Here are a couple of passages from the British press, written during England’s record-breaking heat wave that caught my eye:
“‘What we are seeing is absolutely unusual,’ said Prof Schellnhuber [former chief scientific adviser to the German government and now head of the UK’s leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall centre]. ‘We know that global warming is proceeding apace, but most of us were thinking that in 20-30 years time we would be seeing hot spells [like this].’
“‘We’ve not seen such an extended period of dry weather [in Europe] since records began,’ said Michael Knobelsdorf, a meteorologist at the German weather service. Temperatures across parts of Europe have been a consistent 5C warmer than average for several months, but the heatwaves have extended across the northern hemisphere. Temperatures in some Indian states reached 45-49C (113-120F), with more than 1,500 people dying as a direct result. There have been near-record temperatures in Canada and the US, Hawaii, China, parts of Russia and Alaska.
“The intense heat in some places has given way to some of the most severe monsoon rains on record”
[John Vidal, Global warming may be speeding up, fears scientist, the Guardian)
“India, Sri Lanka and the United States have registered record high temperatures, rainfall and tornadoes; continental Europe has seen forest fires like never before and great rivers such as the Po in Italy reduced to a trickle; and now it is Britain’s turn.”
(Michael McCarthy, One man can take the heat off. Will he heed the global warning?, the Independent)
“‘We’ve not seen such an extended period of dry weather [in Europe] since records began,’ said Michael Knobelsdorf, a meteorologist at the German weather service. Temperatures across parts of Europe have been a consistent 5C warmer than average for several months, but the heatwaves have extended across the northern hemisphere. Temperatures in some Indian states reached 45-49C (113-120F), with more than 1,500 people dying as a direct result. There have been near-record temperatures in Canada and the US, Hawaii, China, parts of Russia and Alaska.
“The intense heat in some places has given way to some of the most severe monsoon rains on record”
[John Vidal, Global warming may be speeding up, fears scientist, the Guardian)
“India, Sri Lanka and the United States have registered record high temperatures, rainfall and tornadoes; continental Europe has seen forest fires like never before and great rivers such as the Po in Italy reduced to a trickle; and now it is Britain’s turn.”
(Michael McCarthy, One man can take the heat off. Will he heed the global warning?, the Independent)
But no single line caught my eye more than this one from a “leader” or editorial in the Guardian with the telling, if depressing, title, “The climate must change, And reform must start with America”: “Respected scientists warn climate change could make the planet too hot for life itself.” Too hot for life itself. There may be the most chilling line of our time. Of any time perhaps. I’m no scientist, of course, and have no way to assess the possible accuracy of such an extreme statement in a perfectly respectable newspaper, but I am struck by the extremity of the environmental fears out there in the world and by how little the issue of global warming has truly penetrated here.
I watched, for instance, prime time news the other night cover the record temperatures in London as essentially a light human interest story from the summer’s silly season. Included, for instance, was an interview with an American visitor to London who commented that 100 degrees was just nice summer weather in New York). This sort of dancing til the end of time would have made most of the later Roman emperors blush.
Yesterday, both typically and symbolically, the Bush administration appointed another FOG (friend of George) to a major position in the administration, this time the Governor of Utah Michael O. Leavitt. “A trusted friend, a capable executive and a man who understands the obligations of environmental stewardship,” announced uncurious George said of Leavitt as, of course, “he arrived in Denver for a fund-raising event.” The governor is to be the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (which should perhaps be retitled the Environmental Rejection Agency). He also received the following encomium, according to the New York Times (Katherine Seelye, Bush Nominates Utah Governor to Lead E.P.A.), “Thomas R. Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents utilities, praised Mr. Leavitt for a management style that ‘stresses collaboration of all stakeholders in policymaking, which helps break down barriers to resolving highly charged environmental issues.”
But perhaps Leavitt has no better credential for the job — “environmental groups, nationally and in Utah, said he supported development over conservation and was a friend of the oil and gas industries” — than that he opposes the Kyoto treaty on global warming. If you want to check out the way the Busheviks are jerking around science, check out the website of the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee “presented by Rep. Henry A Waxman” — ” When President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, he promised the American people that ‘my Administration’s climate change policy will be science-based.’ In fact, however, the Bush Administration has repeatedly manipulated scientific committees and suppressed science in this area.”
Here is what the Guardian editorial quoted above had to say about this administration: “On gaining office, the Bush administration, with its roots in oil and big business, withdrew unilaterally from the biggest international commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto protocol. To gain some scale of how reckless this act of political vandalism was consider this: if US states were independent nations they would comprise 25 of the top 60 nations that emit greenhouse gases – Texas’s emissions alone exceed France’s.”
And now it turns out — revenge of the Cold War superpowers — that Russia may also pull out of the Kyoto agreement. According to the Independent piece (quoted above):
“No matter that Britain – last year – and more than 100 other countries have already ratified. Without the Russians, the commitments are no longer binding. The treaty is dead. The world will have to think of something else to try to deal with what is probably the greatest threat it has faced. And concern is mounting, especially among European governments and environmentalists, that the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and his government – the only major nation apart from the United States not to have ratified – may never do so
“It is known there are many people in Washington who hope and believe that Russia will not ratify, and some European governments are suspicious that the Bush administration may be actively pressing the Russians to do nothing”
Sometimes I think that, if the word weren’t already so badly in use, I might call myself a “conservative.” As I get older, my greatest urge is to conserve something of our Earth and the people on it from the imperial bulldozers and domestic strip-miners. As I’ve often said, I fear an American empire far less than I fear a world in rubble — and that, I think, is where our mullahs are actually taking us.
Just the other day, in another of those FOG (of war) announcements, the President, according to the Financial Times (James Harding, Bush associate to head Iraqi business efforts), chose “a businessman who is a personal friend and a leading Republican fundraiser to rescue the failing Iraqi corporate sector. Thomas C. Foley, a corporate turnround expert based in Connecticut, is due to fly to Baghdad next week to take charge of the privatisation and revival of Iraq’s nearly 200 state-owned companies Mr Foley said he would be developing a plan to advance the privatisation of many of the state-owned enterprises as well as opening Iraq up to foreign trade.”
In a love fest of comments, Foley said charmingly of the President, “He has a real knack for matching people with jobs.” Now, Foley, a “turnround expert” (and what a charming euphemism that is) will go to Iraq to unmatch people and jobs. In the meantime, under this one-policy fits all imperial regime, it turns out that the administration is attempting to perform similar “turnaround” feats at our national parks by dismantling the National Park Service. (The goal is evidently to turn those domestic areas over which we are officially “stewards” into Iraq-like expanses.) Ruth Rosen takes on (see below) the attempt to privatize the national parks in one of her fine San Francisco Chronicle columns. (I include as well below a provocative column by George Monbiot of the Guardian on the “Edens” we do create internationally — Yellowstone National Park being among the earliest of them — out of other people’s lands and lives.)
On our most recent plans, Rosen quotes two former interior secretaries thusly:
“‘What we would have is not national parks but amusement parks,’ said Bruce Babbitt, who served during two Clinton terms. Stuart Udall, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was equally indignant: ‘This is the first administration in the last century that is clearly, even admittedly, anti- conservation. I never thought I would see this. The national parks are not shopping malls to be privatized.'”
And here, from Waxman’s website, is part of an account of how the administration is dealing “scientifically” with Yellowstone Park:
“The Bush Administration has suppressed important information about continuing ecological problems at Yellowstone National Park in order to avoid international attention. In April 2003, Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Paul Hoffman wrote to the United Nations’ World Heritage Committee and requested that Yellowstone be removed from a list of parks at risk and in need of international attention. He wrote, ‘Yellowstone is no longer in danger.’ To make this argument, Mr. Hoffman cited a reported written by Yellowstone Park staff. However, this report had apparently been substantially edited to suppress scientific information.
“A draft report in early 2003 discussed several problems that continue to threaten Yellowstone, including the degradation of water from mining toxins, a parasitic disease among native trout, and continued controversy over potentially diseased bison who stray outside park boundaries. The final version of the report sent by the Interior Department to the United Nation’s World Heritage Committee does not include these ongoing concerns.”
Usually we identify empires with the long haul — the various Chinese dynasties/empires or the Roman Empire that lasted centuries, or the Spanish and British empires that certainly made the century mark. But this may be an illusion. We may just be winnowing the few successful empires from the pack. Perhaps the closest attempt at a truly global empire before our own, the Mongol one (and they, by the way, sacked Baghdad) collapsed almost instantly (though some of its parts lasted far longer). For that matter the great empires of our century went with remarkable speed (though not fast enough for the hundreds of millions who suffered their impact): the Nazis whose thousand year Reich collapsed in twelve years; the Japanese whose imperial dreams lasted from perhaps the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to the firebombing and atomic bombing of the country in 1945; or for that matter the Soviet Empire which barely outlasted the seven decades of a human lifetime before disintegrating.
When I think about this administration and the kind of non-attention that has been given to global warming here, of the mad rise in pickup truck, SUV, and humvee sales, the phrase “as if there were no tomorrow” comes painfully to mind and I begin to think short. I begin to think not empire, but rubble. The insane disconnect between what we know of global warming and our acts can’t simply be blamed on the Bush administration; perhaps it isn’t just a hideous version of serendipity that such an administration with its fierce urge to assault the environment (“stewardship”) arrived at the Kyoto moment.
We seem to be in a state of civilizational denial which the Bush people, who dream of a dominant future but in many ways can hardly think beyond tomorrow’s profits, are pushing for all its worth. Nowhere in the mainstream, except perhaps in a few opinion columns (see a powerful one below by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman), would you find the simple, almost self-evident link between Iraq, oil, and global warming proposed by scientist John Schellnhuber proposes in a piece in the Guardian ( Action stations):
“In fact, the US-led invasion of Iraq will directly help to pave the road towards environmental disaster by bringing back the world’s second largest oil reserves to the free market, thus prolonging the consumption of cheap fossil fuels as a lifestyle of mass destruction. This very lifestyle, which confounds mobility with liberty, is unfortunately a mantra of modern civilisation and it may need a hundred green Gorbachevs to bring about ecological perestroika.”
And here’s the saddest thing, in such a quick-fix nation, who knows what solutions might be found if we actually put our minds (and our money) to work. Take a look, for instance, at a recent brief notice in New Scientist magazine (Most efficient solar cell yet revealed) which reports that the “race to develop cost-effective solar power has sped up with the announcement of the world’s most efficient photovoltaic cell yet. Spectrolab, a subsidiary of Boeing based in California, US, has created a photovoltaic cell capable of converting 36 per cent of the Sun’s rays into electricity. By contrast, ordinary existing solar cells are between 10 and 15 per cent energy efficient.”
And yet sadly, we are in a nation where it’s also perfectly sane to write a piece about the energy bill just sent to a joint committee of the House and Senate, entitled We Don’t Need a National Energy Bill. David Morris at the Alternet website suggests that only at the state and local levels can we now imagine any renewable solutions to our energy fix. “Any energy-related bill that originates in Washington will constitute a major step backward,” he writes, adding, “During the August recess, the Democratic Party would do well to reconsider its fixation on a national energy policy. When the vandals got the handles at the federal level is not the time to give them access to the energy pump.” Tom
Why privatize national parks?
By Ruth Rosen
The San Francisco Chronicle
August 4, 2003Like millions of Americans, I am an enthusiastic explorer of our magnificent national parks.
On a recent vacation, I spent a week hiking with family and friends around Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington. Mesmerized by meadows shimmering with blue lupine and magenta paintbrush, I overheard a park employee gently explain to boisterous teenagers why we need to protect fragile wildflowers by staying on the trails. Near glistening glaciers partly covered by snow fields, I saw a maintenance worker, hauling human waste from the back country, point out hidden crevasses to a group of amateur climbers.
Salt of the Earth
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
August 8, 2003Since we’re stuck in Iraq indefinitely, we may as well try to learn something. But I suspect that our current leaders won’t be receptive to the most important lesson of the land where cities and writing were invented: that manmade environmental damage can destroy a civilization.
When archaeologists excavated the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, they were amazed not just by what they found but by where they found it: in the middle of an unpopulated desert. In “Ur of the Chaldees,” Leonard Woolley asked: “Why, if Ur was an empire’s capital, if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?”
The answer – the reason “the very soil lost its virtue” – is that heavy irrigation in a hot, dry climate leads to a gradual accumulation of salt in the soil
To read more Krugman click here
Driven out of Eden
By George Monbiot
The Guardian
August 5, 2003It is surely one of the most brazen evasions of reality ever painted. John Constable’s The Cornfield – completed in 1826 and now hanging in the National Gallery’s new exhibition, Paradise – evokes, at the very height of the enclosure movement, a flawless rural harmony.
Just as the commoners were being dragged from their land, their crops destroyed, their houses razed, the dissenters transported or hanged, Constable conjures the definitive English Arcadia. A dog walks a herd of sheep into the deep shade of an August day. A ruddy farm boy drinks from a glittering stream, his donkey quietly behind him. In the background, framed by great elms, men in hats and neckerchiefs work a field of wheat. Beyond them, a river shimmers through water meadows. A church emerges from the trees to bless the happy natives and their other Eden.
To read more Monbiot click here