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Riots in Iceland, Latvia and Bulgaria are a Sign of Things to Come

January 24, 2009 in Barack Obama, Capitalism, Collapse, Democracy, Economic Crisis, Resistance | 1 comment

Interesting to see how second-tier nations are facing such dramatic upheaval, it seems the crisis is being somewhat deflected from the United States and other centers of global capitalism. In the long run of course, the US is LEAST prepared to deal with the energy shortage, and will crash hardest. For now though, the coronation of our new fresh president has kept the myth of American exceptionalism alive, at least for a little longer. [alex]

Riots in Iceland, Latvia and Bulgaria are a Sign of Things to Come

Our third global political column explores the start of an age of rebellion over the financial crisis – beginning in Iceland

by Roger Boyes

The Times Online (of London)

January 21, 2009

Icelanders all but stormed their Parliament last night. It was the first session of the chamber after what might appear to be an unusually long Christmas break.

Ordinary islanders were determined to vent their fury at the way that the political class had allowed the country to slip towards bankruptcy. The building was splattered with paint and yoghurt, the crowd yelled and banged pans, fired rockets at the windows and lit a bonfire in front of the main door. Riot police moved in.

Icelanders vented their fury at the political class's handling of the financial crisis by staging angry protests in Reykjavik

Now in the grand sweep of the current crisis, a riot on a piece of volcanic rock in the north Atlantic may not seem to add up to much. But it is a sign of things to come: a new age of rebellion.

The financial meltdown has become part of the real economy and is now beginning to shape real politics. More and more citizens on the edge of the global crisis are taking to the streets. Bulgaria has been gripped this month by its worst riots since 1997 when street power helped to topple a Socialist government. Now Socialists are at the helm again and are having to fend off popular protests about government incompetence and corruption.

In Latvia – where growth has been in double-digit figures for years – anger is bubbling over at official mismanagement. GDP is expected to contract by 5 per cent this year; salaries will be cut; unemployment will rise. Last week, in a country where demonstrators usually just sing and then go home, 10,000 people besieged parliament.

Iceland, Bulgaria, Latvia: these are not natural protest cultures. Something is going amiss.

The LSE economist Robert Wade – addressing a protest meeting in Reykjavik’s cinema – recently warned that the world was approaching a new tipping point. Starting from March-May 2009, we can expect large-scale civil unrest, he said. “It will be caused by the rise of general awareness throughout Europe, America and Asia that hundreds of millions of people in rich and poor countries are experiencing rapidly falling consumption standards; that the crisis is getting worse not better; and that it has escaped the control of public authorities, national and international.”

Ukraine could be the next to go. The gas pricing deal agreed with Moscow could propel the country towards a serious financial crisis. Russia, too, is looking wobbly. A riot in Vladivostok may have been an omen for things to come. What will happen when the wider economic crisis translates into higher food prices? Or if Gazprom has no choice but to increase domestic gas prices?

Governments have so far managed to deflect attention from their role in the crash, their slipshod monitoring, by declaring themselves to be indispensible to the solution. This may save the skins of politicians in wealthier countries who can credibly and expensively try to prop up banks and sickly industries. But it does not work in countries that are heavily indebted, with bloated and exposed financial sectors. There, the irate crowds are already beginning to demand: why hasn’t a single politician resigned? What has happened to ministerial responsibility? Who will investigate government failure?

Good questions, it seems to me, in these unquiet times.

Green Recovery?

January 17, 2009 in Barack Obama, Capitalism, Economic Crisis, Education, Food, Health Care, Jobs, New World, War | Leave a comment

My friend and long-time labor and peak oil activist Jerry Silberman exposes the faults with the so called “Green Stimulus” act that is being put through Congress at the behest of our president-elect, to be coronated Tuesday. The trouble is that any “recovery” for capitalism will simply mean more destruction and poverty to recover from. Capitalism is not sick, it’s the sickness. We don’t need to heal it, we need to kill it in order to be healed. Let alone the fact that there simply isn’t any more energy or resources to fuel previous levels of economic growth. Pumping more dollars into this dead-end economy is like beating on a dead horse. Sorry folks, show’s over. We need a new direction, towards an economy where human life and the planet itself are worth more than just money. [alex]

Obama, Recovery, and the Green Economy

by Jerry Silberman

http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/PressSummary01-15-09.pdf

It is worth everyone’s time to take a look at the House draft stimulus plan and think about it from a perspective of peak energy and global warming. There is much that is admirable in the act, but there are larger problems with its failure to go in new directions. Understanding its unspoken premises is helpful.

What the Act does propose is funding deferred maintenance on existing infrastructure and social programs ignored during the Bush years, and clearly many of these upgrades are needed. A look at transportation funding, however, finds 3x as much, $30 billion, for highways compared to $10 billion for transit. Symmetrically, airports get three times as much as Amtrak, although the admitted backlog need is highest for Amtrak. The underlying assumption is that we will not, and should not move away from the primacy of the private automobile. This is underscored by the huge proportion of research and science funding devoted toward developing electric cars. Missing is the arithmetic of energy consumption not only in cars but in an automotive based land use pattern, and an understanding of the realistic potential for renewable electricity.

Speaking of energy, the press release does not define renewables, but we know that “second generation” agrifuels are high on the list, and Obama is pushing for increased ethanol, despite the rapidly growing global consensus that any generation of agrifuels is a disaster on several levels. The logic is very simple – since these fuels at best have a dramatically lower net energy than fossil fuels, and growing them will accelerate the destruction of fertile land, because all the nutrients are removed, not to mention the natural ecosystems destroyed, they cannot meet the need.

While half a billion is allocated for cleaning up nuclear waste, that doesn’t come close to what is needed to secure the nuclear waste we have already produced, let alone more. By continued to fund the chimera of fusion power, among other points, the report underscores what it says, in fact very directly “the next great discovery” is needed to bail us out. This is a classic example of expecting to solve problems using the same ways of thinking which created them. What is really being pursued, or hoped for, is a perpetual motion machine. Its not there.

$7.8 billion is allocated for military projects. While most of this is for hospitals and veterans facilities, and not directly for weapons, it is still war spending, hidden elsewhere in the budget, when it should come from the Pentagon budget, which is still 50 cents of every tax dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

Heinberg to Obama: Fossil Fuels are SO 20th Century

December 6, 2008 in Barack Obama, Climate Crisis, Coal, Economic Crisis, Education, Food, New World, Oil, Transportation | 2 comments

Richard Heinberg (author of the seminal work The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies) lays out a clear program for Obama, to move the US away from its current suicidal path and towards a green economy. However, the danger may be that Obama has surrounded himself with people who are telling him to do the exact opposite of each of these recommendations. Our job, as a movement, is to move the country away from fossil fuels by blocking the construction of more death machines (coal plants, oil-guzzling cars, the military…), and by simultaneously creating irresistible alternatives. [alex]

Memo to the President-elect on Energy Realism and the Green New Deal

MuseLetter 200
December 2008 by Richard Heinberg

Executive Summary

Our continued national dependence on fossil fuels is creating a crippling vulnerability to both long-term fuel scarcity and catastrophic climate change.

The current economic crisis requires substantial national policy shifts and enormous new government injections of capital into the economy. This provides an opportunity for a project whose scope would otherwise be inconceivable: a large-scale, coordinated energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.

This project must happen immediately; indeed, it may already be too late. We have already left behind the era of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, with a permanent decline of global oil production likely underway within three years. Moreover, the latest research tells us we have less than eight years to bring carbon emissions under control if we hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. Lacking this larger frame of understanding and action, a mere shift away from foreign oil dependence will fail to meet the challenge at hand.

The energy transition must not be limited to building wind turbines and solar panels. It must include the thorough redesign of our economic and societal infrastructure, which today is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. It must address not only our transportation system and our electricity grid, but also our food system and our building stock.

Our 21st century nation’s dependence on 20th century fossil fuels is the greatest threat we face, far more so than the current financial crisis. A coordinated, comprehensive transition to an economy that is no longer dependent on hydrocarbon fuels and no longer emits climate-changing levels of carbon—a Post Carbon Energy Transition—will be the Obama Administration’s greatest opportunity to lead the nation on a path toward sustainable prosperity.

Overview: Need and Scope

As a new Administration prepares to take the reins of power, America’s economy is descending into a recession or, quite possibly, a depression. Read the rest of this entry »

Say it Ain’t So, Barack!

November 11, 2008 in Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Capitalism, Democracy, Economic Crisis, Iraq, New World, Oil, War | Leave a comment

On President-elect Barack Obama’s first trip to the White House yesterday to meet privately with his predecessor, lame duck George W. Bush, reportedly the first and most pressing message Obama delivered to the man in charge was “bail out General Motors.”

Cartoon by The Rag Blog

The American taxpayers are sick and tired of their money being doled out to corporate crooks like the carbon-polluting, oil-guzzling auto industry, or banks like AIG who apparently weren’t satisfied by the first two bailouts and now want another. (They apparently spent too much of their last check on trips to the spa.)

Is this really Obama’s highest priority? Giving public money to private companies that will use it to pollute the planet?

If YOU had the opportunity to sit down with President Bush for an hour and have him actually listen to you, what would YOU ask him to do?

Why not instead bail out homeowners by ending foreclosures to keep people in their houses?

Why not bail out the poor, sick, and elderly, by instituting single-payer universal health care like every other industrialized nation does?

Why not bail out Iraqis, military families and soldiers by pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq and ending a bloody occupation? (or Afghanistan, or the 100+ countries where the US military is stationed)

Why not bail out human rights by ending torture, closing Guantanamo and allowing all prisoners a trial by jury?

Why not bail out civil rights by ending anti-immigrant raids and the criminalizing of immigration?

Why not bail out students, who are suffering from the greatest debt crisis in history as education becomes increasingly unaffordable?

Why not bail out the planet, by investing heavily in renewable energies controlled by local communities, urban gardens, home weatherization and create 5 million new Green Jobs?

Barack, if you’re going to be a president worthy of the immense praise and expectation placed on you, you’re going to need to stop palling around with terroristic industry and corporate lobbyists, and listen to the people.

[alex]

Sources: Obama pressed Bush for auto industry bailout

Originally published by CNN, November 11, 2008
Jessica Yellin, Candy Crowley, CNN’s Ed Henry

(CNN) – At their private Oval Office meeting on Monday, President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush to support billions of dollars in aid for the struggling auto industry during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, according to three officials briefed on the meeting.

The officials said Bush privately expressed skepticism about taxpayer money for automakers on the heels of a string of government bailouts for other industries, and the president also urged Obama to help push through a free trade pact with Colombia Read the rest of this entry »

Open Letter to the President-Elect: Farmer in Chief

November 6, 2008 in Barack Obama, Climate Crisis, Environmental Justice, Food, New World, Oil | Leave a comment

This is a long article, but it’s full of insight on how the federal government could contribute to a sustainable food economy in the US. The problem, of course, is that all of the brilliant policy recommendations are directly opposed by the profit-making food industry. Worth reading, but how about an article explaining what the American public can do for its own food security? [alex]

Open Letter to the President-Elect by Michael Pollan: Farmer in Chief

Farmer in Chief By Michael Pollan
New York Times, October 10, 2008
Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration – the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact – so easy to overlook these past few years – that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on – but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy – 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do – as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis – a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact. Read the rest of this entry »