Coral Reef Meltdown

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  The past few days I’ve been thinking about Dr. James Speth’s call for “civic unreasonableness” and NASA’s Dr. James Hansen’s appeal for scientists to drop “objectivity” from muting their involvement, communicating to the public the impacts of global warming.

Counterpunch: The politics of colony collapse

To Bee or Not to Bee?

Colony collapse disorder sounds so elementally human. A recent 60 Minutes segment featured the disappearing bees. Too bad bees can’t talk. Come back, bees! You’re part of the hive that humans have made of the planet. I was thinking about bees last night, driving and at the same time looking at my brightly lit, new cell phone named for a fruiting tree pollinated by bees.

Counterpunch: The ghosts of the past

Gore Still Lost Florida

For his work to highlight global warming-ridiculed by George W. Bush leading up to the 2000 election-Al Gore just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Well done, citizen Gore.Candidate Gore still lost Florida.

It was an historic blunder of proportions one inadequately grasps for tools to measure. Still–notwithstanding the Nobel Peace Prize–it is important to remember history.

Counterpunch: Genuflecting to China

The Meaning of Mattel’s Strange Apology

 Mattel apologizes to China and to the Chinese people for safety lapses which resulted in the recall of 21 million Chinese-made toys in recent months. Excuse me?

 

Does anyone else feel a backlash rising against China, that is fundamentally different from the trade complaints of the past and skirmishes over the value of the Chinese yuan?

Counterpunch: Who will buy my house?

What the Sale of the Carlyle Group Tells Us About the Collapse of the Housing Market

Would someone from Dubai or China please come to Miami and buy my home?

This seems a reasonable plea, given this morning’s news that the big private equity firm, (in which President George HW Bush made his fortune after leaving the White House)-the Carlyle Group–sold 7.5 percent of itself to the United Arab Emirates. 19.9 percent of NASDAQ is being sold to Dubai, that couldn’t get our ports but getting the platform on which US equities trade. China, discontent with the value of its foreign currency investments, has set up its own fund to invest directly, not just in US debt, the value of which is declining to record lows against other currencies.

Since no one else is going to buy my house, I invite foreign economic ministers to spend a few nights with me in Miami -we’ll put you up, give you the keys to the Toyota hybrid so you can drive around and see the value we’ve created from the sunshine state.

Of Elvis and Rachel — and turning points

May 27 marked the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, who died at a young 56. And soon enough, the August week will arrive to mark the passing of Elvis Presley who died 30 years ago and at an even younger age, 42.

Granted, on the surface there’s not much to connect these two characters.

Elvis, with his open hips, made teen girls think about biology. Rachel, with her award-winning writing on the environment, made the whole chemistry industry hopping mad.

At the same time Rachel was putting the final touches on Silent Spring, Elvis was in Florida shooting a movie in Yankeetown, north of Tampa, where he paid a visit to one of Florida’s most famous springs, Weeki Wachee.

Under the surface is where the spring waters join Rachel, Elvis and us.

In 1941, Rachel Carson published her first book, Under the Sea, establishing her reputation as a prescient writer able to connect for a popular audience how we are connected, ourselves, to nature that shapes us. Elvis was just a child.

Twenty years later, Weeki Wachee, on U.S. Highway 19, was one of Florida’s premier tourist attractions. Elvis was at the height of his career and television had just started casting its net wide into the world of color.

Weeki Wachee was one of the most magical sights nature had to offer within easy distance of a broadcast station. A few years before Elvis’ visit, ABC Broadcasting purchased the spring and its attractions. Not too long after, Disney would make U.S. 19 and its attractions obsolete. (In the 1990s, Disney purchased ABC.)

Today Weeki Wachee lives on, in memories as splendid and youthful as the young Elvis. But in 1961, nothing could have been further from the mass culture fermenting at Weeki Wachee than Rachel Carson’s dire warnings.

Carson had already won a National Book Award for The Sea Around Us. Were she alive today, she would have been equally captivated by what has happened to Weeki Wachee.

The spring and its waters are murky with algae, a symbol of both Florida’s past and present: the entire peninsula of Florida is swimming in a sea of nitrogen pollution, measured in parts per billion.

In Time magazine’s portrait of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century, Peter Mathiessen (a writer who brilliantly chronicled Florida’s natural past) wrote about the hostility Carson faced with the publication of Silent Spring: “A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid — indeed the whole chemical industry — duly supported by the Agricultural Department as well as the more cautious in the media (Time’s reviewer deplored Carson’s ‘oversimplifications and downright errors’.)”

Elvis lives on, at Graceland and in the hearts of millions of aging baby boomers, and also in “sightings” that may have more to do with recapturing what we have lost in ourselves than Elvis, himself.

Today we can look back from Elvis, Rachel and Weeki Wachee and understand that the nature of commerce that pollutes the environment is grounded in changeable ownership.

The same motivation that compelled bitter hostility against Rachel Carson, despite her broad popular appeal, is just as evident in the corporations organized to oppose mandatory measures to combat global warming.

And that is no different than our own state’s failure to impose measures to stop nitrogen pollution — from lawn fertilizers, from dairies and farms, from cesspits and stormwater runoff from roadways.

The publication of Silent Spring was a turning point in public awareness and demand for change in federal laws protecting the environment.

Today, the Bush White House is attempting damage control in advance of a summit of world leaders on climate change. Some of our allies, Germany in particular, have a big head start on adapting energy policies to a new economy.

Is it any wonder that much of the world views America as a nation that is king, mostly, in its own imagination?

We still love Elvis for what he was, but Rachel Carson gave us a glimpse of what we must become: caretakers for what our careless touch can ruin.

In Congress, a Republican senator from Oklahoma has effectively blocked a measure to honor Rachel Carson, on the 100th anniversary of her birth.

If Congress won’t, then there would be nothing more timely than for the chemical industry to reverse course and acknowledge the contribution Rachel Carson made when it was youthful and filled with promise.

A salty future? Everglades restoration is key to state’s survival

If you can see through the smoke of forest fires, consider the experiment of putting 18 million people, plus visitors, on a narrow peninsula — Florida — in the midst of an historic drought.

Soon enough, your eyes should stop itching. What should bother you more is what you can’t see: the effect of drought on shallow-water aquifers serving Floridians with drinking water.

Here is the problem for a state built on limestone: If the aquifer empties, salt water rushes in. A little home experiment can show most of what you need to know.

Fill a shallow plate with a film of water. That would be the bay, the gulf or the ocean.

Now wring a sponge dry. Call it drought.

That would be the Biscayne aquifer. The holes of the sponge are not so different from the geological formation beneath our feet, porous and filled with occlusions and voids that allow the water below ground to migrate the same way it does above ground.

If you have a good imagination, picture a straw pulling water from the sponge. That is a drinking-water well, and represents billions of dollars of pipes and pumps, serving the showers and sinks, the washers and sprinklers and farmland of one of the nation’s fastest-growing states.

The end of the experiment is simple. You put the semi-dry sponge in the plate with a little water and what happens is that the sea wicks into the aquifer.

The most serious consequence of historic drought conditions in Florida is the destruction of drinking-water wells by saltwater intrusion.

It is a really, really big problem, and if this drought goes on much longer, it will be news around the world.

If you have a freshwater swimming pool, you are probably aware that you can’t recirculate chloride in the same pool system. The pump may not be designed to handle the corrosive effects of salt.

Also, at a time when reducing energy demand is urgently needed, the cost or removing salt from municipal drinking-water wells and treatment facilities is untold, unfunded billions of dollars.

There is a further problem with saltwater intrusion, noted by environmentalists who have shouted themselves hoarse over the issue:

It is one thing to know about pollution on the surface where you can see it and take measures (one hopes) to avoid it.

It is quite another thing to wreck an underground aquifer you rely on for the only substance you can’t live without: drinking water.

Are water managers worried about that happening?

Yes.

Ever since Florida was settled, engineering skills have been applied to the draining of wetlands to make the land habitable.

Through the housing boom, elected officials pressed water managers to use more engineering and more industrial processes to wring the maximum productivity from Florida’s aquifers.

If you looked closely, you could see the effects on the ground and it made you want to cry: vast de-watered expanses of Florida, underlying water tables sucked dry by crop irrigation or municipalities.

It was only two years ago that water managers, frightened by a series of dangerous hurricanes, opened control gates to lower the water level of Lake Okeechobee and dumped billions of gallons of polluted fresh water, causing massive ecological destruction along both Florida coasts.

What does the current drought tell us, coming so quickly and so dramatically on the heels of overabundance?

One, that population pressure has removed the elasticity from demand and supply — extraordinary in a state that received more than 50 inches of average rainfall per year and wastes most of it in order for America’s most heavily subsidized crop, sugar, to be profitably grown south of Florida’s liquid heart.

Second, that restoration of the Everglades is more of a necessity than many people ever expected would arise from its benefits to nature.

There are a few critics who argue that global warming will make tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on the Everglades a waste.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If we don’t take care of the interior part of the ecosystem — the Everglades — and make sure it is full of clean, fresh water at the right time of year, there won’t be drinking water at the edges.

Wherever those coastal edges are, in an age of global warming, that’s where most people will be.

Unless, of course, Florida turns into a pillar of salt.

What happens if Virgin Islands’ coral reefs disappear? Imagine climate fundamentally at odds with world economy.

In many of his plays, William Shakespeare used natural disturbances to mirror the transformations of human character. I wonder what he would have made of global warming, a scalable threat to humanity as the Black Death was at that time.

Snorkeling in the Virgin Islands last week, I marveled how the decline of shallow-water reefs is funneling more boats into spots where, by virtue of proximity to cool currents, reef patches still appear functional.

Floating on the surface, swimmers are always transfixed by clouds of blue tangs, lurking barracuda, jacks and yellowtail snapper, seemingly oblivious to how, on the three-dimensional plane of time and space, tens of thousands of years of evolution are breaking apart.

What happens if the coral reefs completely disappear?

People go to places because of the attributes of climate. They get on planes in cold Ohio to cruise ships in Florida to sail to pellucid waters of the Caribbean. On ski lifts in Colorado, for deep and untracked powder snow. Beaches, from Captiva to India.

If the reason people travel to a particular destination dissolves, will local economies survive? Then, climate change may force residents away, too.

It is happening to Inuit villages in the Arctic north, which have been forced to relocate because of rising tides and erosion, and on some South Pacific Islands.

Shakespeare never wrote, “Nature bats last,” nor did he anticipate how the inventions of the Industrial Revolution would turn hostile. (That would wait for William Blake.) Certainly, Shakespeare would not be surprised.

“I personally have done a bunch of ice climbs around the world that no longer exist,” Yvon Chouinard told The Associated Press recently.

Chouinard, a renowned climber and surfer and founder of Patagonia Inc., an outdoor clothing and gear company that champions the environment, added, “I mean, I was aghast at the change.”

We are all aghast, but we are also funneling into airports, departure gates and airplanes, seamlessly contributing to a world economy that is fundamentally at odds with the climate.

The tables are turning: The subtext of the second report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that in the not-so-distant future the climate will be fundamentally at odds with the world economy.

We are getting signals of this, already. They are buried in rapidly escalating insurance rates in Florida. There is inflationary price pressure on food crops like corn. Part of the reason is the rising demand from Asia, and part, from governmental plans to use corn to fuel solutions to our energy crisis.

But the biggest part of inflationary price pressure will be climate.

If corn can’t be planted reliably because of extreme weather in early spring, or extreme drought in summer, Americans may have enough trouble feeding ourselves — never mind supplying ethanol plants.

Perhaps European Alpine regions can convert to non-winter economies at scale — leaving multibillion-dollar industries like skiing to wither on the vine. There was grass growing in Davos, Switzerland, in mid-December.

But what happens in a place like the Virgin Islands?

In Brussels, over the global climate change report one of the points of disagreement among the world’s diplomats and scientists was whether to state an 80 percent as opposed to a 90 percent certainty that global warming is due to man-made impacts.

But a similar debate whether 80 percent or 90 percent of St. Thomas’ economic activities are threatened by global warming is immaterial.

We already know the answer: Already in the Virgin Islands, every necessity is imported from the mainland.

It is easy enough to say that the risk of global warming is catastrophic. And for those who don’t believe it, to attribute doom and gloom instead of facing up to the opportunities for adaptation.

The seamless operation of the world economy is absolutely dependent on a stable climate. Our reward for taking the risk to drastically reduce carbon-dioxide emissions is, simply, a stable economic environment in which mankind will soldier on.

World markets do seem to be adjusting to the need for a new energy future — but what the glaciers and the coral reefs are telling us, and what the scientists are reinforcing with hard data — is that we need a warp-speed response and not an incremental one.

Much depends on being able to see clearly, and we may take from this exactly the words of the poet and clergyman John Donne, Shakespeare’s contemporary, writing in response to a terrible scourge of illness in England, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

On Sunday, my yoga teacher’s T-shirt read, “Love THIS life.” For an Easter meditation as I thought about global warming, it needed no further explanation.

Why Al Gore soft-pedaled the environment in 2000

Al Gore is holding audiences around the nation spellbound with his message on global warming and its consequences: a sea-level rise, acidic oceans, drought and massive economic dislocations.

Carbon-dioxide emissions are raising temperatures around the world.

If we listen to the scientists and understand the facts, there is only one conclusion: We have to turn the global thermostat down.

That is the simple logic of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary that he is presenting to audiences around the nation, as he has in Florida, as “the man who was the next president of the United States.”

But in his 2000 presidential campaign, the environment was invisible in candidate Gore’s campaign.

Key advisers and Gore himself believed that the issue that virtually defined his worldview had to be kept from sight in order to become president.

One can imagine that there were two aspects at work: first, that environmentalists were already on his side. His opposition was hammering persuadable voters (“Ozone Al,” remember that?) with doubts that global warming had any grounding in fact.

The second aspect of his thinking, though, is rarely discussed: Gore’s key campaign finance advisers were concerned that his pro-environmental message could alienate big Democratic donors just when final money was needed for television spots.

In 2000, Gore needed money to be competitive. His Florida campaign advisers told him to stay away from controversies like the Homestead Air Force Base conversion in South Miami-Dade because he would alienate Hispanic voters — which actually wasn’t the case.

What Gore’s advisers were really saying was this: You can’t afford to alienate big Florida donors who are Democrats and for whom environmental issues are a drag on construction and development.

Although we like to talk about the environment and the economy as mutually compatible, the reality is that economic interests with the most to gain from the outcome of money-intensive elections are not particularly friendly to the environment. Just look at Florida’s wasted suburban landscape, de-watered wetlands, polluted waterways, and the endless rounds of assurances that everything is being done, that can be done, to make a better tomorrow.

In his campaign-free life today, Gore represents the epitome of ease and conviction borne of clear logic related to global warming. In his campaign life of yesterday, Gore couldn’t find his way to his own constituents.

Gore ends his speeches with encouragement: We can solve the problems of global warming because “political will is a renewable resource.” He is right, except in the case communicating that will requires a billion dollars in a presidential campaign.

In relying on vast campaign contributions, both political parties are engaged in “mutually assured destruction,” the term once used to describe nuclear arsenals aimed by the Soviet Union and the United States at each other.

Most Americans are so tired, they can’t wait for anyone to be the next president. But the hurry-up-and-wait scenario we face in Super Tuesday primaries next February obscures the truly revolting: that the 2008 presidential election is likely to cost at least $1 billion.

Think of what a billion dollars of political contributions buys the United States.

I think about it because presidential candidates have been scouring the Florida landscape for months. By next Feb. 5, Democratic voters in key primary-election states may decide their candidate to be next president. Republicans will be voting, too, but apportionment of delegates has not yet been decided.

The lines have been drawn. Core supporters enlisted or re-enlisted.

Their goal: for dependable donors to give the maximum contributions today. Once that glass is full, then they’ll be expected to cough up additional donations to political parties or political action committees, including unlimited donations to their hybrids.

This is modern American politics: the wealth of a nation funneled into campaign machinery whose narrow spout emits television spots that most people with TiVos will TiVo right by.

The closer one looks, the harsher the view: A vast machinery of skilled and even brilliant practitioners, consultants and vote counters is applied to the illogic.

Who says there is no inflation?

For the privilege of a big-bucks donation to a candidate, you might get a photo taken or an “exclusive” briefing by the candidate and be amazed by polish applied to nuance so not a hair strays off-course.

Case in point: Al Gore.

Americans and the world deserve much better. And we can do better. It’s time to de-couple the election of the president from a billion-dollar horse race.

Slumbering giant awakens on global warming

On global warming, the American public is slowly rising to attention. Congress and the White House cannot be far behind.

The occasion for optimism is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between evangelical and scientific leaders who met in December to find common ground in the greatest threat to humanity: global warming and climate change.

These are no longer unlikely allies. On Wednesday, the nation’s leading scientists and evangelicals joined in Washington, D.C., to urge action to reverse rapidly escalating environmental problems, including global warming and species extinction.