By John Scales Avery
OSLO, Nov 10 2016 (IPS)

By sabotaging Bernie Sander’s primary campaign, the Democratic National Committee seems to have committed suicide and destroyed the Democratic party. USA’s mass media were also responsible for the stolen primary, and for Donald Trump’s election to the US Presidency.

John Scales Avery

But faced with a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, they chose Trump, who seemed to promise something other than the arrogance that they had been experiencing at the hands of the Beltway establishment.

Donald Trump’s worst characteristic is his denial of anthropogenic climate change.

The participants in the current UN climate talks in Marrakech are extremely worried about the effect that his election will have on the viability of the Paris climate agreement.

In his campaign speeches, Trump has stated that, if elected, he would pull the United States out of the Paris agreement.

The problem with mobilising public opinion on the climate issue is that the worst effects of a disastrous increase in global temperatures lie in the distant future; but to avoid them, action must be taken immediately.

The huge subsidies currently given to fossil fuel companies must be abolished, or, better yet, shifted to the support of renewable energy.

In the long-term future (in several hundred years) climate change threatens to produce ocean level rises which will drown most of the world’s coastal cities, and which will wipe out countries such as Bangladesh and Holland.

At the same time, increases in temperature will make large parts of India and Africa uninhabitable.

Hope that catastrophic climate change can be avoided comes from the exponentially growing world-wide use of renewable energy and from the fact prominent public figures, such as Pope Francis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Elon Musk, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Al Gore, are making the public increasingly aware of the long-term dangers. Short-term disasters due to climate change may also be sufficiently severe to wake us up.

We must work with dedication to save the future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren, a future, which we share with all other living creatures on earth. We must accept our responsibility for the long-term future of human civilization and the biosphere.

The statements and views mentioned in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

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President Barack Obama drops by VP Joe Biden's meeting with former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev in the Vice President's Office, West Wing | 20 March 2009 | The Official White House Photostream / Pete Souza | public domain | Flickr

By John Scales Avery
OSLO, Oct 28 2016 (IPS)

President Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, has appealed to world leaders to reduce the dangerous tensions, which today threaten to plunge human civilization and the biosphere into an all-destroying nuclear war.

In an October 10 interview with RIA Novosti, Gorbachev said: “I think the world has reached a dangerous point, I don’t want to give any concrete prescriptions, but I do want to say that this needs to stop. We need to renew dialogue. Stopping it was the biggest mistake.”

“It is necessary to return to the main priorities. These are nuclear disarmament, the fight against terrorism, the prevention of an environmental disaster,” he continued. “Compared to these challenges, all the rest slips into the background.”

Later the same day, in Iceland, President Gorbachev said: “The worst thing that has happened in recent years is the collapse of trust in relations between major powers, The window to a nuclear weapon-free world…is being shut and sealed right before our eyes.”

John Scales Avery

Alyn Ware Agrees

Alyn Ware, the International Co-ordinater of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, commented:

“I would concur with the assessment of Gorbachev.”

“I have been at the UN General Assembly October sessions (Disarmament and International Security) every year since 1988. This year was the most acrimonious I have ever seen. The tensions between Russia and NATO/Ukraine/US spilled over into the deliberations with accusations and counter accusations flying in many of the sessions. And these were not the only tensions. Syria/Yemen/Middle East, India/Pakistan and North Korea v South Korea/Japan/USA were also vitriolic towards each other.”

“Tension reduction, confidence building and diplomacy are vital at this time”, Alyn Ware continued, “Without this, disarmament is unlikely to occur and further armed conflict is very likely.”

The New UN Secretary General

Hope that the current extremely dangerous tensions can be reduced comes from the appointment of former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres as the new UN Secretary General. The Security Council was united in making this appointment, thus giving us hope for better cooperation in the future.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr. Guterres said that ending the conflict in Syria would be one of his greatest challenges. “I believe it is the international community’s first priority is to be able to end this conflict and use this momentum created by it to try to address all the other conflicts that are interlinked,”

“I hope people will understand that it’s better to put aside different opinions, different interests and to understand that there is a common, vital interest to put an end to these conflicts, because that is absolutely central if you want to live in a world where a minimum of securities are established, where people can live a normal life,” he said.

Nuclear War Would Be a Catastrophe

The danger of a catastrophic nuclear war casts a dark shadow over the future of our species. It also casts a very black shadow over the future of the global environment.

The environmental consequences of a massive exchange of nuclear weapons have been treated in a number of studies by meteorologists and other experts from both East and West.

They predict that a large-scale use of nuclear weapons would result in fire storms with very high winds and high temperatures, which would burn a large proportion of the wild land fuels in the affected nations.

The resulting smoke and dust would block out sunlight for a period of many months, at first only in the northern hemisphere but later also in the southern hemisphere.

Temperatures in many places would fall far below freezing, and much of the earths plant life would be killed. Animals and humans would then die of starvation.

Professor Bernard Lowen of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the founders of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), said in a recent speech:

“…No public health hazard ever faced by humankind equals the threat of nuclear war. Never before has man possessed the destructive resources to make this planet uninhabitable… Modern medicine has nothing to offer, not even a token benefit, in the event of nuclear war…”

“We are but transient passengers on this planet Earth. It does not belong to us. We are not free to doom generations yet unborn. We are not at liberty to erase humanity’s past or dim its future. Social systems do not endure for eternity. Only life can lay claim to uninterrupted continuity. This continuity is sacred.”

The statements and views mentioned in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

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By John Scales Avery
OSLO, Sep 7 2016 (IPS)

We often read comparisons between the prices of solar energy or wind energy with the prices of fossil fuels. It is encouraging to see that renewables are rapidly becoming competitive, and are often cheaper than coal or oil. In fact, if coal, oil and natural gas were given their correct prices renewables would be recognized as being incomparably cheaper than fossil fuels.

A petrochemical refinery in Grangemouth, Scotland, UK.| Author: John from wikipedia | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The concept of externalities in pricing was first put forward by two British economists, Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and Arthur C. Pigou (1877-1959).

In his book “The Economics of Welfare”, published in 1920, Pigou further developed the concept of externalities in pricing which had earlier been introduced by Sidgwick. He proposed that a tax be introduced to correct pricing for the effect of externalities.

An externality is the cost or benefit of some unintended consequence of an economic action. For example, tobacco companies do not really wish for their customers to die from cancer, but a large percentage of them do, and the social costs of this slaughter ought to be reflected in the price of tobacco.

The true environmental costs of fossil fuel use are much greater than those of smoking. Unless we stop burning fossil fuels within one or two decades, we risk a situation where uncontrollable feedback loops will lead to catastrophic climate change regardless of human efforts to prevent the disaster.

If we do not act very quickly to replace fossil fuels by renewables, we risk initiating a 6th geological extinction event. This might even be comparable to the Permian-Triasic extinction, during which 96 per cent of all marine species and 70 per cent of all vertebrates were lost forever.

Subsidies to fossil fuel companies

Far from being penalized for destroying the global environment and threatening the future of all life on earth, fossil fuel companies currently receive approximately $500,000,000,000 per year in subsidies (as estimated by the IEA).

They use part of this vast sum to conduct advertising campaigns to convince the public that anthropogenic climate change is not real.

Betrayal by the mainstream media

If we turn on our television sets, almost nothing that we see informs us of the true predicament of human society and the biosphere.

John Scales Avery

A further betrayal by the mainstream media can be seen in their massive free coverage of US presidential candidate Donald Trump, who is an infamous climate change denier.

Despite the misinformation that we receive from the mainstream media, we must remember our urgent duty to leave fossil fuels in the ground. If threats to the future are taken into account, the price of these fuels is prohibitive.

The statements and views mentioned in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

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By John Scales Avery
OSLO, Aug 1 2016 (IPS)

Physicians have a sacred duty to their patients, whose lives are in their hands. The practice of medicine is not a business like any other business. There are questions of trust and duty involved. The physician’s goal must not be to make as much money as possible, but rather to save lives.

John Scales Avery

Questions of thermonuclear war are involved, or catastrophic long-term climate change.

The survival of human civilization and the survival of the biosphere depend completely on whether the public receives true and important facts, or whether it receives a mixture of lies, propaganda and trivia.

If the erratic, self-centered, bigoted, racist, misogynist, neofascist Republican candidate, Donald Trump, is elected to the US Presidency in 2016, it will be because mass media like CBS find his deliberately outrageous outbursts entertaining and good for ratings.

Besides being manifestly unqualified for the position of President, Trump is an avid climate change denier, and he has said that if elected, he would repudiate the Paris Agreement.“Donald Trump is bad for America, but he is good for CBS” Leslie Roy Moonves, President of CBS

We need to wake up to the real dangers that are facing humanity. Terrorism is not a real danger. The number of people killed by terrorists each year is vanishingly small compared to the number killed in traffic accidents, not to mention the tens of millions who die each year from starvation and preventable diseases.

But the mass media shamelessly magnify terrorist events (some of which may be false flag actions) out of all proportion in order to allow governments to abolish civil liberties and crush dissent.

Meanwhile, the real dangers, the threat of thermonuclear war, the threat of catastrophic climate change, and the threat of a large-scale global famine, these very real threats remain unaddressed.

Our mainstream media have failed us. They are betraying humanity in a time of great crisis. Our educational systems are also failing us, too timid and tradition-bound to warn of the terrible new dangers that the world is facing.

What we need from all the voices that are able to bring a message to a wide public is a warning of the severe dangers that we are facing, combined with an outline of the practical steps that are needed to avert these dangers.

We need realism, we need the important facts, but we also need idealism and optimism.

The fact that our future is in danger must not be an excuse for dispair and inaction, but instead a reason for working with courage and dedication to save the future.

The statements and views mentioned in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

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Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Credit: Neelix. Wikimedia Commons.

By John Scales Avery
COPENHAGEN, Jul 14 2016 (IPS)

As many observers around the world have pointed out, the United States is no longer a true democracy. It is an oligarchy.

The US government ignores the safety, wishes and needs of the majority of its citizens, and instead makes decisions which will bring profit to enormous corporations, or satisfy the wishes of powerful lobbies.

Governmental secrecy occurs in many nations, but in the United States it has assumed huge proportions.

As Edward Snowden’s revelations have shown, the number of people with security clearance (i.e. the number involved in secret operations in the US) is now as large as the entire population of Norway.

Furthermore, trade deals. which threaten both the global environment and the jobs of millions of American citizens, have been negotiated in secret. If people have no knowledge of what their government is doing, how can they exert the control that the word democracy implies?

It is ironic that the United States justifies aggressive wars for regime change by saying that it is “bringing democracy” to various countries. In fact, its own government is not a democracy.

John Scales Avery

“When 91% wanted to strengthen rules on clean air and protection of drinking water, Congress, led by the Republican majority, proposed to weaken them.”

“When 90% wanted to protect public lands and parks, the Republicans proposed putting them on sale or otherwise privatizing them”

“When 74% of Americans favored ending subsidies to big oil, Congress retained most of them.”

“When 70% of Americans said climate change should be a high priority, Congress took no action.“

Atcheson gives a number of other examples. Read his full article.

According to a recent poll, 91 per cent of American citizens are dissatisfied with their electoral system. Its faults have become glaringly apparent this year, when the presumptive candidates for the two major parties, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are both heartily disliked by most of the voters.

The most dangerous feature of Trump’s candidacy is his denial of climate change. If he should be elected, all hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change may be lost. But Hillary Clinton is dangerous too, since her record shows that she is in favour of war.

At present, US policy risks an all-destroying thermonuclear war by provoking both Russia and China. This would continue under Clinton.

How can we get money out of our elections? How can we restore democracy? The reversal of Citizens United would be a vital first step.

Other steps could be de-lelgitimising lobbies, and a law to make networks give equal free broadcasting time to all major candidates.

In 2016 voters are faced with a dilemma. Very many of them would like to vote for Bernie Sanders, but they are afraid that if they do so, Trump will be elected.

There is, in fact a simple voting system in which such a dilemma would not occur: ranked choice voting. Read the following article, which explains the system and its great advantages.

The statements and views mentioned in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

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