even
know that the country is and has been, for the past seven years, at war.

I’m not sure what to make of this oversight on Krugman’s part. Is
he trying to downplay the war, figuring it’s soon to become a
Democratic venture? Is he unfamiliar with the argument that war is bad
for economies?

One thing is clear: You cannot look at a nation at war and analyze
its economy without considering the impact of the war, which is what
the usually astute Krugman has done here.

But let’s make the point crystal clear, even if Krugman doesn’t see
it or doesn’t want to see it: The slumping US economy, and the crashing
US dollar, which is heading towards Peso status as a trash currency,
are clearly the direct result of Bush/Cheney policies, aided and
abetted by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who have bought
the story line that war is good.

We will all be paying for this imperialist misadventure for years to come.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush/Cheney and special contracts with Big Oil in Iraq - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

seandiego — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:32:23 -0400

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE TODAY (7/2/08). THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST UNITE TO SHOW THE WORLD WE DID NOT SUPPORT OR APPROVE OF THE INJUSTICES OF THIS ADMINISTRATION AND THE CRIMES IT COMMITTED AGAINST IRAQ, THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD. TO REGAIN OUR STATURE IN THE WORLD, WE MUST CHARGE BUSH AND CHENEY WITH WAR CRIMES BEFORE THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES IT FOR US. CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS TODAY!

Opening Iraq's oil fields to Big Oil

By Bob Herbert
THE NEW YORK TIMES

July 2, 2008

It's getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. It was the kind of news that big oil lives for.

Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.

We also learned this week that a group of American advisers, led by a team from the State Department, played a key role in drawing up the contracts between the companies and the Iraqi government. Chevron and several smaller oil companies also got contracts.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.

Said Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He didn't wait. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.

One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, U.S. troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target – the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in November 2003:

“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry – not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry – probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its unusual no-bid contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq's vast oil reserves. As the Times reported Monday, “At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world's largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry.”

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

In addition to the terrible toll of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, the war in Iraq has diverted attention and resources from critical problems here in the United States, where the housing market has been crippled, the stock market has tanked, gasoline has soared past $4 per gallon, unemployment is increasing and an extraordinary number of debt-ridden working families are staring into a financial abyss.

Even as oil companies are enjoying staggering profits, many Americans – in July! – are already worried sick about the potentially ruinous cost of heating their homes next winter.

And then there's the so-called war on terror.

The latest news is that al-Qaeda, the terror network that actually did attack the United States, has successfully regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan and has reconstituted its ability to institute terror attacks from the region.

For an administration joined at the hip to the oil industry, the lure of Iraq's enormous reserves was stronger even than the impulse to conquer an enemy that murdered more than 2,700 civilians on Sept. 11, a toll greater than the number of Americans killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Referring to al-Qaeda members who regrouped in Pakistan, the Times reported on Monday:

“Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.”

Who knows how long it will be before the United States disengages in any significant way from Iraq. What you can take to the bank is that this country will not make any major advances in energy policy, in health coverage, in rebuilding its infrastructure, in improving its public schools or in curtailing runaway public and private debt until our open-ended commitment to this catastrophic multitrillion-dollar war comes to an end.

How long will it take before that finally sinks in?

Switch to Hydrogen Fuel, Wind and Solar energy

dredyoung — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:20:21 -0400

Why This Deafening Silence about Our Most Viable Solution to the Energy Crisis?

The ongoing debate, and the framing of it, between the Senate and the heads of the major oil companies, is a completely irrelevant and devastating approach to solving our energy crisis. The question is not whether the oil companies should or could solve the gasoline crisis. Rather, the question is how the government can immediately begin to stimulate alternative sources of energy and, furthermore, which of the contemplated alternatives they should stimulate or subsidize.

As alternatives, coal, nuclear, and ethanol pale when set beside the benefits of hydrogen as the potential for solving the domestic and world energy crisis as well as the crisis in global warming and pollution of the air, water, and earth. Hydrogen could be mobilized, quickly and universally, to solve our problem. It is far more ready to swing into action than the media and legislators are leading us to believe. When hydrogen is backed up and shored up with wind and solar, the latter especially for rural areas, the energy crisis would not only be solved quickly, cleanly, and efficiently, but this three-pronged approached would be exponentially more cost effective.

However, the transition to hydrogen, wind, and solar, to the almost total exclusion of oil, nuclear, and coal, would mean a massive displacement and reallocation of our nation's work force. Of course, with our current corporate globalization and its policy of labor outsourcing, there has already been a massive displacement of the work force. Ironically, this transitional initiative would usher in a vast new range of employment opportunities and bring us out of this chaos.

Of course, this transition would also have global effects that would mean a massive disruption of both domestic and international financial and employment systems. On the other hand, if properly forewarned and educated through the current global media outlets, the US and other nations could meet that challenge successfully.

Countries, such as in the Middle East, whose economies are solely dependent upon the oil industry, would be faced with the greatest near-term hardships. Nevertheless, in the long-term, a beneficial by-product of such massive realignments around the globe would be a dramatic reduction in conflicts between nations that is caused by the current and growing fierce competition for oil, exploitation of workers, formidable imbalances in finance and trade, and global warming and pollution of the earth.

If the US and the rest of the world are made aware of these impending worldwide changes quickly, we all have the financial resources and organizational knowhow to reorient our populations to a new set of industries on a new economic basis. In addition, we have the UN that could assist the international community in finding ways to mediate and work toward these goals cooperatively.

Please pass this on to fellow legislators, media outlets and spokespersons, and other national and international leaders.

We must not remain silent about our most viable solution to so many of our worldwide crises which is the energy triumvirate of hydrogen, wind, and solar.

Oil exploration and alternative Energy

kenbear1948 — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:55:26 -0400

We need to start drilling for oil in every known place we can find it!! We are slaves to the oil producing countries literally. The time is now people because it will take five to ten years to get the oil we drill for today to go online. Drill threw the white house if we need to. The next thing we need to do is build more refineries and start converting coal to fuel. This problem is not going to go away any it’s going to kill us. The country’s we get our oil from could care less they only care about our MONEY PEOPLE they don’t even like us! There taking about oil going up to $200.00 a BARRAL eight to ten dollars a gallon of gas! That would destroy the US economy, shut down the air lines and probably put the US in a Depression like the world has never seen before. The sadist thing of all do you think anyone would come to our rescue? You think we would get any aid? Do we even have any friends that could help us? If you think we do then who are they?

News of Rapid Glacial Melting Raises a Big Question for Presidential Candidates

dlindorff — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:21:24 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay. Enough about race.

We've got a bigger problem here than how to get along with each other, as important as that may be, and that's how to make sure that any of us--or our children and grandchildren--are around in another hundred years.

Fast on the heels of reports about the increasingly, and unexpectedly rapid melting of Greenland's giant ice sheet, come even more scary reports about accelerated glacial melting in Antarctica, where there is a whole lot more ice.

Taken together, if these trends, which are based upon extensive photographic and on-the-ice observations, continue, not only could we see the oceans rise not just a few feet, but perhaps 15 feet within most of our lifetimes, with devastating results for coastal cities and regions around the world, but we could see runaway global warming ignited that could put the earth on a one-way trip to a mass extinction event worse, perhaps, than what hit the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

In a remarkable book titled Six Degrees, author Mark Lynas, a science writer with National Geographic Magazine, documents in chilling detail what will happen to life on earth, and to the earth itself, with each degree celsius that the earth's average temperature rises.

Chapters 1-3, which document temperature rises of 1-3 degrees celsius (about 2-6 degrees fahrenheit) are pretty disturbing, but the later chapters documenting temperature rises of 4, 5 and 6 degrees celsius, are truly nightmarish. And the scariest part is that once you get to the 3 degree celsius level, the stage gets set for the higher temperatures, making it difficult if not impossible to avoid the increasingly worsening scenarios. This is because once the temperature gets a few degrees out of whack, crucial forests die off, whole swaths of temperate zone landmasses become desert, and worst of all, the permafrost in the Siberian and North American tundra disappears, freeing massive amounts of trapped methane gas from the rotting swamps and peat bogs that cover that region. And methane, remember, is 23 times as potent a global warming gas as is carbon dioxide.

Worse yet, as melting polar regions lead to a slowdown in the oceanic currents and as the stagnating seas begin to warm, an even greater danger--the release of even vaster quantities of methane trapped as icy hydrates under the sea floor--is posed. If these hydrates pop to the surface in massive "burps," they could, Lynas reports, mimic several such events in the Earth's past, causing global temperatures to soar, and the oceans to become stagnant, anoxic (devoid of oxygen), lifeless pools, which would then begin emitting vast amounts of toxic sulfur dioxide gas. On several occasions, Lynas notes, life itself was threatened on Earth when just such a thing happened, and if such a scenario played out again, life would be threatened again. The difference is that now the sun itself is hotter than it was 55 or 150 million years ago, making a return to "normal" that much more problematic.

Scientists can debate the risks of such a disaster's occurring, and certainly there is (thank goodness!) a minority view that we are not headed towards climate catastrophe.

Hope, as candidate Barak Obama is wont to say, is a fine thing, and I'm all for hope.

But here's the rub: If the majority scientific view is correct, and there is even a small chance that the Earth is headed towards a historically unprecedented rapid heating event that would bring temperatures into the range where methane will start to be the main threat, then doesn't prudence and sanity require that we embark ASAP on efforts to prevent that happening?

The cost of seriously combating climate change now--and I'm not talking about switching from cars that get 25 mpg to cars that get 60 mpg, and switching from coal-powered generating plants to LNG-powered plants; I'm talking about eliminating the internal combustion engine as a mode of transportation, and eliminating carbon-fueled generating plants altogether--would be enormous. That is clear. To actually cut global carbon emissions by 80 percent from current levels over the next decade, we would, economists say, have to forego a couple percentage points of global economic growth every year, cut consumption dramatically, embark on major campaigns to save rainforests, and halt and even reverse population growth. We would, ultimately, have to change our entire economic model from one of growth to one of sustainability.

But how do we compare that kind of hardship with extinction?

Let's say, hypothetically, that there is a 10-percent chance that we are headed down a road that leads to extinction of the human race in a scant 1-200 years, if we do nothing dramatic to change course. And let's say there's a 90 percent chance that nothing bad is going to happen. Should we take that gamble and carry on as we are?

If you say yes, let me change the odds. Suppose there's a 30-percent chance we're headed the way of the dinosaur if we don't change our ways dramatically? Still think we should just carry on?

Personally, I think the evidence before my eyes, in the earlier budding of the trees that I have witnessed just over the last five or six years, and the evidence of the melting away of the Arctic ice cap, not to mention the above-mentioned galloping melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, suggests that the odds of disaster are much, much greater than 50 percent (in fact, I think they're closer to 90 percent!).

In any event, whatever odds you may assign to climate disaster, isn't it the wise thing to do to take steps to minimize that risk? What do you do about car insurance? Sure the law requires you to buy it, but what are the odds of your ever being stopped by a cop and being ordered to show an insurance card? What are the odds of your having an accident, and needing coverage? Heck, I drove 10 years without an accident or a stop (and the one minor accident I did have was so small I was able to pay for the damage and avoid having to report it). And yet each year, I was paying out over a grand for coverage. It would have been far cheaper to skip all those premiums and to pay a fine if I got caught. But, I have prudently calculated that if I ever had a serious accident, unlikely as that may be, it would be better to have the insurance, so I buy it and give up $1000 a year worth of income I could have enjoyed spending. And how much more serious is extinction than the consequences of driving without insurance?

And here is where our politics and our media are failing us abysmally. With such a huge issue facing not just our nation, but the world, none of the three candidates running for the presidency of the nation that accounts for 25 percent of the world's total carbon emissions has been asked, or has offered, an opinion on this issue.

All three, to the extent that they've been asked about climate change at all, have been allowed to make vague feel-good statements about their support for carbon trading, or for increased gas mileage requirements (Hillary Clinton actually answered a question about global warming by saying she would install thermal windows on all government buildings!).

None has been asked whether he or she thinks that humanity is heading for catastrophe, or whether we can continue with an economic system that makes economic growth a key goal. None has been asked what he or she would do as president if convinced by science advisors that the danger of runaway global warming and imminent mass extinction were real.

How pathetic and irresponsible is that? Reporters will regularly ask candidates what they would do if Iran got the bomb, or if there were another 9-11 type of attack on the US, but no one is asking what they would do if it became evident that our children, or grandchildren, might not survive the century.

It is time to make these would-be leaders all face up to this most serious of all crises. We as voters need to know: What do each of these candidates think about the threat of global warming, and how do they plan to attack it? If they believe the government's own scientists at NASA and NOAA, what are they going to do, both nationally and globally, to save the planet?

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia based journalist whose house is slated to be inundated if Greenland melts. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martins Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Rep. Mark Udall says save the Roan Plateau!

mike@mikeditto.com — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:30:33 -0400

I have some great news to share and a request to make for your help. I just passed through the House of Representatives with broad Democratic and Republican support, a package of common-sense proposals to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and to increase our usage of clean, renewable energy. For the first time ever, national energy policy will require all electric utilities to acquire 15% of their power from wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources by the year 2020. I sponsored or cosponsored important provisions in the energy bill that will provide funding for climate change research, surface owner protection, funding for research into carbon capture and storage, and protection of the Roan Plateau. But the fight's only begun, and I need your help right away. The bill still needs to pass the U.S. Senate and be signed by President Bush. But not everyone supports this important bill, and some in the oil and gas industry are organizing to prevent passage. According to theRocky Mountain News, "a newly formed nonprofit in Denver, Americans for American Energy, has raised tens of thousands of dollars to launch a campaign in the coming weeks to push for drilling on the Roan." What the News did not report is that this organization is not new, and they have raised a lot more money than that. Though it is based in Golden, this advocacy group for the oil and gas lobby has been around since 2005, has raised millions of dollars, and has run TV ads in several states promoting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This group has now pledged to pull out all the stops in order force Western Slope communities to give up on protections they have sought for the top of the Roan Plateau. You can show your support for John Salazar's and my efforts to protect the Roan and passage of needed legislation to secure America's energy future today by signing this petition and sending it around to your friends. I'll share the results with my colleagues in the Congress to show that we have broad support for protecting the Roan. www.markudall.com/SaveTheRoan Lets show the oil and gas lobby what the grass roots really looks like. While they prepare to spend "tens of thousands" as documented by the Rocky (or millions of corporate dollars if history repeats itself), we prepare to fight for what's right our way--the Colorado way. Sportsmen, anglers, conservationists, the Garfield County Commissioners, and the town councils of Silt, Rifle, New Castle, Carbondale, Parachute, and Glenwood Springs have voiced their support. These are fellow Coloradans trying to protect the West Slope. Sign the petition. Pass it on. Time is short, as this bill will be voted on in the Senate when Congress reconvenes in two weeks, and then it's on to President Bush's desk. www.markudall.com/SaveTheRoan Over the next few weeks, I'd like to tell you the story behind my twelve-year fight for energy independence that also protects our natural resources and the air that we breath. But this issue is pressing, and I really need your help today. Please--sign the petition and spread this far and wide. Warm Regards, Congressman Mark Udall