Pax Americana

House Of Cards

I've blogged about the collapse of society before, and not only are my students are required by the College to come up with emergency plans in the event of epidemics but I talk about Diamond's book(s) a lot, so this article in New Scientist caught my eye:

FOR years we have been warned that a pandemic is coming. It could be flu, it could be something else. We know that lots of people will die. As terrible as this will be, on an ever more crowded planet, you can't help wondering whether the survivors might be better off in some ways. Wouldn't it be easier to rebuild modern society into something more sustainable if, perish the thought, there were fewer of us.

Yet would life ever return to something resembling normal after a devastating pandemic? Virologists sometimes talk about their nightmare scenarios - a plague like ebola or smallpox - as "civilisation ending". Surely they are exaggerating. Aren't they?

Many people dismiss any talk of collapse as akin to the street-corner prophet warning that the end is nigh. In the past couple of centuries, humanity has innovated its way past so many predicted plagues, famines and wars - from Malthus to Dr Strangelove - that anyone who takes such ideas seriously tends to be labeled a doom-monger.

There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale, complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse. "It's an argument so ingrained both in our subconscious and in public discourse that it has assumed the status of objective reality," writes biologist and geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, author of the 2005 book Collapse. "We think we are different."
Ever more vulnerable

A growing number of researchers, however, are coming to the conclusion that far from becoming ever more resilient, our society is becoming ever more vulnerable (see page 30). In a severe pandemic, the disease might only be the start of our problems.

No scientific study has looked at whether a pandemic with a high mortality could cause social collapse - at least none that has been made public. The vast majority of plans for weathering a pandemic all fail even to acknowledge that crucial systems might collapse, let alone take it into account.

There have been many pandemics before, of course. In 1348, the Black Death killed about a third of Europe's population. Its impact was huge, but European civilisation did not collapse. After the Roman empire was hit by a plague with a similar death rate around AD 170, however, the empire tipped into a downward spiral towards collapse. Why the difference? In a word: complexity.

The Space Shuttle.  Our banking system.  The world's most powerful military.  Anything with a bit of complexity that we accept because in general there won't be the exact cascade of failures to cause a complete collapse.  Can we fail gracefully?

ntodd

Nuclear Waste?: Part 4 (where it gets exciting)

With some background material laid down in the first three segments of this series, we can now turn to some of the more fascinating — and puzzling — aspects of the Patoka Lake and dam story. Aspects that have kept me researching and working on this topic for more than three decades.

The construction of the lake and dam was completed in 1978 and in the weeks shortly thereafter, water began to be impounded to create the lake. The recreation area and the roughly 8,500-acre lake were opened to the public in 1980.  All the while, John Flynn and I were making regular visits to the site with a couple of low-tech geiger counters. 

They were the yellow kind, leftover from old Civil Defense shelters created during the Cold War. We knew they wouldn't detect low level releases of radiation, but we took them along anyway just in case we came across some high-level release area. We took them because during the final months of the dam's construction phase, and during the time when Continental Drilling was pumping tens of thousands of gallons of grout into various drilled holes in the lake bed and dam site, we kept hearing stories of men in radiation suits, men with geiger counters, Naval officers supervising the off-loading of trucks that contained huge cylinders.  And the cylinders appeared to be made of silicon or some other glass-like material.  I never saw any of this myself; John and our farmer friend, Wayne Jordan (remember, not his real name) did.  They saw Naval officers; they saw what appeared to be radiation suits; they saw the "glass" cylinders.

On most of our visits, we walked along the back side of the dam, checking the tops of long tubes that had been driven into the ground some 50 to 100 feet or more.  At the bottom of those tubes were devices to measure any flowing water — pesiotomers I believe they are called. (And I must admit I don't know how to spell them.)

The spillway from the dam reached out it's backside for about 300 yards and at that point emptied into a small stream about six feet wide.  On a visit there in 1982, Flynn and I came across a scene that energized us both, that renewed our interest in getting to the bottom of the Patoka rumors.

Two men dressed in green work clothes — they looked to be Dickies pants, shirts and green jackets, all the same color — were kneeling beside the stream.  They had what looked to be a cooler filled with dry ice, liquid nitrogen or something else very cold because each time they opened the lid a fog would roll off the edges and float down to the ground.  It was like something Holmes and Watson would have seen while searching the moors for the Hounds of the Baskervilles.

The two men had no markings at all on their shirts or jackets, and they had a huge battery of some type. That battery was connected to two electrodes which were in turn connected to a wire mesh-like net that was stretched across the tiny stream.  Water was flowing out of the spillway and we watched these two guys from a distance to see what the heck they were doing.

Everyone once in a while when a small fish would be caught in the metal net, they appeared to turn a switch on their power supply, giving the fish a stunning shock.  Then they would remove the fish from the water, slit open its belly, slide the entrails into what looked to be a plastic jar, cap it, and then place the entrails jar in the cooler with the dry ice or whatever it was.  The rest of the fish, the part most people would consider frying and eating, they simply tossed into the woods.

After a quarter hour or so of this, we decided to approach these guys to see what was going on.  One looked up and said "What are you two doing?"

"We're just walking through the woods," I said.

Then he pulled back his jacket and revealed a holster carrying what looked to me like a 45-caliber automatic, the kind they gave us to train with in Naval Officer School.  He revealed the gun quite intentionally, stared at us both and said, most malevolently, "Then just keep on walking."

So we did.  But when we went into the office the following Monday, we both made calls to the  Corps of Engineers and to the Indiana office of Wildlife and Fisheries.  We described what we'd witnessed, and surprise, no one at either office could imagine what in the world those two guys were doing.  Never heard of such a thing, they said.

It was just one more mystery to be added to a list of questions about the place and the project; a list that seems to keep growing even now.

Glenn

Nuclear Waste?: Part Three

The Manhattan Project is known as one of the largest, best-kept secret in the nation's history — at least that's what a couple of historians have said over the years.  And when John Flynn and I began researching the creation and construction of Patoka Lake years ago, we were surprised to learn of some indirect ties the latter project had to the program that built the first atomic bomb.

Two sources — one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the other at the Defense Intelligence Agency — told us we should look into a couple of organizations.  One was a company named Continental Drilling, the other was a consortium or collection  of colleges called Associated Universities, Inc.

The sources said Associated Universities was the entity the government used to pay the scientific members of the Manhattan Project team.  Since the program was secret, the scientists were paid through the association of universities, according to the sources.  Officially, its website says Associated Universities was created in 1946 "as an educational institution dedicated to research, development and education in the physical, biological and engineering sciences."

So what does that have to do with nuclear waste and a lake in Indiana?  The sources also said that Associated Universities was the organization that, following World War II, also helped to marshall the engineering and scientific brains necessary to build the nation's nuclear installations such as Savannah Rivers in South Carolina, Rocky Flats in Colorado and Hanford in Washington state.  And in creating the 13 or so known nuclear (and nuclear waste) facilities, the government often turned to Continental Drilling as one of the various site contractors.

When the possibility of the Patoka Lake and dam as a nuclear waste site emerged, one of the company names that kept coming to our attention was Continental Drilling.  Various sources — local residents, on-site workers, and eventually one of the engineering superintendents on the project — confirmed that Continental Drilling was at Patoka, that they were responsible for drilling as many as 1,200 or so deep cores into what became the lake bed and the dam site.

There were records to indicate that Continental Drilling had been involved in the development of the hydrofracture waste-storage process used at Oak Ridge.  In fact, when a company spokesman was finally located, he said, you bet, we were at Patoka.

"We do a lot of preliminary site preparation work (for nuclear waste sites)," the spokesman — named Gerald Bair — said some 25 years ago.  "We do work through Associated Universties and we've done seven or eight nuclear sites.  We do the drilling; do some grouting when it involves low-level material.

"We did a lot of work at the Hanford, Washington site; did the deep well injection at Oak Ridge," he continued. "We were at Patoka for quite a while. Who did you say you worked for again?"

I said I was with a newspaper and he terminated the conversation.

Oddly enough, the government agencies we contacted said Continental Drilling wasn't at the Indiana site.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Continental Drilling was not a subcontractor at Patoka.  The Department of Energy said no company by that nam worked on the project.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the same thing; so did the Department of Defense. And in the mountain of financial records that were available to us, we could never find a budget line or accounting of any payment by the Core or anyone else to Continental Drilling. (And by the way, there are a half-dozen or so "Continental Drilling" companies throughout the U.S.  The one we examined had been based in California and when we checked with the Secretary of State's office there, we were told it had closed up shop and left a forwarding address — a post office box number in the Bahamas.)

The Department of Energy,  Corps of Engineers and Nuclear Regulatory Commission also  told us that many of the Patoka records were stored in a document repository at Kansas City, Mo. and unavailable for review.  From the records we were able to examine, Flynn and I determined that about $70 million (in 1980 dollars) of appropriations for the project were not accounted for.

John Albrecht, a spokesman for one the Patoka site's main contractor, a construction company out Wixom, Mich., acknowledged that Continental Drilling was responsible for the project's deep well cores and the grouting.  And a source with the Corps of Engineers contradicted his bosses in D.C. and said "yeah, they were there.  They were supposed to drill the sample cores and ended up drilling a lot of them. They were supposed to pump grout (to seal the lake and the area around the dam) for a week or two and ended up pumping grout for more than a year.

"I never understood why."

Glenn

Nuclear Waste?: Part One

The late John Flynn was a terrific reporter, especially when he was covering something that interested him deeply, such as the environment.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Flynn was one of the first reporters in the country to frequently write about acid rain at a time when the subject was largely ignored.

Flynn covered the growth and development of coal-fired power plants throughout the Ohio River Valley, then with the help of scientists such as Jim Hansen and Orie Loucks, he documented the rise of carbon dioxide from the plants and its return to earth as acid rain father east in the upper Appalachian Mountains and north through the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys.

The acid rain was killing the mixed mesophytic forest — the nation's oldest growth of trees east of the Mississippi River. It was turning trout streams acidic and killing lots of aquatic life.  The tops of trees were dying from Maine to the Carolinas, and Flynn wrote about it when few other journalists were paying attention.

So what's this have to do with nuclear waste?  Nothing yet. But it sets the stage for how John Flynn came to work in the Ohio River Valley, and as a result, was approached by some Indiana farmers who were worried about what was proposed for their land.

The farmers lived in the Patoka River watershed in Southern Indiana, just west northwest of Louisville, Ky. Flynn and I worked for the Louisville, Ky., Courier-Journal, then a family-owned newspaper of national stature which had won a Pulitizer Prize in the 1960s for its coverage of the then-new phenomena of strip mining in Eastern Kentucky.  It was a paper with a given instinct to cover the environment in a time before that kind of coverage was in vogue.

So Flynn came to work in Louisville, not as a environmental writer at first, but as a Southern Indiana bureau reporter. I was the paper's Indiana columnist at the time. And we were both in the office when one of the worried Indiana farmers came to see us.

You need to take a look at this Patoka project, he said.  We knew about it. The state, together with the Army Corps of Engineers, was planning to build an 8,800 acre flood-control dam and lake 118.3 miles above the mouth of the Patoka River, a tributary of the Wabash River, in southern Indiana.

It's a beautiful part of the state, because Southern Indiana west of the Interstate 65 dividing line, the highway that runs north and south from Louisville to Indianapolis, looks a great deal like Kentucky.  There are gently rolling hills and lots and forests.  In fact, the Harrison-Crawford State Forest is one of Indiana's most gorgeous outdoor areas.

We thought very little of the farmer's visit to us at first.  Assumed it represented the usual dispute between land owners and a government that wanted to condemn part of their property. Those disagreements had bubbled to the surface in local papers the previous few months. So Flynn and I thought that this was simply another case of a small land-owner with little clout wanting to complain about losing his land for this lake project.

But that wasn't it at all.  The farmer was a guy we'll call Wayne Jordan — that's not his real name, but I'm using a fake moniker here because Wayne is now dead and his widow is very ill and, quite honestly, now is not the time to burden her with a request and then drag all this up again.  So Wayne Jordan came to see us and said you've got to look at this project because there's something bizarre going on.

Bizarre?

Yep, he said.  They're trying to build a lake over ground that's covered with limestone caves and sinkholes. Hundreds of them. There's no way a lake will hold water there, unless they fill all the sinkholes and caves and link them together somehow, Wayne said.  And that would take millions of pounds of grout, or concrete or something. 

So that's one thing, he said.  "But here's something else.  I know it's a government project, but I'm watching them drill the test cores in a little valley just beside my farm.  And there are military guys there all the time; look like Navy uniforms to me.

"And some of them are carrying what looks like geiger counters."

Glenn

Nuclear Waste: A series of stories

Over the next few weeks and months, you'll find posted here some brief stories surrounding nearly four decades of reporting done by the late John Flynn and me.  It began back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when some Indiana farmers were surprised to learn that the state and federal government planned to build a dam and lake over much of their property.

The farmers thought the government boys were fools because the land was pock-marked with sinkholes, limestone caves and underground rivers.  Building a lake over a bunch of karst limestone sinkholes was folly, they all said. It won't hold water.

But they didn't know the reason behind the enterprise.

The story of Patoka Lake and nuclear waste reads like a poorly-scripted Jerry Bruckheimer movie, only without things blowing up all the time.  You're going to hear of news sources within the Defense Intelligence Agency, within the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and within other segments of the nation's intelligence services. You'll hear about office break-ins, threats from alleged government officials, of opened mail and telephone eavesdropping, of FBI break-in teams and stolen notes and records.

You'll hear of conversations with President Clinton's first Secretary of the Department of Energy, Hazel O'Leary; you'll learn about argillaceous shale — the geological formation beneath Patoka Lake and beneath the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, too.  You'll also learn about hydrofracture, the process used at Oak Ridge to pump liquified nuclear waste into shale formations 1,500 to 1,800 feet beneath the ground.

There are similar formations beneath Patoka Lake, and John and I believe — or believed, in his case — that the same hydrofracture process used at Oak Ridge was used at this Southern Indiana lake.

It's a long tale and it has it's share of intrigue and, some would say, implausibility. I'm going to break it up into a dozen or so short entries — it will be a bit of an outline of the book I've written and continue to revise on the subject.

I'll tell you what I know over the next few weeks and let you decide if it's plausible or not.  In cases where I haven't received full release from individuals for the use of their names, I'll keep them to myself.

In the meantime, if you happen to know people who visit Patoka Lake for sport, tell them to catch and release.  Don't eat the fish.

Glenn

A First Post, And A Good Cause...

Hi, I'm Monkeyfister, and this is my first post. (hi, Monkeyfister.)

 I hope that it is OK to start my tenure here, at Pax, by  introducing you to NukeFree.

GO THERE. Watch the very cool video at their site, and Sign This Petition . You'll be in excellent company.

Dear Friend,

Do you live near a nuclear power plant? You may not today, but if the nuclear power industry has their way, a lot more of us could have those radioactive smokestacks as neighbors.

Please join musicians Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt as well as a growing list of concerned citizens in signing a petition to Congress that will stop a pending bailout of the nuclear power industry.

The Senate version of the Energy Bill now pending in Congress could authorize virtually unlimited loan guarantees for backers of new nuclear reactors – effectively, a blank check, at taxpayer expense. Besides the fact that reactors are vulnerable to terrorist attacks, human error in operation, and earthquakes, there is also no solution to the problem of safely storing or transporting nuclear waste. Why would we want more nuclear power facilities built if the safety of those already in operation is in question?

Tell Congress that nuclear power is not a “clean alternative” and has no place in an Energy Bill that seeks to expand the role of truly safe and reliable renewable energy from wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal and other green technologies.

Please Sign This Petition and call your Senator and Congressperson   and urge them to “REMOVE THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY LOAN GUARANTEES FROM THE PENDING ENERGY BILL.”

Thank you for taking action, please forward to your friends by October 22nd and ask them to do the same. Together we can make a difference, but time is of the essence!

~ No Nukes

I give up on trying to figure out how to embed YouTube video to TypePad. I'm lucky enough to have finally gotten this into postable format. I'm such a Luddite.

Stuff

Via My Favorite Witch comes The Story of Stuff:

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

One way to resist war is to resist stuff.  Pledge to do it this holiday season to create peace.

ntodd

That's Crazy Enough, It Just Might Work

HuffPo's got a little video of a few Dems, including DK and his wife Elizabeth, discussing our dependence on hydrocarbon-based energy.  Oddly, the hed screams: Elizabeth Kucinich: My Husband Would "Absolutely" Consider Running With Ron Paul. 

The issue only comes up at the very end, so why this wouldn't be titled "Elizabeth Kucinich: We have to stop ratcheting up war with Iran" or something more, you know, germane is beyond me.  No, wait...

I guess Arianna really doesn't like DK and wants us all to think that there's some possible Crazy Antiwar Candidate Unity Ticket we can mock until a "real" candidate is nominated.

ntodd

PS--I don't think Ron is nuts, but hell if I want him running with Dennis.  His only attraction is regarding Iraq, but otherwise he's one of those annoying Libertarian types with a penchant for anti-women policies, and would be just as much a disaster as anybody else in the GOP field.

Grist For The Satanic Mills

Grist (via the Kucinich website):

On Saturday, Nov. 17, Grist will be sponsoring the first-ever presidential candidate forum focusing on the issues of energy policy and climate change. All Democratic and Republican presidential candidates were invited to attend; Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich have accepted the invitation.

We'll show a live webcast here starting at 2:00 p.m. PST on Nov. 17.

Maybe DK will get more than 5 minutes to speak this time...

ntodd

Put The Ozone Man Under House Arrest

Climate Progress:

In February 2006, officials removed the words “understand and protect our home planet” from NASA’s mission statement. More substantively, NASA’s earth sciences budget has dropped 30% while the funding has gone up for the President’s Mission to Mars program.

Then there is the story behind the Deep Space Climate Observatory. DSCOVR, as it now is known, is a satellite sitting in a warehouse in Maryland, gathering dust rather than climate data. Its original mission was to hold a position in space that would allow it to continuously photograph the sunlit side of the planet, providing scientists with their first direct measurements of the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth and how much is reflected. In addition, DSCOVR would monitor weather systems, vegetation and other indicators of climate change.

DSCOVR has one fatal flaw, however. It was conceived by Al Gore, not as an instrument to gather climate data, but to broadcast a constant image of Earth on the internet, which Gore hoped would raise public awareness about the planet and the climate. DSCOVR originally was scheduled to launch in 2001 but Congress, controlled by Republicans at the time, dubbed the satellite “Goresat” and ordered that it be put in storage at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Despite the fact that the U.S. Academy of Sciences judged that DSCOVR would make a “strong and vital” contribution to our understanding of climate change, NASA cancelled the program in January 2006, explaining that “the context of competing priorities and the state of the budget for the foreseeable future precludes continuation of the project.”

Yet the cost to launch DSCOVR was estimated at $100 million, only one-thousandth the cost of the International Space Station and the “competing priority” apparently is the Mars program. Why Mars should enjoy a higher priority than Earth in the president’s cosmology remains one of the great mysteries of the universe.

Climate scientists lament that with the erosion of NASA’s satellites budget, the institutions trying to better understand global warming are going blind. “The observations we have at this point just aren’t good enough,” said Robert Charlson of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The biggest single problem we have now is a lack of adequate satellite measurements, and the platforms that could be moving us toward answers are either pending or being killed.”

Goresat apparently is to the Irrational Right what Galileo’s telescope was to the Church in the 17th Century — a scientific instrument that threatens the old world view. If now were then, Limbaugh would be calling for an Inquisition to silence Gore-ileo’s heresy and to cast him into a dungeon from which he would never be heard again.

Yup, perfect analogy with Galileo (though he was just put under house arrest after commutation of his sentence).

ntodd

Blog Action Day

Via my favorite witch comes a reminder about today's Blog Action Day:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blog Action Day is about MASS participation.  That means we need you!  Here are 3 ways to participate:

• Post on your blog relating to the environment on Blog Action Day
• Donate your day’s earnings to an environmental charity
• Promote Blog Action Day around the web

I didn't get around to a biofuels post today, and I'll be teaching on campus during the day tomorrow, but I suspect I might find some time when I get home in the evening for environmental bloggy goodness.

ntodd

Is This What They Mean By An Adversarial Press?

WaPo editorial:

The Nobel committee chairman said that awarding the prize to Mr. Gore and the IPCC was not meant to be "a kick in the leg to anyone." The White House said it didn't see it that way, either. But these denials are hard to take seriously from a group that has handed the peace prize to adversaries of President Bush in several recent years.

Apparently it never occurred to our friends at Pravda that anybody truly interested in peace is inherently an adversary of President Bush...

ntodd

It Ain't A Popularity Contest

Some wingnuts don't want Al Gore to win the Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow:

Awarding AlBore the Nobel “Peace” prize would prove the absurdity of the prize once and for all. Bring it on.
...
After prior winners like Yasser Arafat, Kofi Annan, and Jimmy Carter you have to wonder if this prize has become political.

CAD professionals and manufacturers join in as well.  And of course Michelle Malkin took time out from stalking 12-year olds to snark about Gore:

Well, the Big Reveal will take place on Friday, and Gore has canceled  on a Babs Boxer fundraiser to travel overseas for the announcement. (Update: Or not? HT - HAHeadlines)

No doubt he’s already purchased carbon offsets for the trip…if he does indeed win the prize.

Don’t forget: You can offset his offsets here!

Malkin has a history of mocking Gore's efforts and "hypocrisy," which makes the offset offsets even richer in...something.  The wingersphere likes to yell about Bush Derangement Syndrome, but there's reasonable cause for that while their hatred of Gore is something I just cannot fathom.  You'd think he'd launched an immoral, illegal war that has killed over a million people and will cost upwards of 2 trillion dollars for no good reason.  Really, it's complete denial about the issue of global warming and hatred of somebody who is trying to be constructive rather than destructive:

Gore shouldn't even have been nominated, and if he actually wins the thing it will be a slap in the face to other nominees who have genuinely worked for peace, such as Irena Sendler, a Pole who saved more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Holocaust in World War Two, and Finland's former President Martti Ahtisaari. And they, by the way, were acting out of genuine humanity, rather than being motivated by self-interest and conceit.

It would also be an insult to the memory of every past winner (Arafat, Carter and a couple of others excepted), including Jean Henry Dunant, Founder of the Red Cross, Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Luther King.

It would be a disgrace.

The reason it would be a disgrace?  Because a judge in the UK decided there were 9 "errors" in Gore's movie.  I'm not even going to address them, but they appear at first blush to be trivial and a misunderstanding of the actual facts presented.  I'm just amused that people think that any movie would be completely error-free and that these specifics somehow destroy Gore's overall point about the scientific consensus or that an award he hasn't even necessarily won yet would be "tainted" somehow.

So was Gore nominated solely because of An Inconvenient Truth?  No, of course not--it's one component of his consistent work that started well before this single project:

“A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference,” Conservative Member of Parliament Boerge Brende, a former minister of environment and then of trade, told The Associated Press.

Brende said he joined political opponent Heidi Soerensen of the Socialist Left Party to nominate Gore as well as Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier before the nomination deadline expired Thursday.

“Al Gore, like no other, has put climate change on the agenda. Gore uses his position to get politicians to understand, while Sheila works from the ground up,” Brende said.

"I think climate change is the biggest challenge we face in this century," Brende said.

During eight years as Bill Clinton’s vice president, Gore pushed for climate measures, including the Kyoto Treaty. Since leaving office in 2001 he has campaigned worldwide, including with his Oscar-nominated documentary on climate change called “An Inconvenient Truth.”

But whatever.

Of course there have been many controversies over prize awards and the omission of awards to the likes of Mahatma.  Clearly the fact that he never won shows that he wasn't a very good peace ambassador...or, uh, maybe the Nobel Prize is compromised, or, er, more likely it doesn't mean anything at all.

In response to the Right's complaints about various Monsters who have been awarded the Prize (more on that in a moment), Lefties usual bring up Henry "Never Met A Dictator He Didn't Like If It Were Convenient" Kissinger:

At its meeting on October 16 the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting decided to award the Peace Prize for 1973 to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the two chief negotiators who succeeded in arranging the ceasefire after negotiating for nearly four years.

For many long and bitter years the civilian population of Vietnam and the fighting troops engaged on both sides had borne the sufferings and privations of war. This was a war that concerned not only Vietnam and its people; it was a war moreover that had poisoned the atmosphere in countries and between countries all over the world.

Never since the conclusion of the Second World War have the people of Vietnam enjoyed unbroken peace.
...
The Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting was fully aware that a ceasefire and not a peace agreement was involved. They realised that peace has not yet come to Vietnam, and that the sufferings of the population of Vietnam are not at an end. They were also aware that events in Vietnam may yet endanger the détente in the world. The ceasefire agreement was only the first but a tremendously important step on the laborious road to full peace in Vietnam.

It is our hope that the two chief negotiators and statesmen who have been awarded the Peace Prize this year will show the same understanding of the purpose and intention of the award as that expressed by Chancellor Willy Brandt in his speech here in this Festival Hall when he received the Peace Prize for 1971:

"Nobel's Peace Prize is the highest honour, but at the same time the one that imposes the greatest obligations, that can be bestowed on any man bearing political responsibility."

Perhaps it was a bit naive, but Vietnam was a major moral disaster and encouraging the peace process was certainly a noble (pun not intended) idea.  You can't really have peace without parties attempting to bring it about, so I actually don't think this was a horrible award as some people do, nor does it taint Nobel.

Similarly, when wingers complain about Arafat winning 1/3 of the 1994 award, I observe that the conflict would never end if those involved didn't realize it's not in their peoples' interests to continue it and subsequently let go of age-old grudges.  Rabin and Peres were necessarily not the only ones involved in breaking the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate and giving the area a realistic chance at peace (that was squandered in the end).  Same goes for John Hume, who needed David Trimble to bring the Northern Ireland peace process to fruition, for which the pair were awarded the Nobel in 1998.

That said, I don't think anybody can doubt that in 2002 the award wrongly went to History's Greatest Monster, who said:

Most Nobel Laureates have carried out our work in safety, but there are others who have acted with great personal courage. None has provided more vivid reminders of the dangers of peacemaking than two of my friends, Anwar Sadat and Yitzak Rabin, who gave their lives for the cause of peace in the Middle East.

Like these two heroes, my first chosen career was in the military, as a submarine officer. My shipmates and I realized that we had to be ready to fight if combat was forced upon us, and we were prepared to give our lives to defend our nation and its principles. At the same time, we always prayed fervently that our readiness would ensure that there would be no war.

Later, as President and as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, I was one of those who bore the sobering responsibility of maintaining global stability during the height of the Cold War, as the world's two superpowers confronted each other. Both sides understood that an unresolved political altercation or a serious misjudgment could lead to a nuclear holocaust. In Washington and in Moscow, we knew that we would have less than a half hour to respond after we learned that intercontinental missiles had been launched against us. There had to be a constant and delicate balancing of our great military strength with aggressive diplomacy, always seeking to build friendships with other nations, large and small, that shared a common cause.
...
The world has changed greatly since I left the White House. Now there is only one superpower, with unprecedented military and economic strength. The coming budget for American armaments will be greater than those of the next fifteen nations combined, and there are troops from the United States in many countries throughout the world. Our gross national economy exceeds that of the three countries that follow us, and our nation's voice most often prevails as decisions are made concerning trade, humanitarian assistance, and the allocation of global wealth. This dominant status is unlikely to change in our lifetimes.

Great American power and responsibility are not unprecedented, and have been used with restraint and great benefit in the past. We have not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom, and we have consistently reached out to the international community to ensure that our own power and influence are tempered by the best common judgment.
...
It is clear that global challenges must be met with an emphasis on peace, in harmony with others, with strong alliances and international consensus. Imperfect as it may be, there is no doubt that this can best be done through the United Nations, which Ralph Bunche described here in this same forum as exhibiting a "fortunate flexibility" - not merely to preserve peace but also to make change, even radical change, without violence.

He went on to say: "To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war."

Despicable!  I don't know how anybody could vote for a guy who works with Habitat for Humanity and stands up to awful regimes.

Oh, right, it's not really a popularity contest or an election.  It's one award based on the will of the guy who invented dynamite, and if somebody wins the Peace Prize or not it doesn't negate any other good or bad works they might do in their lives.  It recognizes specific good that laureates have brought to bear in a Cosmos that doesn't really make judgments for us.

If Gore wins, that will certainly be a nice addition to the Oscar and the Emmy.  Yet it won't stop global warming so he still has, as was observed before, the obligation to continue his work.  And if he doesn't win, it means somebody else was viewed as having more impact on our continuous struggle for peace.

As for the notion that somehow the Nobels have become "political," I say: no duh.  Allow me to borrow from Clausewitz and note that peace is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means.

So it doesn't really matter how many people get pissed if Gore wins or crow if he "loses."  He continues to do important things to improve the world, which is the whole point.

ntodd

[Update: now that he's won, there is more gnashing of teeth.  Boohoohoo.]

Bill's Such A Hypocrite!

My friend Bill and his wife Emily just became vegetarians.  I guess I'll have to at some point, given the incredible waste involved with raising meat animals (not to mention our food production system in general), but I haven't made that leap yet for a variety of selfish and not-entirely-selfish reasons.  And now, I'm going to reheat some leftover steak...

ntodd

Recreeping Normalcy

I still haven't been able to muster my response to the response to last Sunday's Lysistrata post.  My time's been too fragmented to tackle what's becoming a rather involved thing.  In the meantime, here's a brief dealio I was thinking about whilst driving in my Ford Escape hybrid.

Jared Diamond discussed something called 'creeping normalcy' in Collapse, which is all about how we often miss little important subtle changes around us and that can prevent us from acting to avert catastrophe.  So as I was driving and looking at my Fuel Economy and Energy Flow computer displays, I wondered if we can reverse such trends by creeping incrementally in the other direction.

It was little things that have added up over time to cause our current issues with oil dependency, climate change and the like.  To Ordinary People, trying to fix the problems can seem to be an overwhelming task, particularly on an individual level.  Yet I've discovered that by paying attention to a few new things now that I have information about my car's performance, I've been able to change teeny things about my driving behavior (e.g., accelerating more smoothly to prevent the gas engine from kicking in) that have resulted in 3 to 4 MPG better efficiency. 

That might not sound like much, but that's more than 10% savings so far, which is fairly significant I think.  So if you look at the larger task and just think about simple things you can easily change about yourself, you'll be going a long way to helping save the environment, stop the war, etc.

Jas was right that it's all about baby steps, baby steps.  And as Mr Dryden says in Lawrence of Arabia: big things have small beginnings.

ntodd

Save The World Entire

New Scientist:

The increase in extremely hot summers predicted by climate change models will lead to a higher death toll that will not be offset by fewer deaths during warmer winters, say researchers.

"The increase in mortality when you have one extra cold snap is 1.59%, but the increase in mortality for an additional heatwave is 5.74%," explains Mercedes Medina-Ramón of Harvard University's School of Public Health in Massachusetts, US.

Medina-Ramón and colleagues looked at how temperature correlated to mortality in 50 US cities between 1989 and 2000. They found that heart attacks and cardiac arrest were the causes of death that were most likely to increase with more extreme temperatures.

The team says that the widespread use of central heating in US cities means that people across the country are equally prepared to cope with cold snaps. But workplaces and homes are not equally equipped with air conditioners.

As a result, they found that cities with less air conditioning and denser populations suffered a greater increase in the number of deaths on extremely hot summer days.

They caution that the knee-jerk reaction to go out and carpet the country with air-conditioning units would be ill-advised.

"Air conditioning itself constitutes a problem for climate change," says Medina-Ramón. "The more we increase air conditioning, the more we increase our energy consumption, and therefore our carbon dioxide emissions – which will just make the problem worse."

In the past few days, a heat wave in southeastern Europe has caused at least 38 deaths. Romania is worst hit, with at least 23 dead. Greece and Italy are also affected.

I've got an idea: what if we stopped spending so much on killing people and invested it in dealing with human-induced climate change?  Crazy enough, it just might work...

ntodd

Collapsing

I've been reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed, and a few parts of Chapter 14 (Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?) struck me so I thought I'd share:

Prior experience is not a guarantee that a society will anticipate a problem, if the experience happened so long ago as to have been forgotten.  That's especially a problem for non-literate societies, which have less capacity to preserve detailed memories of events long in the past, because of the limitations of oral transmission of information compared to writing.  For instance...Chaco Canyon Anasazi society survived several droughts before succumbing to a big drought in the 12th century AD.  But earlier droughts had occurred long before the birth of any Anasazi affected by the big drought, which would thus have been unanticipated because the Anasazi lacked writing.  Similarly, the Classic Lowland Maya succumbed to a drought in the 9th century, despite their area having been affected by drought centuries earlier.  In that case, although the Maya did have writing, it recorded kings' deeds and astronomical events rather than weather reports, so that the drought of the 3rd century did not help the Maya anticipate the drought of the 9th century.

In modern literate societies whose writing does discuss subjects besides kings and planets, that doesn't necessarily mean that we draw on prior experience committed to writing.  We, too, tend to forget things.  For a year or two after the gas shortages of the 1973 Gulf oil crisis, we Americans shied away from gas-guzzling cars, but then forgot that experience and are now embracing SUVs, despite volumes of print spilled over the 1973 events. [ed note: Diamond goes on to recount the failure of imagination by the French with their Maginot Line and note victors often plan for the last war.]
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Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations.  The prime example in modern times is global warming.  We now realize that temperatures around the world have been slowly rising in recent decades, due in large part to atmospheric changes caused by humans.  However, it is not the case that the climate each year has been exactly 0.01 degree warmer than in the previous year.  Instead, as we all know, climate fluctuates up and down erratically from year to year...With such large and unpredictable fluctuations, it has taken a long time to discern the average upwards trend of 0.01 degree per year within that noisy signal.  That's why it was only a few years ago that most professional climatologists previously skeptical of the reality of global warming became convinced.  As of the time that I write these lines, President Bush of the US is still not convinced of its reality, and he thinks that we need more research.  The medieval Greenlanders had similar difficulties in recognizing their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi had trouble discerning that theirs was becoming drier.

Politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations.  If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it's difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one's baseline standard for what constitutes "normalcy" shifts gradually and imperceptibly.  It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.
...
Contrary to what Joseph Tainter and almost anyone else would have expected, it turns out that societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.

Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what economists and other social scientists term "rational behavior," arising from clashes of interest between people.  That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people.  Scientists term such behavior "rational" precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible.  The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn't effectively enforced.  They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals.  That gives the losers little motivation to go to the hassle of fighting back, because each loser loses only a little and would receive only small, uncertain, distant profits even from successfully undoing the minority's grab.  [ed note: hmm...I wonder what examples we might come up with?]

I don't really have anything to add, but I suspect the astute reader will figure out why these passages leaped out at me.  I guess I only can ask: what lessons can we glean and how can we apply them as we try to end our current war and perhaps mitigate the impact of our addiction to oil and the rampant militarism in our society?

ntodd

PS--I recommend the book, as well as Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which I also recently read.