By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, California, Jul 20 2011 (IPS)

Nine thousand feet beneath the surface of 34 U.S. states lie vast deposits of shale impregnated with natural gas. Unlike the concentrated reservoirs of earlier eras, most of which have now been tapped out, this gas is trapped in hairline cracks in the shale itself. It can only be tapped through an energy- and water-intensive process called hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) recently developed by American geologists and mining engineers. Toxic chemicals are injected two miles deep and another mile in all directions to break up shale rock and release the gas.

“Clean Energy. What are we waiting for?” ask ads blanketing national and regional media. Fracking is being promoted by gas and oil industry executives, their Congressional allies, and some energy analysts as the ultimate “bridge fuel” between a dangerous dependence on foreign oil and a post-petroleum age of renewables like wind and solar. But for skeptics, this new gas rush is a bridge to nowhere good, a speedway leading away from energy efficiency and renewables. They charge that it’s just the latest delaying tactic in the oil industry’s endless postponement of an essential transition to an energy-efficient, carbon-free society.

The scale of the gas industry’s ambition is staggering. “The potential for natural gas is enormous,” says President Obama, presenting it as a central feature of his energy policy. In the three years since being broadly launched, fracking-based gas production in the U.S. has reached half a million barrels a day and is projected to reach three million a day by 2020. Politicians promote natural gas as a national security imperative and job creator in an era of oil-nation instability and high unemployment.

The gas rush that began in North America has quickly spread worldwide. Recent discoveries of deeply buried oil shale layers containing natural gas or oil are being reported in Australia, Canada, Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, France, India, China, North Africa and the Middle East. Taken together, say some energy analysts, these “plays” could become a game-changer, making Australia and Canada into new Saudi Arabias. At the same time, critics note, they would postpone development of renewables and energy efficiency measures and place new pressures on natural environments already stressed by climate change.

Given the potent array of natural gas promoters in industry, government, media, and academia, until recently skeptical voices have found it hard to be heard. But as fracking has hit the ground in regions where the ravages of resource extraction haven’t been a common occurrence, reports of water contamination, deceptive recruitment practices, and other abuses have begun to gain traction. On a recent visit to northeastern Pennsylvania and the Southern Tier of New York State, this correspondent heard from residents of a neighborhood where a dozen neighbors on a single country lane adjacent to fracking operations had found extreme methane contamination of their water supplies. One even set his well water aflame with the sound and flash of exploding gas.

It was the proverbial shot heard round the world. A film called “Gasland,” the recounting a Pennsylvania resident’s road trip across the U.S. gathering disconcerting testimony from those affected by fracking, garnered an Academy Award nomination. In a series of in-depth front-page reports, The New York Times has raised serious questions about the safety and environmental hazards of fracking. Abroad, France recently became the first nation to ban fracking and the U.K. is considering a similar measure

Concerns about the natural gas fracking boom revolve around several key issues:

-To dislodge the gas trapped in hairline cracks, several million gallons of precious fresh water must be injected into each of thousands of well-heads, often in already arid regions. Once mixed with toxic chemicals, most of this water is unrecoverable. Though natural gas burns cleaner at the tailpipe, the drilling process and leaking well casings release methane into the air and water table. As a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon, leaking methane could actually worsen climate change.

-Rapid resource extraction is characterized by boom and bust cycles that often decimate the social fabric of communities and deface landscapes in their wake. In regions and cultures with deeply rooted traditions unused to such intrusions, the effects are often devastating and enduring.

-The oil industry and its allies have been deft at deflecting pressures to shift to energy efficiency and conservation. They have debunked climate science and talked the talk without walking the walk toward a more sustainable future.

For communities and countries battered by recession, unemployment and rising energy costs, the prospect of a gas rush seems heaven-sent. But in our haste to develop this resource with new, more hazardous methods, we are making more problems for ourselves without confronting our core challenge –learning to live better using less energy in all its forms. This transition is not so much a techno-fix as a culture shift, a simpler yet still harder challenge. Are we up to it? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities ( www.aworldofpossibilities.org). A two-part, two-hour series of radio programs on natural gas fracking can be found at http://aworldofpossibilities.org/program-topic/natural-gas-fracking .

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
TRINIDAD, CALIFORNIA, May 2 2011 (IPS)

At a time when most conventional fuels cast ever longer shadows of unintended consequences, algae ­that lowly pond scum– offers a pleasant surprise: a near-term, low-tech alternative with apparently few of the hidden costs of more elaborate, expensive and exploitive energy sources.

The first, simplest, and fastest-growing life form, algae holds unheralded promise to become a pivotal resource for the planet’s future as the basis for a high quality biodiesel that doesn’t (like corn) siphon food from humans. And itÂ’s not just a fuel. ItÂ’s animal feed, human food (think spirulina), and the building block for a wide range of biodegradable bio-plastics to replace petroleum-based plastics. And algae does all this as it grows by absorbing enormous amounts of CO2, the very greenhouse gas we most urgently need to reduce.

At the moment algae is not a high priority on most national or major corporate energy R&D agendas, but it is rapidly gaining traction in the private sector and academia as its potential becomes clear. In some cases it is being researched by giant energy conglomerates as a byproduct of the development of so-called “clean coal,” since it effectively absorbs the CO2 generated by the burning of carbon. But coal is nothing but 500 million-year-old algae. So, ask some algae advocates, why not just stop strip-mining and mountaintop removal, leave the coal in the ground and instead farm fast-growing, CO2-absorbing algae?

This is not a distant dream. One fact that sets algae apart from just about every other energy option, conventional or alternative, is its simplicity, ubiquity, and near-term availability. Algae researchers say that while technical obstacles remain to be resolved before they can achieve cost-effective large-scale production for its many uses, none appear to be insurmountable. With its prodigious growth habit, algae under cultivation does need to be carefully controlled. Algal blooms occur naturally, but they are also triggered by chemical and agricultural pollution. Eutrophication chokes waterways and harms marine and aquatic life, blocking the essential flow of oxygen in a process known as hypoxia.

ItÂ’s a serious problem and must be considered when designing algae farms in the open rather than in the controlled environments of bio-digesters, as most biodiesel is currently produced. But unlike a nuclear chain reaction, even if allowed to bloom excessively, algae will inflict consequences nowhere near those of a nuclear meltdown.

On a recent visit to ENN, a fast-growing Chinese energy company based an hour from Beijing, this correspondent was given a tour of a laboratory where a team of scientists is developing micro-algae for a variety of uses. ItÂ’s part of a joint venture between ENN and Duke Energy, the largest U.S. public utility. Standing in a sunlit greenhouse filled with walls of clear glass tubing through which green sludge circulates, Liu Minsung, the young, energetic director of ENNÂ’s algae team, gestured to a row of transparent vials of varying color and consistency. He lifted them one by one.

“This,” he said, “is micro-algae in its pure form. We’re experimenting with different forms of micro-algae and breeding new varieties to develop those easiest to adapt to our purposes.” Then he lifted the next vial.

“This is vegetable oil ­very pure, no flavor of its own, very good for you.” He put the vial down and lifted the next.

“This is animal feed. Very nutritious.”

Then he lifted the next. “This is brain food for children.” Some would say that, given today’s smart-phone-addicted kids, this may be algae’s most urgently needed function.

“This is biodiesel,” Liu continued. “It can be used to fuel everything from motor vehicles to ships and jets.” “Oilgae,” as some have called it, is refined through an inexpensive, long-established process ­mid-tech, not high tech.

Liu moved on. “And this is the basis for bioplastics. Could replace all the plastic we make out of petroleum today.” And it’s biodegradable.

“How many years will it take till all this becomes commercially viable?,” I asked.

He thought for a moment, as if consulting his calendar. “Check back with us next year.”

Next year indeed. In 2012, the U.S. Navy will launch what it calls a Green Strike Group, a flotilla of ships powered by a 50% algae-based and 50% NATO F-76 fuel, forming a 50/50 blend of hydro-processed renewable diesel. By 2016, the Navy plans to launch a Great Green Fleet, a carrier strike group composed of hybrid electric ships and aircraft propelled by biofuels including algae, and ­maybe not so green- nuclear-powered vessels.

Algae is a full circle innovation because it serves many uses at once. In its elegant synthesis of stacked functions, algae as fuel, food, feed and plastic follows bio-logic rather than techno-logic. It demonstrates the virtues of elemental simplicity in an era of hype technology. Technological solutions have grown so complicated and costly that, as with not-so-smart phones, a surfeit of inessential features ends up defeating their core capabilities. Algae is ancient but it is far from primitive. In fact, it has had about five billion years to evolve into a lean green growing being.

Like every other “solution” that’s ever been devised, algae undoubtedly has shadow sides that have yet to be discovered. But the greatest danger it poses is that, like the electric car, it won’t developed. But one great virtue of algae is that you can grow your own. Algae grows most everywhere other than the Arctic. If researchers focus on scaling down as well as up, local communities could grow their own municipal algae farms and farmers could cultivate algae for new sources of income and fuel to power their own equipment.

Life on earth began with algae, and if life is found on distant orbs it will likely be algae we find there first. Will this simplest, wisest life form help rescue us from our energy dilemma? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS) (*) Mark Sommer is host of the internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities ( www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

Algae are rapidly gaining traction in the private sector and academia as their potential becomes clear.

- Fabricio Vanden Broeck

The first, simplest, and fastest-growing life form, algae hold unheralded promise to become a pivotal resource for the planet's future as the basis for a high quality biodiesel that doesn't (like corn) siphon food from humans.

And it’s not just a fuel. It’s animal feed, human food (think spirulina), and the building block for a wide range of biodegradable bio-plastics to replace petroleum-based plastics. And algae do all this as it grows by absorbing prodigious amounts of CO2, the very greenhouse gas we most urgently need to reduce.

At the moment algae ire not a high priority on most national or major corporate energy research and development agendas, but they are rapidly gaining traction in the private sector and academia as their potential becomes clear.

In some cases it is being researched by giant energy conglomerates as a byproduct of the development of so-called “clean coal,” since it effectively absorbs the CO2 generated by the burning of carbon. But coal is nothing but 500 million-year-old algae.

So, ask some algae advocates, why not just stop strip-mining and mountaintop removal, leave the coal in the ground and instead farm fast-growing, CO2-absorbing algae?

This is not a distant dream. One fact that sets algae apart from just about every other energy option, conventional or alternative, is its simplicity, ubiquity, and near-term availability.

Algae researchers say that while technical obstacles remain to be resolved before they can achieve cost-effective large-scale production for its many uses, none appear to be insurmountable.

With its prodigious growth habit, algae under cultivation do need to be carefully controlled. Algal blooms occur naturally, but they are also triggered by chemical and agricultural pollution.

Eutrophication chokes waterways and harms marine and aquatic life, blocking the essential flow of oxygen in a process known as hypoxia. It’s a serious problem and must be considered when designing algae farms in the open rather than in the controlled environments of bio-digesters, as most biodiesel is currently produced.

But unlike a nuclear chain reaction, even if allowed to bloom excessively, algae will inflict consequences nowhere near those of a nuclear meltdown.

On a recent visit to ENN Group, a fast-growing Chinese energy company based an hour from Beijing, this correspondent was given a tour of a laboratory where a team of scientists is developing micro-algae for a variety of uses. It’s part of a joint venture between ENN and Duke Energy, one of the largest U.S. public utilities.

Standing in a sunlit greenhouse filled with walls of clear glass tubing through which green sludge circulates, Liu Minsung, the young, energetic director of ENN’s algae team, gestured to a row of transparent vials of varying color and consistency.

He lifted them one by one. “This,” he said, “is micro-algae in its pure form. We’re experimenting with different forms of micro-algae and breeding new varieties to develop those easiest to adapt to our purposes.”

Then he lifted the next vial. “This is vegetable oil – very pure, no flavor of its own, very good for you.” He put the vial down and lifted the next. “This is animal feed. Very nutritious.”

“This is biodiesel,” Mr. Liu continued. “It can be used to fuel everything from motor vehicles to ships and jets.” “Oilgae,” as some have called it, is refined through an inexpensive, long-established process – mid-tech, not high tech.

Mr. Liu moved on. “And this is the basis for bioplastics. Could replace all the plastic we make out of petroleum today.” And it’s biodegradable.

“How many years will it take till all this becomes commercially viable?,” I asked. He thought for a moment, as if consulting his calendar. “Check back with us next year.”

Next year, indeed. In 2012, the U.S. Navy will launch what it calls a Green Strike Group, a flotilla of ships powered by a 50 percent algae-based and 50 percent NATO F-76 fuel, forming a 50/50 blend of hydro-processed renewable diesel.

By 2016, the Navy plans to launch a Great Green Fleet, a carrier strike group composed of hybrid electric ships and aircraft propelled by biofuels including algae, and – not so green – nuclear-powered vessels.

Algae are a full circle innovation because they serve many uses at once. Technological solutions have grown so complicated and costly that, as with not-so-smart phones, a surfeit of inessential features ends up defeating their core capabilities.

Algae are ancient but far from primitive. In fact, they have had about five billion years to evolve into a lean green growing being.

Like every other “solution” that’s ever been devised, algae undoubtedly have shadow sides that have yet to be discovered. But the greatest danger they pose is that, like the electric car, they won’t developed.

But one great virtue of algae is that you can grow your own. Algae grow most everywhere other than the Arctic. If researchers focus on scaling down as well as up, local communities could grow their own municipal algae farms and farmers could cultivate algae for new sources of income and fuel to power their own equipment.

Life on earth began with algae, and if life is found on distant orbs it will likely be algae we find there first. Will this simplest, wisest life form help rescue us from our energy dilemma?

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jul 19 2010 (IPS)

As a commodity of almost irresistible attraction, chocolate has always played contradictory roles in human life. For those consuming it, chocolate has been an exquisite experience. For those growing the cacao from which itÂ’s made, itÂ’s more often been excruciating. For those of us savoring its flavor, itÂ’s the ultimate indulgence. For those struggling to survive on the pittance paid for cacao beans, it has been the ultimate indignity. Many of those who grow cacao have never even tasted chocolate.

As currently processed, chocolate is candy, not food. But chocolate has been cultivated for four thousand years, and for all but the last hundred and fifty it was a food and a medicine, not a confection. Some hint of its nutritional value has been revealed by recent research indicating that dark chocolate is rich in antioxidants, flavinoids, epicatechin and other ingredients that shield against heart attacks and stroke, cancer and diabetes. But most chocolate consumed today is essentially a highly fattening mix of sugar and milk with an overlay of chocolate flavoring made from inferior beans.

Yet chocolate need not be bad for us or a bad deal for the cacao grower. In fact, if properly grown, processed, and marketed, it could become a transformational source of food and nutrition, revived culture and agriculture, biodiversity, and personal and social health.

But to become truly transformational, chocolate itself needs to change. We must change the way we grow and process cacao. Seventy percent of the beans grown today comes from West Africa, where it is cultivated as a monoculture from few strains in minimal shade. But cacao is a native of the splendidly diverse original rainforests of Central and South America. There it grows in the wild among hundreds of species of trees and plants, many of which possess largely unexplored nutritional or medicinal values of their own.

In Brazil, cabruca, a unique method of cacao cultivation that dates back 250 years, leaves the original rainforest largely intact. It simply opens space beneath the canopy for cacao trees to grow. Cabruca holds the potential to provide cacao farmers with a partial economic basis for preserving the remaining rainforests of the vast Mata Atlantica – and beyond them to tropical forests worldwide where cacao is also grown. Like a charming host, the unique appeal of chocolate could attract attention to the nutritional and medicinal values of many less charismatic but equally beneficial trees and plants growing in these forests.

Cabruca is a form of agroforestry, an emerging approach to agriculture that combines cultivated crops and domestic animals with food-rich wild forestlands in a mutually supportive ecosystem. Unlike industrialized agriculture, which removes all competing flora and replants crops each growing season in freshly plowed ground, agroforestry operates in long cycles where trees yield their fruit or nuts for a hundred years or more without the farmer ever needing to plow the soil or cut the forests to harvest their bounty. Meanwhile, beneath their canopy, chickens, pigs and other domestic animals can be raised and their manure used to fertilize both wild and domesticated tree crops.

Such a highly diverse ecosystem, with both its naturally occurring and humanly managed elements, is adaptable to changing conditions in ways industrial agriculture is disastrously proving not to be. A broad range of rainforest crop revenues could shield against failures of particular crops. Cacao itself has been struck in recent years by scourges like witchesÂ’ broom and moniliasis that have reduced yields in the Americas by as much as 90 percent. So while it is valuable, it canÂ’t be relied on to provide the sole support for a rainforest economy. The natural diversity of an original rainforest offers a broader range of commodities on which to base a sustainable economics.

A more biodiverse approach to cacao cultivation could provide a powerful economic incentive to preserve and replant the rainforests that once carpeted the tropics. If done on a large enough scale, replanting rainforests and managing them as long-cycle ecosystems could also help stabilize the climate worldwide since they absorb excess carbon dioxide produced by industrial activity.

At the same time, cacao farmers need and deserve a greater share of the fruits of their labor. Today, they are only able to sell their beans raw and receive a tiny fraction of the price charged to consumers. The lionÂ’s share of revenues go to the middlemen, distributors and processors that are some of the largest corporations on earth. Yet it is perfectly practical and not hugely expensive to process cacao on-site in the regions where it is grown. As a group, most cacao farmers make a marginal living and donÂ’t possess the resources to build their own processing facilities. To do so, they would need help from a low-interest loan program, perhaps run by an international agency promoting climate mitigation measures and financed by carbon credits earned through reforestation programs.

Well-intentioned proposals to reforest the tropics, improve livelihoods and reduce the heedless exploitation of natural resources have long foundered on a lack of hard-nosed economic incentives. Grown in the long cycles of agroforestry, locally processed for added value, and bolstered by a diverse range of rainforest foods and medicines, cacao offers the possibility of just such a sound economic base. But it would also challenge a well-entrenched set of private and public interests that profit from a semi-colonial system of resource extraction common to many commodities. Since that system will not soon be supplanted, success will depend on whether the two approaches can find ways to coexist, like the rainforest flora themselves, in healthy competition and cooperation with one another. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities ( www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Feb 17 2010 (IPS)

"Speed Kills: Slow Down and Live". So say American road signs urging drivers to lighten their foot on the gas pedal. But little else has slowed down in the U.S. or elsewhere in the 36 years since traffic planners instituted a 55 mile-per-hour national highway speed limit (and later, in haste, repealed it). In a global culture dominated by the impatience of youth, counted in nanoseconds and fueled by just-in-time supply chains, everything needs to be done yesterday since today is no longer soon enough.

But just when it seems warp speed has altogether extinguished the present, movements to slow down and savor lifes pleasures are springing up in those very cultures most addicted to acceleration. Ancient Eastern cultures like China and India, long trapped in poverty and technological backwardness, now surge forward, sweeping away centuries of slow-moving village life and much rich culture with it in frenetic industrial development.

Meanwhile, Western societies long addicted to speed find themselves stalled in life-altering recession. A downward-trending economy is forcing many Americans to stick closer to home. Once an eagerly anticipated adventure, air travel has become an expensive, often excruciating ordeal. Home cooking, gardening, and the long-lost art of conversation are all regaining popularity. Unemployment and under-employment are reversing the priorities of mainstream middle and working class Americans. With less money but more time, many are rediscovering the pleasures of non-monetary work and play.

Even the most advanced sectors of big business, ever conscious that "time is money," find themselves having to scale back employee travel and making more efficient use of rapidly evolving technologies to move electrons rather than bodies.

Some of these changes are less self-chosen than forced by shifting conditions. But there are also highly conscious movements. Slowness advocates cite their genesis in Italy’s "slow food movement" founded by Carlo Petrini in the 1980’s during a campaign to prevent a MacDonald’s from being built near Rome’s Spanish Steps. Slow food advocates seek not just more attention to the arts of cooking but a more locally sourced and sustainable agriculture, a more compassionate animal husbandry, and a more leisurely savoring of flavors in the equally important art of eating.

Slow food has since proliferated into slow travel, slow art, slow design, even slow sex. As Mae West once noted, "Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing slowly." Journalist Carl Honore, whose book, In Praise of Slowness, first drew together the disparate threads of this burgeoning movement, emphasizes that theirs is not rejection of advanced technology nor a Luddite resistance to all things new and fast. Instead, he says, it is about striking a better balance between fast and slow, movement and stillness. So, for example, we can use the undeniable advantages of instantaneous communications to reduce the need to move ourselves from place to place.

The Seattle-based "Take Back Your Time" movement argues for jumping off the juggernaut as a means of regaining control of your life, reducing your impact on the environment, improving personal and public health, and saving money. National Coordinator John de Graaf points to startlingly counterintuitive statistics to support his conclusion that for all their inescapable hardship, on balance economic downturns have been good for both personal and public health. For every one percent increase in unemployment, there is a half percent decrease in the death rate. The greatest lengthening of American lifespans -six years- occurred during the Great Depression.

Moreover, during the current recession there has been more volunteerism, a forty percent increase in home gardening, and a twenty percent decrease in U.S. traffic fatalities (10,000 fewer deaths per year). With official unemployment over 10 percent and the underemployed adding another 7 percent, the average workweek is 33 hours, its lowest level since 1964. With less driving, there’s been less air pollution and correspondingly lower rates of asthma.

Until recently, the slow movement has been largely confined to those with the leisure and means to afford to slow down. But the Great Recession may drive a much more mainstream American culture to begin exploring slower, less consumptive ways of being and doing. The energy, environmental, and health benefits of slowing down in the speed-addicted West are potentially enormous. But they may well be diminished, if not altogether overwhelmed, by the sudden acceleration of Eastern economies and cultures.

Western Europe is decades ahead of North America in its turn towards slowness. Having endured centuries of war, revolution and industrialization, Europeans breathed a collective sigh of grief and relief after the losses of the Second World War and embraced a more leisurely lifestyle. As the declining superpower, the U.S. is about to experience a definitive downsizing. For some, resentment and a refusal to face facts is fueling a defiant pedal to the metal mentality. But for many others, this deceleration is an opportunity to slow down and savor what’s been lost during generations of hot pursuit. And for still others, its a necessity that could just become a discovery and delight. As the Buddhists advise, Don’t just do something. Sit there. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities ( www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Dec 7 2009 (IPS)

The twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall reminded Americans of just how heady it felt when a triumphant America stood astride a collapsing Soviet empire. Two decades later, Americans find themselves bewildered and resentful. Many are now asking, Where did it all go?

In truth the decline of American supremacy was a long time coming. Even at the height of U.S. power, crucial trends were undermining the long-term health of American society. A humiliating defeat in Vietnam, an exhausting war of choice in Iraq, a political class ever more beholden to corporate coffers, crumbling educational, medical and public infrastructures, an debt-driven economy dominated by risky financial speculation at the expense of productive activity: all these and more sapped the essential sources of national strength.

Now, as Americans survey the wreckage of their dreams, their responses to this diminished destiny are sharply divided. The financial collapse of 2008 left most Americans breathless and bereft. After the initial shock and loss, some claimed to welcome the chance to simplify their lives. Many declared themselves ready to downshift in order to savor the intimate pleasures of family, friends, nature and nurture in place of the mad dash for the next big thing. Media trumpeted the trend towards “a new frugality” while skeptics speculated that the trend would vanish with the first uptick of the stock exchange.

The ethically challenged rich haven’t ceased their profligacy, but public outrage at record bonuses going to the very banks bailed out by taxpayers has presented them with a sticky public relations problem, obliging them to mute their impulse to flaunt for fear of provoking public wrath and prompting more regulation.

The financial collapse occurred just in time to hand Barack Obama a ticking time bomb. Recently released documents reveal that the fix was already in during the last days of the Bush administration to hand U.S. banks and investment firms a free pass to cover their misdeeds and emerge not just unscathed but with a still more dominant role in the American economy. The Obama administration was handed a poisoned chalice and forced to drink it.

But Obama then compounded the crime with egregious errors of his own that have left his supporters deeply dispirited. Instead of defending ordinary Americans from the depredations of an unconscionable financial sector, he handed the tiller to the bankers.

Today’s hard-bitten Republicans feed on rage and resentment, a remnant “rebel” culture of one-time Southern Confederates who never stopped fighting the Civil War. They practice a scorched-earth strategy of denying Obama, and the country, any of the resources essential to success.

The result is that ten months after a tidal wave of progressive populist hope, the “liberal moment” is already waning. In its place, a much more menacing populism is emerging. It deftly exploits the fears of those left behind by the new economy and stokes fear and loathing in venom spewed by incendiary talk show hosts, Rupert Murdoch’s fact-free Fox News, a virulent blogosphere, orchestrated “tea parties” and bizarre “birther” movements.

This retro populism glories in its own ignorance. For the past few decades Republicans have found a winning formula in putting forth presidential candidates manifestly unqualified for the job yet hugely appealing to a significant segment of the population that isn’t comfortable with anyone leading them who knows more than they do. As Sarah Palin, the quintessential embodiment of clever, charismatic ignorance, said of brown-skinned, Harvard-educated Barack Obama in carefully coded language, “He’s not one of us.”

Far right populism is fueled by conspiratorial fantasies and a surly contempt for facts and reasoned debate. Historian Richard Hofstadter once called this “the paranoid style in American politics.” Like a lethal political virus, it routinely erupts during periods of economic distress and social dislocation.

It all sounds eerily familiar, with haunting echoes of the rise of fascism in Europe two generations ago. The accelerating decline of U.S. power and influence after decades of malfeasance and mis-governance raises the question of how Americans will take no longer being Number One. The contrasting populisms of right and left reflect radically different responses. On the left a new localism is emerging in post-political movements for self-reliance, simplicity, and a renewed spirit of interdependent community. Many long for their country to be liberated from the burdens of empire so as to focus on rebuilding a more equitable and sustainable American dream.

Confronting the same disturbing trends, retro populism shares the impulse to return to family, friends and community. But it expresses itself in anger at the immigrants, minorities, and cultural elites its adherents see as undermining traditional American values. And it forcefully rejects any future where the United States is perceived as anything less than “the greatest nation on earth.”

Progressives have long warned of a homegrown American fascism. Yet the self-balancing nature of its government and the ballast of its middle-class society have always prevented the country from succumbing to its worst excesses. But now, the decline of its superpower status, massive economic insecurity, orchestrated rage, and a poorly informed and educated public could combine with the amplifying effects of partisan media to unhinge American history. Democracy in decline all too often sinks into demagoguery. It is essential that Americans of good will face this prospect squarely now and boldly unite to renounce it before the cancer spreads.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer is host and executive producer of the internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Nov 9 2009 (IPS)

For the first postwar generation of American workers, putting in a faithful forty years ‘working for The Man’ may have sometimes felt like a jail sentence, but it offered a handsome reward. Corporate and state employee pensions bolstered the federal government’s Social Security system to provide a secure if not always lavish retirement for a substantial majority of Americans. But recent and long-term trends have eroded that assurance. Their children and grandchildren will likely inherit a far less ample retirement, if indeed they receive any at all.

The good news is that despite alarming predictions of imminent insolvency by those who seek to privatise the system and hand it to Wall Street, for the moment the Social Security system remains well-funded. A federal programme of mandatory social insurance established during the New Deal, it draws on payroll taxes from both employees and employers and is placed in a separate fund not to be accessed for other purposes. Never intended to be the sole source of retirement support, Social Security pays its beneficiaries (retirees as well as the disabled and survivors of recipients) lifetime benefits that average 40 percent of the inflation-adjusted pre-retirement income of middle earners and 50 percent for low-income workers.

Until recent years, as part of their traditional benefit packages employers in the public and private sectors routinely provided their employees with private pensions to supplement Social Security. But as the US manufacturing sector has dwindled and unions have lost membership and influence, the percentage of American workers covered by private pension plans has dropped to less than half.

Moreover, as titans like General Motors have plunged into bankruptcy, they’ve tried to shed long-term commitments to corporate pension plans. Business interests complain that USD1600 of every vehicle’s purchase price goes to cover ‘legacy costs’, mostly contract-mandated retiree health and pension benefits. In return for saving jobs, auto workers have surrendered many of these benefits, but apparently not enough to prevent attacks on the rest. Watching GM’s struggles, many employers from newer industries avoid such long-term commitments. Increasingly they’ve turned to outsourcing and contract labour to provide them with the flexibility to shed workers when revenues won’t support them.

Public sector workers -city, state and federal employees- have long figured that while they generally receive lower pay than in the private sector, they’re compensated by rock-solid pension plans. But as state governments facing billion-dollar budget deficits slash away at public services, health care, and higher education, many employees fear that politicians will raid their once sacrosanct public employee retirement plans.

As always, however, the most vulnerable are the tens of millions of American workers who have never been covered by a pension plan. These include temporary and part-time workers, farmers and migrant labourers, and service workers in industries like retail and the restaurant and hospitality trades. They also include a higher income class of knowledge workers, professionals, independent contractors and others who’ve chosen a more independent but insecure path. Most of these free-spirited baby boomers have yet to retire and look on the prospect with increasing unease. They’ll need to cobble together a retirement from Social Security benefits based on intermittent incomes, their own often modest savings, and whatever they inherit from their more security-minded parents.

And now comes the Great Recession. If, as predicted, it’s a slow and painful recovery, it will only further fray America’s already threadbare retirement safety net. Low income wage-earners in industries like fast food, retail, maintenance, and construction that routinely provide no pension face a future of work without end. Nearly half of all Americans have no net worth and many of these are mired in chronic debt. Often in poor health from the multiple stresses of work, family conflicts, lifestyle choices, and violent, toxic environments, 45 million Americans also lack the health insurance that would enable them to treat or prevent their worsening health.

But increasing insecurity about old age is by no means limited to the working poor. Many faithful workers find themselves laid off in their fifties, struggling to be rehired as prospective employers turn to eager youth willing to work for less. Until recently, middle-income boomers looked to the rising values of their mortgaged homes as retirement collateral. Now that both their homes and stock portfolios have shrunk by a third, they look to the future with increasing anxiety. They dread the prospect of putting their kids through college as tuition costs rise to replace declining state support. And they wonder whether they’ll ever be able to retire or, absent that option, to maintain their health and keep or create income-producing work into their seventies and beyond.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The postwar promise of steady work and a secure retirement lasted just one generation before the profligacy of politicians, snowballing private and public debts, the venality of the financial sector, the decline of American manufacturing and other adverse trends rendered it moot. In an increasingly unbalanced society, inequalities of wealth and income are producing radical inequities of ultimate outcome. For the fortunate few who exit the recession richer than when it began, retirement plans hardly matter: they’ve got their own. But for the great majority who depend on public and private pension plans, retirement may be one American Dream that will remain painfully out of reach for many years to come. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Sep 1 2009 (IPS)

We Americans like our meat. In the course of a year, on average we eat more than 220 pounds of chicken, beef, and pork. But some are starting to pause at the meat counter as they hear about incidents of contamination and compromised food safety, the breeding of drug-resistant super-bugs and the inhumane conditions endured by animals raised in extreme confinement.

The fault, say critics, lies with an industrial farm animal production system that forces farmers to confine their livestock in tight quarters to eke out a profit in a highly competitive marketplace. The conflicting expectations of consumers also drive the priorities of a mass production process that puts cheap meat on our plates at rising costs to human health, animal welfare, and environmental integrity.

In order to place pigs and poultry in such close quarters, farmers have turned to routinely feeding antibiotics to their animals not just to treat infections but to prevent bacterial disease outbreaks and promote weight gain. Up to 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. go to farm animals. But scientific researchers have been warning for decades that the use of antibiotics in meat production other than to stem an actual infection is producing a chain of unintended negative effects. Biologists say it’s breeding drug-resistant strains of bacteria that are undermining the effectiveness of the antibiotics we humans vitally depend on to fight our own infections.

Most pork and poultry raised in North America is now housed in indoor, confined animal feedlot operations known as CAFO’s. Here, close quarters create an ideal environment for the growth and spread of harmful bacteria. The routine addition of antibiotics to animal feed has enabled highly adaptive bacteria to learn how to fend off most of the medicines used to kill them. In effect, say microbiologists, by overusing antibiotics we’ve selected the strongest to survive, the very ones we’re least prepared to defend against. Developing new antibiotics to protect against these mutating bacteria is so costly and time-consuming that researchers can’t keep pace with their rapidly evolving resistance.

That’s an issue not just for the health of pigs and poultry but for people. A landmark 2008 study by the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production (www.ncifap.org) asserts that the overuse of antibiotics is not just a personal hazard but a major public health issue affecting farm workers, nearby communities, aquifers, and even consumers. Citing $5 billion annual health care costs to deal with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Commission calls for a phase-out and ban of all non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics in animal production.

Over the past decade scientists, policymakers and food activists have exerted increasing pressure on the meat production industry to reduce its use of antibiotics for any purpose other than treating actual infections. Antibiotics were banned for such uses in Denmark in 2000 and in the European Union as a whole in 2006. The European experience, say its advocates, demonstrates that meat animals can be raised in relative confinement without the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics.

The key to not having to use antibiotics, say farmers who have eliminated them from non-therapeutic uses, is raising animals in the way they were before the introduction of CAFO’s over the past few decades -in the open air and the dirt, not in confinement crates or slatted-floor pens suspended over huge “lagoons” of their liquid waste, which themselves pose health hazards. As with children, moderate exposure to a natural mix of beneficial and harmful bacteria by playing in the spacious surroundings of a backyard enables them to gain exposure to most of what they’ll eventually encounter and build up the natural immunities to fend off common infections.

North Dakota rancher Fred Kirschenmann believes farmers are not primarily to blame for these practices. He says the fault lies with a system driven by the consumer’s demand for low prices and the big box retailer’s motivation to meet those expectations at the expense of human and animal health that ripples down the food chain to force the farmer to adopt harmful practices to feed an ostensibly more cost-effective production system.

But when all the long-term impacts are factored in, the system may not be as cost-effective as advertised. Dealing with disease outbreaks, decreasing effectiveness of our antibiotics for human use, and the stark inhumanity of living conditions for these animals all exact their own steep costs.

The tough economics of industrial farming are helping drive a change in U.S. industrial agriculture. In response to pressures from scientists, policymakers, the marketplace and the consuming public, some observers see a gradual evolution by industrial meat producers towards the adoption of practices dismissed till recently as inefficient or unprofitable. At a World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, veterinarians and vendors alike observed that most CAFO farmers are starting to scale down their use of antibiotics in feed. They’re also experiencing pressure from fast food chains who themselves are feeling the heat from consumers.

As consumers we’ve come to expect our meat to be delivered to us in shrink-wrapped packages at bargain prices. But its convenience and affordability have come at a high hidden price in public health, environmental contamination, and animal welfare. Our individual decisions may seem harmless in themselves, but taken collectively they produce unintended consequences that harm us all. We all want and deserve food that is safe, healthy and affordable. We just need to be sure that in seeking a bargain we don’t create new problems for ourselves in the process. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities ( www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jul 21 2009 (IPS)

Forty years ago I drove across the United States traversing mid-winter blizzards before entering the blissful warmth and light of California, a state blessed not only with stunning topography but also a diverse and hugely talented population, a top-tier educational system, and a culture of freewheeling, sky’s-the-limit innovation. We cruised the sinuous curves of Highway 1 on the spectacular Big Sur coastline crooning, ‘California Dreamin”.

Fast forward four decades and the California dream has turned to nightmare. On July 1, facing a USD 24 billion budget shortfall, the state began issuing thousands of contractors IOUs that major banks warned they wouldn’t honour. California’s celebrity governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has presided over the end of the state’s fiscal viability, but the origins of the calamity are more deeply rooted, in contradictory and delusional states of mind as much as institutional dysfunction.

Hyper-individualism, self-indulgence, and the dreamer’s contempt for everyday realities and responsibilities have produced a political system of epic paralysis.

The most diverse state in the Union, California is also the most culturally and politically divided. Eco-liberals in the North face off against right-of-Reagan conservatives in the South, no-tax libertarians, and a vast, frustrated underclass of Latinos and African-Americans that services this affluent minority. Add to this emulsion several key policies, most of them enacted by voters through the initiative process, that have left the state increasingly incapable of meeting the obligations those voters expect it to fulfil:

Proposition 13, a 1978 voter-enacted law, slashed the property taxes that funded the state’s top-flight educational system and other services, in the absence of which its schools have plummeted to the bottom of national rankings. A large proportion of California students graduate from high school altogether unprepared to participate in a twenty-first century economy.

A 1994 ‘three strikes’ mandatory sentencing law enacted by crime-wary voters converted thousands of minor offenders into ‘lifers’ and has swelled the prison population by 82 percent since. The prison system now houses 170,000 inmates and costs taxpayers USD 13 billion a year, more than all the state’s colleges and universities combined.

The initiative process itself, instituted in 1911 to give voters direct democracy in combating railroad trusts, has since been captured by ‘grasstops’ industry lobbies that use it to confuse voters into enacting regressive policies the legislature would never pass.

Yet the legislature itself is a study in institutional incompetence. Riven by partisan divides, the state’s apportionment system militates against compromise, electing only the more extreme elements of the electorate. To make matters worse, tax increases, now desperately needed to fill the yawning budget shortfall, can only be enacted with a two-thirds vote of the legislature. This stipulation gives minority anti-tax Republicans lethal veto power over any tax increases.

Watching California’s woes, the rest of the country and world, long both envious and resentful of the state’s outsized share of good fortune, feel a certain satisfaction in seeing confirmation of their scepticism.

Californians can be both child-like and childish. And as with the US as a whole, the state’s eccentricities and enthusiasms often charm a world that long ago dispensed with golden dreams.

Now, drowning in its sea of red ink, the state must close most of its parks, radically slash educational budgets and health care services for the poor, furlough state employees, curtail crucial government operations, and release thousands of prisoners from jail. No one can calculate the cumulative impact of these unprecedented measures.

But it’s already clear, for California as for the entire US, that we are at childhood’s end.

Some observers say an increasingly under-educated populace, disincentives for business development, and decaying public infrastructure and services will drive away the kinds of catalytic initiatives that have traditionally made the state a magnetic field of dreams. Will the state -and state of mind- that gave us Google, iPhones, and the modern environmental movement, among many playful and profound innovations, finally grow up and dispense with childish things?

Not likely anytime soon. For better and worse, California remains a state of both dreams and denial. It has always evoked both the best and worst human impulses, attracting both dreamers and schemers, visionaries and scam artists. And it still hatches new movements like rabbits out of a hat: California cuisine and organic supermarkets, social networks, renewable energy experiments (though increasingly upstaged by other states and countries), and an irrepressible culture of innovation.

One of the most enduring and endearing sources of its inspiration is its open-hearted embrace of newcomers. Arrive here and you’re home. No one asks who your parents were or what they did. You can still birth a world-shaking new idea here and find enough like-minded eccentrics to help you deliver it. And you can still fail, openly and ingloriously, and come right back without shame or regret to try again. The once and future California will never cease being golden. And like gold, it will never cease attracting dreamers, knaves and fools. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities.

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, May 25 2009 (IPS)

The specter of a swine flu pandemic has driven home the urgent need for more rapid and effective responses to a wide range of public health threats. But in order to respond more effectively, we need to create a more open system for the exchange of vital health information and research across sectors, disciplines, geographic, economic and cultural boundaries. In a world of increasingly global emergencies, we need all hands on deck, including the patients and publics most affected.

Pioneers in medical and scientific research are now laying the foundations for a global health commons, a medical information and innovation exchange system that could greatly accelerate the pace and enhance the effectiveness of crucial discoveries. Based largely online for global reach, access, and affordability, they believe such a common resource could serve as a meeting place and clearinghouse where stakeholders in diverse dimensions of public and personal health could find one another, share the results of their experiments, identify common challenges, and collaborate in designing solutions to them.

The concept of an open source health commons orginates in part with Internet commerce pioneer Marty Tenenbaum. In 1998 he was at the peak of success as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, launching the first commercial Internet transactions and web-based auctions, when he was struck by a rare form of melanoma. Frustrated by the lack of drug treatments for his illness, he launched an online patient-researcher alliance called CollabRx (www.collabRx.com ) that facilitates the creation of virtual biotech companies to speed the research process to develop treatments for diseases that wouldn’t otherwise receive the attention of major pharmaceutical companies.

On average, says Tenenbaum, the development of a major new drug takes seventeen years and a billion dollars. With numbers like these, most pharmaceutical companies focus on so-called “blockbuster drugs” with millions of potential customers. Some of these drugs address widely felt needs but many cater more to affluent consumers ready to spend lavishly for enhanced beauty or pleasure. This system of skewed incentives neglects the vast majority of “orphaned” diseases that kill or disable millions of mostly poor people worldwide but won’t generate the profits drug companies are looking for. CollabRx brings doctors and researchers, those most knowledgeable about medical science, together with patients, those most motivated to push for a cure.

With the development of computational biology, some kinds of medical trials can be conducted at a cost that even a group of patients can collectively afford to finance. Just as patients are desperate for a cure, many doctors and researchers are desperate to develop treatments for diseases long thought incurable.

A related experiment in open source science has already proven remarkably successful. The Public Library of Science (www.plos.org) was launched in 2000 by Nobel prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus and other eminent medical researchers. Their goal is to “open the doors to the world’s library of scientific knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, patient, or student anywhere in the world unlimited access to the latest scientific research.” In just nine years, PLoS’ largely online publications have grown to seven journals ranging from computational biology to neglected tropical diseases.

Now it has launched PLoS One, a unique experiment in rapid, researcher-financed publication of a huge volume of peer-reviewed scientific papers. Morever, PLoS One is equipped with innovative user tools that enable readers to comment on and rate papers in open dialogue with their authors. Gavin Yamey, a senior editor at PLoS, calls it “Open Access 2.0” and believes that scientific publishers will soon find it no longer possible to continue locking promising research behind legal and financial barriers. The genius of crowd-sourced creativity is out of the bottle, and in the view of many in the open innovation movement that’s all to the good.

In the silo-ed world of medical and scientific research, doctors speak primarily to doctors, researchers to researchers, patients to doctors and sometimes to each other. But in the kind of world where pandemics spread with stunning speed, we need to peer over the walls of the institutional and cultural compartments that separate us, to compare experiences and collaborate in devising solutions to common threats. What better place to start than with the human body? Each of us is in effect an experiment station constantly observing and adapting to changing circumstances. And each of us is potentially an inventor, a discoverer of new and better ways to regain and maintain health.

Global emergencies like swine flu illustrate the need to more freely exchange information about what’s working and what’s not, so we can quickly and efficiently adapt, adopt, and share the results of our experiments. In the case of health, both public and personal, we need to bring millions more people and many more constituencies into the innovation process. Patients, victims of diseases who can’t obtain care, traditional and alternative healers, innovators not housed within existing institutions and therefore sometimes freer to think anew: the experience of all these and more are essential to effectively address the increasingly complex challenges we now face.

The greater challenge will be to overcome deep-seated structural barriers and longstanding patterns of competition and isolation. Competitive relationships and institutional imperatives are not innately counterproductive, but they’ve too often prevented much needed cooperation. Now we’re forced by necessity to collaborate as never before because the challenges we face require a diversity of skills and perspectives. There is no more appropriate field to begin that convergence than in the quest for cures to the world’s most devastating diseases. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Mar 23 2009 (IPS)

In an economic downturn long on loss and short on solutions, few buzzwords have travelled more rapidly from the margins to the mainstream than the term “green jobs”.

It was just five years ago that civil rights activist Van Jones was burning out on the politics of protest working on juvenile justice issues in Oakland, California. Inspired by the grounded optimism of famed redwood tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, he began to take a more positive tack, using the term “green jobs” as shorthand for a proposal to address two long-standing challenges at once — poverty and climate change. He proposed employing inner city youth to plant trees, install insulation and solar panels, clean up toxic waste sites, and construct mass transit systems.

The mantra of “green jobs” is a compelling if still largely untested vision. Yet it now routinely pops up in President Obama’s major speeches and recently jumped the Atlantic when British prime minister Gordon Brown called for the creation of millions of new green jobs in the UK. The US stimulus package contains USD 500 million for the creation of thousands of green collar jobs weatherising homes and retrofitting federal buildings with energy efficient devices. The UK pledges to create 400,000 green jobs in the next eight years cleaning up the environment and curbing pollution. And the White House recently announced Jones’ appointment as special adviser on “green jobs, enterprise and innovation”.

While Jones is one of its most articulate advocates, the idea of combining urban environmental renewal with re-employment and poverty eradication dates back more than a decade to small-scale experiments at both the state and federal level. Two Chicago-based programmes launched in the early nineties have prospered with similar aims. Greencorps, sponsored by Chicago’s city government, provides horticultural instruction, materials, and employment to inner city youth while Growing Home, a nonprofit organization, runs a network of community-supported farms ringing the city that serve a mostly low-income clientele.

Meanwhile, Majora Carter, a young artist who had grown up in the industrial squalor of New York’s South Bronx, went off to art school and returned to her roots only when she ran out of money. Walking her dog one day, she discovered that behind a phalanx of city dumps lay the still pristine Bronx River. With a vision, determination, and charisma to spare, she founded Sustainable South Bronx. Working with a team of low income minority activists and persuading reluctant politicians to come on board, they created the 1.4 acre Hunts Point Riverside Park, the first in what they hope will become a series of riverfront parks called the South Bronx Greenway.

These and other pilot projects offer what policy analysts call “proof of concept” for a strategy that if widely applied could transform not only low-income neighbourhoods but the entire US economy. But scaling up to a size and reach that would make a real difference at a national or international level is entirely another question.

Van Jones’ strategy is elegantly simple: “Let’s connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done.” But its implementation is fraught with complications. In a downward spiralling economy that has thrown millions of skilled professionals out of work, arguing that we should spend precious employment funds on unskilled and chronically underemployed inner city youth might prove a hard sell. Moreover, such professionals are in a better position to work the system than those who’ve always been shut out of it. And one company’s green job is another’s greenwash. A “clean coal” company could argue that the jobs it generates sequestering coal-generated CO2 underground could make this cheapest energy source environmentally benign. But most environmentalists believe clean coal is a contradiction in terms and argue that a job created in that sector is more black than green.

Jones isn’t fazed by the complications. “That’s why I like a term like green jobs,” says Van Jones. “It starts the conversation.”

Efficient as it might seem to alleviate poverty and pollution at the same time, it may prove challenging to optimize both objectives in one policy initiative. Jones compares the creation of a green collar economy that includes the chronically excluded to the construction decades ago of the Interstate highway system and the Internet. It’s true that those were system-changing innovations. But at the time they were sold not as social and environmental justice initiatives but as national security strategies, a proven winner even when the real reasons and benefits lie largely elsewhere.

At the deepest level, Van Jones insists that like the economy, the environment is an issue for all of us, not just the favoured few. If this economy doesn’t serve rich and poor alike, it’s not only morally bankrupt, it will sow the kind of anger and bitterness in inner cities that deprivation and desperation have produced abroad, with deadly consequences for domestic tranquillity. And that’s a true issue of national security. “Some people say, `We can’t afford to do this,'” says Jones. “I say we can’t afford not to.” (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities. (www.aworldofpossibilities.org). For more on Van Jones, Majora Carter, and a green collar economy, see “Growing the Green Collar Economy” http://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/details.cfm?id=349.

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Feb 4 2009 (IPS)

In May 1932, with the United States and Europe mired in a devastating depression, then-presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt counselled his countrymen not to cower in fear but to rekindle the animating myth of “the American experiment”: “The country needs and demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

FDR’s words fit our times and provide a bracing injection of willed optimism to balance President Obama’s sombre declaration of “a new era of responsibility”.

Historians tell us that despite the reduction of financial resources available, economic downturns have proven to be the most fertile moments for innovative activity. A great deal of innovation occurs in good times as well, but this generally consists of incremental modifications of existing prototypes, less related to meeting needs than to stimulating and fulfilling non-essential desires. But when those needs are more urgently felt, the inventive impulse is intensified, producing breakthroughs and system-shifting inventions.

When all systems, from the economy and environment to conflict and public health, converge at the edge of collapse, the focus of our collective ingenuity turns decisively towards meeting common needs. As essayist Samuel Johnson once observed, “The prospect of hanging in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully.”

The good news in the cascade of terrifying statistics is that we are about to enter an era of unprecedented experimentation. This innovation transformation will occur not only in technological invention but also in our social relationships at all levels -in our habits, attitudes, institutions and behaviour. At moments like these, everything is called into question. Indeed, history itself is asking whether we will continue to use our incomparable ingenuity to undermine our collective well-being or to reinvent the way we live on the basis of sustainability and the common good.

We are also on the cusp of a flowering of life-affirming human creativity equal in genius and far larger in its reach and scope than the Renaissance. A convergence of crises is matched by a convergence of capabilities in information, insight, communications, and collaboration that, if guided by wisdom, will spur us to make chasm-spanning leaps of collective intelligence.

The model that will drive this innovation transformation is the open source movement that created the Internet two decades ago. That was a collective effort by thousands of computer “nerds” who neither sought nor earned fame nor financial reward but simply the chance to contribute to a worthy shared enterprise. The Internet is an innovation commons where information is freely exchanged and users build easily on the results of one another’s experiments.

The challenges we now face are of such complexity and interconnectedness that their solution will require both a wider range of perspectives and participants and better communication among them than can be gathered from even the most brilliant team of specialists.

One of our most crucial social inventions will be more efficient processes to enlist and organise the information and insights of expanded circles of stakeholders in the solution of a given problem. Essential as they are, experts are by no means enough. Indeed, it was our misplaced trust in one-dimensional financial ‘wizards’ that led to the current economic catastrophe. Only the cross-pollination of specialists, independent innovators, and laymen will yield the breadth of perspective and depth of experience needed to produce robust solutions.

Promising experiments are already underway to tap into the “distributed intelligence” of global publics with specialised knowledge but no organisational or geographic affiliation with one another. Often called “crowd-sourcing”, they utilise an “open innovation” model in contrast to the 20th century approach of closed-circuit innovation, where the best engineers were sequestered in private laboratories and tasked with designing proprietary inventions. Open innovation advocates urge that we harvest insights and information from every relevant source.

Following this strategy, Innocentive, a private web-based operation spun off from the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, brings together corporations, academic institutions, public sector and nonprofit organisations with a global network of 160,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people with expertise in life sciences, engineering, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and entrepreneurship in an Open Innovation Marketplace. There, “Seekers” can post problems to be solved and “Solvers” can browse the Innocentive site (www.innocentive.com) by “Discipline” or “Pavilion” and take on a range of highly specific design challenges for rewards ranging from USD 5,000 to 1 million.

Once we grasp the positive potential at the heart of this terrifying moment, we can make use of adversity to fuel a transformation of the many systems, human and technological, that must be reinvented to address a radically different reality. In the process, we will regain confidence in ourselves, one another, and our shared posterity.

In the same speech in which he called for bold experimentation, FDR called on fearful Americans to adopt the innate optimism of youth. “We need the courage of the young,” he said. “Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but of remaking the world which you will find before you.” (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Oct 22 2008 (IPS)

The current financial market collapse represents an unparalleled opportunity to rethink and restructure a uniquely American model of capitalism that in recent decades has become increasingly unsustainable and inequitable as it has proliferated worldwide, writes Mark Sommer, host of A World of Possibilities, an award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme. In this article, Sommer writes that now as never before we need fresh ideas and approaches, new ways of organizing our work, our production processes, our energy generation and consumption patterns, the entire way we do business with one another. We are about to experience a systemic transformation of both global economics and culture. Whether the outcome will prove positive or negative will depend on whether we approach the future with fear or confidence. If, seized by panic, we fight for more than our share of finite and diminishing resources, the economy we create will be riven by chronic instability, inequity, and conflict. If, on the other hand, we take this defining moment as a challenge rather than solely a threat, we can transform it into a singular opportunity to reassert balance, equity, and sustainability as the organizing principles of a new global economy.

The stock market will undoubtedly continue to gyrate as investors vainly seek solid ground. But George Bush notwithstanding, the fundamentals are not in fact sound. This is not just a housing bust or a credit crunch. It is an unparalleled crisis of confidence in US economic leadership and, to some degree, in the entire global economy. Investors have lost faith that the system in which they’ve invested their lives and savings is stable or safe.

For a relative few, the fact that the American economic model is collapsing is hardly surprising. Like canaries in the mine they’ve been predicting collapse since the last great swoon, the 1970s. Their timing turned out to be wrong but their trend-lines may well have been right. The cumulative US debt (governmental, corporate, and personal), the trade and budget deficits, the widening chasm between rich and poor and destruction of a stabilizing middle class, the disinvestment in education, healthcare, and infrastructure in the world’s leading economy — all these trends assure that downward pressures will not reverse anytime soon. Call it recession or depression, what’s coming is likely to be longer and deeper than any of us is ready to admit.

There are actually two major elections this fall, one linked to the other. The presidential contest will turn on whether voters believe current policies can sustain their future or must fundamentally change. Then investors in the global economy, influenced in part by the election results, will vote with their investments in American dollars whether they believe the world’s largest economy can remain the world’s financial superpower — or whether, as New York Times economist David Leonhart asks, “2008 will come to be seen as the first year of a distinctly non-American century.”

And yet this crisis of confidence also represents an unparalleled opportunity to rethink and restructure a uniquely American model of capitalism that in recent decades has become increasingly unsustainable and inequitable as it has proliferated worldwide. In high times, few other than those left behind question the wisdom of a system that relentlessly exploits both labour and natural resources. But now that it’s imploding, many more are starting to question its basic assumptions and looking for more equitable and sustainable ways to organize the global economy.

Historians of the Great Depression say that for all the hardship, it was also a time of unparalleled social innovation. Driven by necessity, experiments of all kinds proliferated as individuals and institutions sought new solutions. Now as never before we need fresh ideas and approaches, new ways of organizing our work, our production processes, our energy generation and consumption patterns, the entire way we do business with one another. We need to re-instill shared values into an economy and culture that have long known only share values.

As the global economy slows, along with the inescapable hardship will come essential shifts that we’ve desperately needed to make but simply haven’t made while the choice was purely voluntary. With global warming, reducing our energy consumption has become imperative. Yet till now we’ve shown no sign of heeding the alarms. Now, without the cash to consume our energy demand is plummeting. Oil prices are falling still faster than they rose.

A prolonged global downturn will dramatically reduce global trade and travel, easing our burden on the climate while spurring more rapid innovation and investment in cleaner, more efficient energy technologies. Democracies’ dangerous dependence on authoritarian petro-states may be reduced by falling demand, though competition for dwindling resources could lead to new threats to the environment and democratic norms worldwide.

A second silver lining is the return to localism. With shipping increasingly expensive, the fledgling movement to grow and buy locally will gain momentum. We will see farmers markets, truck farms, and other local commerce revive and grow. Some manufacturing may even return closer to home, though this could prove more challenging. Reducing chronic trade deficits could reduce one problem but create another since China and other exporting nations depend on US imports to fuel their economies. Finding the right balance will not be easy.

Along with more localized economies we will see a relocalisation of culture — neighbours coming to know each other, families taking more time together. During the Depression parents spent less money but more time with their children. We may become a “less is more” conservation culture, learning to savour rather than devour.

We are about to experience a systemic transformation of both global economics and culture. Whether the outcome will prove positive or negative will crucially depend on whether we approach the future more with fear or confidence. If, seized by panic, we fight for more than our share of finite and diminishing resources, the economy we create will be riven by chronic instability, inequity, and conflict. If, on the other hand, we take this defining moment as a challenge rather than solely a threat, we can transform it into a singular opportunity to reassert balance, equity, and sustainability as the organizing principles of a new global economy.

Social stability and economic vitality both require a broad distribution of resources. Only by giving everyone purchasing power and a stake in the system can we provide a sturdy foundation for sustainable growth. Sustainability requires support for all that nature and the efforts each of us contribute to our common life. Creating an economic system that preserves our common wealth and prevents its theft for private gain is the challenge and charge of these times. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jul 23 2008 (IPS)

Between floods, droughts, epidemics, food shortages and rising prices, the world seems about to spin off its axis. For all the drama of the past half century, historians and natural scientists tell us that the postwar era has actually been something of an anomaly, a period of relative calm in nature and human events in a world that history has shown to be reliably unpredictable. That hiatus may now be ending. Moreover, they say, we are approaching a threshold moment, a change of phase that will throw every long-held habit and assumption into question. War and revolution are just such moments, but never before have we endured simultaneous transformations of politics, culture and nature, writes Mark Sommer, hosts of A World of Possibilities, an award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program ( www.aworldofpossibilities.com). This transformation is driven in large part by nature’s blowback against human misbehavior. And it is to nature that a new school of ecologists say we must now turn for clues about how to survive and thrive in the turbulent times to come. They invoke the term “resilience” to describe the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing our ability to function. We’re used to seeing resilience in nature and healthy human personalities. But can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic transition?

This transformation is driven in large part by nature’s blowback against human misbehavior. And it is to nature that a new school of ecologists say we must now turn for clues about how to survive and thrive in the turbulent times to come. They invoke the term “resilience” to describe the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing our ability to function. We’re used to seeing resilience in nature and healthy human personalities. But can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic transition?

In April 2008, six hundred ecologists, anthropologists and social scientists gathered in Stockholm, Sweden for Resilience 2008, the first global conference applying the principles and processes of nature’s resilience to human societies. It was the culmination of more than thirty years of quiet, patient work by a small group of innovative thinkers calling themselves the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org). In their book, Resilience Thinking, authors Brian Walker and David Salt lay out the core principles of the concept.

The question they pose is whether we are headed straight for the waterfall or if there might be another way to ride the rapids. For Frances Westley the operative metaphor is not a waterfall but an avalanche. Founder of the program in Social Innovation Generation at the University of Waterloo, Canada, she sees human ingenuity guided by humane values as our best chance of surviving and thriving in a world of turbulent change.

The notion of looking to nature’s resilience to inform responses to dramatic disturbances in human affairs began in the 1970’s when C.S. (Buzz) Holling, a pioneering Canadian-American ecologist, observed the “adaptive cycles” of forest succession. A forest grows from an immense initial profusion of diverse flowers and plants into mature stands of dominant tree species, then to over-maturity, rot and insect infestation, and often catastrophic fires that devastate the forest but release seeds to produce a renewed explosion of diversity.

Just so, said Holling, human societies evolve from a diversity of small and relatively simple social structures into ever greater size and complexity. But their very complexity renders them vulnerable to catastrophic, cascading collapse. We see such cascading failures today in the global economy, public health epidemics, wildfires, electrical power outages and the viruses in the virtual world of the Internet. Mercifully, none has yet become unstoppable, but we seem to be coming ever closer to that edge. In pursuit of efficiency, we now operate on perilously narrow “just in time” margins that fail to factor in the unforeseen. Nature knows better and builds in redundancy.

Since resilience theorists look to nature as their guide, one would think they’d recommend a return to nature. But it’s in the world’s great cities, they say, that the principles of resilience thinking most urgently need to be applied. As millions migrate to urban shantytowns in search of a better life, cities become increasingly untenable. Charles Redman, director of the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, believes cities will be the crucible in which our capacity for adaptive change will be tested in the coming decades. Can we reintroduce nature and community to cities through farmers’ markets, urban gardens, mass transit and non-motorized transport, more affordable housing, walkable neighborhoods and more inviting public spaces? Can we create natural amenities that cost little other than cooperative human effort but make cities both more appealing and more livable?

Unlike conventional “homeland” and “national security” strategies that typically resist change as subversion, resilience thinking makes an ally of uncertainty, finding opportunity where defense doctrine sees only threats. It emerges from self-confidence rather than insecurity. Resilience is both a healthy frame of mind and a practical approach to change. It is even capable of turning resistance into fuel for forward movement, much as a sailboat moves in its intended direction by indirection, tacking at oblique angles into a headwind.

We can’t return to a state of pre-modern isolation and simplicity. That is both unrecoverable and in many ways undesirable. We are immensely enriched by having access at the click of a mouse to an immense range of illuminating knowledge, stories and ideas. But our current social and technological structures are so rigidly hierarchical and dangerously co-dependent that a single commercial airliner slamming into the World Trade Center instantly reduced it to rubble. A more resilient approach to reorganizing social and technological complexity would combine the flexible connections of networks for exchange and mutual aid with a capacity for self-reliance when required.

Resilience is reassuring in the most grounded of ways. We’re an often heedless, hidebound, sometimes self-destructive species. Yet our capacity for self-renewal in the face of life’s vicissitudes demonstrates that in the crunch we’re also buoyant and resourceful. But only if we’re able to glimpse those patches of blue among the storm clouds now gathering on the horizon. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jul 1 2008 (IPS)

It’s not easy to explain why, virtually alone among advanced industrial democracies, the United States holds on to the practice of capital punishment. The United Nations General Assembly recently passed a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment and most advanced industrial democracies have outlawed the death penalty. Capital punishment is coming to be seen in much of the world as an ultimate abuse of human rights. In continuing to embrace the practice, the United States finds itself aligned with nations whose human rights records it routinely condemns -China, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Why it persists in this globally unpopular policy and why the American public continues to support it by two-thirds majorities- is a source of puzzlement., writes Mark Sommer, host of A World of Possibilities, an award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program. Today, 35 states have capital punishment laws on their books but just ten maintain active execution programs. A number of Midwestern and Northeastern states have abolished capital punishment. About 3,350 people languish today on \”death row,\” and keeping them there is an immensely expensive proposition. The great majority are poor and a significant number are mentally disturbed. More than 40 percent are African American (four times their proportion in the general population), and disproportionate numbers are Native American, Latino, and Asian. Most experts on the death penalty decline to speculate as to why the United States hold so firmly to capital punishment. It’s not enough to say that it’s a tenet of conservatism in an era of conservative ascendancy since recent surveys reveal that even Barack Obama, an unapologetic liberal, finds it necessary to support the death penalty in cases in which “the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage.\”

Capital punishment has a deep-rooted history in the US. State-sanctioned executions hark back to the country’s colonial days, when the practice was imported from England but applied to a narrower range of crimes. In the course of more than 200 years, some 14,000 Americans have been put to death by the order of the state. In the mythic popular rendering of the Wild West, frontier justice followed the Biblical dictum of “an eye for an eye,” though with scant reverence for its source and less than consistent application of the law. The death penalty was most actively applied in the first half of the twentieth century, when 150 people or more were put to death annually. But it began to be called into question during the civil rights movement of the sixties, when its vastly disproportionate toll on African Americans and other minorities first came to public notice.

In the late sixties, federal courts, then in a far more liberal temper than today’s bench, began handing down decisions that effectively if only temporarily halted executions. In 1972 U.S Supreme Court invalidated hundreds of death sentences, declaring that state laws were being applied in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner that violated constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process. But in 1976, the Court revived the death penalty, opening the way to the execution of over a thousand death row inmates over the next thirty years.

Today, 35 states have capital punishment laws on their books but just ten maintain active execution programs. A number of Midwestern and Northeastern states have abolished capital punishment. About 3,350 people languish today on “death row,” and keeping them there is an immensely expensive proposition. The great majority are poor and a significant number are mentally disturbed. More than 40 percent are African American (four times their proportion in the general population), and disproportionate numbers are Native American, Latino, and Asian.

Most experts on the death penalty decline to speculate as to why the United States hold so firmly to capital punishment. It’s not enough to say that it’s a tenet of conservatism in an era of conservative ascendancy since recent surveys reveal that even Barack Obama, an unapologetic liberal, finds it necessary to support the death penalty in cases in which “the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage.”

Yet even in his home state of Illinois, it was a Republican governor, George Ryan, who instituted a January 2000 moratorium on executions to re-evaluate the state’s death row inmates on the basis of newly available DNA testing. In so doing, he commuted the sentences of all the state’s death row inmates and said, “Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error, error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?”

In the past few years there has been modest movement even in an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court to limit the range of crimes to which the death penalty applies. In 2002, the court barred the execution of mentally retarded defendants, in 2005, it ruled against the death penalty for crimes committed before the age of 18, and in June 2008 the court struck down the death penalty for the rape of a child. In this most recent case, Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority, asserted that “when the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality,” T

Yet the moral case against capital punishment is unlikely to carry the day on its own in a country whose religiosity recalls the Biblical injunction, “an eye for an eye,” but fails to note the Gandhian amendment, “till all the world is blind.” In the end, it may be more practical considerations that tip the balance in favor of de facto if not formal abolition. Maintaining death row facilities and dealing with decades of litigation costing millions per case is an exceedingly expensive proposition. In an era of declining economies and shrinking state budgets, death row inmates cost vastly more than “lifers” to maintain. The cost of a new death row facility slated for construction at California’s San Quentin penitentiary has ballooned to $400 million, and at current rates of death row sentencing will be full within three years of completion.

Americans may soon be forced to choose between retribution for criminals and health care or education for their children. It may then be hard to tell which is the greater crime, the sparing of life for those who have taken it or the deprivation of opportunity for those just starting theirs. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jun 4 2008 (IPS)

We humans speak some seven thousand languages. The great majority are spoken by a vanishingly small number of people in isolated jungles and mountains while a few are spoken by billions. Languages, and with them cultures, are disappearing at an alarming rate; we may lose half in just the next generation. At the same time, plant and animal species are vanishing at an equally rapid pace. These two trends are closely related, writes Mark Sommer, host of A World of Possibilities, an award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program. Both anthropologists and biologists are finding that the diversity of plant and animal life is central to the richness of a culture ­ and to its long-term survival. Monocultures, be they in culture or agriculture, may be more efficient in good times but they are more vulnerable if and when attacked by disease and pestilence. In diversity lies resilience, the capacity to remain vital and viable even one some components are lost. Just as the smart investor diversifies her portfolio, a wise steward cultivates a diversity of flora, fauna and cultures so that if some are lost others will take their place. But as a species we’ve been remarkably heedless of this axiom. “Nature no longer trusts us,” says Vyacheslav Shadrin, head of the Yukaghir Elders Council in the Russian Far North. It’s a haunting commentary on modernity’s betrayal of ancient ways. Like thousands of other isolated peoples, his is under threat of being swallowed by the larger empire that surrounds them.

In April 2008 a diverse range of top scientists gathered for a landmark conference at New York’s Museum of Natural History to focus on these twin extinctions. In striking multicolor maps of the planet, ethnobiologists have tracked the correlation between biological and cultural diversity (which together they call “biocultural diversity”) in a band of brightness girdling the earth’s tropical middle. In mountains and jungles, isolation prompts people to develop their own ways of saying and doing things, their unique ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Just so, plants and animals in isolation adapt to the peculiarities of their environments. Think of the remote island of Galapagos and its strange giant turtles. In a boundary-less world, even those turtles are in danger.

But we’ve got plenty of turtles, right? Why does diversity matter? Both anthropologists and biologists are finding that the diversity of plant and animal life is central to the richness of a culture ­ and to its long-term survival. Monocultures, be they in culture or agriculture, may be more efficient in good times but they are more vulnerable if and when attacked by disease and pestilence. In diversity lies resilience, the capacity to remain vital and viable even if some components are lost. Just as the smart investor diversifies her portfolio, a wise steward cultivates a diversity of flora, fauna and cultures so that if some are lost others will take their place.

But as a species we’ve been remarkably heedless of this axiom. “Nature no longer trusts us,” says Vyacheslav Shadrin, head of the Yukaghir Elders Council in the Russian Far North. It’s a haunting commentary on modernity’s betrayal of ancient ways. Like thousands of other isolated peoples, his is under threat of being swallowed by the larger empire that surrounds them.

Yet modern technologies may also offer one of the few paths not only to preserve vanishing cultures and ecosystems but to disseminate their knowledge and wisdom to a wider world much in need of both. Vyacheslav communicates with his colleague Tero Mustonen in Northern Finland via email, the Internet and cell phone. And they jet to New York together to forge common strategies with other isolated peoples in defense of their endangered cultures and ecosystems.

Like it or not, there’s no isolated cultures or ecosystems from both the blights and blessings of modernity. Most teenagers, whether living in Manhattan or Mumbai, now long for or listen to an iPod or its equivalent and text their friends on cell phones. For Eleanor Sterling it’s all one world. As director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, she moves easily between ancient and modern cultures. Indeed, she is less interested in cultural purity than cultural vitality, the kind of vibrant interchange that occurs when and where cultures meet, mix, and produce something new and vital in its own right. Strolling through the Central American wing of the museum past Aztec and Mayan carvings, she gestures in their direction. “I’m not interested in cultures as museum pieces,” she told me. “Cultures are living things. They don’t vanish. They evolve.”

I came to the conference on biocultural diversity thinking we were going to document the dual disappearance of fragile, isolated cultures and ecosystems in a kind of rear-guard action to stop the onslaught of all things modern. But I came away with a very different impression. It’s absolutely true and tragic that cultures and ecosystems of great richness and diversity are being plowed under and assimilated at an astonishing rate. It’s also true that they hold within them clues to a more viable future that we can’t afford to lose. These include medicinal herbs that could help heal our post-modern maladies and wisdom traditions that could help guide us through the rapids of unpredictable change.

It’s also true, however, that we can’t prevent change any more than we can reverse the course of the mighty Amazon. Nor can we prevent our youth or those from traditional cultures from wanting the many goodies ­ and baddies ­ of modern life. But it may be that the best outcome we can hope and work for is an artful blend of traditional and modern that utilizes the most sophisticated technologies and techniques of modern life to protect, promote and disseminate the most valuable gifts from all our varied traditions. Modernity offers a set of tools that rightly used can actually help us re-diversify our cultures and ecosystems. Rediversify among and within each one of us so that each can enjoy the opportunity to mix and match from the irrepressible richness of biological and cultural variety. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jan 29 2008 (IPS)

Less than a decade after neo-conservatives gained ascendancy in the White House and announced a \’new American century\’, that unrivalled supremacy has been challenged by a titanic haemorrhaging of American economic dominance, military readiness, and political influence, writes Mark Sommer, host of the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, \’A World of Possibilities.\’. In this article, Sommer writes that the fact that the \’family jewels\’ of American capitalism are being sold off to \’sovereign wealth funds\’ controlled by national governments is an ominous development for a nation that until now has seldom had to worry about its solvency or sovereignty. US decline is neither inevitable or irreversible. The emergence of an African American and a woman as viable candidates for president has energised not only American voters but observers from around the world who despite its egregious recent record still yearn for re-inspired American leadership.

In the wake of the new year’s grim greetings – a global stock market swoon and growing consensus that the US economy is headed for recession – the only question still being debated is how far and long will it fall.

American policy makers and economic analysts studiously avoid telling a truth they dread but may not themselves fully comprehend: less than a decade after neo-conservatives gained ascendancy in the White House and announced a ‘new American century’, that unrivalled supremacy has been challenged by a Titanic haemorrhaging of American economic dominance, military readiness, and political influence.

These trends have been long in the making. Reversing them will require a stiff dose of realism for which there is currently little appetite and a regimen of self-restraint and rededication still far from the minds of both American politicians and their publics.

For the past generation the US has been dis-investing in its educational and health care systems, its physical and industrial infrastructures, and its decaying democratic institutions while Europe, China, and India have been reinventing themselves as vibrant economies.

No more stunning illustration of this reversal of positions can be found than in the current ‘fire sale’ of stakes in prime US corporate and financial assets to the likes of Russia -just a decade past terminal bankruptcy and now flush in oil revenues – tiny city-states like Singapore and Abu Dhabi, and, most of all, China. The fact that the ‘family jewels’ of American capitalism are being sold off to ‘sovereign wealth funds’ controlled by national governments is an ominous development for a nation that until now has seldom had to worry about its solvency or sovereignty.

Just eight years after the announcement of a sole-superpower world, we are entering a post-American era in which at least two other potent power centres have emerged to challenge the hegemony of the debt-ridden American empire: an expansive and increasingly self-confident European Union, and a Chinese economic engine that has deftly combined the state-controlled politics of communism with the rapacious dynamism of unbridled capitalism. Not far behind is India, whose population is due to surpass China’s within a few decades and boasts a burgeoning middle class that, like China’s, demands Western-style consumer comforts, social freedoms, and, increasingly, political rights.

To be sure, the EU, China, and India all face challenges of their own which, if not effectively addressed, could short-circuit their rise to global stature. Heady with success, the EU has taken on new members with a rapidity that strains its internal cohesion. China faces a collision with the environmental and social consequences of heedless industrialisation. and India’s hundreds of millions of urban and rural poor remain locked out of the country’s new-found affluence.

None of these emerging superpowers will continue deferring to the US as they have for the past half century. Seven years of the Bush administration’s arrogance and obstructionism combined with rising levels of prosperity and education have both obliged and enabled Europe, China, and India to start forging links with one another. They are now setting their own global standards and making their own trade arrangements with one another and a second tier of resource-rich nations like Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Brazil.

The fact that stock exchanges from Shanghai to Bombay and Frankfurt appeared to ‘catch pneumonia’ after Wall Street ‘sneezed’ confirmed that this ‘decoupling’ is still far from complete. But analysts in Europe and Asia say their economies are unlikely to follow the US into recession because their ‘fundamentals’ are so much healthier and none is burdened with Iraq or a global war on terror. With a common currency and a market a third larger than the US, the EU now sets global manufacturing standards and social and environmental benchmarks which China and other global suppliers must adhere to.

Stunningly, none of the leading candidates for president acknowledges the power shift now under way. This denial is in itself a signal that the United States is unlikely to respond decisively to its loss of unchallenged dominance by undertaking the deep changes required to reverse current trends.

But US decline is neither inevitable or irreversible. The emergence of an African American and a woman as viable candidates for president has energised not only American voters but also observers from around the world who despite its egregious recent record still yearn for re-inspired American leadership.

Despite its loss of power and influence, the US will remain a powerful player in global politics for the foreseeable future. Unlike Britain when the relinquishment of empire forced a retreat to the second tier of nations, its size, enterprising culture, and innovative tradition ensure the US a pivotal role in global politics. Hard times ahead may even revitalise a dysfunctional political culture. More likely, American citizens, institutions, and corporations will join with millions of others from around the globe to advance a common agenda that their government will, at best, be late in joining. But in our collective race to adapt to changing realities, American political leaders may well find themselves running to catch up.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Nov 6 2007 (IPS)

The fuel source the US has chosen to start replacing petroleum, corn-based ethanol, is expensive, inefficient, and both environmentally and economically destructive, writes Mark Sommer, who hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’. In recent years, giant agricultural commodity distributors like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland have successfully pressured both the White House and Congress to extend lavish, long-standing corn subsidies largely benefiting their corporate farming partners. But corn-based ethanol turns out to be a bad bargain: it causes just 13 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum, and a recent OECD report found that \’\’the overall environmental impacts of ethanol and biofuel can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel\’\’. The pressure on corn supplies exerted by ethanol demand has contributed to a 50 percent rise in the price of tortillas in Mexico in the past year, sending this staple food beyond the reach of the poor. China and India are starting to suffer from food price inflation rippling out from rising corn and soybean prices. Food is fundamentally a human right, not a mere commodity to be traded like any other at the expense of those who can\’t afford it. Not until we acknowledge this fact will we design both a fuel and a food system driven more by human values than shareholder value.

However, pushed by potent industrial and agricultural interests, the fuel source the US has chosen to start replacing petroleum — corn-based ethanol — is expensive, inefficient, and both environmentally and economically destructive.

Ethanol is not inherently a bad bargain, and, if certain technological hurdles are overcome, it could be made from agricultural and wood wastes and primeval prairie grasses and become a significant part of a diverse post-petroleum energy supply.

Though ethanol has been around since Henry Ford first considered it to run his Model Ts, the only nation that has aggressively exploited its practical potential is Brazil, which recently achieved energy self-sufficiency thanks in part to a burgeoning ethanol industry. A large portion of the country’s transportation fuel needs are supplied by sugarcane-based ethanol, which has eight times the energy efficiency of corn and would have long ago swept the American market had the US not slapped a 54-cent/gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol to protect US corn interests.

In recent years, giant agricultural commodity distributors like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland have successfully pressured both the White House and Congress to extend lavish, long-standing corn subsidies largely benefiting their corporate farming partners to new 51-cent/gallon ethanol subsidies. But corn-based ethanol turns out to be a bad bargain on many accounts: it causes just 13 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum, and a recent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) report found that ”the overall environmental impacts of ethanol and biofuel can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel”.

The economic costs, borne by the most vulnerable, are already apparent to the eight hundred million food-deprived people on earth, a growing portion of whom depend on international food aid for survival. The pressure on corn supplies exerted by ethanol demand has contributed to a 50 percent rise in the price of tortillas in Mexico in the past year, sending this staple food beyond the reach of the poor. China and India are starting to suffer from food price inflation rippling out from rising corn and soybean prices. International food aid experts say this food-for-fuel formula is likely to drive hundreds of millions more poor working people into hunger as they can no longer afford the staple foods. In addition, world food stocks are falling to levels too low to withstand a major hunger epidemic of the kind that drought, floods, and other climate-related events are starting to send our way.

If drawn from non-food sources, however, ethanol could yet provide significant benefits both environmentally and economically and obviate the ethically abhorrent choice between fuel for the affluent and food for the hungry. Cellulosic ethanol, made not from corn or any other food source but from agricultural and wood wastes and native grasses, offers a potential way around such brutal tradeoffs. First considered a decade ago, it has been slow to take off because of a shortage of capital and research, and a substantial technological obstacle — designing an enzymatic cellulose processing system that works cheaply and efficiently enough for mass production. No large-scale cellulosic ethanol plant has yet been built, and the enzymatic process remains more expensive than for corn. But biotech research may yet produce breakthrough strains of sugarcane, corn stover, switchgrass and other fuel crops that could further boost their energy yield.

The key to reducing the economic and environmental impacts of ethanol is using food wastes rather than the foods themselves and planting crops explicitly grown for fuel on eroded or disused land that won’t support other forms of agriculture. There is a kind of poetic justice in replanting the Great Plains of North America with the hardy prairie grasses that once fed millions of buffalo (which are also returning to the prairie as a healthier meat source than beef). Though it still lags far behind corn-based ethanol in subsidies and investment, cellulosic ethanol is starting to gain momentum. ”There is nothing in the last several decades that has generated such private sector enthusiasm and investment,” says Keith Collins, the US Agriculture Department’s chief economist.

Underplanned and oversold, the corn-based ethanol boom is already waning as its downsides become apparent. So much land has been planted to corn and so many processing plants built that the supply has outstripped the infrastructure available to ship it to market and the gas stations equipped to dispense it.

Yet even if corn-based ethanol is ultimately replaced by agricultural wastes, prairie grasses, and other biomass, we still face the challenge of bringing agricultural middlemen, some of the most potent political and economic forces in the world today, into line with urgent human needs that are far from their first priority. Ironically, high commodity prices don’t help the farmer any more than they do the consumer, but as the Depression-era ballad lamented, ”the middleman’s the man who takes it all.”

Food is fundamentally a human right, not a mere commodity to be traded like any other at the expense of those who can’t afford it. Not until we acknowledge this fact will we design both a fuel and a food system driven more by human values than shareholder value. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Sep 26 2007 (IPS)

The industrial agriculture system that supplies Americans their cheap food is predicated on cheap labour, lax enforcement of already weak labour regulations, often hazardous working conditions, and physical and sexual abuse, writes Mark Sommer, host of the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’. In this article, Sommer writes that this is not just an American problem. In an increasingly integrated global food system, affluent consumers in North America, Europe, and elsewhere have come to expect low prices for food from far away and far out of season, much of which is grown and harvested by marginal farmers in distant places who receive a tiny portion of what we pay for it. Driven from the land by impossibly low commodity prices, they crowd the cities of the developing world in search of work. Failing to find it, their desperation becomes a breeding ground for extremist movements. Our abundance must not be built on their indigence. How much are we willing to pay for the food we eat to assure that those whose labour brings it to our tables are paid enough to eat it too?

The industrial agriculture system that supplies this cheap food is predicated on cheap labour, lax enforcement of already weak labour regulations, often hazardous working conditions, and physical and sexual abuse that in extreme cases has been likened to modern-day slavery.

In some respects conditions for migrant workers remain little better than those documented by journalist Edward R. Murrow a half century ago in his classic TV special ”Harvest of Shame”, which revealed the existence of a hitherto hidden underclass of migrant workers who endured substandard housing and sanitation, abysmal working conditions, and exploitation of many kinds in the course of harvesting tomatoes in mid-fifties Immokalee, Florida. There as elsewhere in the US, rootless immigrants, largely from Central America, plant and harvest crops they themselves can’t afford to buy.

Now the very same region is the scene of an epic struggle by migrant workers for decent working and living conditions and a livable wage. Immokalee is the state’s largest farmworker community and the most important centre of agricultural production. Field labourers here pick crops on vast holdings owned and operated by giant multinational corporations. It’s been the same for decades: long hours of back-bending labour, staying in substandard housing, exposed to toxic pesticides, isolated by language, and exploited by labour bosses preying on their vulnerabilities.

Migrant labour has always been a hard row to hoe. Workers live an average of just 49 years; the US average is 78. The median annual income of migrant workers is just USD 7,500, 6,500 in Florida; the median US household income is USD 48,000. Adjusted for inflation, migrant labour income has fallen by 60 percent in the past twenty years. Each year 20,000 farmworkers require medical treatment for acute pesticide poisoning and that many more cases go unreported. Nationally, 50 percent of migrants –80 percent in Florida– lack legal work papers.

While Florida farmers are paid USD 10 per twenty-five-pound box of tomatoes, the tomato pickers are paid 45 cents per 32-pound bucket, less than 5 percent of what the farmer gets. To earn 50 dollars, a picker must harvest 2.5 tonnes in a typical ten-hour day, twice as much as thirty years ago, just to earn the same minimum wage.

Yet the farmer is not the big winner in this system. Fast food chains with enormous buying power exert intense downward pressure on the prices they are willing to pay farmers, who in turn squeeze workers to retain their own profit margin.

Facing these grim realities, in the early nineties a small group of workers who called themselves the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) began organizing in a local church. Through work stoppages, general strikes, a month-long hunger strike, and a 230-mile march, in 1998 the Immokalee farmworkers won industry-wide raises of 13-25 percent. Meanwhile, CIW began campaigning against what it calls ”modern-day slavery”, farm operations in Southeastern states where workers labour in conditions a federal prosecutor labelled ”involuntary servitude”.

In a series of highly-publicized campaigns targeting major fast-food chains that depend in part on Immokalee’s tomato harvest, CIW organizers succeeded in persuading Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Mac Donald’s and other corporations to commit to a penny-a-pound raise for Immokalee labourers. Burger King (BK) refused to join the agreement, arguing that farmers are actually paying more than the workers say and that BK would like a more comprehensive settlement that gives workers better working conditions while assuring the company and industry of consistent prices and a stable workforce. BK has offered to employ in its own operations any farmworker who would like to change occupations, an offer Immokalee workers dismiss as ”eliminating farmworker poverty by eliminating farmworkers”.

Most Americans don’t want to do such backbreaking work but few are aware of the working and living conditions of those who do. However redressing the inequities of the current industrial food production system is not easy. To begin with, it’s hard to make sure that extra money spent in the supermarket will filter down the food chain to the migrant labourers at the bottom.

The poorest and weakest work longest and hardest and receive the last and least. To provide a living wage to those at the bottom will take more than a piece work rate hike. It will require a systemic shift, with those of us higher on the food chain pulling it hard in the direction of those at the bottom. Not only must farmworkers be paid living wages for their labour and farmers a fair return on their crops, but governmental regulations must bring farm labour practices up to global human rights standards.

This is not just an American problem. In an increasingly integrated global food system, affluent consumers in North America, Europe, and elsewhere have come to expect low prices for foods from far away and far out of season with great hidden costs in fuel and transportation, environmental devastation, worker exploitation, and social conflict. Much of the food that comes to our tables is grown and harvested by marginal farmers in distant places who receive a tiny portion of what we pay for it. Driven from the land by impossibly low commodity prices, they crowd the cities of the developing world in search of work. Failing to find it, their desperation becomes a breeding ground for extremist movements. Our abundance must not be built on their indigence.

Automaker Henry Ford, a self-interested capitalist, understood this elementary principle when he insisted on paying his workers enough for them to buy the cars they built. How much are we willing to pay for the food we eat to assure that those whose labour brings it to our tables are paid enough to eat it too? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Aug 22 2007 (IPS)

\”Better living through chemistry.\” That was the tag-line used by Dow Chemical in the 1950s at the outset of an era when industrial chemicals were introduced on a massive scale into consumer goods, agriculture, and virtually every other sector of modern life, writes Mark Sommer, host of the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio programme, \”A World of Possibilities\”. Sommer writes in this article that the phrase has become hauntingly ironic as, tens of thousands of chemicals later, environmental health researchers discover more and more evidence of negative long-term impacts from some of what we had long thought to be a purely benign technology. In the advanced industrial world all of us are unavoidably immersed in a brew of synthetic chemicals most of whose ingredients have never been tested for their long-term impacts on human health. The costs of testing such a vast reservoir of synthetic chemicals would be huge and one way or another those costs would be passed on to consumers. But the costs of continuing to ignore the impacts would undoubtedly be far greater. Given the choice, would you rather find out now and act accordingly or risk being surprised at a later date by maladies that could have been avoided?

But the phrase has become hauntingly ironic as, tens of thousands of chemicals later, environmental health researchers discover more and more evidence of negative long-term impacts from some of what we had long thought to be a purely benign technology. We have met the guinea pigs and they are us.

In the advanced industrial world all of us are unavoidably immersed in a brew of synthetic chemicals most of whose ingredients have never been tested for their long-term impacts on human health. Tens of thousands of chemicals contribute to the comfort and convenience of our lives and the flavor of our foods. But from their manufacture to their disposal, in their consumption and use and in the environments we inhabit indoors and out, they accumulate in our bodies to unknown effect. Many never diminish but continue to accumulate over time with continuing exposure and absorption.

For the mostly poor people of color who live closest to the refineries and plants where these chemicals are manufactured, the health consequences are obvious and often severe. The local residents cite cancers and respiratory illnesses throughout their neighborhoods and extended families. For their part, plant owners and public officials often say the evidence of cause-and-effect is inconclusive.

But even for those who live in more privileged circumstances, the foods we eat, the cosmetics we use, the electronic devices we utilise to communicate and entertain ourselves, even the beds we sleep in and the couches we lounge on all contain a mix of chemicals most of whose effects have never been tested. Some widely-used chemicals, like phthalates (used to soften plastics in children’s toys and other items) have been found in laboratory tests to contribute to breast cancer, early puberty in girls, reduced testosterone levels, lowered sperm counts, genital defects in baby boys, and testicular cancer. Rising rates of illnesses ranging from asthma and breast cancer to fertility problems raise troubling questions. But given the immense range of variables at play in any individual, including genetic predisposition, personal habits like smoking and drinking, psychosocial factors, and frequency of exposure, it’s nearly impossible to prove a direct causal relationship between hazardous environmental toxins and personal illness.

Nonetheless, the circumstantial evidence is often compelling. Until recently public health researchers have had few tools to measure such impacts, but new instruments now enable them to be much more precise. The term “bio-monitoring” is now being applied to scientific techniques used to sample blood, urine, breast milk, and other tissue to assess human exposure to natural and synthetic chemicals. Using these tools, researchers can now measure an individual’s “body burden”, testing for the presence of specific chemicals known or thought to be hazardous to human health. But the costs of such monitoring are still far too high to be widely administered to whole populations. And they are altogether unaffordable for those individuals, most of them impoverished, who live near chemical industry plants and are most heavily exposed to toxic pollution.

There has been little effort in the United States either by federal or state regulatory agencies or manufacturers to test the chemicals they introduce into our collective bloodstream at the rate of a thousand new ones per year. Indeed, there has been stiff resistance from both quarters backed by a well-financed industrial sector.

But in the European Union a new set of far-reaching regulations, known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) attempts to gain a handle on the proliferation of untested synthetic chemicals by applying the “precautionary principle: “better safe than sorry”. REACH will require chemical manufacturers to provide basic health and safety information for all the substances they produce and will create a special category of some 2000 “substances of very high concern” slated for eventual replacement by safer alternatives. Of course, inventing those alternatives will pose a major challenge to medical researchers, especially since they may also conceal long-term negative health impacts not apparent at the time of their adoption.

The notion of a “body burden” adds still more weight to the concerns each of us now carries as a participant in industrial civilisation. It’s vital that we get a handle on what we’re putting into our bodies without realising it and what effects it’s having on our health.

A major question is whose responsibility is it to test and pay for the testing of the thousands of chemicals currently in use and the thousand more being introduced each year? The costs of testing such a vast reservoir of synthetic chemicals would be huge and one way or another those costs would be passed on to consumers. But the costs of continuing to ignore the impacts would undoubtedly be far greater. Given the choice, would you rather find out now and act accordingly or assume there will be no ill effects and risk being surprised at a later date by maladies that greater curiosity and care could have avoided? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jun 19 2007 (IPS)

With temperatures and oil prices rising, energy-hungry industrial nations are seeking alternatives to a petroleum economy, and many find themselves turning back to coal, writes Mark Sommer, who hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’. In this article, Sommer writes that although coal remains plentiful, strip-mining and mountaintop removal remain standard industry practices, and greenhouse gases released by the burning of coal are a prime contributor to global warming. As advanced industrial nations start instituting cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes, the rising costs of investing in such a carbon-clogging energy source are becoming apparent even to Wall Street. Renewables are on the way, though many say not soon enough to fill the gap. How much sooner might they come on line if instead of investing in more coal-fired plants we invested today in wind, solar, biomass, methane and wave power? And how much more might we squeeze out of the energy we now use if we applied ourselves to greater efficiency and conservation?

The catch is that when burned, even high-grade coal is one of the most heat-inducing sources of energy. And in the case of China, it is high-sulphur coal, the dirtiest of all, that’s powering its 21st century industrial revolution, casting a pall on Chinese cities reminiscent of the Dickens’ London.

“Our shiny white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks,” writes Jeff Goodell, author of ”Big Coal”. On average, Americans consume 20 pounds of coal per person per day powering their lights, computers, and TVs. Half of all the electricity generated in the US and two-thirds of China’s is generated by burning coal.

Coal advocates are pushing for the rapid construction of hundreds of new coal-fired power plants across the United States and the pace is still more rapid in China. Industry representatives say that dramatic advances in ”scrubbers” and other filtering technologies have vastly reduced the toxic particulates that once blighted industrial cities and still foul the air in developing nations. Strict regulations now curb the most destructive mining practices, whose disfigured and polluted landscapes still fester a century after their operations ceased.

Coal critics say that while progress has been made, strip-mining and mountaintop removal remain standard industry practices and greenhouse gases released by the burning of coal are a prime contributor to global warming. Coal-state Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana advocates a process that captures greenhouse gases and sequesters them essentially forever in underground seams. He promotes clean coal with the fervour of a technological evangelist, but the technology he espouses is still largely unproven and its premium price deters most prospective investors. Keeping coal-generated greenhouse gases securely and eternally sequestered in caverns and finding enough space to hold them remain largely unsolved problems.

At the same time, rising awareness of the risks of climate change is driving together constituencies long suspicious of one another. In oil-drenched Texas, business executives, mayors and governors, environmental activists, evangelical Christians, and Wall Street investment houses are uniting in a common quest to block the wholesale expansion of coal-fired power plants.

This spring the huge Texas power company TXU, which had sought permission to construct eleven new coal-fired power plants in the state, was not only blocked but bought by a consortium of investors promising not to build eight of the eleven and to apply strict environmental safeguards on the remaining three. Laura Miller, mayor of Dallas, a city not formerly known for environmental militancy, threw herself into the fray and brought on board powerful business leaders and fellow mayors. ”The public wants this,” she says.

Mayor Miller and her allies won the first round but they warn it’s going to be a long struggle against powerfully entrenched economic interests.

Given the pressure to find new sources of energy, turning to a resource as cheap and plentiful as coal is hard to resist. Is there a technological solution to the coal conundrum? What if carbon sequestration fails even to a modest degree and some of the CO2 injected into subterranean seams leaks back into an already overheated atmosphere? Are we willing to pay the real price of cleaning up the coal we burn and the costs of restoring mine-ravaged lands to their natural state? Is such restoration even possible?

As advanced industrial nations start instituting cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes, the rising costs of investing in such a carbon-clogging energy source are becoming apparent even to Wall Street’s profit-seeking investment firms. Renewables are on the way, though many say not soon enough to fill the gap. How much sooner might they come on line if instead of investing in more coal-fired plants we invested today in wind, solar, biomass, methane and wave power? And how much more might we squeeze out of the energy we now use if we applied ourselves to greater efficiency and conservation?

”Light bulb by light bulb, power plant by power plant, we can re-prioritise clean energy and not make continued investments in dirty power that will saddle us with their high cost for decades to come,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Rainforest Action Network.

Like it or not, coal will be with us for some time to come, in existing plants if not new ones. The question is whether to keep investing in an energy source that runs counter to a carbon-free future. Which would you prefer: changing habits or changing planets? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Apr 4 2007 (IPS)

While a nervous world focuses on putative terrorist threats and nuclear strikes from Iran and North Korea, small arms are killing far more people than all the bombs and missiles in national arsenals, writes Mark Sommer, host of the internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities . In this article, Sommer writes that small arms are the real weapons of mass destruction and are undermining the stability and security of whole societies in the process. A prime contributor to the phenomenon of failed states, small arms are a pre-eminent threat to global security and public health. Yet uprooting the virus of small arms trafficking will be dauntingly difficult precisely because they are cheap, easy to fire and conceal, and everywhere available. Unlike landmines, they move readily from hand to hand and can be aimed at any target for any purpose. Efforts to track and curtail the trade have long been thwarted by well-organised private gun lobbies and powerful nations that make use of small arms to fuel counterinsurgencies or proxy wars. After years of ignoring the problem, the UN General Assembly recently launched an effort to enact a treaty that would regulate trade in small arms. Yet many governments, including that of the United States, are reluctant to allow the enactment of a regime that would constrain their ability to freely distribute them. Not until the global public demands the imposition of constraints on the small arms trade will governments rein it in, albeit reluctantly. And not until that public fully realises that small arms in the wrong hands are the ultimate terror weapon will we give this public health pandemic the priority it deserves.

Small arms are the real weapons of mass destruction and are undermining the stability and security of whole societies in the process. The global gun trade, ranging from official transactions to illicit and grey markets for small arms and light weapons of every kind, has become a coercive and intimidating force in both political and personal relations, between rival groups as between the sexes, in failed or failing states in Africa and lawless neighborhoods of Latin American and Asian cities. Not least of all, the toxic mix of guns and drugs on the mean streets of some American inner cities leaves many residents cowering in their apartments under a self-imposed curfew.

In unstable societies like Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Palestine and Iraq, the widespread availability of AK-47s has greatly exacerbated the lethality of political and ethnic conflicts. On the streets of Kinshasa, you can pick up a knock-off Kalashnikov for as little as 30 dollars. In the hands of child soldiers so young that by all rights they should be playing with squirt guns, wielding a military assault rifle provides an initial illusion of omnipotence and invulnerability but in reality produce mayhem and self-destruction.

Ninety percent or more of the deaths in wars today occur among civilians who have no stake in the quarrel. A hundred million Kalashnikovs flow through the global bloodstream, toted not only or even primarily by soldiers but by thieves, thugs, men trying to prove their manhood or children abducted and pressed into service to warlords. Among some desperate subcultures, the AK-47 has taken on an almost mythic status. Young boys are nicknamed ”Kalash” and Hezbollah’s flag features a Kalashnikov.

The insurgent’s weapon of choice, the AK-47, was first developed for a far different purpose. Designed by the Soviet Army for use against the Nazis, the design wasn’t finished until the war’s end. During the cold war the Soviet Union exported Kalashnikovs to its Eastern European allies. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, these small arms stockpiles began to leak into zones of conflict from the Balkans to Central Africa, showing up in places like Rwanda, where they complemented the machetes that slaughtered 900,000 civilians between April and July of 1994. Now the AK-47 has become the killing machine of choice for warlords, rebel leaders and even some governments around the world. Replicas of the original are now being produced in some sixty countries, the best of them in Russia and China.

The amoral nature of the small arms trade is best demonstrated in the tale of Russian weapons broker Victor Bout, a young post-Soviet entrepreneur. Bout gained notoriety in the past decade for operating a highly-profitable business shuttling small arms around the world on a fleet of sixty former Soviet transport planes, often accompanied by fresh flowers, disaster relief supplies, and even UN peacekeepers. The redoubtable Bout so consistently undersold his competitors that even after the UN caught on to his gun-running ways, it continued to utilise his services when others were either unavailable or unaffordable. Bout’s success in weaving seamlessly between licit and illicit worlds and his tacit protection by Russian authorities demonstrate how hard it is to curtail a trade that is so intimately woven into both legitimate business transactions and the undercover operations of national intelligence and security operations.

Even when small arms aren’t actually fired, they wreak havoc on women and children when wielded by men who use them to impose their will. Police in countries with weak central authority find themselves outgunned in urban jungles where every man who can packs heat. Small arms undermine the rule of law and the patience to resolve conflicts by means other than violence. A prime contributor to the phenomenon of failed states, small arms are a pre-eminent threat to global security and public health.

Yet uprooting the virus of small arms trafficking will be dauntingly difficult precisely because they are cheap, easy to fire and conceal, and everywhere available. Unlike landmines, they move readily from hand to hand and can be aimed at any target for any purpose. Efforts to track and curtail the trade have long been thwarted by well-organised private gun lobbies and powerful nations that make use of small arms to fuel counterinsurgencies or proxy wars.

After years of ignoring the problem, the UN General Assembly recently launched an effort to enact a treaty that would regulate trade in small arms. Yet despite their destructiveness, many governments, including that of the United States, are reluctant to allow the enactment of a regime that would constrain their ability to freely distribute them. Not until the global public demands the imposition of constraints on the small arms trade will governments rein it in, albeit reluctantly. And not until that public fully realises that small arms in the wrong hands are the ultimate terror weapon will we give this public health pandemic the priority it deserves. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Feb 2 2007 (IPS)

The flip side of the ubiquitous spy camera tracking our every movement in department stores, government offices, and corporate headquarters is \’\’inverse surveillance\’\’, the private citizen\’s new-found ability to invade the privacy of public figures who have so long and with such impunity invaded their privacy, writes Mark Sommer, who hosts the internationally-syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’ (www.aworldofpossibilities.com) and directs the Mainstream Media Project. In this analysis, Sommer writes that nearly universal access to portable audio and video recording devices can now catch a politician\’s random moment of indiscretion or conspiratorial whisper and disseminate it to a global public to the everlasting embarrassment of the subject of scrutiny. What does this radical transparency do to leadership itself when, taken out of context, almost any act can appear incriminating? On the one hand, micro cameras and recording devices in the hands of ordinary people give them the power of a citizen\’s arrest with a potential impact that extends far beyond throwing someone in jail. In that sense, it is an essential counterweight to ever greater concentration of power and surveillance in the hands of elites, a levelling device that places public figures on notice that they can never be assured that malfeasance will not be discovered and tried in the court of public exposure. It\’s a power whose potency even those wielding it may not yet fully realise.

In so doing, it upstaged the carefully choreographed efforts of Iraqi and American officials to invest the judicial process with an aura of legitimacy. What both Saddam loyalists and Islamic extremists had been unable to accomplish in years of exhortation, a few-minute YouTube home video achieved in a matter of hours, enshrining the dictator in enduring martyrdom in the eyes of the faithful and producing shame and revulsion even among those who felt Saddam deserved his fate.

Ever since a home video camera recording of African-American cab driver Rodney King’s brutal beating at the hands of Los Angeles police in 1992 and the acquittal of three police officers triggered four days of rioting, 55 deaths, and 2,400 injuries, politicians, police, and sports and entertainment figures have become wary not only of photojournalists but of the ubiquitous eyes of digital and cell phone cameras in the hands of ordinary citizens.

The flip side of the ubiquitous spy camera tracking our every movement in department stores, government offices, and corporate headquarters is ”inverse surveillance”, the private citizen’s new-found ability to invade the privacy of public figures who have so long and with such impunity invaded their privacy. Nearly universal access to portable audio and video recording devices can now catch a politician’s random moment of indiscretion or conspiratorial whisper, immortalise it on film or audio, and disseminate it to a global public to the subject’s everlasting embarrassment.

How does this new capability in the hands of people with no special journalistic training or ethics alter the balance of power and privacy between elites and publics? How will it influence the behaviour of public figures, who can never again be certain that their public acts or private behavior is not being recorded and won’t later be splayed across the mainstream media? How does the lack of public privacy, what might be called ”the glass house effect”, influence the craft of professional journalism and the decisions newsroom editors make about what to cover and how?

Just as hundreds of millions of handguns and Kalashnikovs have levelled the playing field between police and criminals, ragtag insurgents, and the world’s mightiest army, the weapon of potential public exposure on a grand scale places every leader, dictator, or democrat in perpetual jeopardy. What does this radical transparency do to leadership itself when, taken out of context, almost any act can appear incriminating?

Nor is the evidence itself certain to be authentic. The 1994 film ”Forest Gump” utilised special effects like chroma key, warping, morphing, and rotoscoping to enable Tom Hanks to be digitally painted into actual historical scenes alongside presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. More than a decade later such techniques enable video evidence to be fabricated not just by studio engineers but by amateur camera buffs. Given these capabilities and the means to disseminate them worldwide via YouTube and other unfiltered digital broadcasting networks, how can we detect the difference between fact and fabrication?

On the one hand, micro cameras and recording devices in the hands of ordinary people give them the power of a citizen’s arrest with a potential impact that extends far beyond throwing someone in jail. In that sense, it is an essential counterweight to ever greater concentration of power and surveillance in the hands of elites, a levelling device that places public figures on notice that they can never be assured that malfeasance will not be discovered and tried in the court of public exposure. It’s a power whose potency even those wielding it may not yet fully realise. Did the clandestine cameraman who videoed the execution of Saddam Hussein have any idea how the display of his video clip on YouTube would influence global politics and the way Saddam — and American-directed systems of justice abroad — would be viewed by observers the world over for years to come? Can we expect random individuals to exercise good judgment in the use and dissemination of such explosive materials when professional media routinely transgress their self-expressed journalistic values?

What can we learn from the unauthorised broadcast of Saddam’s execution and similar events about how to make best use of these new-found powers of witnessing and recording in an era when we can no longer be sure what and what isn’t being documented, what is and isn’t real? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jan 1 2007 (IPS)

The conundrum that has long obstructed progress on global warming and a broader transition from a petro-centric to a biocentric economy — can environmental imperatives be addressed within a profit-driven economic system? — may finally be giving way to a tidal wave of global green innovation, writes Mark Sommer, host of \’A World of Possibilities,\’ an award-winning,internationally syndicated radio programme that can be heard at www.aworldofpossibilities.com. In this article, Sommer writes that November\’s flush of Democratic victories was less an endorsement of the party than a rejection of the oil-igarchy that has blocked effective action on a wide range of issues. In its wake, the pent-up demand for new products and services to serve a post-carbon economy may now begin to trigger a potent market-driven response from industry, academia, consumers, and after all others, policymakers. The greening of the global economy will likely be led not by the environmental activists whose persistence was so essential to raising initial public awareness but by some of the very corporate behemoths who were rightly criticised for their inaction and some of the very conservatives (though not of the Bush variety) who have long held that environmental goals and economic realities are innately incompatible.

The conundrum that has long obstructed progress on global warming and a broader transition from a petro-centric to a biocentric economy — can environmental imperatives be addressed within a profit-driven economic system? — may finally be giving way to a tidal wave of global green innovation.

November’s flush of Democratic victories was less an endorsement of the party than a rejection of the oil-igarchy that has blocked effective action on a wide range of issues. In its wake, the pent-up demand for new products and services to serve a post-carbon economy may now begin to trigger a potent market-driven response from industry, academia, consumers, and after all others, policymakers.

If emerging trends hold true, the greening of the global economy will be led not by the environmental activists whose persistence and commitment were so essential to raising initial public awareness but by some of the very corporate behemoths who were rightly criticised for their inaction and some of the very conservatives (though not of the Bush variety) who have long held that environmental goals and economic realities are innately incompatible.

‘Climate change is inevitable,’ says Joseph Romm, a former US Assistant Secretary of Energy, ‘and once you know something is inevitable you really want to go first.’ He predicts that by 2050 every sector of the global economy will have turned green, with the emergence of a new ‘supersector’ focused entirely on the development of carbon reduction technologies. The ‘green rush’ to exploit the rapidly-growing global marketplace for environmentally benign technologies will be no more high-minded and no less ruthlessly competitive than previous gold rushes, replete with the false advertising, unmet expectations, technological dead-ends, and financial reverses that accompany most explosions of innovative activity.

‘Green China will be a greater threat to the United States than Red China ever was,’ predicts New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, as China aggressively moves, both for economic opportunity and from environmental necessity, to invent low-cost, scalable green technologies that could capture a large share of the global green marketplace. Disdaining the ‘moralism’ of the green movement, Friedman calls for a tough-minded ‘geo-greenism’ based on hard-headed national security considerations — ‘living green instead of fighting reds’.

No better example of the sudden, almost religious conversion of once adamant corporate and political opponents of environmentalism can be found than in the case of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer. Following a revival-like shareholders’ meeting in fall 2005 that included an impassioned speech by former Vice President Al Gore, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott committed his company to a set of astonishingly ambitious environmental goals — spending USD 500 million/year to reach specific benchmarks; increasing the fuel efficiency of Wal-Mart’s 7,000 trucks by 25 percent in the next three years and doubling it in ten; cutting greenhouse gas emissions at stores and distribution centres by 20 percent in seven years; cutting solid waste from domestic stores by 25 percent in the next three years; and offering vast quantities of organic produce and products at just 10 percent above conventionally grown foods. ‘By their size, they’re forcing manufacturers to come up with more earth-friendly, energy-efficient products, which then become the industry norm,’ writes environmental real estate consultant Charles Lockwood.

Wal-Mart’s many critics, who have long faulted the company’s labour and healthcare as well as environmental practices, are wary but hopeful that its initiatives reflect a real if wholly self-interested shift. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, believes that Wal-Mart is making a sincere and significant commitment, even as he remains sceptical that it can actually achieve its most ambitious goals.

At the same time, by its very size Wal-Mart could pre-empt the emergence of a more diverse, small-scale green products and services industry, as it has often done through aggressively low pricing. And shipping organic produce from China to the US and other far distant markets, the only means by which Wal-Mart could keep prices down, would generate more greenhouse gases than all it does to reduce energy use in its day-to-day operations.

Another powerful and unexpected ally in the green shift is the global insurance industry, second largest in the world, which stands to lose trillions if cataclysmic climate change predictions come true. With its political and financial clout, it has a unique ability to exert influence on policymakers, corporations, and individual behaviour. US-based Traveler’s Insurance has begun cutting premiums for green buildings that save energy and emit fewer greenhouse gases. Swiss Re is investing in new solar technologies, Munich Re in renewable energy.

With its unparalleled dynamism and capacity for innovation, green capitalism is likely to seize new market opportunities with the same alacrity and avarice with which it pursues every other profitable enterprise. Only if the values behind it also shift ‘ either through internal conversion or through external vigilance will green gold turn out to be something more than fool’s gold. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARKATA, CALIFORNIA, Sep 1 2006 (IPS)

After decades of frustratingly slow growth, rising energy prices are hastening the dawn of a long-heralded solar renaissance, writes Mark Sommer, host of the internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities. Though still outdistanced by the rapid rise of wind power, silicon-based solar technologies are finally becoming sufficiently efficient to be competitive with conventional energy sources, Sommer writes in this article. Industry experts predict that based on recent advances, further improvements in efficiency will continue, but a real breakthrough to widespread use worldwide awaits development of a technology beyond the painstaking silicon-based manufacturing process. Solar advocates argue that in an era of permanent oil decline, if the photovoltaic industry sustains growth averaging 50 percent or more per year for the next two decades, it will contribute as much as 20 percent of the global energy budget. This is an ambitious, even unlikely rate of growth, but it also presumes no significant technological breakthroughs. And given that necessity is the mother of invention, solar energy may yet surprise us all.

After decades of frustratingly slow growth, rising energy prices are hastening the dawn of a long-heralded solar renaissance. Though still outdistanced by the rapid rise of wind power, silicon-based solar technologies are finally becoming sufficiently efficient to be competitive with conventional energy sources — without subsidies and with the cost amortised over 20 years — in regions where electrical power costs customers USD 0.25 or more per kilowatt-hour.

Demand for the refined silicon that is the core component of solar panels, manufactured in just five plants worldwide, has grown so rapidly in the past few years that there is now a two-year lag time in the supply chain. This year for the first time use of silicon in the manufacture of solar equipment exceeds its use for computer microprocessors.

But the full potential of the world’s most plentiful and renewable energy source will not be tapped until a new, less energy-intensive non-silicon based technology is invented. Solar experts say that’s only a matter of time, perhaps as little as five to ten years.

Twenty-five years ago, the manufacture of solar panels was a cottage industry funded on a micro-experimental basis by a few American oil companies (Arco and Exxon among them). Today, solar panels are three times the size they were then and twice as efficient (50 percent more efficient than just five years ago), at a quarter the price they were in the 70s. Efficiencies in their manufacture continue to rise, but individual users have been largely supplanted by institutional and corporate installations. WalMart is installing solar panels at many of its megastores while Costco sells and installs solar equipment for homeowners.

Given that solar depends on sunlight, one might well assume that sunny climes lead the world in the industry’s development. But after an early lead in pioneering the technology in the seventies and eighties, California and the US ceded the industry to Germany and Japan, a strategic blunder that could prove costly in the long run.

While California still leads the US in solar installations, accounting for 80 percent of all American-based solar grid development, ironically it is Germany in sun-starved Central Europe that now leads the world in both manufacturing and installing solar equipment. Unfortunately, those regions with the most sunlight and the greatest need for energy in remote locations, like Africa and India, can least afford it while nations with little sunlight, like Japan, are better able to invest in solar technology.

Spurred on public demand and generous federal subsidies pushed through the Bundestag by a Greens and Social Democratic majority in the nineties, the German solar industry has soared. In just six years, revenues at Conergy, the country’s leading solar manufacturer, have grown a thousand-fold to USD 1 billion/year. Until its termination last year by a newly-elected conservative government (which argued that the industry is now so healthy that it no longer needs them), the federal subsidy enabled ratepayers to receive solar installations on 2 percent interest loans, sell the power generated back to the public utility at 50 euro cents per kw-hr and pay just 12 euro cents per kw-hr for their own use of it. In sun-drenched southern Europe, Italy, Greece and Spain have launched similar programmes but progress is impeded by red tape and a less favourable political climate.

In the birthplace of solar technology, the industry is picking up after decades of stagnation, and industry experts project that the United States will soon become the fastest-growing centre of solar installations as states adopt portfolio standards mandating requirements for renewal energy investment. Yet at USD 36,000 (or about USD 25,000 after tax credits), the cost to a homeowner of investing in a solar system of equivalent yield to the average ratepayer’s electrical use is still beyond the reach of anyone other than a committed and prosperous environmentalist.

Industry experts predict that based on recent advances, further improvements in efficiency will continue, but a real breakthrough to widespread use worldwide awaits development of a technology beyond the painstaking silicon-based manufacturing process. Thin film solar technologies, which have been under development for decades, use less silicon but are a third to half as efficient as conventional solar panels.

Grand visions of the dawning of the solar age have thus far not come into being, and barring a revolutionary non-silicon breakthrough solar technologies are likely remain a growing but still modest portion of the global energy budget. But solar advocates argue that in an era of permanent oil decline, if the photovoltaic industry sustains growth averaging 50 percent or more per year for the next two decades, it will contribute as much as 20 percent of the global energy budget. This is an ambitious, even unlikely rate of growth, but it also presumes no significant technological breakthroughs. And given that necessity is the mother of invention, solar energy may yet surprise us all. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, May 1 2006 (IPS)

Fully developed, biomass could reduce reliance on hydrocarbons of all kinds, foreign and domestic, not only as fuel for light-duty vehicles but as a raw material for biodegradable manufactured plastics. At the same time, rightly utilised, biomass could be harvested not from food crops but from the stalks and stover of grains that would otherwise go to waste. In the process, it could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fuel a rebirth of long languishing rural regions worldwide. Unlike oil, coal, uranium and other conventional fuels, the processes that produce biofuels are not intensely toxic to humans or the natural environment. Moreover, unlike fossil fuel and nuclear plants, biorefineries are most efficiently run when they are small-scale, decentralised, and locally-managed, with raw materials drawn from as little as a thirty-mile radius of the plant. One of the benefits of biofuels is that they offer the possibility of returning the sources of energy, income and political power to each locale. In an era when centralised power is revealing itself to be ever more inefficient and untrustworthy, an energy system of distributed power driven by biology rather than mineralogy might provide not only heat and light but, as a beneficial byproduct, a greater measure of democracy.

When President Bush cited switchgrass, the original tall grass that graced the Great Plains of pre-European North America, in his 2006 State of the Union Address, it left most listeners puzzled — not only those who’d never heard of it but the tiny minority who had but were astonished to hear it from a Texas oiligarch. Still more surprisingly, the president anointed alternative fuels like switchgrass-fueled ethanol as an essential element in America’s energy salvation, baptising biomass as a means to reduce the country’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

Fully developed, biomass could reduce reliance on hydrocarbons of all kinds, foreign and domestic, not only as fuel for light-duty vehicles but as a raw material for biodegradable manufactured plastics. At the same time, rightly utilised, biomass could be harvested not from food crops but from the stalks and stover of grains that would otherwise go to waste. In the process, it could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fuel a rebirth of long languishing rural regions worldwide.

Cellulose ethanol is not the fuel derived from feed corn and wheat that is currently mixed in a 1-to-10 ratio with standard petroleum in some US gas stations, nor that derived from sugarcane and used on a broader scale in Brazil. Standard ethanol is drawn from products that would otherwise be used for food and is therefore a relatively costly fuel to produce. But a new process based on organic decomposition of plant fiber accelerated by biotech manipulation and a simple distillation of basic sugars converts the cellulose in the fibrous stalks of corn, wheat, rice, other agricultural crops and even small diameter trees and shrubs into a wide range of petroleum substitutes.

The story starts during World War II on the South Pacific island of Guam, where US soldiers found their canvas tents disintegrating at astonishing rates in the tropical jungle. The culprit, they eventually found, was a tiny microorganism with a prodigious appetite for cellulose fibers. Fast forward sixty years to the biotech laboratory in Ottawa, Canada, where an innovative company called Iogen has isolated the enzyme produced by this microorganism and accelerated the process of natural decomposition.

Having built and operated a prototype biofuel refinery in Ottawa, Iogen is now looking to the US state of Idaho to build the world’s first full-scale bio-refinery, which local ranchers have eagerly signed up to supply with wheat stalks and corn stover. Traditionally, at the end of the growing season, farmers set fire to their fields, filling the air with climate-changing smoke. But Idaho farmers now see potential to revive their depressed rural economy by using wheat and barley wastes to produce energy-rich cellulose ethanol.

Unlike oil, coal, uranium and other conventional fuels, the processes that produce biofuels are not intensely toxic to humans or the natural environment. Moreover, unlike fossil fuel and nuclear plants, biorefineries are most efficiently run when they are small-scale, decentralised, and locally-managed, with raw materials drawn from as little as a thirty-mile radius of the plant.

The raw materials for cellulose ethanol are not confined to agricultural crops. The selective thinning of woodlands that are currently choked with undergrowth from decades of forest fire suppression could yield raw materials for cellulose ethanol while returning the woods to something resembling their pre-European openness. For decades, environmentalists opposed to all logging have fought with timber companies seemingly fixated on cutting anything still standing. A false dichotomy had emerged between jobs and the environment. Meanwhile, the forests were either being clearcut or left to grow thick with highly flammable brush, only to burn in calamitous wildfires.

But many rural residents have grown weary of both unconstrained resource extraction and uncompromising environmentalism. Environmentalists formerly resistant to any logging in old growth forests are seeing the wisdom in the highly selective thinning of dense underbrush and small diameter trees, while loggers and the US Forest Service are seeing the value in replacing clearcuts with all-age stands that a generation down the line may begin to resemble the spacious ancient forests.

One of the benefits of biofuels is that they offer the possibility of returning the sources of energy, income and political power to each locale. In an era when centralised power is revealing itself to be ever more inefficient and untrustworthy, an energy system of distributed power driven by biology rather than mineralogy might provide not only heat and light but, as a beneficial byproduct, a greater measure of democracy. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Mar 1 2006 (IPS)

Support for capital punishment is starting to soften even among some long-time death penalty advocates, writes Mark Sommer, director of the US-based Mainstream Media Project and host of the award-winning internationally-syndicated radio programme \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’. In this article Sommer writes, alongside Iraq, Iran, and China, the US remains the sole advanced democracy still cleaving to what much of the world views as state-sponsored homicide. At 64 percent, Americans\’ support for the death penalty is 20 percent higher than Canada and 40 percent higher than Australia. Nonetheless, it is at its lowest level in 27 years and is lowest among youth, indicating that a shift may be in the offing. Surprisingly, this shift is occurring most of all among some of those who until now have been adamantly opposed to abolishing the death penalty: Republican officeholders. The reason they are changing their minds is less ideological than pragmatic — a realization that too often the wrong man is executed and the exorbitant cost of prosecution is stealing resources from law enforcement programmes of more proven effectiveness.

When death row inmate Tookie Williams sought a final reprieve from execution this January, California Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger expressed uncharacteristic anguish before making the decision not to intercede. A founder of the notorious Crips gang in Los Angeles, Williams claimed to have undergone a remarkable transformation in prison. His exhortations to youth not to join gangs had earned him several Nobel Prize nominations.

The governor’s tremors were likely less due to qualms of conscience than to a queasy sense that support for capital punishment is starting to soften even among some long-time death penalty advocates.

Alongside Iraq, Iran and China, nations whose human rights records it vociferously condemns, the US remains the sole advanced democracy still cleaving to what much of the world views as state-sponsored homicide. At 64 percent, Americans’ support for the death penalty is 20 percent higher than Canada and 40 percent higher than Australia. Nonetheless, it is at its lowest level in 27 years and is lowest among youth, indicating that a shift may be in the offing.

Surprisingly, this shift is occurring most of all among some of those who until now have been adamantly opposed to abolishing the death penalty: Republican officeholders. The reason they are changing their minds is less ideological than pragmatic — a realization that too often the wrong man is executed and the exorbitant cost of prosecution is stealing resources from law enforcement programmes of more proven effectiveness.

In recent years, DNA testing has resulted in the exoneration of 14 death row inmates. In all, 114 people nationwide have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence, sometimes within hours of their scheduled execution. These exonerations have sown doubt about the fairness of the entire death penalty prosecution system. Following the lead of Illinois Republican Gov. George Ryan, several states have instituted moratoria on executions pending comprehensive reviews of their death row cases.

Still more troubling is the racial bias embedded in death penalty prosecutions, as it is in the entire US criminal justice system. In an American population that is just 12 percent African American, 42 percent of the more than 3,100 inmates on death row are black and just 45 percent white. Of those actually executed, 34 percent are African American. In Pennsylvania and Texas, minorities comprise 70 percent of death row inmates. A 1990 US government report found that ”those who murdered whites were more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks”.

Indeed, since 1976, 209 black defendants were executed for killing whites while just 12 whites were executed for killing blacks. The reasons for this stark imbalance are not far to seek. The great majority of prosecutors in every state are white and in many jurisdictions blacks are barred from jury service for frivolous reasons. Black defendants lack the financial resources to hire their own attorneys and must often settle for overwhelmed, under-qualified public defenders.

To those for whom racial discrimination is not a compelling concern, the cost of prosecuting capital punishment cases is more persuasive. With complex pre-trial motions, lengthy jury selections, and the protracted appeals required to assure due process, capital trials cost up to six times more than other murder trials. In Texas, which leads the nation in executions, the average death penalty case costs taxpayers 2.3 million dollars, three times the price of placing someone in solitary confinement for 40 years. In California, given that just 11 death row inmates have been executed since capital punishment was reinstated thirty years ago, federal and state taxpayers have paid 250 million dollars for each execution. The burden of death penalty prosecutions falls most heavily on counties with few resources to bear them.

Ironically, a single capital trial can force early prisoner releases and law enforcement cutbacks, measures that only increase the likelihood of higher crime rates.

For some former hard-line death penalty advocates, such ironies are starting to trump ideology. ”This may seem strange coming from a man known as the `hanging judge’ of Orange County,” wrote Donald McCartin, a retired Superior Court judge from right Republican Southern California, ”but I think it’s time to abolish the death penalty. Legal debates result in staggering expenses and years of irresolution. In times of huge budget deficits, too much money is being squandered in murder trials. Human error, inequities, biases and personal ideologies create the problems that have caused my rejection of the death penalty. because these frailties will not magically vanish, capital punishment cannot be implemented with any sense of balance or fairness.”

And finally, no survey to date has definitively proven that capital punishment actually deters capital crimes. A 1996 UN study reported that ”research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment.” On the contrary, programmes like community policing, restorative justice, alternative sentencing, and educational opportunities within the prison system appear to be more effective both in preventing crime and reducing recidivism. such programmes cost far less than capital prosecutions, yet they remain unaffordable as long as death row cases dominate the docket.

But if not the death penalty, what other form of justice should be meted out to convicted murderers? Death penalty opponents advocate life in prison without parole combined with restitution to the victim’s family. When offered this option, Americans’ support for the death penalty plunges to just 41 percent.

Given that the US is currently governed by politicians from a state of fervent death penalty devotees, it could be some time yet before the country as a whole relinquishes the practice, though individual states may jump-start the process. If and when the death penalty is abolished, it will be less because soft hearts prevail than because a hard look at the costs and benefits persuades a pragmatic majority that public safety is better served by alternative sentencing that is less costly and more effective in deterring capital crimes. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
BERKELEY, May 1 2005 (IPS)

Environmental racism is a global phenomenon that follows closely in the wake of economic globalisation, writes Mark Sommer, director of the U.S.-based Mainstream Media Project and host of the award-winning international radio program, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’ In this article, Sommer writes that for the affluent global minority, \’\’out of sight, out of mind\’\’ leaves the conscience largely untroubled.The media often cooperate by giving only fleeting coverage to distant industrial accidents. The catastrophic leak of lethal chemicals at a Union Carbide facility in Bhopal, India, two decades ago left 3,000 people dead and 500,000 injured in the worst industrial accident in history. But while the victims of the World Trade Centre attack, which killed as many but injured few, attracted enough attention to transform the global agenda, Bhopal was soon forgotten. Outsourcing manufacturing jobs to low-wage sites in China, India, and elsewhere not only lowers labour costs but enables manufacturers to avoid environmental regulations that would otherwise make their products non-competitive. In its headlong lunge for industrial supremacy, China is placing the poorest of its own citizens at greatest risk by siting and operating manufacturing plants with scant regard for their lethal effects on the surrounding air, water, and soil.

Environmental racism is a global phenomenon that follows closely in the wake of economic globalisation. When seeking sites for toxic industrial development, multinational firms are well aware of the political power of affluent ”NIMBYs” who benefit from the products these firms produce but insist, ”Not In My Backyard”. Most also prefer to dispose of their discarded products in the global South where poverty and the lack of employment alternatives make handling toxics a tragic necessity.

Outsourcing manufacturing jobs to low-wage sites in China, India, and elsewhere not only lowers labour costs but enables manufacturers to avoid environmental regulations that would otherwise make their products non-competitive. Nor are they alone in their ”race to the bottom”. In its headlong lunge for industrial supremacy, China is placing the poorest of its own citizens at greatest risk by siting and operating manufacturing plants with scant regard for their lethal effects on the surrounding air, water, and soil.

For the affluent global minority, ”out of sight, out of mind” leaves the conscience largely untroubled. The media often cooperate by giving only fleeting coverage to distant industrial accidents. The catastrophic leak of lethal chemicals at a Union Carbide facility in Bhopal, India, two decades ago left 3,000 people dead and 500,000 injured in the worst industrial accident in history. But while the victims of the World Trade Centre attack, which killed as many but injured few, attracted enough attention to transform the global agenda, Bhopal was soon forgotten. Its victims received little of the USD 470 million settlement and continue to suffer from severe respiratory illnesses and congenital defects in their offspring.

Even in a wealthy nation like the United States, pockets of poverty attract toxic industry. Non-whites are 50 percent more likely to live in communities with hazardous waste facilities. Residents of largely poor, non-white ”fenceline communities” bordering on giant petrochemical plants in Louisiana’s ”Cancer Alley” and other sites around the country suffer disproportionately from air, water and soil pollution and lead and pesticide poisoning. These environmental health hazards in turn produce significantly higher rates of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and birth defects.

Tracing cause and effect, however, is a challenging task requiring long-term research and data collection for which there is little funding, especially when those affected are not in a position to demand it.

In Diamond, Louisiana, a mixed-income African American community located beside the Mississippi River along the Chemical Corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, several hundred direct descendants of former slaves live sandwiched between two huge chemical refineries operated by oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell. For half a century they have lived with a toxic bouquet of polluted air, massive gas flares, and periodic industrial accidents. The memory of two huge explosions at the vast Norco complex continues to haunt many long-time residents.

Most important, Diamond’s residents have experienced health effects they are convinced come from close exposure to Shell’s chemical operations — headaches, allergies, asthma, and respiratory illnesses of all kinds, skin disorders and cancers that have taken numerous lives. Curiously, however, the community of Norco (which officially includes Diamond) also contains a 98 percent white neighbourhood that shares a fenceline with Shell. The two are separated by a wooded strip — and by a chasm of culture and experience that leaves the two communities worlds apart.

Unlike Diamond’s residents, few of whom have been able to secure work at Shell, Norco’s white neighbourhood is a company town where Shell has provided jobs, schools, hospitals, and other amenities to generations of residents. While Diamond’s residents reported severe symptoms of chemical contamination, Norco’s residents insisted that their health was better than the national average. The perception gap between the two halves of Norco demonstrates the consequences of institutionalised segregation and the ways in which socio-economic factors contribute to a toxic natural environment in racially divided communities.

In the mid-nineties, Diamond’s black residents embarked on an arduous twenty-year campaign to get Shell to buy them out at prices that would enable them to relocate — an option they couldn’t afford on their own. Resistant at first, Shell eventually succumbed to pressure from bad publicity masterfully orchestrated by environmental activists from across the United States as well as legal and scientific experts who successfully challenged industry and government data.

The campaign was also aided by drawing connections to foreign environmental justice struggles like Shell’s notorious repression of the Ogoni people in the Niger delta. At a major global climate change conference, Diamond’s grassroots leader Margie Richard publicly confronted a top Shell official with a sample of Diamond’s toxic bouquet and asked him to breathe it. Stunned and moved, Shell’s Robert Kleiburg quickly mobilised top Shell management to take decisive action to avoid a repeat of the company’s Nigerian experience.

Over time, Diamond’s seemingly quixotic quest form compensation not only succeeded in securing a buyout from Shell but became a model for environmental justice campaigns worldwide. Among the many lessons learned was that success depends on the coordination of complementary strategies — grassroots activism, legal and scientific expertise, back channel negotiations, foundation grants, appearances by celebrities and politicians, and the mobilisation of diverse constituencies — local, national and international. And it requires both barricading and bridging, a shared understanding among allies that such apparently contradictory tactics are often both essential.

Just as it is crucial to remain faithful to one’s first purposes, it is critical to connect on a human level to those on ”the other side” with different interests but equally worthy motives. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
BERKELEY, Mar 1 2005 (IPS)

Electronic waste is the fastest growing disposal problem in the world. From the industrial backwaters of mainland China to rapidly industrialising regions of India and Pakistan, a wide range of electronic devices and appliances are being received and recycled in conditions that imperil the health of the recyclers, their communities, and their environments, writes Mark Sommer, who directs the US-based Mainstream Media Project and hosts \”A World of Possibilities\”, an award-winning internationally-syndicated radio programme, where a three-part series on electronic waste can be accessed and downloaded.. In this article, Sommer writes that most of the components in these devices are recovered by poor, often migrant scavengers and sold for reuse. But in the process they and the environments around them are exposed to heavy metals like mercury, lead, beryllium, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants that leave lethal residues in bodies, soils, and watercourses. Governments and electronics firms have long known about the hazardous effects of this \”effluent of the affluent\” and as early as 1989 drafted the Basel Convention, an international treaty dealing with the global trade in toxic wastes. In 1994 it was strengthened to ban the export of all hazardous wastes from rich to poor countries, even for the purpose of recycling. Alone among developed countries, the US has refused to ratify the Basel Convention and has consistently sought to undermine its implementation. Yet as with so many other global agreements, the rest of the world has ceased waiting for the US to lead and has instead taken the initiative itself. The EU has already implemented the Basel Convention, banning the export of all hazardous wastes to developing countries for any reason, while readying a comprehensive set of regulations that will require electronics manufacturers selling to its 25 member countries to bear the responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products, taking them back at the end of their useful life and phasing out their toxic components.

Like the promise of the peaceful atom, the early hope of the computer revolution was that it would banish the blight of the first industrial revolution: quiet, clean industry powered by silicon chips would eliminate contaminated rivers and polluted landscapes. But there is still a dark side to the computer revolution. Out of sight and mind, on the other side of the world from the affluent West, are the dumping grounds for hundreds of millions of computers, TV’s, cell phones, stereos, refrigerators, and other electronics discarded with ever-accelerating speed as consumers race to keep pace with the latest, most full-featured digital hardware. The average American computer user now replaces a computer every 18 to 24 months.

Electronic waste is the fastest growing disposal problem in the world. From the industrial backwaters of mainland China to rapidly industrialising regions of India and Pakistan, a wide range of electronic devices and appliances are being received and recycled in conditions that imperil the health of the recyclers, their communities, and their environments. Most of the components in these devices are recovered by poor, often migrant scavengers and sold for reuse. But in the process they and the environments around them are exposed to heavy metals like mercury, lead, beryllium, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants that leave lethal residues in bodies, soils, and watercourses.

Those who do the disassembling in the Asian E-waste industry are most often the most marginal of their societies, rural migrants driven by poverty to city shantytowns. Unable to find steady employment, they settle instead for a scavenging life in which just to survive in the short term, they must perform tasks that most know imperil their survival in the long term. Entire families, including children, disassemble computer monitors and other electronics, using tools little more sophisticated than hammers and screwdrivers without even the most rudimentary protective equipment. Children play in waterways laced with lead and mercury. Families ferret out filaments of copper and tiny ingots of gold which they sell for pocket change to middlemen who in turn sell the raw materials back to manufacturers.

It’s recycling of a sort, but not quite what consumers have in mind when they dutifully deposit their computers at the local dump. Industry experts say 50-80 percent of the electronics collected for recycling ends up on container ships bound for Asian dumping grounds, where its toxic components begin their journey into bloodstreams and watercourses.

Governments and electronics firms have long known about the hazardous effects of this “effluent of the affluent” and as early as 1989 drafted the Basel Convention, an international treaty dealing with the global trade in toxic wastes. In 1994 it was strengthened to ban the export of all hazardous wastes from rich to poor countries, even for the purpose of recycling. Alone among developed countries, the US has refused to ratify the Basel Convention and has consistently sought to undermine its implementation.

Yet as with so many other global agreements, the rest of the world has ceased waiting for the US to lead and has instead taken the initiative itself. The European Union has already implemented the Basel Convention, banning the export of all hazardous wastes to developing countries for any reason. More importantly, the EU is readying a comprehensive set of regulations that will require electronics manufacturers selling to its 25 member countries to bear the responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products, taking them back at the end of their useful life and phasing out their toxic components. For its part, Japan is mandating more stringent manufacturing criteria reducing toxic components and instituting mandatory take-back programs.

With the world’s largest base of affluent, well-educated consumers, the EU is poised to replace the US as the standard-setter for the world’s electronics industry, and with it much else besides. And despite its defiant posture, even the Bush administration has begun to recognise this rapidly emerging reality. Furious at the Europeans’ regulatory threats, it dispatched the US trade representative to Brussels to warn of dire consequences. Undeterred, the Europeans reminded Washington that it was not speaking to a subservient ally but to an independent power fifty percent larger than the US and turned to the World Trade Organisation for vindication of its right to regulate.

The core concept behind the European approach to the e-waste problem is “extended producer responsibility”, the principle that producers should be held responsible for the full “cradle-to-grave” lifespan of their products. Faced with having to deal with the detritus of their short-lived inventions, manufacturers suddenly become more ingenious about reducing their toxic burdens and reusing their most valuable components.

Indeed, some innovative redesign specialists are proposing that both manufacturers and consumers think of their computers and other electronics not so much as products to be purchased but as services to be utilised. Most computer components in this maturing technology remain relatively consistent from year to year, yet we keep throwing them away in a year or two only to buy, at high cost, another box that but for a faster processor is largely the same. We must then buy an extended warranty just to enable the computer to last its fleeting lifetime. What if instead we bought basic “boxes” containing the core components from the manufacturer, who as part of a long-term service agreement would then maintain the machine on a regular basis and install upgrades as they become available? The usable lifespan of computers would then extend to five or more years instead of the one or two we now hold onto them.

To adopt such an approach would require shelving the manufacturer’s survival strategy of planned obsolescence and the consumer’s conditioned preference for ceaseless novelty. But by imposing the responsibility for downstream impacts on the upstream producer, the EU might just start to reverse the river’s flow. Facing the EU’s impending regulations, major US manufacturers find themselves in the uncharacteristic position of lobbying their own government to match Europe’s standards so they won’t face the expense of building different computers for different markets or competition from corner-cutting competitors.

What if, instead of the American-led “globalisation 1.0” we see the launch of a European-led “globalisation 2.0”, based on the simple principle, familiar to every first grader, that you clean up any mess you make? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Mar 1 2005 (IPS)

Domestic divisiveness within the United States represents a far greater danger to the American democratic republic than any threat from foreign terrorists, writes Mark Sommer, host of the award-wining internationally syndicated radio programme, \”A World of Possibilities\” and co-creator, with William Ury, of BothAnd (www.bothand.org). In this article, Sommer argues that as currently framed, the war on terror is the ultimate either/or paradigm: \”You\’re either with us or against us.\” But this frame has divided Americans both from one another and the rest of the world in ways that could prove fatal to the country\’s future if it does not soon reframe the struggle in more inclusive ways. A different kind of Middle America – both principled and pragmatic, strengthened rather than weakened by its differences — could bring fresh energy to a paralysed body politic by creating a vibrant new process outside the dead zones that are the White House and Congress today. By combining the best of many perspectives into creative, effective syntheses, they may yet produce hybrid solutions with the vigour to withstand our all-too- human fractiousness.

Domestic divisiveness within the United States represents a far greater danger to the American democratic republic than any threat from foreign terrorists. As Lincoln famously said, “A house divided cannot stand.”

Yet calls to line up behind the current leadership in Washington ring hollow for millions of Americans from left and right who see in such appeals a transparent attempt to force obedience and suppress vital differences of perspective and approach. Any real meeting of minds, they insist, must be the outcome of an open, creative process of listening, hearing, and regaining respect for both differences and commonalities.

For many Americans, this “re-civilising” process must begin not in Washington but on the “third side”, a broader public whose task is now to walk away from the warring parties towards the scorched earth between and cultivate there a common garden. Numerous initiatives are sprouting in this ashen but fertile soil at local, regional, and national levels across the United States seeking to bridge the “red/blue” conservative/liberal divide drawn from the graphics of recent electoral maps.

Some analysts challenge the very notion that there is such a division, asserting that the dichotomy is the invention of politicians and pundits exaggerating differences in order to mobilise their bases.

Survey researcher Celinda Lake asserts that there is actually a “great middle” of the American public, some sixty percent, that is neither muddled nor indifferent. This new “silent majority”, she asserts, is more pragmatic than ideological and more interested in answers than arguments. Many believe that the answers don’t belong solely to one side and are most likely to come from a hybrid synthesis of the best elements in each of many perspectives. They consider the common good even as they pursue their personal interests. Indeed, some don’t even see the two as contradictory.

Rediscovering shared values and aspirations will not result from mere good intentions. Many an appeal to “come together” has fallen victim to a verbal cold war that richly rewards rage over reason. Extracting the venom will require a more tough- minded approach that posits the acceptance of differences as a precondition for candour and convergence across the divides. It also means challenging the odd assumption that getting along should just come naturally. Building relationships is a rigorous discipline that requires learning very specific skills. It takes far more tools and knowledge to build a bridge than to blow one up.

Over the past three decades, conflict resolution specialists have developed a range of mediating techniques in the “greenhouse” environments of social, civil, and international conflicts, labour and management disputes, communities, and schools. The most effective of these tools are now being applied in the open air of unrehearsed mass media and live meetings to give ordinary citizens the opportunity to utilise these skills.

With names like Search for Common Ground, Public Conversations Project, Let’s Talk America, and BothAnd, these initiatives all seek to shift the public discourse from an either/or paradigm that assumes only one side can be right to a both/and perspective that assumes answers come from many sources. All seek to combine the best elements in multiple approaches to produce a creative synthesis.

Rather than settle for a lowest common denominator process that produces an unsatisfying compromise, these initiatives seek the highest common denominator that meets the essential needs though not every desire of all involved. BothAnd (www.bothand.org), a joint initiative of the Harvard Global Negotiation Project and the Mainstream Media Project, uses the acrimonious medium of talk radio as a laboratory for “convergence conversations” between principled progressives and traditional conservatives who share a concern about the destructive divisions in American politics and a common devotion to constitutional rights.

As currently framed, the war on terror is the ultimate either/or paradigm: “You’re either with us or against us.” But this frame has divided Americans both from one another and the rest of the world in ways that could prove fatal to the country’s future if it does not soon reframe the struggle in more inclusive ways. A different kind of Middle America – both principled and pragmatic, strengthened rather than weakened by its differences — could bring fresh energy to a paralysed body politic by creating a vibrant new process outside the dead zones that are the White House and Congress today. By combining the best of many perspectives into creative, effective syntheses, they may yet produce hybrid solutions with the vigour to withstand our all-too- human fractiousness. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
ARCATA, California, Nov 1 2004 (IPS)

In the near term, the re-selection of Team Bush would seem to give neoconservatives free rein to pursue their imperial dreams. But a host of factors beyond their control threatens not only to slow their momentum but to bring the empire to an earlier end than even its opponents assume, writes Mark Sommer, who directs the US-based Mainstream Media Project and hosts an award-winning syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities.\’\’ The crux of the American empire\’s vulnerability is its a wilful and increasingly desperate denial of facts and a blindness to the limits to its own power. Some US analysts already doubt that the world will tolerate another \’\’American century\’\’ and see a gradual waning of American power over the next thirty years as other great powers like the EU, China, and India challenge US dominance. But the American imperial project may not even last that long. The pace at which negative trends are moving both within and towards the American empire could greatly accelerate this time-line. Wealthy and powerful as it still appears, the Bush regime is pursuing self-destructive policies that together could create \’\’the perfect storm\’\’ in a dynamic not unlike the collapse of the Soviet empire.

In the near term, the re-selection of Team Bush would seem to give neoconservatives free rein to pursue their imperial dreams. But a host of factors beyond their control threatens not only to slow their momentum but to bring the empire to an earlier end than even its opponents assume.

The November elections only deepened the profound divisions that now run through American politics. These contradictions could fatally weaken US resolve to prosecute its plans, as they ultimately did in Vietnam. The Iraqi insurgency is only intensifying the determination of the opponents of empire, who this time come equally from the US right and left as well as from abroad, to bring a halt to what they see as a self-destructive pursuit of unattainable dreams of permanent global dominance.

In its second term the Bush regime is likely to experience still more intense isolation from the rest of the world, becoming a superpariah among nations. And with its ever-growing financial costs, the accelerated pursuit of empire will devastate a US economy that has already sabotaged its future by funnelling the lion’s share of its resources — human, financial, and material — into non-productive military spending, unsustainable consumption, regressive tax cuts, and unprecedented corporate and state corruption. Unlike their more restrained conservative predecessors, the tiny coterie of neoconservatives who currently hold sway in the White House speak without embarrassment of their imperial ambitions.

Manifestos of ”manifest destiny”, updated to ”benign hegemony”, flow from the American Enterprise Institute, Wall Street Journal, and Fox TV. Some openly court comparisons with imperial rome, ignoring the inevitable tag-line ”decline and fall”. In the article ”In praise of American Empire”, Dinesh D’Souza asserts that US is ”the most magnanimous imperial power ever”. and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment rejoices that ”the benevolent hegemony exercised by the US is good for a vast portion of the world’s population,” a premise not likely endorsed by a vast portion of that populace.

The crux of the American empire’s vulnerability is a wilful and increasingly desperate denial of facts and a blindness to the limits to its own power. Some US analysts already doubt that the world will tolerate another ”American century” and see a gradual waning of American power over the next thirty years as other great powers like the EU, China, and India challenge US dominance.

But the American imperial project may not even last that long. The pace at which negative trends are moving both within and towards the American empire could greatly accelerate this time-line. Wealthy and powerful as it still appears, the Bush regime is pursuing self-destructive policies that together could create ”the perfect storm” in a dynamic not unlike the collapse of the Soviet empire:

– Compulsively lying to itself, its own people, and the world: Deliberate deception not only blinds the regime to the consequences of its actions but erodes the credibility of its professed intentions, fatally undermining confidence in its leadership among its own people and the world.

– Dividing its own people against one another: Bush strategist Karl Rove has proven devastatingly effective at inciting the partisan rancour that wins or steals elections but in the process also devastates national unity. These divisions extend deep into the conservative Republican base. As the empire attenuates in Iraq and beyond, potent opposition builds from within the US military and among traditional conservatives wary of foreign entanglements and intrusive state power.

– Betraying the values and preferences of the American people: Contrary to what most Americans and foreign observers assume, in-depth polling by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the University of Maryland Programme on International Policy Attitudes reveals that a majority of Americans, including many traditional conservatives, supports international treaties and institutions and multilateral approaches to foreign policy in much the same proportions as Western Europeans. Curiously, most erroneously believe that the Bush regime currently pursues such policies. Most also erroneously believe that most of their compatriots don’t support such enlightened policies.

– Bankrupting the US economy: Even the wealthiest nation on earth can’t long sustain an economy based on haemorrhaging national, corporate and personal debt and soaring trade deficits. One of the first casualties may be the dollar itself. As debt suppresses demand and stalls economic recovery, the US dollar may lose its premier status as the world’s reserve currency to the rapidly rising euro.

– Destroying US ”soft power”: While the cultural influence of ”Brand America” remains formidable, anti-American sentiment is already reducing US corporate profits abroad. It’s becoming as fashionable to be anti-American as it once was to be an American look-alike. Journalist Seymour Hersh predicts, ”It’s going to be a mantra not to buy American.” Having defied world opinion in Iraq and elsewhere, the Bush regime now finds that foreign leaders and peoples less intimidated by its words and actions. They are starting to implement global accords like the Kyoto Treaty even without US participation.

Like many Americans, I view the decline of American empire not as a defeat but as a prospective victory for the great democratic tradition that originated on American soil. The urgent question for the rest of us is how to manage this implosion as a process of deliberate devolution so that its reversion to a democratic republic does the least harm to all concerned. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
BERKELEY, Oct 1 2004 (IPS)

If oil lubricates the global economy, its increasing scarcity is driving the development of new technologies, writes Mark Sommer, directs the US-based Mainstream Media Project and is host of award-winning syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities. In this article, Sommer writes that with crude oil prices soaring and turmoil in oil-rich regions, transition technologies like electric-gas hybrid vehicles are starting to look like a cheap price to pay for salvation. But while current demand for hybrids is rising rapidly, it could yet collapse if its early promise is not followed up by auto makers with major expansion of production capability to meet rising demand, increased R&D to refine the technology, and a wider range of vehicles and models to meet varied user needs. In the case of hybrids, the customer is literally in the driver\’s seat. If we insist on fuel-efficient vehicles and forcefully address our demands to both auto makers and government regulators, we\’ll get them sooner rather than later. And by increasing sales volume, we will drive prices down to achieve mass market affordability. In the process, we will save more than money. We\’ll save ourselves, the author states.

If oil lubricates the global economy, its increasing scarcity is driving the development of new technologies. With crude oil prices pushing past the milestone marker of USD50/barrel, increasing political turmoil in oil-rich regions from the Middle East to Nigeria and Venezuela (and increasing dependence on OPEC supplies), and perfect storms stampeding through the Caribbean and Florida like the Four Housemen of the Apocalypse, transition technologies like electric-gas hybrid vehicles are starting to look like a cheap price to pay for salvation.

Leading the race to bring hybrids to the highways is Toyota, whose Prius saw US sales double in just the first half of 2004. While the first hybrids, from Honda and Toyota, appeared on the market in 1997, they did not immediately catch on. Just 120,000 Prius’s have been sold in the past six years. But this year alone Toyota expects to sell 130,000 hybrids and 300,000 a year by 2006. Running its single Prius production facility 24/7, Toyota plans to open a second soon in Japan and perhaps another in the United States. Meanwhile, Ford is scrambling on board with its Escape, the first fuel-efficient model in its ”E” series of SUVs otherwise best characterised as Ford Excess.

In a global economy that takes pride in its responsiveness to consumer demand, prospective hybrid purchasers express frustration that car makers failed to anticipate demand and invest in adequate production capacity. As one wag put it, their intelligence must have come from the same agencies that failed to predict 9/11 and the absence of weapons mass destruction in Iraq. Detroit’s Big Three auto makers have never much liked the prospect of electric vehicles and have consistently impeded their development as a threat to an oil-based transportation system.

Pressured by stricter pollution and fuel efficiency standards, Detroit has been slow to invest in the essential up-front R&D while Japanese car makers leapt ahead. Until recently, the Big Three have put little into marketing Japanese hybrids in US showrooms because they make less on them than on their vastly more profitable SUVs. Wedded to supersized muscle wagons like the modified military assault vehicle, the ”Hummer”, Detroit seems not to have realised the light has changed. And it appears destined to repeat its costly mistake in wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo when North American consumers turned en masse from Detroit’s winged chariots to Japan’s fuel-frugal compacts.

Not all hybrids are alike, however. The Toyota Prius and Ford Escape are ”full” hybrids with technologies that take complete advantage of the technology, more than doubling auto fleet fuel efficiency to 55 miles per gallon and reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90 percent. Other vehicles marketed as hybrids, like the Honda Civic, are classified as ”mild” since they are incapable of driving solely on electric power, as does the Prius up to 15 mpg. Still others are dubbed ”muscle hybrids” because they use hybrid technology not to reduce fuel consumption but solely to boost peak performance. Consumers seeking not only to save fuel but the earth as well are advised to determine the difference before buying.

Hybrids are not an end-point but a transition technology on the road to a long-term replacement for the ‘infernal’ combustion engine. If fully utilised, conventional technologies could quickly boost the average fuel economy of the passenger fleet to 40 mpg, though a lingering North American cultural obsession with conspicuous consumption continues to impede implementation of these advances. Over the longer term, hydrogen fuel cell technologies are widely considered the best bet since they altogether eliminate oil-based engines. But they are ten to twenty years from mass production and continued use of conventional vehicles for years past the introduction of new technologies will slow cumulative gains in fuel efficiency and pollution control. With worldwide car ownership and travel set to explode during these decades, any gains could be largely offset by increasing mileage on the world’s streets and highways.

Given these constraints, hybrid technologies, if rapidly adopted, could bring near-term relief. Since their electric motors share many features with hydrogen fuel cell technologies, the development of hybrids will advance the longer-term research agenda. But while current demand for hybrids is rising rapidly, it could yet collapse if its early promise is not followed up by auto makers with major expansion of production capability to meet rising demand, increased R&D to refine the technology, and a wider range of vehicles and models to meet varied user needs. In addition, governments need to make large institutional hybrid purchases for their own fleets and offer tax breaks to purchasers to reward them for choosing an alternative that reduce the prohibitive costs societies will ultimately pay for climate change, air pollution, foreign wars, and ever-rising gas prices if they delay the switch to more efficient technologies.

In the case of hybrids, the customer is literally in the driver’s seat. If we insist on fuel-efficient vehicles and forcefully address our demands to both auto makers and government regulators, we’ll get them sooner rather than later. And by increasing sales volume, we will drive prices down to achieve mass market affordability. In the process, we will save more than money. We’ll save ourselves. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
BERKELEY, Oct 1 2004 (IPS)

If oil lubricates the global economy, its increasing scarcity is driving the development of new technologies, writes Mark Sommer, directs the US-based Mainstream Media Project and is host of award-winning syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities. In this article, Sommer writes that with crude oil prices soaring and turmoil in oil-rich regions, transition technologies like electric-gas hybrid vehicles are starting to look like a cheap price to pay for salvation. But while current demand for hybrids is rising rapidly, it could yet collapse if its early promise is not followed up by auto makers with major expansion of production capability to meet rising demand, increased R&D to refine the technology, and a wider range of vehicles and models to meet varied user needs. In the case of hybrids, the customer is literally in the driver\’s seat. If we insist on fuel-efficient vehicles and forcefully address our demands to both auto makers and government regulators, we\’ll get them sooner rather than later. And by increasing sales volume, we will drive prices down to achieve mass market affordability. In the process, we will save more than money. We\’ll save ourselves, the author states.

If oil lubricates the global economy, its increasing scarcity is driving the development of new technologies. With crude oil prices pushing past the milestone marker of USD50/barrel, increasing political turmoil in oil-rich regions from the Middle East to Nigeria and Venezuela (and increasing dependence on OPEC supplies), and perfect storms stampeding through the Caribbean and Florida like the Four Housemen of the Apocalypse, transition technologies like electric-gas hybrid vehicles are starting to look like a cheap price to pay for salvation.

Leading the race to bring hybrids to the highways is Toyota, whose Prius saw US sales double in just the first half of 2004. While the first hybrids, from Honda and Toyota, appeared on the market in 1997, they did not immediately catch on. Just 120,000 Prius’s have been sold in the past six years. But this year alone Toyota expects to sell 130,000 hybrids and 300,000 a year by 2006. Running its single Prius production facility 24/7, Toyota plans to open a second soon in Japan and perhaps another in the United States. Meanwhile, Ford is scrambling on board with its Escape, the first fuel-efficient model in its ”E” series of SUVs otherwise best characterised as Ford Excess.

In a global economy that takes pride in its responsiveness to consumer demand, prospective hybrid purchasers express frustration that car makers failed to anticipate demand and invest in adequate production capacity. As one wag put it, their intelligence must have come from the same agencies that failed to predict 9/11 and the absence of weapons mass destruction in Iraq. Detroit’s Big Three auto makers have never much liked the prospect of electric vehicles and have consistently impeded their development as a threat to an oil-based transportation system.

Pressured by stricter pollution and fuel efficiency standards, Detroit has been slow to invest in the essential up-front R&D while Japanese car makers leapt ahead. Until recently, the Big Three have put little into marketing Japanese hybrids in US showrooms because they make less on them than on their vastly more profitable SUVs. Wedded to supersized muscle wagons like the modified military assault vehicle, the ”Hummer”, Detroit seems not to have realised the light has changed. And it appears destined to repeat its costly mistake in wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo when North American consumers turned en masse from Detroit’s winged chariots to Japan’s fuel-frugal compacts.

Not all hybrids are alike, however. The Toyota Prius and Ford Escape are ”full” hybrids with technologies that take complete advantage of the technology, more than doubling auto fleet fuel efficiency to 55 miles per gallon and reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90 percent. Other vehicles marketed as hybrids, like the Honda Civic, are classified as ”mild” since they are incapable of driving solely on electric power, as does the Prius up to 15 mpg. Still others are dubbed ”muscle hybrids” because they use hybrid technology not to reduce fuel consumption but solely to boost peak performance. Consumers seeking not only to save fuel but the earth as well are advised to determine the difference before buying.

Hybrids are not an end-point but a transition technology on the road to a long-term replacement for the ‘infernal’ combustion engine. If fully utilised, conventional technologies could quickly boost the average fuel economy of the passenger fleet to 40 mpg, though a lingering North American cultural obsession with conspicuous consumption continues to impede implementation of these advances. Over the longer term, hydrogen fuel cell technologies are widely considered the best bet since they altogether eliminate oil-based engines. But they are ten to twenty years from mass production and continued use of conventional vehicles for years past the introduction of new technologies will slow cumulative gains in fuel efficiency and pollution control. With worldwide car ownership and travel set to explode during these decades, any gains could be largely offset by increasing mileage on the world’s streets and highways.

Given these constraints, hybrid technologies, if rapidly adopted, could bring near-term relief. Since their electric motors share many features with hydrogen fuel cell technologies, the development of hybrids will advance the longer-term research agenda. But while current demand for hybrids is rising rapidly, it could yet collapse if its early promise is not followed up by auto makers with major expansion of production capability to meet rising demand, increased R&D to refine the technology, and a wider range of vehicles and models to meet varied user needs. In addition, governments need to make large institutional hybrid purchases for their own fleets and offer tax breaks to purchasers to reward them for choosing an alternative that reduce the prohibitive costs societies will ultimately pay for climate change, air pollution, foreign wars, and ever-rising gas prices if they delay the switch to more efficient technologies.

In the case of hybrids, the customer is literally in the driver’s seat. If we insist on fuel-efficient vehicles and forcefully address our demands to both auto makers and government regulators, we’ll get them sooner rather than later. And by increasing sales volume, we will drive prices down to achieve mass market affordability. In the process, we will save more than money. We’ll save ourselves. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
BERKELEY, Aug 1 2004 (IPS)

Renewable energy advocates say that wind offers the best near-term option to reduce the demand for oil, coal and natural gas, writes Mark Sommer, host of award-winning syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities. In this analysis for IPS, the author writes that recent technological breakthroughs have greatly increased the efficiency of wind turbines, driving the price per kilowatt/hour down to levels competitive with oil. And if the hidden costs and subsidies incurred by oil and coal were factored into the comparison, the true cost of wind energy would be far lower. The foreign wars waged, the occupations and military bases built to protect supply lines, the degradation of air, water, and human health make the true cost of a barrel of crude not 40 but 200 dollars, or more. Yet for all the promise of wind power, its rapid development is still thwarted by numerous obstacles, which are less technological than political. The multinational companies that dominate the energy industry and national energy policies today are well aware that oil, coal, and natural gas are finite resources but are determined to squeeze the largest profits they can before switching to other sources. Their favoured alternative is not wind power but nuclear power.

As war, terror, pollution, and increasing scarcity drive the price of oil inexorably upward, politicians and energy producers scan the horizon for near-term alternatives. Solar, biomass, and geothermal energy, ocean currents: all could contribute something, though too little in the near term to substantially reduce the rapidly rising risks of continuing dependence on oil– and the dominance of the oligarchies fossil fuels have financed.

But a new breeze is stirring. Renewable energy advocates say that wind offers the best near-term option to reduce the demand for oil, coal and natural gas. Recent technological breakthroughs have greatly increased the efficiency of wind turbines, driving the price per kilowatt/hour down to levels competitive with oil. And if the hidden costs and subsidies incurred by oil and coal were factored into the comparison, the true cost of wind energy would be far lower. The foreign wars waged, the occupations and military bases built and maintained to protect supply lines, the degradation of air, water, and human health make the true cost of a barrel of crude not 40 but 200 dollars, or more.

Worldwide, wind’s energy potential dwarfs that of fossil fuels, and unlike oil, gas and coal, its supply is inexhaustible. But to date a tiny fraction of that potential is being exploited. At the end of 2003, there were 39,000 megawatts of wind capacity being generated worldwide, producing as much power as a dozen large nuclear power plants.

In percentage terms, wind is the fastest-growing power source. According to US Energy Department estimates, wind could supply more than fifteen times the energy from all sources consumed by the entire world each year. In addition to reducing the industrial world’s all-consuming addiction to fossil fuels, wind could bring electrical power to two billion people in the developing world who currently see no prospect of utility service. Not least of all, wind could enable rapidly industrialising nations like China, which is increasingly burning low-grade coal, to avoid poisoning its people and environment by instead taking the ”soft energy” path.

Western Europe has seen the most aggressive development of wind resources. Germany leads the way with a third of worldwide wind production and tiny Denmark generates 20 percent of its national energy budget from wind, producing five times as much as China. But even in the oil-greased politics of the United States, the very regions that have long depended on oil and gas are seeing a passionate grassroots demand for a shift to wind as the only way to move beyond the boom-bust economic cycle that has made ghost towns of once-thriving communities.

Yet for all the promise of wind power, its rapid development is still thwarted by numerous obstacles, which are less technological than political. Fossil fuels still hold a hammerlock on global economics and politics. The multinational companies that dominate the energy industry and national energy policies today are well aware that oil, coal, and natural gas are finite and rapidly- declining resources but are determined to squeeze the largest profits they can before switching to other sources. Their favoured alternative is not wind power but nuclear power, another highly hazardous technology.

Some, like BP and Shell, are starting to invest in wind farms, but these are more like insurance policies or public relations promos than serious shifts of corporate resources. Their collusion with politicians, auto makers, and a vast industrial infrastructure and their profit-driven mindset all militate against a rapid policy shift.

With global warfare over, dwindling oil supplies, and global warming from greenhouse gases, turning to wind is a no-brainer. Yet it won’t happen anytime soon unless both individual and institutional consumers clearly and consistently demand that their governments commit themselves to a time line to bring wind farms on-line on a massive scale in the next 25 years. Under the thumb of oil interests, the US projects wind power to produce 5 percent of national needs by 2020, up from just 0.4 percent today — but a concerted push could make that 20 percent by 2030.

To be fully effective in reducing the multiple threats facing us, however, this shift must be worldwide and must include subsidies from a source other than cash-strapped national treasuries. The most appropriate funding source would be a surcharge on all oil and coal production that would both generate large amounts of revenue for renewable energy development and encourage conservation of declining and environmentally destructive resources. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Mark Sommer and - -
BERKELEY, May 1 2004 (IPS)

Alarmed by the unrelenting destruction of the world\’s remaining old growth trees and frustrated by unresponsive and ineffectual government regulators, ancient-forest activists are turning to market-based strategies to pressure leading paper producers and retailers to shift to recycled and tree-free paper products, writes Mark Sommer, director of the Mainstream Media Project and host of award-winning syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities.\’\’ Over the past few years, the Paper Campaign, a US-based grassroots coalition of environmental groups, has targeted the world\’s top three paper products retailers in a concerted effort to shift market signals. In November, 2002 Staples announced its commitment to rapidly phase out all wood and paper products made from endangered forests, achieve 50 percent post-consumer content within two years, and phase out all products with 100 percent virgin wood fibre. Using recycled rather than virgin wood-fibre papers is one step in the right direction, but paper can be and is being made economically from numerous other fibres besides trees. The most promising of new options is kenaf, a fast-growing, single-season crop that can reach 18 feet in several months under optimal conditions and can be manufactured by existing paper mills.

Alarmed by the unrelenting destruction of the world’s remaining old growth trees and frustrated by unresponsive and ineffectual government regulators, ancient-forest activists are turning to market-based strategies to pressure and persuade leading paper producers and retailers to shift to recycled and tree-free paper products.

Worldwide, paper production consumes nearly half of the total harvest of forests, most often for single-use packaging, newspapers and magazines, and office copiers. One in six of these trees grows in ancient stands hundreds of years old, from the great boreal forests of Canada and Siberia, the temperate forests of the US Southeast, and tropical forests in Indonesia, the Amazon and elsewhere.

With 95 percent of its own old growth already harvested, the US is now turning to virgin forests in the developing world, where 80 percent has already been logged.

Paper production also consumes vast amounts of energy (as the fifth highest industrial user worldwide and second highest in the US) and water (where it reduces supplies for human consumption) and generates 40 percent of all municipal solid waste. Ironically, the promised ”paper-less” computer age has not only failed to reduce the demand for paper products but has actually increased it.

Worldwide, demand for paper products is slated to increase substantially. Given rising demand, declining forest reserves, diminishing species, and deteriorating environmental quality, paper and ancient forest activists have chosen to harness the power of the purchase to persuade leading paper producers and retailers to reduce their use of virgin trees and, indeed, of wood-based paper products altogether. Their shrewd use of a range of boycotting and ”buycotting” strategies is not only proving effective in transforming the paper industry but is providing a model with potentially broad relevance to other issues. Their market-based approach is a deft blend of public protests, consumer boycotts, paid ads and free media coverage, and back-channel negotiations with leading paper companies where activists both brandish threats of bad publicity and lost revenue and offer rewards of comparative advantage to those who ”do the right thing”, encouraging a ”race to the top” instead of the bottom.

Over the past few years, the Paper Campaign, a US-based grassroots coalition of environmental groups, has targeted the world’s top three paper products retailers in a concerted effort to shift market signals. Focusing first on Staples, the world’s largest paper retailer, they mounted 600 demonstrations and garnered mainstream media attention. Initially resistant to their pleas and whipsawed by competing demands from its supplier, International Paper, Staples’ senior management eventually accepted an invitation from environmentalists to fly over the Cumberland Plateau, the last great ancient forest in the US Southeast.

Moved by the devastation wrought by logging and the beauty of the remaining virgin stands, Staples came to the table with a heightened commitment to reach a settlement. In November 2002 Staples announced its commitment to rapidly phase out all wood and paper products made from endangered forests, achieve 50 percent post-consumer content within two years, and phase out all products with 100 percent virgin wood fibre. Sixteen months later, Office Depot announced a commitment to the same set of standards.

Using recycled rather than virgin wood-fibre papers is one step in the right direction, but paper can be and is being made economically from numerous other fibres besides trees. Ultimately, in order to meet rising demand for paper products while preserving the ecological diversity of native forests, we will need to shift to agricultural substitutes for trees. Bamboo, hemp, rice and banana have traditionally been used to make high quality papers. Indeed, trees have only been used for paper since the 1850’s. For nearly 2,000 years, paper was made from silk, then rags, fishing nets, and parchment, all recycled.

But the most promising of new options is kenaf, a fast-growing, single-season crop that can reach 18 feet in several months under optimal conditions, can be manufactured by existing paper mills with modest modifications, and carries none of the environmental burdens of tree-based paper products. Kenaf proponents claim the plant could become the basis for a tree-free paper industry.

For kenaf pioneers, however, it is still a high-risk venture. Lacking the capital to create economies of scale that would drive down production costs, their papers still sell at premium prices in a marketplace where consumers, unaware of long-term costs, still gravitate to the cheapest prices.

The thought that the last grand stands of ancient forests are being used for toilet paper and other disposable uses seems somehow beneath us as a species. Paper has exercised a large unrecognized influence on the course of history as a primary source of ideas, information and education. Now we are challenged to apply the very gift of this education to transform the way we make paper so the forests on which we depend for our material and spiritual sustenance can themselves be sustained for generations to come. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt: