Josh Tickell, Director of "The Big Fix" reveals the continuing BP Gulf oil spill cover-up. S. Dutta on mega coal plant construction binge in India. "GM Food Song" by Superweed. Conclusion of tar sands speech by independent scientist Dr. David Schindler.
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From the high desert, from the dry falls of ages past, this is Alex Smith. We have a full menu of audio for you this week.
You'll start out with a main course of awful truth about the continuing BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Director Josh Tickell joins us for a look at his dark reality pic "The Big Fix".
Then we go to the coal disaster you never hear about. The government of India has teamed up with one of its biggest corporations to build some of the largest coal plants on the Planet. S. Dutta reports from Delhi about the Tata Mundra mega plant. Their lives and your climate in one big story.
I'll play you a fine activist song about GM foods and wrap up with more from my recording of Dr. David Schindler's breakout speech against the Canadian Tar sands.
Bon appetite.
THE FIG FIX ON THE BP GULF OIL SPILL
Sales of oil and gas leases are the second largest source of revenue to the United States government. About forty percent of that happens in the Gulf of Mexico.
As we learn in this interview with Josh Tickell, only the Internal Revenue Service brings in more (from taxes, with a much bigger overhead). Is it any wonder the fossil fuel industry has so much control over the government?
There is hardly any oversight. That is why BP was allowed to drill in deep waters on the edge of a ridge in the Gulf of Mexico, even after companies like Exxon had abandoned drilling efforts there. The area was known to host pools of explosive gas as well as the oil.
Tickell goes over a long list of illness suffered by cleanup workers and many residents of the Gulf states. Skin rashes, asthma, and many other chronic conditions popped up after BP poured millions of gallons of the toxic oil dispersant Corexit into the Gulf. Exactly how many million gallons is still in dispute.
The Corexit was carried toward the shorelines, where waves and winds whip it up into water droplets which hit Gulf residents, to this day.
Tickell says despite the multi-million dollar advertising campaign saying the beaches are all clean, there are still workers cleaning beaches, and popular beaches have closures now and then. Tickell, who grew up in Louisiana, in a Cajun family, dug into "cleaned up" beaches and found lots of oil deeper in the sand. It isn't just a metaphorical "cover up", he tells us, but the oil is really just covered up for now.
We go into the Obama deception, the multibillions of shareholder profits paid out by BP even during and after the spill, why the military was co-opted by BP and more.
Josh Tickell first came to prominence after driving his grease-powered "veggie van" across America. That became the film "fuel". Now with wife Rachel, "The Big Fix" is winning acclaim at film festivals around the world. It got a standing ovation at Cannes. Our Radio Ecoshock correspondent in Washington D.C., Gerri Williams, saw it at a film festival there. She said the audience was wowed, and recommended this interview with Josh Tickell.
Since many standard theaters are afraid of blowback from the powerful oil industry, it may not play near you. Fortunately, the DVD will be available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Netflix and ITunes in June. Or you can get it directly from the film web site, after the June release, at thebigfixmovie.com
COAL IN INDIA
You know Americans are blowing tops of Appalachian Mountains for dirty coal power. Warren Buffet's endless coal trains flow from the America West.
In early May, activists from Vancouver, including two prominent academics, Dr. Bill Rees of the ecological footprint, and energy expert Mark Jaccard, were arrested stopping a coal train there.
Everybody knows China built a coal plant a week. So why don't we hear about the mega mega coal plants springing up in India? Now you will.
Mr. S. Dutta joins us for an in-depth report from India about the growing coal binge there.
The coal mining industry is mainly nationalized, run by the government of India. Politicians have promised to electrify the country, and coal is their main fuel, even as India is hit hard by climate-driven drought, floods, and heat waves.
The center of attention now is the giant 4 gig watt Tata Mundra plant in Northwest India (Gujarat State). It is right on the coast, in one of the most ecologically sensitive and productive areas. Further inland is the great desert, so most people live and work on the coast.
The poorest people, small farmers and fisher people, will be most directly hurt by construction and operation of the many coal plants planned at Tata Mundra.
I ask Mr. Dutta to compare the many anti-coal plants there, and the Occupy movement in the West. Although many people have been arrested at both, there are major differences. The coal-powered electricity will benefit the middle and upper classes, so they are supporting it. The many poor people are those protesting. They do not speak Hindi, the language of their government, and are not consulted or compensated. These poor people need the help of non-profits like the one Mr. Dutta works for.
We go into the larger energy picture of India with lots of facts and figures which may surprise you. Along with the many coal plants either under construction or planned, goes a lot of corruption of land sales. The power will go to fuel shopping malls, which the poor people can never dream to visit. It's a deep interview, with many angles you should hear.
Before we go to our exclusive recording of Dr. David Schindler on the Tar Sands, you'll want to hear this smart new song about a dangerous idea: genetic modification of your food. From You tube, here is the band Superweed.
[Superweed]
THE REST OF THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT THE TAR SANDS - DAVID SCHINDLER
A few weeks ago I played you part of a daring speech by one of Canada's most prominent and honored scientists, Dr. David Schindler. He spoke out about the many dangers of the Canadian Tar Sands, in a speech to a packed audience at the Wosk Centre in Vancouver. Here is David Schindler wrapping up, about the deformed fish, the fake restoration promoted on TV, and the lasting cost to us all.
For example, The First Nations people of Northern Alberta, who depend on fish to live, complained they were finding some too deformed to eat, or even feed to their dogs. Schindler set up a collection point, and in just the first year found fish with tumors, fish with two tails, fish with one big eye and so on. He concludes these are the product of embryos poisoned by tar sands waste.
Still on the subject of fish, we hear another scandal. When a mine pit is finished, the big corporations are allowed to fill them in with tailings, and then add 10 meters (about 32 feet) of water. They call this restored "fish habitat" - even though nothing can live in them. Starting 17 years ago, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans have approved over 25 of such "fish lakes". The first one from 17 years ago shows no signs of life, much less fish, but the Federal government doesn't care, Schindler says.
The Caribou stocks of the Tar Sands area have been wiped out. Under the law, they should have been treated as endangered species, but the Minister in charge says Canada has lots of caribou - we'll just stuff in some new ones later, when the lands are restored.
Schindler says very little has been restored, and even those projects are an ecological failure. Supposed forests are sparsely treed. The companies try to restore peat bogs - but the tailings are too salty, at least ten times too salty, to host the peat bogs. Instead of 300 species, the "restored" lands are lucky to host a few dozen.
Meanwhile paid "green" spokespeople like Patrick Moore appear on TV and You tube showing off the restored lands. Schindler says real biologist laugh when Moore points out a pleasant yellow plant as an example of new growth. The plant is exotic, shouldn't be there, and is known to accumulate cyanide.
The whole "restoration" game is a Ponzi scheme. The oil companies have saved about 10% of the cost to restore the easiest lands, those built up with removed top soil (not the toxic tailings). Schindler says Canadians under forty years of age will be stuck with the cleanup bill in years to come.
I doubt restoration will ever happen. As the oil runs out, or becomes too expensive for an industrial economy, these ravages lands will be abandoned, with their toxic lakes and pits, a scar the size of a small European country, left on the planet, as signs of a past oil age.
My thanks to Simon Fraser University for permission to record this speech. Dr. David Schindler is an award winning Canadian scientists, of international renown. That he would speak out at this point shows how bad the Canadian Tar Sands situation has become.
The big fix on the Gulf oil spill, the push for coal in India, Tar Sands propaganda - the fossil fuel industry is flourishing - while the species and climate thrash toward catastrophe.
Now you know, but knowing is only half the battle. Action is up to you.
I would say knowing is less than half the battle - but the with all the propaganda paid for by the fossil fuel industry, and the bought-out mainstream media, it is a bit of work to find out what is really going on. That is why I do Radio Ecoshock. To help you know.
Visit our new web site at ecoshock.org.
From Wi-Fi somewhere in America, I'm Alex Smith, thank you for listening and caring about your world.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Why Are Forests Dying?
A startling documentary from the public broadcaster ABC Australia explores dying forests. It is happening around the world, in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and all down the West Coast of North America. Call it bugs, call it fungus, call it drought and record heat. Call it climate change and plain old pollution.
Whether it's satellite photos, or walking through the dying woods, it's heart-breaking. Why are forests dying around the world?
I'm Alex Smith. I've covered climate change in so many Radio Ecoshock programs. Later in this program we'll talk to a key scientist, Lisa Ainsworth, about misplaced expectations that rising carbon dioxide levels will green the planet and feed billions more people.
But first we are going to ground with a citizen activist from New Jersey. Her trees, and all our trees, are weakened and dying from a much simpler cause: plain old pollution. The air looks cleaner, but all that industrial exhaust is still deadly to plants - and our lungs.
The trees are talking to us, but we just aren't listening.
Gail Zawacki is speaking out on the pollution that is killing trees, shrubs and crops - despite all the government back patting on supposedly cleaner air.
First we have to remember there is good and bad ozone. The saying is "Good in the sky, bad nearby." The ozone in the upper stratosphere protects all living things from harmful ultraviolet light from the sun. That was the worry of the ozone hole.
Lower down near the ground, we have what is called "tropospheric" ozone. That is part of the smog, but ozone itself is invisible. It's a type of oxygen, but it has three oxygen atoms instead of two.
As Gail tells us, there are no factories spewing ozone - that is what makes it so difficult to control. Tropospheric ozone is created in an air-borne reaction with other chemicals called "precursors". The main precursor is nitrogen - and we are the nitrogen civilization. We release it from burning fossil fuels, but laying billions of tons of nitrogen on farm fields as fertilizers, and many other sources.
Another precursor is a group of "volatile organic compounds" also known as VOC's. Our industrial society creates plenty of VOC's, especially from the chemical and refinery industries. Some consumer and household products, including paints, also release VOCs.
It turns out trees can release VOC's as well. That is how Ronald Regan was infamously able to claim that trees cause pollution. However, natural forests existed for millions of years without producing harmful smog or dangerous ozone levels. We do that.
Ozone is a "reactive" substance. It oxidizes everything from plant leaves to granite monuments, all of which begin to deteriorate.
Please listen to the Gail Zawacki interview to learn how ozone impacts trees, shrubs and crops. (It also harms our lungs, especially anybody with breathing problems. That's another whole story.)
The leaves begin to shut down. You can find black stippling, or sometimes they "bronze" - turning color well before the fall. Then the plant cannot perform the photosynthesis it needs. As a result, trees and shrubs are weakened, and less able to prevent diseases (like a fungus) or insect pests from doing damage.
We may see the immediate cause of tree deaths as caused by a fungus or boring beetle, but the tree is weakened by ozone damage. Zawacki, and the Australian documentary, compare the dying tree situation to HIV. The AIDS damaged immune system may die due to pneumonia, but the real driver was HIV.
Agricultural agencies, and forest departments, know all about ozone damage. They have pictures on their web sites. But other government agencies hardly ever talk about it. We have been told air pollution in the West is all cleaned up, but really the ozone plague goes on and on.
Gail has wrapped up all her research on the ozone threat in a really great document titled "Pillage, Plunder & Pollute, LLC (A Global Glut of Invisible Trace Gases is Destroying Life on Earth)" It has lots of illustrations and links. You can download it as a free .pdf - or buy the print version from Amazon. It was a real education for me, and part of the reason we asked her to come on Radio Ecoshock.
Gail writes: "This is really well known to the USDA, and by the international scientific community. In fact the USDA in cooperation with many academics at universities has been engaged in research for years, trying to develop ozone "resistant" or "tolerant" crops.... Ozone is also of concern for farmers, not only because it reduces the yield but also quality of protein, minerals etc. - so it also means ruminants like cows and pigs are getting less nutrition for the amount eaten."
In the Journal Nature, I found a paper saying tropospheric ozone has increased 35% over the last century.
The 2003 paper by Wendy Loya and others says increased ozone levels hurts both forests and crops, even when carbon dioxide is increased, as we expect in the coming decades. They conclude "Our results suggest that, in a world with elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, global-scale reductions in plant productivity due to elevated ozone levels will also lower soil carbon formation rates significantly."
You can also keep learning from Gail by visiting her blog "Wit's End".
At the close of our interview, I ask about her continued support of the Occupy movement. Gail tells us the mainstream media totally failed to report the May 1st Occupy march in New York City. It was at least tens of thousands of people, filling major avenues as far as you could see. Newspapers and TV played it down, saying the protest "fizzled". Hardly what those attending experienced.
When I asked Gail about solutions to the ozone problem - we had a pause. We would need to cut down on nitrogen use, and nitrogen-producing crops like soy and peas. Chemical factories would need different processes, and the whole fossil fuel burning society would have to find clean alternatives. It's a huge job. I suppose awareness of the problem is a good start.
Here is another of Gail's sites on dying trees.
I also recommend this article from her blog, with a critique of the Australian TV documentary.
In this Radio Ecoshock program you hear a couple of clips from the ABC Australia television program Catalyst which aired on April 26th 2012. Find the the video and a transcript here.
Our theme music this week is Canadian folk artist Bruce Cockburn, "If A Tree Falls" performed live in Montreal in 2005. We also heard brief clips of "I Talk To The Trees" by Thomas L. Thomas in 1950, and updated by Masha Qrella from her album "Speak Low" Berlin 2007
WHAT WILL INCREASED CARBON DIOXIDE MEAN TO PLANTS?
Whether you accept climate change science or not, nobody disputes the fact that carbon dioxide levels are growing in the atmosphere, as we burn fossil fuels. That changes the way plants grow.
Various experts, including some climate modelers, count on increased plant growth as carbon dioxide rates go up in the atmosphere. Others have promised that is how we will feed a more heavily populated planet. Is it true?
Our guest is Lisa Ainsworth, Assistant Professor of Plant Biology and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences, at the University of Illinois. She is co-author of one of the most cited papers on the effects of increased carbon dioxide on plant growth.
She is working with the FACE method of spraying increased carbon dioxide up around the trees, which are more or less in a wild setting. This is better than the former greenhouse methods, because the open air setting allows for real variables such as rain, sunlight, and wind. The official meaning of FACE is "Free Air Concentration Enrichment"
Early climate models depended on greenhouse measurements of extra plant growth with added carbon dioxide. They projected up to 30% increase in plant growth on earth by 2100 with CO2 at 550 parts per million. With the ever-increasing fossil fuel use, scientists now project we will reach 550 ppm CO2 by 2050 instead.
However, the FACE testing shows extra growth due to increased CO2 is less outside, than in greenhouse settings. The increase might be 15%, and it varies according to the crop. The difference is important, because early climate models assumed extra plant growth would soak up a lot more carbon than will really happen.
It turns out plants have worked out several different ways of handling carbon dioxide intake, as evolution continued. For example, most trees have not yet reached their saturation point. If the CO2 increases, they can use more of it. Dr. Ainsworth describes how this works, for what are called "C4" type plants. They will benefit from more CO2, and so will such crops as rice and wheat.
Contrast that with plants like corn and sorghum. These developed a type of super-concentrator for CO2, before it goes into photosynthesis. They are already getting as much CO2 as they can handle. Adding more to the atmosphere will NOT increase their growth. The same applies to the grasslands of the Savannas - one of the largest biomass types on the planet.
One of the limitations of the FACE method is it has only been studied in Western-type countries like the US, Japan, and New Zealand. There have not been open-setting tests in the tropics, where most of the biomass of the planet is. That leaves a huge hole in our knowledge, and a big question mark about how tropical forests and savanna lands will respond to more CO2. We'd better find out quickly, because it takes at least a decade of testing, and 2050 is not that far away.
Not only do we want to know if the extra CO2 will help us feed the expected new billions of people arriving on the planet. We also want to know how it will affect all the natural plants, from forests to grasslands. Plus, there is a feed-back effect that could help us, or not, if plants can soak up more of that carbon dioxide. Add in the predicted droughts and desertification around the sub-tropics, and the forest die-offs we covered earlier, and we see that extra plant growth may not reduce our carbon dioxide laden atmosphere. They may even add to it, becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink.
There is so much we do not know, but we have discovered a closer look at the coming reality through FACE, and through scientists like Lisa Ainsworth.
HERE ARE A BUNCH OF HELPFUL LINKS TO FOLLOW UP ON C02 AND PLANTS
the FACE experiments (Ainsworth et al)
Also, recommended by Ainsworth in interview: SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment) at University of Illinois
and at the Oakridge Nat'l Lab (database of results)
Find out more about rising CO2 levels and plants in this Nature article. Here is a worrying article: Australia's trees may not survive excess carbon dioxide
And see this Sydney Morning Herald video of the FACE experiments in Australia.
A SIDE NOTE ON PLANTS RESPONDING TO WARMING
As reported by the BBC, Spring is coming earlier than ever, and plants are blooming sooner, according to new research just published in the journal Nature. British scientific bodies and nature lovers have kept such records going back to 1875. Spring is now at least 5 days earlier, with some plants flowering eight times faster than climate models predicted.
The insects are keeping pace, breeding earlier and more often.
In the Australian documentary "Dying Trees", there is a shot of a forest in Spain that suddenly died. The whole thing. Even though I've seen millions of dying trees with my own eyes, right here in British Columbia, I was shocked. That one photo, and all it means, hurt me deep inside.
I'm Alex Smith, your reporter. As I limp off to lick my green wounds, the forests call out to us. Will anybody hear?
Don't forget our new web site, at ecoshock.org
Whether it's satellite photos, or walking through the dying woods, it's heart-breaking. Why are forests dying around the world?
I'm Alex Smith. I've covered climate change in so many Radio Ecoshock programs. Later in this program we'll talk to a key scientist, Lisa Ainsworth, about misplaced expectations that rising carbon dioxide levels will green the planet and feed billions more people.
But first we are going to ground with a citizen activist from New Jersey. Her trees, and all our trees, are weakened and dying from a much simpler cause: plain old pollution. The air looks cleaner, but all that industrial exhaust is still deadly to plants - and our lungs.
The trees are talking to us, but we just aren't listening.
Gail Zawacki is speaking out on the pollution that is killing trees, shrubs and crops - despite all the government back patting on supposedly cleaner air.
First we have to remember there is good and bad ozone. The saying is "Good in the sky, bad nearby." The ozone in the upper stratosphere protects all living things from harmful ultraviolet light from the sun. That was the worry of the ozone hole.
Lower down near the ground, we have what is called "tropospheric" ozone. That is part of the smog, but ozone itself is invisible. It's a type of oxygen, but it has three oxygen atoms instead of two.
As Gail tells us, there are no factories spewing ozone - that is what makes it so difficult to control. Tropospheric ozone is created in an air-borne reaction with other chemicals called "precursors". The main precursor is nitrogen - and we are the nitrogen civilization. We release it from burning fossil fuels, but laying billions of tons of nitrogen on farm fields as fertilizers, and many other sources.
Another precursor is a group of "volatile organic compounds" also known as VOC's. Our industrial society creates plenty of VOC's, especially from the chemical and refinery industries. Some consumer and household products, including paints, also release VOCs.
It turns out trees can release VOC's as well. That is how Ronald Regan was infamously able to claim that trees cause pollution. However, natural forests existed for millions of years without producing harmful smog or dangerous ozone levels. We do that.
Ozone is a "reactive" substance. It oxidizes everything from plant leaves to granite monuments, all of which begin to deteriorate.
Please listen to the Gail Zawacki interview to learn how ozone impacts trees, shrubs and crops. (It also harms our lungs, especially anybody with breathing problems. That's another whole story.)
The leaves begin to shut down. You can find black stippling, or sometimes they "bronze" - turning color well before the fall. Then the plant cannot perform the photosynthesis it needs. As a result, trees and shrubs are weakened, and less able to prevent diseases (like a fungus) or insect pests from doing damage.
We may see the immediate cause of tree deaths as caused by a fungus or boring beetle, but the tree is weakened by ozone damage. Zawacki, and the Australian documentary, compare the dying tree situation to HIV. The AIDS damaged immune system may die due to pneumonia, but the real driver was HIV.
Agricultural agencies, and forest departments, know all about ozone damage. They have pictures on their web sites. But other government agencies hardly ever talk about it. We have been told air pollution in the West is all cleaned up, but really the ozone plague goes on and on.
Gail has wrapped up all her research on the ozone threat in a really great document titled "Pillage, Plunder & Pollute, LLC (A Global Glut of Invisible Trace Gases is Destroying Life on Earth)" It has lots of illustrations and links. You can download it as a free .pdf - or buy the print version from Amazon. It was a real education for me, and part of the reason we asked her to come on Radio Ecoshock.
Gail writes: "This is really well known to the USDA, and by the international scientific community. In fact the USDA in cooperation with many academics at universities has been engaged in research for years, trying to develop ozone "resistant" or "tolerant" crops.... Ozone is also of concern for farmers, not only because it reduces the yield but also quality of protein, minerals etc. - so it also means ruminants like cows and pigs are getting less nutrition for the amount eaten."
In the Journal Nature, I found a paper saying tropospheric ozone has increased 35% over the last century.
The 2003 paper by Wendy Loya and others says increased ozone levels hurts both forests and crops, even when carbon dioxide is increased, as we expect in the coming decades. They conclude "Our results suggest that, in a world with elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, global-scale reductions in plant productivity due to elevated ozone levels will also lower soil carbon formation rates significantly."
You can also keep learning from Gail by visiting her blog "Wit's End".
At the close of our interview, I ask about her continued support of the Occupy movement. Gail tells us the mainstream media totally failed to report the May 1st Occupy march in New York City. It was at least tens of thousands of people, filling major avenues as far as you could see. Newspapers and TV played it down, saying the protest "fizzled". Hardly what those attending experienced.
When I asked Gail about solutions to the ozone problem - we had a pause. We would need to cut down on nitrogen use, and nitrogen-producing crops like soy and peas. Chemical factories would need different processes, and the whole fossil fuel burning society would have to find clean alternatives. It's a huge job. I suppose awareness of the problem is a good start.
Here is another of Gail's sites on dying trees.
I also recommend this article from her blog, with a critique of the Australian TV documentary.
In this Radio Ecoshock program you hear a couple of clips from the ABC Australia television program Catalyst which aired on April 26th 2012. Find the the video and a transcript here.
Our theme music this week is Canadian folk artist Bruce Cockburn, "If A Tree Falls" performed live in Montreal in 2005. We also heard brief clips of "I Talk To The Trees" by Thomas L. Thomas in 1950, and updated by Masha Qrella from her album "Speak Low" Berlin 2007
WHAT WILL INCREASED CARBON DIOXIDE MEAN TO PLANTS?
Whether you accept climate change science or not, nobody disputes the fact that carbon dioxide levels are growing in the atmosphere, as we burn fossil fuels. That changes the way plants grow.
Various experts, including some climate modelers, count on increased plant growth as carbon dioxide rates go up in the atmosphere. Others have promised that is how we will feed a more heavily populated planet. Is it true?
She is working with the FACE method of spraying increased carbon dioxide up around the trees, which are more or less in a wild setting. This is better than the former greenhouse methods, because the open air setting allows for real variables such as rain, sunlight, and wind. The official meaning of FACE is "Free Air Concentration Enrichment"
Early climate models depended on greenhouse measurements of extra plant growth with added carbon dioxide. They projected up to 30% increase in plant growth on earth by 2100 with CO2 at 550 parts per million. With the ever-increasing fossil fuel use, scientists now project we will reach 550 ppm CO2 by 2050 instead.
However, the FACE testing shows extra growth due to increased CO2 is less outside, than in greenhouse settings. The increase might be 15%, and it varies according to the crop. The difference is important, because early climate models assumed extra plant growth would soak up a lot more carbon than will really happen.
It turns out plants have worked out several different ways of handling carbon dioxide intake, as evolution continued. For example, most trees have not yet reached their saturation point. If the CO2 increases, they can use more of it. Dr. Ainsworth describes how this works, for what are called "C4" type plants. They will benefit from more CO2, and so will such crops as rice and wheat.
Contrast that with plants like corn and sorghum. These developed a type of super-concentrator for CO2, before it goes into photosynthesis. They are already getting as much CO2 as they can handle. Adding more to the atmosphere will NOT increase their growth. The same applies to the grasslands of the Savannas - one of the largest biomass types on the planet.
One of the limitations of the FACE method is it has only been studied in Western-type countries like the US, Japan, and New Zealand. There have not been open-setting tests in the tropics, where most of the biomass of the planet is. That leaves a huge hole in our knowledge, and a big question mark about how tropical forests and savanna lands will respond to more CO2. We'd better find out quickly, because it takes at least a decade of testing, and 2050 is not that far away.
Not only do we want to know if the extra CO2 will help us feed the expected new billions of people arriving on the planet. We also want to know how it will affect all the natural plants, from forests to grasslands. Plus, there is a feed-back effect that could help us, or not, if plants can soak up more of that carbon dioxide. Add in the predicted droughts and desertification around the sub-tropics, and the forest die-offs we covered earlier, and we see that extra plant growth may not reduce our carbon dioxide laden atmosphere. They may even add to it, becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink.
There is so much we do not know, but we have discovered a closer look at the coming reality through FACE, and through scientists like Lisa Ainsworth.
HERE ARE A BUNCH OF HELPFUL LINKS TO FOLLOW UP ON C02 AND PLANTS
the FACE experiments (Ainsworth et al)
Also, recommended by Ainsworth in interview: SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment) at University of Illinois
and at the Oakridge Nat'l Lab (database of results)
Find out more about rising CO2 levels and plants in this Nature article. Here is a worrying article: Australia's trees may not survive excess carbon dioxide
And see this Sydney Morning Herald video of the FACE experiments in Australia.
A SIDE NOTE ON PLANTS RESPONDING TO WARMING
As reported by the BBC, Spring is coming earlier than ever, and plants are blooming sooner, according to new research just published in the journal Nature. British scientific bodies and nature lovers have kept such records going back to 1875. Spring is now at least 5 days earlier, with some plants flowering eight times faster than climate models predicted.
The insects are keeping pace, breeding earlier and more often.
In the Australian documentary "Dying Trees", there is a shot of a forest in Spain that suddenly died. The whole thing. Even though I've seen millions of dying trees with my own eyes, right here in British Columbia, I was shocked. That one photo, and all it means, hurt me deep inside.
I'm Alex Smith, your reporter. As I limp off to lick my green wounds, the forests call out to us. Will anybody hear?
Don't forget our new web site, at ecoshock.org
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Is It Too Late for Environmentalism?
Give up hope and exit out of environmentalism? In the UK, deep greener Paul Kingsnorth says he's leaving the climate movement, which is lost anyway. Who else is on the way out the door?
This week we'll hear a challenging interview with one of the co-founders of Greenpeace International. Michael M'Gonigle has been battling since the late 1960's. He teaches environmental law at the University of Victoria in Canada. Two hosts from the podcast "The Extra Environmentalist" interview Michael for Radio Ecoshock - about his new strategy which he calls "Exit Environmentalism". Just in case, we'll top that off with a shot at techno-optimism.
But first, I'll talk with chemical engineer and biofuels specialist Robert Rapier
We go at the fundamentals of the energy crisis - peak oil, Asian demand, speculation and all that. Rapier compares greenhouse gas emissions from Asia to an unstoppable hurricane. I don't agree with everything all our guests say, but Robert takes me closer to "exit environmentalism" with his clear cold logic about the real world we live in.
Brain stimulation from Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith.
Download just the Robert Rapier interview (CD quality 22 min)
Download just the Michael M'Gonigle interview (26 min CD Quality).
ROBERT RAPIER: IS THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE JUST "ACADEMIC"? WILL AMERICA BECOME AN ENERGY GIANT ONCE AGAIN?
How realistic are biofuels as a replacement for oil? Are we headed for energy independence - or an energy crash?
Robert Rapier would know. He's got 20 years’ experience as a chemical engineer, working with all kinds of fuels. Currently Robert is Chief Technology Officer at Merica International, a renewables and forestry company based in Hawaii. Rapier is also Managing Editor of "Consumer Energy Report", and a regular guest on mainstream media. His latest book is "Power Plays, Energy Options in the Age of Peak Oil".
I called up Robert after reading his article "Why the Debate Over Global Warming Is Academic". It's a new perspective, and I grilled him on it. Here is part of Robert's reply in the Radio Ecoshock interview:
"What is likely to happen is our emissions will probably continue to decline somewhat from here. But Asia-Pacific's emissions are going to continue to grow unabated.
It's not only Asia-Pacific. Africa, the Middle East, South America - all these developing regions are rapidly increasing their fossil fuel consumption. I say it [climate change] becomes "academic" because while we debate and debate how we're going to get our emissions down, the emissions just continue to climb.
The reason I liken it to a hurricane - you know we can talk about whether climate change is going to be really bad and disastrous and so forth, just like when we watched hurricane Katrina come in. The night before it came in, I told my wife, I said 'I'm afraid this is going to destroy New Orleans.' But one thing we didn't talk about is 'Well, how do you stop the hurricane?'
And that's what I see in Asia-Pacific right now. The reason I say it's "academic", I don't see a viable way to stop them from increasing their fossil fuel consumption because they are already at such a low level per capita. So I've likened it to a rich person trying to tell a poor person to live within their means. The poor person is just trying to scratch out a living and increase their standard of living, while the rich person has already done that. We've already increased out emissions from a very low level, and we've gotten to a very high level. We just don't have nearly as many people as they do.
The technology does not exist. No country has developed to a high level of development without fossil fuels. So to imagine that it can be done, we are imagining something that has never been done before."
I offer two points of minor disagreement. First, the people of China and other countries are suffering terribly from air pollution. They may begin to demand clean energy just to preserve their health and their lives. Second, there is a limited amount of oil, and even coal, left. Eventually the pressures generally known as "peak oil" may limit the amount of fossil fuels, and make them uneconomical to use.
I could have offered more reasons, such as an utter economic collapse - which always cuts emissions, or severe and continuing damage from a destabilized climate, which either convinces people and governments to change, or again destroys the infrastructure required for supporting the food system and or industrial society.
Finally, there is always the dreamer's hope that humans will come to understand they are wrecking the future and make a choice to do otherwise.
Robert Rapier offers us some tough realities though. The average American uses 22 barrels of oil a year. To give up one or two barrels may not be that difficult, with some not too painful lifestyle choices. The average Chinese person uses two barrels a year, Rapier tells us. That second barrel may be used for things like the tractor, the irrigation pump, or heating a home. Nobody is going to want to give that up, almost no matter what the cost is. Low fuel consumers are going to be willing to pay much higher prices per liter or gallon, and keep burning it, because they need it so badly.
Frankly, it's very discouraging news in the context of fighting climate change. Rapier is not alone in feeling that battle is lost. I begin the program with a quote from Paul Kingsnorth, the UK deep green thinker behind The Dark Mountain Project.
"And also coming to the conclusion, and it was a very difficult conclusion to admit to myself, but I think lots of people are starting to admit it to themselves now - coming to the conclusion that a lot of the problems that we are facing can't be solved, in the sense that we would like to solve them.
For example, we're not going to stop the climate changing. We're not going to stop the mass extinction event that we're in at the moment. Hopefully we can prevent it from getting any worse than it has to get but we're in it, and it's happening and it's too late to do a lot of things about it."
Is that realism or pessimism? The quote comes from an Orion magazine podcast that I hope to play for you later this season on Radio Ecoshock.
As I have a grandchild that I love, I cannot give up. We are in it. It is happening. But we must do all we can to prevent the worst from happening, and I believe we can.
Continuing with Robert Rapier, I draw on his expertise in biofuels. Can biofuels replace fossil fuels? Absolutely not, he says. The maximum we can expect is ten to twenty percent replacement. Rapier isn't shy about discussing the negative trade-offs with some biofuels, like corn ethanol. He suggests the "holy grail" of biofuels is algae production. That doesn't use up land space, and may be biologically sound. However, so far algae production is not economical on any meaningful scale. More research and development needs to be done.
We also discuss the difference between methanol and ethanol. Methanol is derived from natural gas, so it is not a substitute for fossil fuels. It was tested fairly widely in California a couple of decades ago, and found to be a good fuel. The industrial production methods for methanol are well known. But methanol had less political support. Ethanol has the widespread support of the farm lobby, so politicians like it.
Both ethanol (which is derived from plant material) and ethanol are more corrosive than the gasoline we use now.
At one point, U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing European fuels containing ethanol. The subsidized fuel was blended in the U.S. and then exported to Europe. That ended when the subsidies for ethanol expired at the end of last year.
I ask Robert Rapier about the media hype that America will re-emerge as a world energy giant, due to the "trillions of barrels" of reserves in places like oil shale. Rapier says the U.S. will always be an oil importer, as long as it is able. The so called "reserves" are really rocks containing the beginnings of oil, left unfinished by geological processes. It takes a lot of energy just to finish the process.
Rapier compares these "reserves" in the oil shales of the West, in places like Utah and Wyoming, to the gold in the sea. Yes, there are trillions of dollars’ worth of gold flakes in the oceans. No, we don't have any economical way to retrieve that. Ditto the inflated dreams of billions of barrels of potential oil locked up in the stones of the West.
I highly recommend the Robert Rapier interview. Here is his regular column at Consumer Energy Report.
EXIT ENVIRONMENTALISM, WITH PROFESSOR MICHAEL M'GONIGLE
I first heard Michael M'Gonigle's talk on "Exit Environmentalism" in a badly recorded You tube video speech at the University of Victoria. It seemed too important to waste. Seth Moser-Katz and Justin Ritchie volunteered to do this interview for Radio Ecoshock, as part of their longer podcast called "The Extraenvironmentalist". Just Google that, or go to extraenvironmentalist.com.
University of Victoria You tube "Exit Environmentalism" Part 1 61 minute delivered October 27, 2011.
Part 2 Critique and answers 63 min
Be sure to check The Extraenvironmentalist web site for an extended version of this interview with Professor M'Gonigle.
In the interview done for Radio Ecoshock, M'Gonigle questions several aspects of the green model of expectations. For example, we protest and lobby for legislation to be enforced by governments. But that regulation seldom happens - because the legislators depend on the polluters for campaign donations, but even deeper, because governments themselves are the biggest spenders on the growth model that needs to be kept in check. It's pretty profound when a University teacher of green law says the legal system can't work to save us from environmental catastrophe.
I've known Michael M'Gonigle's work for some years. He was one of the founders of Greenpeace International, and then Chair of the Board of Greenpeace Canada. We interviewed Michael about his push to green universities around the world, as models for our next generation of leaders. But M'Gonigle might be the first to say, despite his lifetime of work, we have failed. Mass extinction is already developing, and the climate is already spinning up, possibly out of any control. He works his way through our fallacies, trying to reach new answers. Check out this powerful interview.
In this Radio Ecoshock show we had time for just a quick sample from another podcast from The Extraenvironmentalist. Seth and Ritchie interview Dr. Michael Huesemann author of the book "Techno-Fix". That is Episode number 37.
The Techno-fix podcast runs 1 hour 54 minutes, and I've sliced out a couple of sample running less than 10 minutes. It's definitely just a scratch of the surface, a teaser to encourage you to hear the whole thing.
Still wondering what to think? Is it realistic and cool to hope? Even if the ship is sinking, I must keep on bailing. We'll have more dialogs on the way forward in coming Radio Ecoshock shows, plus news about the three crises: climate change, the energy crisis, and the fragile economy. Keep tuned to Radio Ecoshock at our new web site, at ecoshock.org.
I'm Alex Smith, thank you for listening.
This week we'll hear a challenging interview with one of the co-founders of Greenpeace International. Michael M'Gonigle has been battling since the late 1960's. He teaches environmental law at the University of Victoria in Canada. Two hosts from the podcast "The Extra Environmentalist" interview Michael for Radio Ecoshock - about his new strategy which he calls "Exit Environmentalism". Just in case, we'll top that off with a shot at techno-optimism.
But first, I'll talk with chemical engineer and biofuels specialist Robert Rapier
We go at the fundamentals of the energy crisis - peak oil, Asian demand, speculation and all that. Rapier compares greenhouse gas emissions from Asia to an unstoppable hurricane. I don't agree with everything all our guests say, but Robert takes me closer to "exit environmentalism" with his clear cold logic about the real world we live in.
Brain stimulation from Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith.
Download just the Robert Rapier interview (CD quality 22 min)
Download just the Michael M'Gonigle interview (26 min CD Quality).
ROBERT RAPIER: IS THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE JUST "ACADEMIC"? WILL AMERICA BECOME AN ENERGY GIANT ONCE AGAIN?
How realistic are biofuels as a replacement for oil? Are we headed for energy independence - or an energy crash?
I called up Robert after reading his article "Why the Debate Over Global Warming Is Academic". It's a new perspective, and I grilled him on it. Here is part of Robert's reply in the Radio Ecoshock interview:
"What is likely to happen is our emissions will probably continue to decline somewhat from here. But Asia-Pacific's emissions are going to continue to grow unabated.
It's not only Asia-Pacific. Africa, the Middle East, South America - all these developing regions are rapidly increasing their fossil fuel consumption. I say it [climate change] becomes "academic" because while we debate and debate how we're going to get our emissions down, the emissions just continue to climb.
The reason I liken it to a hurricane - you know we can talk about whether climate change is going to be really bad and disastrous and so forth, just like when we watched hurricane Katrina come in. The night before it came in, I told my wife, I said 'I'm afraid this is going to destroy New Orleans.' But one thing we didn't talk about is 'Well, how do you stop the hurricane?'
And that's what I see in Asia-Pacific right now. The reason I say it's "academic", I don't see a viable way to stop them from increasing their fossil fuel consumption because they are already at such a low level per capita. So I've likened it to a rich person trying to tell a poor person to live within their means. The poor person is just trying to scratch out a living and increase their standard of living, while the rich person has already done that. We've already increased out emissions from a very low level, and we've gotten to a very high level. We just don't have nearly as many people as they do.
The technology does not exist. No country has developed to a high level of development without fossil fuels. So to imagine that it can be done, we are imagining something that has never been done before."
I offer two points of minor disagreement. First, the people of China and other countries are suffering terribly from air pollution. They may begin to demand clean energy just to preserve their health and their lives. Second, there is a limited amount of oil, and even coal, left. Eventually the pressures generally known as "peak oil" may limit the amount of fossil fuels, and make them uneconomical to use.
I could have offered more reasons, such as an utter economic collapse - which always cuts emissions, or severe and continuing damage from a destabilized climate, which either convinces people and governments to change, or again destroys the infrastructure required for supporting the food system and or industrial society.
Finally, there is always the dreamer's hope that humans will come to understand they are wrecking the future and make a choice to do otherwise.
Robert Rapier offers us some tough realities though. The average American uses 22 barrels of oil a year. To give up one or two barrels may not be that difficult, with some not too painful lifestyle choices. The average Chinese person uses two barrels a year, Rapier tells us. That second barrel may be used for things like the tractor, the irrigation pump, or heating a home. Nobody is going to want to give that up, almost no matter what the cost is. Low fuel consumers are going to be willing to pay much higher prices per liter or gallon, and keep burning it, because they need it so badly.
Frankly, it's very discouraging news in the context of fighting climate change. Rapier is not alone in feeling that battle is lost. I begin the program with a quote from Paul Kingsnorth, the UK deep green thinker behind The Dark Mountain Project.
"And also coming to the conclusion, and it was a very difficult conclusion to admit to myself, but I think lots of people are starting to admit it to themselves now - coming to the conclusion that a lot of the problems that we are facing can't be solved, in the sense that we would like to solve them.
For example, we're not going to stop the climate changing. We're not going to stop the mass extinction event that we're in at the moment. Hopefully we can prevent it from getting any worse than it has to get but we're in it, and it's happening and it's too late to do a lot of things about it."
Is that realism or pessimism? The quote comes from an Orion magazine podcast that I hope to play for you later this season on Radio Ecoshock.
As I have a grandchild that I love, I cannot give up. We are in it. It is happening. But we must do all we can to prevent the worst from happening, and I believe we can.
Continuing with Robert Rapier, I draw on his expertise in biofuels. Can biofuels replace fossil fuels? Absolutely not, he says. The maximum we can expect is ten to twenty percent replacement. Rapier isn't shy about discussing the negative trade-offs with some biofuels, like corn ethanol. He suggests the "holy grail" of biofuels is algae production. That doesn't use up land space, and may be biologically sound. However, so far algae production is not economical on any meaningful scale. More research and development needs to be done.
We also discuss the difference between methanol and ethanol. Methanol is derived from natural gas, so it is not a substitute for fossil fuels. It was tested fairly widely in California a couple of decades ago, and found to be a good fuel. The industrial production methods for methanol are well known. But methanol had less political support. Ethanol has the widespread support of the farm lobby, so politicians like it.
Both ethanol (which is derived from plant material) and ethanol are more corrosive than the gasoline we use now.
At one point, U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing European fuels containing ethanol. The subsidized fuel was blended in the U.S. and then exported to Europe. That ended when the subsidies for ethanol expired at the end of last year.
I ask Robert Rapier about the media hype that America will re-emerge as a world energy giant, due to the "trillions of barrels" of reserves in places like oil shale. Rapier says the U.S. will always be an oil importer, as long as it is able. The so called "reserves" are really rocks containing the beginnings of oil, left unfinished by geological processes. It takes a lot of energy just to finish the process.
Rapier compares these "reserves" in the oil shales of the West, in places like Utah and Wyoming, to the gold in the sea. Yes, there are trillions of dollars’ worth of gold flakes in the oceans. No, we don't have any economical way to retrieve that. Ditto the inflated dreams of billions of barrels of potential oil locked up in the stones of the West.
I highly recommend the Robert Rapier interview. Here is his regular column at Consumer Energy Report.
EXIT ENVIRONMENTALISM, WITH PROFESSOR MICHAEL M'GONIGLE
University of Victoria You tube "Exit Environmentalism" Part 1 61 minute delivered October 27, 2011.
Part 2 Critique and answers 63 min
Be sure to check The Extraenvironmentalist web site for an extended version of this interview with Professor M'Gonigle.
In the interview done for Radio Ecoshock, M'Gonigle questions several aspects of the green model of expectations. For example, we protest and lobby for legislation to be enforced by governments. But that regulation seldom happens - because the legislators depend on the polluters for campaign donations, but even deeper, because governments themselves are the biggest spenders on the growth model that needs to be kept in check. It's pretty profound when a University teacher of green law says the legal system can't work to save us from environmental catastrophe.
I've known Michael M'Gonigle's work for some years. He was one of the founders of Greenpeace International, and then Chair of the Board of Greenpeace Canada. We interviewed Michael about his push to green universities around the world, as models for our next generation of leaders. But M'Gonigle might be the first to say, despite his lifetime of work, we have failed. Mass extinction is already developing, and the climate is already spinning up, possibly out of any control. He works his way through our fallacies, trying to reach new answers. Check out this powerful interview.
In this Radio Ecoshock show we had time for just a quick sample from another podcast from The Extraenvironmentalist. Seth and Ritchie interview Dr. Michael Huesemann author of the book "Techno-Fix". That is Episode number 37.
The Techno-fix podcast runs 1 hour 54 minutes, and I've sliced out a couple of sample running less than 10 minutes. It's definitely just a scratch of the surface, a teaser to encourage you to hear the whole thing.
Still wondering what to think? Is it realistic and cool to hope? Even if the ship is sinking, I must keep on bailing. We'll have more dialogs on the way forward in coming Radio Ecoshock shows, plus news about the three crises: climate change, the energy crisis, and the fragile economy. Keep tuned to Radio Ecoshock at our new web site, at ecoshock.org.
I'm Alex Smith, thank you for listening.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
IT'S WRONG TO WRECK THE WORLD
http://bit.ly/JpmhuZ
I record a lot of speeches, and listen to many more. This talk by Dr. Kathleen Dean Moore of Oregon State University is one of the best speeches of 2012.
The title was "It's Wrong to Wreck the World: Climate Change and the Moral Obligation to the Future". The presentation was organized by Simon Fraser University, in their Continuing Studies in Science and Environment program.
Kathleen spends every summer on a remote island off the coast of Alaska. She's in touch with Nature there, and at home in Oregon. In this artful, moving speech, we get some readings from her work - examples of why her books are so popular.
Find out more about Kathleen Dean Moore at her blog at riverwalking.com
Her latest book, a collection of 1500 short essays about our obligation to the future, is called "Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril." The writers are among the most famous people in the world, all speaking for the rights of the next generation(s).
"Morality" sounds boring. This speech surprised and moved me. It will do the same for you.
NEW MUSIC
The program also premieres a new original song by Libby Roderick: "The Lifeboats Are Burning", and a song inspired by a Radio Ecoshock Show - "We Are" by the new band Tempting Eve in Sydney Australia.
The title was "It's Wrong to Wreck the World: Climate Change and the Moral Obligation to the Future". The presentation was organized by Simon Fraser University, in their Continuing Studies in Science and Environment program.
Kathleen spends every summer on a remote island off the coast of Alaska. She's in touch with Nature there, and at home in Oregon. In this artful, moving speech, we get some readings from her work - examples of why her books are so popular.
Find out more about Kathleen Dean Moore at her blog at riverwalking.com
Her latest book, a collection of 1500 short essays about our obligation to the future, is called "Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril." The writers are among the most famous people in the world, all speaking for the rights of the next generation(s).
"Morality" sounds boring. This speech surprised and moved me. It will do the same for you.
NEW MUSIC
The program also premieres a new original song by Libby Roderick: "The Lifeboats Are Burning", and a song inspired by a Radio Ecoshock Show - "We Are" by the new band Tempting Eve in Sydney Australia.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
The Beginning of The End
http://bit.ly/IEik8w Economic collapse will come before peak oil or climate disruption, says investment guru Chris Martenson, author of "Crash Course". Matthew Stein, author of "When Technology Fails" explains how a solar flare could cripple society and set off 400 Chernobyls - and how we could fix it. Alex rants against 2012 mythology. Radio Ecoshock 120425 1 hour.
Sorry, it's a long blog this week. Blame it on our guests - they had too many good things to say!
If you want to quickly download the interview separately, here they are, in CD quality (larger file) and Lo-Fi (faster download, lower quality)
CHRIS MARTENSON INTERVIEW (22 min)
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/economy/ES_Martenson.mp3
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/economy/ES_Martenson_LoFi.mp3
MATTHEW STEIN INTERVIEW (27 min)
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/nuclear/ES_Stein.mp3
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/nuclear/ES_Stein_LoFi.mp3
CHRIS MARTENSON - THE FINANCE GURU WHO KNOWS ABOUT CLIMATE, PEAK OIL, AND THE TOPPLING ECONOMY
Most of us have a gut worry about the state of governments, big banks, and big finance. Like we'll wake up one morning with nothing.
Our guest Chris Martenson trained as a scientist, but retrained in business. He made good money in the investment world with a big American corporation. Then the Martenson family life changed dramatically. We'll ask him why, and then pick his brain about things we all wish we knew.
In a talk at Oxford University in 2010, the very wealthy investor Jim Rogers told students to forget about financial careers, and go study agriculture or mining. In a way, Martenson made a similar transition. He tells us about his journey from the business world to a rural life.
Investments weren’t going his way, and when Chris investigated money and high finance, he didn’t like what he saw. He and his family moved out of the rich enclave of Bridgeport Connecticut to a more rural location. Now they are involved in self-sufficiency and community building.
But Chris continues to be one of the more popular financial bloggers on the Net. He also podcasts with another top Net blogger, Mish Shedlock. His “Crash Course” advising people how to prepare for a much more difficult financial and social scene has sold very well.
There is a lot of stress out there about banking, and broke governments. A growing group of blogs, radio hosts, and just plain folks wish it would all just end somehow. Some are cheering for a collapse. Chris says “Be careful what you wish for.” He isn’t hoping for a crash, but thinks the current system cannot go on indefinitely. Most of us, says Martenson, should prepare for a lower standard of living.
WHEN?
The never-ending question is: WHEN will the stuffing hit the fan. I've just read an analysis by Charles Hugh Smith, in his blog "Of Two Minds." The article title says it all: "When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally End?" Charles says various historic cycles show a major collapse around 2021. The problem is, and this is always the case, we can see the financial system is totally unsustainable, but so far the central banks and governments have managed to keep the dance going much longer than any of us thought possible. Nobody can say whether the readjustment will come this month, this year, or even in this decade.
It is even possible we may not see a really big collapse in our lifetime (depending upon your age now). I thought it might all go under in 1981, when New York City and Chrysler went bankrupt. Interest rates went to 22% and folks lost their homes. But it all limped on.
ENERGY AND WEALTH
Scientist Tim Garrett wrote a 2009 paper saying without a complete collapse of industrial civilization, out-of-control climate change was inevitable. He based that on a historic formula about the relationship between energy and wealth. More energy makes more wealth, less energy makes less.
Find a transcript of my 2010 interview with Professor Garrett here. Or listen to this audio interview.
Chris Martenson talks about the relationships between energy availability and wealth. Basically, without energy, we can’t build much of anything else in the way of an industrial society, or even feed the current world population.
I ask Chris for his position on human-induced climate change. Too many finance gurus have either denied climate change, or said it doesn’t matter. Martenson is much more clued into the environment. He sees climate change as a long-term problem, with peak oil biting sooner, and the financial system the most pressing short-term problem.
On his blog at chrismartenson.com, you ran a two part series by Gregor MacDonald called "The Race for BTU's". The second part requires a paid subscription, but check out the first part, there is lots there for you.
Martenson dismisses claims that North America will become an oil giant once again. He’s very knowledgeable about such things as the oil shale in Utah, and the Bakken oil field. The trillions of barrels of oil claimed is much different from the amount we can actually get out without expending more energy than it is worth. Martenson says America will always be an oil importer, as long as it has the money to buy.
One of the stories I've been following is the bottleneck of refineries. Three refineries on the U.S. East Coast have closed, because the oil they were built for is too expensive or going elsewhere else now. We're down to the heavy oil, and we don't have refinery capacity connected up. It’s a sign of the shift that happens during peak oil, and it’s happening now.
MAYBE FOOD NOT OIL WILL CAUSE THE CRASH?
Many people expect a destabilizing blow to come from high gas prices at the pump. I think it may come in the grocery store. There is potential damage to this year's crops from lack of snow cover in the Prairies. A big part of the South and East are experiencing drought conditions, among a host of other problems. I ask Chris if he expects a food crisis in coming times. Martenson recommends having “deep pantries” with enough food to outlast a temporary food shock.
How much pressure is the average North American feeling because of increased consumer demand in Asia? In a resource-defined world, do we have to give up everything they gain? Martenson says “yes” – our standard of living will drop, even as poorer people in Asia gain just a little each.
When trying to model the future, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change develops several possible scenarios. I ask Chris for his plausible scenario where the current macro-financial system melts down fairly quickly. What would be the warning signs, if any, and what would we as ordinary people, the kind who need work for our next paycheck, - what would we experience?
Most of our listeners believe the science of climate change. A lot of us think M. King Hubbert was right about peak oil. But hardly any of us understand the giant dinosaurs bumping around in the secret night of high finance. Derivatives give us the shivers. With the help of people like Chris Martenson, all of us need to get smart about the economy. That is partly what the Occupy movement is about.
We got some good advice, from Chris Martenson, the investment expert who is not afraid to look a bear in the face. You can find a lot more on his web site, chrismartenson.com.
MATTHEW STEIN - THINKING THROUGH DISASTER
We have a fascination for disaster, don't we? It sells in the movies and the news. Fearing the future is part of our evolutionary brain that got us this far.
Mathew Stein doesn't just think about it. He plans, writes, and advises how to survive emergencies and crisis of all kinds. With his MIT training in engineering, Mat's built off-grid homes that would probably survive hurricanes. His books include "When Disaster Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide for Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival", and his giant reference work "When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency".
First we talk about a possible quick planet-wrecking event, and then get a few tips for surviving a long period of troubled times.
Mat Stein, welcome to Radio Ecoshock.
I've listened to several of your interviews, and listeners have written in asking to hear you. We finally get a chance to talk.
A SOLAR FLARE = 400 CHERNOBYLS?
Surfing through Google news just a week ago, I saw brilliant NASA images of a giant solar flare. It was beautiful. But in the Huffington Post you warned there could be a problem if one of those big solar storms hits the Earth. Mat explains this danger better than anyone else, I think.
You can find a Radio Ecoshock feature on the risk of solar storms here. But that was prepared before the Fukushima triple nuclear meltdown in Japan. Now Mat Stein fills in the details about a risk of 400 nuclear melt-downs around the world. It could happen!
If you are new to solar storms – they are the big flares that come from the sun from time to time. Whether we experience damage depends on whether that part of the sun if facing Earth at the time.
Listen to/download the 2010 Radio Ecoshock feature on solar storms here. Or read this transcript.
The worst solar storm we know of happened in 1859. It’s called “the Carrington Event” named after Lord Carrington who happened to see it occur on the sun. Three days later the world’s telegraph lines were hit with an electro-magnetic pulse which set off some fires in stations, and knocked out many lines. Other than that, there weren’t a lot of wires.
In 1921 there was a solar storm so large it lit up the night-time sky from the North Pole all the way south to the Caribbean for 3 nights, and from the South Pole up to Samoa – that’s most of the world, except the Tropics!
As Mat Stein points out, most of the big cities in North America had their own electrical grids – there was no national power grid in 1921. There were some problems – and Mat says that why Penn Station burned.
Fast-forward to today. Since the 1970’s, the United States alone has built over 100,000 miles of high voltage lines. These would act like a big antenna drawing the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) toward the hundreds of big transformers which regulate the national grid.
Many of those transformers would be blow out. “Just get some more” – you might think. But each weights hundreds of tons, and was custom made. Only two factories in the world make them. Freeways have to be closed to move one in. A Congressional panel found it could take two to ten years just to replace the transformers in America. But the Americans would have to compete with Europe, China, and everyone else for the limited production. We don’t even have enough copper in stock to make them. And the rate of production assumed a normal world – not one that closes down with no electricity.
Without that electricity, refineries and filling stations stop running. Trucks laden with food for cities stop running. And cities no longer have food warehouses. The food you eat Monday was in a truck the previous Thursday. Starvation and riots would occur.
But the most serious problem of all is this: as we found out at Fukushima, nuclear reactors require outside power to cool the core, and spent fuel, even after an automatic shutdown. After a big solar storm, 400 nuclear reactors around the world might not have cooling power, after their diesel fuel runs out.
Most American plants have up to 30 days of diesel fuel. So after a month, there could be 400 Chernobyl size nuclear accidents around the world. It’s hard to know how many living things could survive that. The radioactive damage would last for millennia.
The wild thing is a congressionally mandated EMP Commission studied this problem. In their report, they found just $1 billion could help protect the America grid. There is a type of giant vacuum tube technology that can quickly isolate transformers from the electric pulse. Apparently, solid state electronics cannot react fast enough, but the old vacuum tube tech can. That’s the kind of great info we get from Matthew Stein, who is an MIT-trained engineer.
It’s a mark of our cavalier attitude, or tendency toward mass suicide, that this small amount of money has not been invested to protect the electric grids of the world! It’s just half the price of one Stealth bomber – but the Commission’s recommendations have not been implemented. We are totally exposed to the next solar storm.
We are talking with disaster expert Mathew Stein about events that happened in the past, and will happen again. We just can't say when.
We started with a low probability, super-high risk event we call a solar storm, which could cause nuclear reactors around the world to melt-down. Again, here is the link to Matt's article "400 Chernobyls: Solar Flares, EMP, and Nuclear Armageddon".
WHAT ABOUT A FOOD EMERGENCY?
Then we move on to another projected event with no fixed date. I've spoken to several guests who expect just-in-time shipping methods that feed us all, could stop on short notice for a number of reasons. It could be a war, super-storms, a new virus, or a sudden economic break down, like the one that almost happened in 2008.
Let's assume we don't fall into violent anarchy if the industrial system stops for a while. Our better intentions come out, and we want to survive as communities. Before we get to some solutions, I ask Mat: “What are the early challenges we face, when technology fails?”
If anybody is an expert on that question, it is Matthew Stein. His huge book “When Technology Fails” has just been updated. It’s like an encyclopedia of work-arounds you’ll need if the lights go out.
WHY SOME BECOME LEADERS WHILE MANY GO PASSIVE OR INTO SHOCK
In an emergency, some people go into non-responsive shock. We saw it in New Orleans after Katrina, in Asia after big tsunamis, and in towns blown away by hurricanes or tornados. But other folks come alive in an emergency. They go into over-drive to organize for survival. Is it from thinking about these things in advance, or do you think it's social or genetic differences that freeze some folks, while empowering others?
Mat thinks it’s a mix of factors, and impossible to predict who will become a leader if a disaster strikes. He has examples of those survival leaders in his books.
Let's imagine a major Western city is heavily damaged and cut off from outside help for some time. It could be an earthquake that brings down all the freeways and ports. It could be after a nuclear attack, or even a deadly virus.
What will the real survivors do? Do they organize people, or hide in holes with provisions? I suppose that depends on the nature of the threat. Personally, during a plague or super-virus, I wouldn’t head out to self-organize with my community. I’d stay home with my food stash.
But after a quake, we’d all be out there helping the wounded, and trying to build new shelter and water supplies.
THE LONG SLIDE DOWN
As you know James Howard Kunstler has written at least two novels about times after the oil supplies have run out. One was "World Made By Hand". Kunstler isn't talking about a sudden disaster, but a long slide when energy becomes more expensive, harder to find, and then gone, for most of us. He calls it "the Long Emergency". In the interview, I ask Mat how his ideas work into that scenario of a long, slow descent.
We wrap up with a simple question I ask myself, and like you ask yourself. Why do we focus on such negative futures?
Mat replies he’s a kind of realistic optimist. We need to look honestly at the problems to figure out solutions. He thinks we will muddle our way through most challenges, although nothing is guaranteed.
Some serious people, including major scientists, have suggested humanity may not survive, joining the procession of other species into extinction. I can’t believe that, but perhaps we are programmed to always believe in human survival. Anyway, I express my hope at the end of this blog.
Much of our future fate may depend on this question: If our current high-energy globalized life-styles are fragile and unsustainable, can we picture a different way of living?
Our guest Mathew Stein has worked for renewable energy, sustainable growth and alternative healing techniques. Find his web sites at matstein.com, stein-design.com and www.whentechfails.com.
If you really want to know what to do if the lights go out, make sure you have a copy of Mat's latest encyclopedic work called "When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency".
We'll have to have Mat Stein back, to get more tips. He’s a really useful guest for all of us.
MY RANT AGAINST 2012 CRAZINESS
I'm Alex Smith with an important message.
Pull up a chair; you may want to be sitting down.
Despite what you may have heard, the end is not coming in 2012.
A big solar storm is possible. As Mat Stein said, that could possibly end civilization as we know it. But that's a high risk, low probability event. Don't quit your day job waiting for it, unless you want to quit your day job anyway, and have another plan to make a living.
An economic crash is possible, but far from guaranteed. I expect the banks to be open next week, next month, and probably next year. This civilization has a lot of momentum. We humans have the flexibility to keep going.
Even when three reactors melted down on a small island, millions of people went back to their regular jobs and lives.
THE REAL PROBLEM: THIS PLANET-WRECKING SYSTEM MAY NOT CRASH
That is the real problem. A growing number of scientists say without an economic crash, we will continue to wreck the world, in some ways that cannot be repaired, and may not be survivable for mammals. Our biggest problem may not be that the world will end this year, but that it won't.
GOING BACK TO MEDIEVAL SUPERSTITION
Millions of humans are responding to this existential threat with a strange desire to see the collapse of absolutely everything. Money will be worthless, anarchy will be the norm.
There are really odd ideas are popping up all over the Internet. Our new means of mass communication by and for the masses has also exposed an echo chamber for the weirdest fringes.
Look, I could build up a really solid following by telling you this is the last week of Radio Ecoshock. The collapse is coming this week, so stock up on some food and water, because the whole system is going down.
I could probably do that every week for a few years, and still have a loyal following. It's like the bands where the lead singer collapses, the audience is worried, but somehow the star revives, and struggles back by sheer will power to play three more songs. That is old "stage magic".
Even worse, the magic of the Internet is connecting up a style of medieval thinking and emotion I hoped we'd left behind us. No, a strange dark planet is not about to appear and envelope us in evil. The distant Pleiades stars are not driving human affairs. Here is a good video which debunks most of the 2012 claims - but bail halfway when the scientific answers against star alignments, unknown planets etc ends - and gives way to a Christian explanation that old-fashioned Medieval-style "devils" are to blame! (Sigh).
David Icke can pack theatres with his stories of evil reptiles in human form. David Wilcox claims he's channeled alien voices which will be revealed in a television special with President Obama - a 2 hour special no less! - this year.
We don't know why the Mayans ended their calendar in 2012. They didn't say. We do know that Sony Pictures is milking popular superstition to sell lots of box office tickets on that fear. Sony has a long-running Net and You tube campaign to make you afraid this year. Fear sells, and while millions are packing into the 2012 fantasy, the multi-billionaires continue to rake in more of the world's wealth unseen.
As always, plenty of Christians also believe they will be physically lifted off the Earth, as the Anti-Christ goes into a last battle this year. They've believed that for two thousand years.
I'm calling B.S. on all that. The truth is horrifying enough. We have serious changes to make, and these 2012 rumors are just distractions.
It is true our industrial system has taken fragility to the max, to wring out billions more in profits for the few. You should have some fallback food and water around the house, or at least deep pantries as Mat Stein suggested. I also recommend having a little money at home, in case the ATM's stop working, as Chris Marten son said. But neither of these guests promises this is the year of collapse. The end may not be nigh. Sorry, but 2012 is just another year. I expect to be making useful radio programs in 2013.
Let's list out a few real problems:
One: We continue to grow the human population even though we can't feed those already here.
Two: we are wasting the limited resource of fossil fuels, leaving little for coming generations.
Three: we can't burn what we have, because we are wrecking the atmosphere with pollution that threatens all life on Earth
Four: even if we could burn them all, we are hacking down and poisoning the natural life-support system in other ways, from pesticides to plastics filling the oceans. The richness of life on Earth is going extinct.
Five: our economic system is unfair, to the majority of people on the planet now, and to the next generations. When we create trillions or quadrillions in debt we are lying to ourselves, and borrowing from the future. That is unsustainable and will collapse, whether suddenly or slowly. Nobody knows when.
Six: we continue to use nuclear technology, for power and weapons, even after their irreparable danger and terrible consequences are fully known.
Seven: Although we have limited our past history of all-out war, militarism continues. Social and family violence continue.
Which leads to our central problem: in all of the above, we are showing an inability to respond to reality - to do something about these situations, even when solutions exist. Instead, we continue to adopt and spread fantasies which do not address reality. These delusions make it less likely we will survive our self-made challenges, and more likely our children and grandchildren will suffer more.
ROASTING IN BOISE - HANSEN SAYS IT'S NO ACCIDENT
I don't know if you've ever heard of Boise Idaho. It's in the middle of the United States, sort of. I've just looked through their high temperature records from 1973 to 2011. The highest April temperatures are generally around 80 degrees, or about 27 Celsius. The top was in 1987, when Boise hit 88, or 31 C.
Last week it was 32 degrees, or 89.6 degrees in Boise. In April. Then it went higher, into the 90's. That is just one of the tens of thousands of heat records which continue to break across much of North America this year. There was hardly any snow in Eastern North America. See my recent program "Summer in March" with guests Jeff Masters from the Weather Underground and Joe Romm of Climate Progress (now at thingprogress.org).
The TV weathermen just call it strange, or weird weather. They seldom call it global warming. Even scientists have said for years you can't call any one season "climate change".
Now the leading American climate scientist, the man who warned Congress of this coming change in 1988, says the heat events in recent years are due to human activity. NASA's Dr. James Hansen, along with Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, has published a new paper called "Public Perception of Climate Change and the New Climate Dice".
It's a game changer. Without going into detail, this paper explains how we can now know, scientifically, these extreme weather events would not have happened without human modification of the climate, by burning fossil fuels. The dice are loaded, and they will continue to come up "hot" many more times than "cold".
That means our climate, and life for all living things timed to the seasons, will get stranger and stranger. We are committed to at least a century of climate disruption, and warming for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
In future shows, I'll be looking at ways we can adapt, while still fighting to contain the damage.
I CAN'T GIVE UP HOPE
I should have given up hope. This is not an option for me, as long as I love my children, and hold my grandchild. You shouldn't give up hope either. We can make a significant difference. We can make a better society. We can live better with nature.
But we can't do it by indulging in a mass psychosis where aliens are causing all our problems. Or by hoping to see the end times. Please, let's keep our minds clear, even as others fall into delusions or despair.
The sun will rise tomorrow, in 2013, and 2100. Despite difficult times, many many people will experience love, happiness, and fulfillment, even as they struggle to make a better world. Join that party, join them, join us.
I'm Alex Smith, for Radio Ecoshock.
Find out more, at our web site, ecoshock.org
Sorry, it's a long blog this week. Blame it on our guests - they had too many good things to say!
If you want to quickly download the interview separately, here they are, in CD quality (larger file) and Lo-Fi (faster download, lower quality)
CHRIS MARTENSON INTERVIEW (22 min)
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/economy/ES_Martenson.mp3
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/economy/ES_Martenson_LoFi.mp3
MATTHEW STEIN INTERVIEW (27 min)
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/nuclear/ES_Stein.mp3
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/nuclear/ES_Stein_LoFi.mp3
CHRIS MARTENSON - THE FINANCE GURU WHO KNOWS ABOUT CLIMATE, PEAK OIL, AND THE TOPPLING ECONOMY
Most of us have a gut worry about the state of governments, big banks, and big finance. Like we'll wake up one morning with nothing.
Our guest Chris Martenson trained as a scientist, but retrained in business. He made good money in the investment world with a big American corporation. Then the Martenson family life changed dramatically. We'll ask him why, and then pick his brain about things we all wish we knew.
In a talk at Oxford University in 2010, the very wealthy investor Jim Rogers told students to forget about financial careers, and go study agriculture or mining. In a way, Martenson made a similar transition. He tells us about his journey from the business world to a rural life.
Investments weren’t going his way, and when Chris investigated money and high finance, he didn’t like what he saw. He and his family moved out of the rich enclave of Bridgeport Connecticut to a more rural location. Now they are involved in self-sufficiency and community building.
But Chris continues to be one of the more popular financial bloggers on the Net. He also podcasts with another top Net blogger, Mish Shedlock. His “Crash Course” advising people how to prepare for a much more difficult financial and social scene has sold very well.
There is a lot of stress out there about banking, and broke governments. A growing group of blogs, radio hosts, and just plain folks wish it would all just end somehow. Some are cheering for a collapse. Chris says “Be careful what you wish for.” He isn’t hoping for a crash, but thinks the current system cannot go on indefinitely. Most of us, says Martenson, should prepare for a lower standard of living.
WHEN?
The never-ending question is: WHEN will the stuffing hit the fan. I've just read an analysis by Charles Hugh Smith, in his blog "Of Two Minds." The article title says it all: "When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally End?" Charles says various historic cycles show a major collapse around 2021. The problem is, and this is always the case, we can see the financial system is totally unsustainable, but so far the central banks and governments have managed to keep the dance going much longer than any of us thought possible. Nobody can say whether the readjustment will come this month, this year, or even in this decade.
It is even possible we may not see a really big collapse in our lifetime (depending upon your age now). I thought it might all go under in 1981, when New York City and Chrysler went bankrupt. Interest rates went to 22% and folks lost their homes. But it all limped on.
ENERGY AND WEALTH
Scientist Tim Garrett wrote a 2009 paper saying without a complete collapse of industrial civilization, out-of-control climate change was inevitable. He based that on a historic formula about the relationship between energy and wealth. More energy makes more wealth, less energy makes less.
Find a transcript of my 2010 interview with Professor Garrett here. Or listen to this audio interview.
Chris Martenson talks about the relationships between energy availability and wealth. Basically, without energy, we can’t build much of anything else in the way of an industrial society, or even feed the current world population.
I ask Chris for his position on human-induced climate change. Too many finance gurus have either denied climate change, or said it doesn’t matter. Martenson is much more clued into the environment. He sees climate change as a long-term problem, with peak oil biting sooner, and the financial system the most pressing short-term problem.
On his blog at chrismartenson.com, you ran a two part series by Gregor MacDonald called "The Race for BTU's". The second part requires a paid subscription, but check out the first part, there is lots there for you.
Martenson dismisses claims that North America will become an oil giant once again. He’s very knowledgeable about such things as the oil shale in Utah, and the Bakken oil field. The trillions of barrels of oil claimed is much different from the amount we can actually get out without expending more energy than it is worth. Martenson says America will always be an oil importer, as long as it has the money to buy.
One of the stories I've been following is the bottleneck of refineries. Three refineries on the U.S. East Coast have closed, because the oil they were built for is too expensive or going elsewhere else now. We're down to the heavy oil, and we don't have refinery capacity connected up. It’s a sign of the shift that happens during peak oil, and it’s happening now.
MAYBE FOOD NOT OIL WILL CAUSE THE CRASH?
Many people expect a destabilizing blow to come from high gas prices at the pump. I think it may come in the grocery store. There is potential damage to this year's crops from lack of snow cover in the Prairies. A big part of the South and East are experiencing drought conditions, among a host of other problems. I ask Chris if he expects a food crisis in coming times. Martenson recommends having “deep pantries” with enough food to outlast a temporary food shock.
How much pressure is the average North American feeling because of increased consumer demand in Asia? In a resource-defined world, do we have to give up everything they gain? Martenson says “yes” – our standard of living will drop, even as poorer people in Asia gain just a little each.
When trying to model the future, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change develops several possible scenarios. I ask Chris for his plausible scenario where the current macro-financial system melts down fairly quickly. What would be the warning signs, if any, and what would we as ordinary people, the kind who need work for our next paycheck, - what would we experience?
Most of our listeners believe the science of climate change. A lot of us think M. King Hubbert was right about peak oil. But hardly any of us understand the giant dinosaurs bumping around in the secret night of high finance. Derivatives give us the shivers. With the help of people like Chris Martenson, all of us need to get smart about the economy. That is partly what the Occupy movement is about.
We got some good advice, from Chris Martenson, the investment expert who is not afraid to look a bear in the face. You can find a lot more on his web site, chrismartenson.com.
MATTHEW STEIN - THINKING THROUGH DISASTER
We have a fascination for disaster, don't we? It sells in the movies and the news. Fearing the future is part of our evolutionary brain that got us this far.
Mathew Stein doesn't just think about it. He plans, writes, and advises how to survive emergencies and crisis of all kinds. With his MIT training in engineering, Mat's built off-grid homes that would probably survive hurricanes. His books include "When Disaster Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide for Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival", and his giant reference work "When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency".
First we talk about a possible quick planet-wrecking event, and then get a few tips for surviving a long period of troubled times.
Mat Stein, welcome to Radio Ecoshock.
I've listened to several of your interviews, and listeners have written in asking to hear you. We finally get a chance to talk.
A SOLAR FLARE = 400 CHERNOBYLS?
Surfing through Google news just a week ago, I saw brilliant NASA images of a giant solar flare. It was beautiful. But in the Huffington Post you warned there could be a problem if one of those big solar storms hits the Earth. Mat explains this danger better than anyone else, I think.
You can find a Radio Ecoshock feature on the risk of solar storms here. But that was prepared before the Fukushima triple nuclear meltdown in Japan. Now Mat Stein fills in the details about a risk of 400 nuclear melt-downs around the world. It could happen!
If you are new to solar storms – they are the big flares that come from the sun from time to time. Whether we experience damage depends on whether that part of the sun if facing Earth at the time.
Listen to/download the 2010 Radio Ecoshock feature on solar storms here. Or read this transcript.
The worst solar storm we know of happened in 1859. It’s called “the Carrington Event” named after Lord Carrington who happened to see it occur on the sun. Three days later the world’s telegraph lines were hit with an electro-magnetic pulse which set off some fires in stations, and knocked out many lines. Other than that, there weren’t a lot of wires.
In 1921 there was a solar storm so large it lit up the night-time sky from the North Pole all the way south to the Caribbean for 3 nights, and from the South Pole up to Samoa – that’s most of the world, except the Tropics!
As Mat Stein points out, most of the big cities in North America had their own electrical grids – there was no national power grid in 1921. There were some problems – and Mat says that why Penn Station burned.
Fast-forward to today. Since the 1970’s, the United States alone has built over 100,000 miles of high voltage lines. These would act like a big antenna drawing the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) toward the hundreds of big transformers which regulate the national grid.
Many of those transformers would be blow out. “Just get some more” – you might think. But each weights hundreds of tons, and was custom made. Only two factories in the world make them. Freeways have to be closed to move one in. A Congressional panel found it could take two to ten years just to replace the transformers in America. But the Americans would have to compete with Europe, China, and everyone else for the limited production. We don’t even have enough copper in stock to make them. And the rate of production assumed a normal world – not one that closes down with no electricity.
Without that electricity, refineries and filling stations stop running. Trucks laden with food for cities stop running. And cities no longer have food warehouses. The food you eat Monday was in a truck the previous Thursday. Starvation and riots would occur.
But the most serious problem of all is this: as we found out at Fukushima, nuclear reactors require outside power to cool the core, and spent fuel, even after an automatic shutdown. After a big solar storm, 400 nuclear reactors around the world might not have cooling power, after their diesel fuel runs out.
Most American plants have up to 30 days of diesel fuel. So after a month, there could be 400 Chernobyl size nuclear accidents around the world. It’s hard to know how many living things could survive that. The radioactive damage would last for millennia.
The wild thing is a congressionally mandated EMP Commission studied this problem. In their report, they found just $1 billion could help protect the America grid. There is a type of giant vacuum tube technology that can quickly isolate transformers from the electric pulse. Apparently, solid state electronics cannot react fast enough, but the old vacuum tube tech can. That’s the kind of great info we get from Matthew Stein, who is an MIT-trained engineer.
It’s a mark of our cavalier attitude, or tendency toward mass suicide, that this small amount of money has not been invested to protect the electric grids of the world! It’s just half the price of one Stealth bomber – but the Commission’s recommendations have not been implemented. We are totally exposed to the next solar storm.
We are talking with disaster expert Mathew Stein about events that happened in the past, and will happen again. We just can't say when.
We started with a low probability, super-high risk event we call a solar storm, which could cause nuclear reactors around the world to melt-down. Again, here is the link to Matt's article "400 Chernobyls: Solar Flares, EMP, and Nuclear Armageddon".
WHAT ABOUT A FOOD EMERGENCY?
Then we move on to another projected event with no fixed date. I've spoken to several guests who expect just-in-time shipping methods that feed us all, could stop on short notice for a number of reasons. It could be a war, super-storms, a new virus, or a sudden economic break down, like the one that almost happened in 2008.
Let's assume we don't fall into violent anarchy if the industrial system stops for a while. Our better intentions come out, and we want to survive as communities. Before we get to some solutions, I ask Mat: “What are the early challenges we face, when technology fails?”
If anybody is an expert on that question, it is Matthew Stein. His huge book “When Technology Fails” has just been updated. It’s like an encyclopedia of work-arounds you’ll need if the lights go out.
WHY SOME BECOME LEADERS WHILE MANY GO PASSIVE OR INTO SHOCK
In an emergency, some people go into non-responsive shock. We saw it in New Orleans after Katrina, in Asia after big tsunamis, and in towns blown away by hurricanes or tornados. But other folks come alive in an emergency. They go into over-drive to organize for survival. Is it from thinking about these things in advance, or do you think it's social or genetic differences that freeze some folks, while empowering others?
Mat thinks it’s a mix of factors, and impossible to predict who will become a leader if a disaster strikes. He has examples of those survival leaders in his books.
Let's imagine a major Western city is heavily damaged and cut off from outside help for some time. It could be an earthquake that brings down all the freeways and ports. It could be after a nuclear attack, or even a deadly virus.
What will the real survivors do? Do they organize people, or hide in holes with provisions? I suppose that depends on the nature of the threat. Personally, during a plague or super-virus, I wouldn’t head out to self-organize with my community. I’d stay home with my food stash.
But after a quake, we’d all be out there helping the wounded, and trying to build new shelter and water supplies.
THE LONG SLIDE DOWN
As you know James Howard Kunstler has written at least two novels about times after the oil supplies have run out. One was "World Made By Hand". Kunstler isn't talking about a sudden disaster, but a long slide when energy becomes more expensive, harder to find, and then gone, for most of us. He calls it "the Long Emergency". In the interview, I ask Mat how his ideas work into that scenario of a long, slow descent.
We wrap up with a simple question I ask myself, and like you ask yourself. Why do we focus on such negative futures?
Mat replies he’s a kind of realistic optimist. We need to look honestly at the problems to figure out solutions. He thinks we will muddle our way through most challenges, although nothing is guaranteed.
Some serious people, including major scientists, have suggested humanity may not survive, joining the procession of other species into extinction. I can’t believe that, but perhaps we are programmed to always believe in human survival. Anyway, I express my hope at the end of this blog.
Much of our future fate may depend on this question: If our current high-energy globalized life-styles are fragile and unsustainable, can we picture a different way of living?
Our guest Mathew Stein has worked for renewable energy, sustainable growth and alternative healing techniques. Find his web sites at matstein.com, stein-design.com and www.whentechfails.com.
If you really want to know what to do if the lights go out, make sure you have a copy of Mat's latest encyclopedic work called "When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency".
We'll have to have Mat Stein back, to get more tips. He’s a really useful guest for all of us.
MY RANT AGAINST 2012 CRAZINESS
I'm Alex Smith with an important message.
Pull up a chair; you may want to be sitting down.
Despite what you may have heard, the end is not coming in 2012.
A big solar storm is possible. As Mat Stein said, that could possibly end civilization as we know it. But that's a high risk, low probability event. Don't quit your day job waiting for it, unless you want to quit your day job anyway, and have another plan to make a living.
An economic crash is possible, but far from guaranteed. I expect the banks to be open next week, next month, and probably next year. This civilization has a lot of momentum. We humans have the flexibility to keep going.
Even when three reactors melted down on a small island, millions of people went back to their regular jobs and lives.
THE REAL PROBLEM: THIS PLANET-WRECKING SYSTEM MAY NOT CRASH
That is the real problem. A growing number of scientists say without an economic crash, we will continue to wreck the world, in some ways that cannot be repaired, and may not be survivable for mammals. Our biggest problem may not be that the world will end this year, but that it won't.
GOING BACK TO MEDIEVAL SUPERSTITION
Millions of humans are responding to this existential threat with a strange desire to see the collapse of absolutely everything. Money will be worthless, anarchy will be the norm.
There are really odd ideas are popping up all over the Internet. Our new means of mass communication by and for the masses has also exposed an echo chamber for the weirdest fringes.
Look, I could build up a really solid following by telling you this is the last week of Radio Ecoshock. The collapse is coming this week, so stock up on some food and water, because the whole system is going down.
I could probably do that every week for a few years, and still have a loyal following. It's like the bands where the lead singer collapses, the audience is worried, but somehow the star revives, and struggles back by sheer will power to play three more songs. That is old "stage magic".
Even worse, the magic of the Internet is connecting up a style of medieval thinking and emotion I hoped we'd left behind us. No, a strange dark planet is not about to appear and envelope us in evil. The distant Pleiades stars are not driving human affairs. Here is a good video which debunks most of the 2012 claims - but bail halfway when the scientific answers against star alignments, unknown planets etc ends - and gives way to a Christian explanation that old-fashioned Medieval-style "devils" are to blame! (Sigh).
David Icke can pack theatres with his stories of evil reptiles in human form. David Wilcox claims he's channeled alien voices which will be revealed in a television special with President Obama - a 2 hour special no less! - this year.
We don't know why the Mayans ended their calendar in 2012. They didn't say. We do know that Sony Pictures is milking popular superstition to sell lots of box office tickets on that fear. Sony has a long-running Net and You tube campaign to make you afraid this year. Fear sells, and while millions are packing into the 2012 fantasy, the multi-billionaires continue to rake in more of the world's wealth unseen.
As always, plenty of Christians also believe they will be physically lifted off the Earth, as the Anti-Christ goes into a last battle this year. They've believed that for two thousand years.
I'm calling B.S. on all that. The truth is horrifying enough. We have serious changes to make, and these 2012 rumors are just distractions.
It is true our industrial system has taken fragility to the max, to wring out billions more in profits for the few. You should have some fallback food and water around the house, or at least deep pantries as Mat Stein suggested. I also recommend having a little money at home, in case the ATM's stop working, as Chris Marten son said. But neither of these guests promises this is the year of collapse. The end may not be nigh. Sorry, but 2012 is just another year. I expect to be making useful radio programs in 2013.
Let's list out a few real problems:
One: We continue to grow the human population even though we can't feed those already here.
Two: we are wasting the limited resource of fossil fuels, leaving little for coming generations.
Three: we can't burn what we have, because we are wrecking the atmosphere with pollution that threatens all life on Earth
Four: even if we could burn them all, we are hacking down and poisoning the natural life-support system in other ways, from pesticides to plastics filling the oceans. The richness of life on Earth is going extinct.
Five: our economic system is unfair, to the majority of people on the planet now, and to the next generations. When we create trillions or quadrillions in debt we are lying to ourselves, and borrowing from the future. That is unsustainable and will collapse, whether suddenly or slowly. Nobody knows when.
Six: we continue to use nuclear technology, for power and weapons, even after their irreparable danger and terrible consequences are fully known.
Seven: Although we have limited our past history of all-out war, militarism continues. Social and family violence continue.
Which leads to our central problem: in all of the above, we are showing an inability to respond to reality - to do something about these situations, even when solutions exist. Instead, we continue to adopt and spread fantasies which do not address reality. These delusions make it less likely we will survive our self-made challenges, and more likely our children and grandchildren will suffer more.
ROASTING IN BOISE - HANSEN SAYS IT'S NO ACCIDENT
I don't know if you've ever heard of Boise Idaho. It's in the middle of the United States, sort of. I've just looked through their high temperature records from 1973 to 2011. The highest April temperatures are generally around 80 degrees, or about 27 Celsius. The top was in 1987, when Boise hit 88, or 31 C.
Last week it was 32 degrees, or 89.6 degrees in Boise. In April. Then it went higher, into the 90's. That is just one of the tens of thousands of heat records which continue to break across much of North America this year. There was hardly any snow in Eastern North America. See my recent program "Summer in March" with guests Jeff Masters from the Weather Underground and Joe Romm of Climate Progress (now at thingprogress.org).
The TV weathermen just call it strange, or weird weather. They seldom call it global warming. Even scientists have said for years you can't call any one season "climate change".
Now the leading American climate scientist, the man who warned Congress of this coming change in 1988, says the heat events in recent years are due to human activity. NASA's Dr. James Hansen, along with Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, has published a new paper called "Public Perception of Climate Change and the New Climate Dice".
It's a game changer. Without going into detail, this paper explains how we can now know, scientifically, these extreme weather events would not have happened without human modification of the climate, by burning fossil fuels. The dice are loaded, and they will continue to come up "hot" many more times than "cold".
That means our climate, and life for all living things timed to the seasons, will get stranger and stranger. We are committed to at least a century of climate disruption, and warming for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
In future shows, I'll be looking at ways we can adapt, while still fighting to contain the damage.
I CAN'T GIVE UP HOPE
I should have given up hope. This is not an option for me, as long as I love my children, and hold my grandchild. You shouldn't give up hope either. We can make a significant difference. We can make a better society. We can live better with nature.
But we can't do it by indulging in a mass psychosis where aliens are causing all our problems. Or by hoping to see the end times. Please, let's keep our minds clear, even as others fall into delusions or despair.
The sun will rise tomorrow, in 2013, and 2100. Despite difficult times, many many people will experience love, happiness, and fulfillment, even as they struggle to make a better world. Join that party, join them, join us.
I'm Alex Smith, for Radio Ecoshock.
Find out more, at our web site, ecoshock.org
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Fire! In A Crowded World
I've been working on the latest science about wildfires and climate change. The plan was to save the broadcast for summer, when the fires start.
Nature isn't waiting. From the first week of April major television networks like CBS reported wildfires all the way from New England, Long Island, down through Virginia, into Georgia - the whole East Coast.
This follows a winter with very little snow. New York got 20 inches less than normal. It's all gone, as places like Boston sizzled into the 90's at the very end of winter. Gardeners started to feel like planting a month early. Farmers feared a continuing drought, with no snow to water the land before seed time.
Forget about normal. Wildfire season started ridiculously early this year in North America, in the first week of April.
TV and news reported thousands of heat records set in the Eastern United States, without ever mentioning "global warming".
It's time for the Radio Ecoshock special, my recordings of a special session on fire and climate. The fire experts gathered at the February conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver 2012.
You'll hear how fires make a hotter climate which feeds more fires, the cycle of positive feedback. An internationally recognized wildfire expert, Dr. Michael Flannigan reports on the latest science and experience in the field. Flannigan also describes a new risk that could tip the climate of the world.
You may have a personal stake in this. Anyone with lungs does. From the University of British Columbia School of Medicine, Dr. Mike Brauer explains new ways of tracking dangerous smoke, which can travel thousands of miles, across international boundaries. I like Brauer's talk, because he also tells us how citizens can protect themselves during a smoke event.
Finally we'll hear from Dr. Fay Johnston from the University of Tasmania. She was part of a team asking the big question: how many people die from fire smoke every year? The answer, and the places most at risk, may surprise you.
DR. MIKE FLANNIGAN
Let's get the big picture, from one of my favorite wildfire experts. Dr. Mike Flannigan is a Professor of the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta, and Senior Research Scientist at the Canadian Forest Service. His PHD is from Cambridge. He also trained in meteorology. Flannigan is Editor-in-chief of International Journal of Wild land Fire, and part of the U.S. Assessment on Global Change. Mike is a leader in newly formed Western Partnership for Fire Science.
In the program you hear excerpts from my recording of Mike Flannigan's presentation at "Forest fires in Canada: Impacts of Climate Change and Fire Smoke" delivered Sunday morning, February 19th, 2012, in a special workshop at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science general meeting in Vancouver.
Nobody says more in fewer words than Flannigan. When huge fires erupt, in Canada or internationally, Mike often gets called in. He begins by exploring the fire in Northern Alberta, Canada, where a town called Slave Lake had one third of the place burned out, including the municipal buildings the libraries. Video of that fire appoaching the town here. Photos of the aftermath here. And this could happen to any town or city. Hundreds of homes were burned in Kelowna British Columbia in 20003. I don't have to tell anyone in California or Texas about the huge risks from out-of-control wild fires.
Australians know how deadly fires can be.
Slave Lake had to be evacuated. There was no way to fight such fires, and they moved fast with ferocity. Satellite images show the Slave Lake fire was actually the smallest of four infernos raging at the time.
Remember the fire leader in Texas who said "No one alive has seen fires like this". Except we are seeing them more and more, especially after heat events.
Mike Flannigan makes it clear that climate change is a contributing factor to these fierce fires. The underbrush is tinder dry, even in spring-time. The hotter weather creates a longer fire season. Heat also induces more lightening, which ignites the wild fire.
It's a positive feed-back cycle, at least in the near-term. The burning forests release all the carbon previously held in vegetative matter. Tree trunks are mostly carbon. That release of carbon, and the extra black soot, all drive more warming.
A few years after the fire, perhaps 7 years later, new growth will re-absorb some of the carbon back from the atmosphere. The fire zone changes from a carbon source to a carbon sink. But in the meantime, climate change has been further ramped up.
If you ever wanted to know the basics of wild fires, and why we hear more about them, or get hit with smoke from faraway places, Mike Flannigan is the man to learn from.
You can download my Radio Ecoshock interview with Mike Flannigan in May 2011 from the program titled "FLOOD FIRE WIND - Climate Shift" at ecoshock.org. (13 minute interview)
About two weeks after this broadcast, you can download a free mp3 of Mike Flannigan's full speech at the triple AS from our Climate 2012 page. All of today's speakers will be there in full.
HOW DO THESE FIRES COMPARE TO PAST AGES?
Can we say there are more fires now than at any time in human history? What about fires in the past hot ages, in previous greenhouse worlds? I listened to two presentations on the history of fire by Douglas Woolford, from Canada's Wilfred Laurier University, and Richard Routledge, Simon Fraser University.
The science was too complicated for radio broadcast. I came away thinking the field of fire archeology is still very young. Do we know enough to answer those questions, to compare our future to the distant past of fire?
I came away from these American Academy presentations thinking we just don't know enough yet. You can dig further into the research that has been done, by downloading those two speeches (for a fee) from aven.com.
We do know that fire smoke travels huge distances, sometimes smudging out part of a continent. In the soot below, human lungs don't do very well. As we'll hear in our third speaker, hundreds of thousands of humans die every year from inhaling smoke from natural and agricultural fires.
DR. MICHAEL BRAUER
But first, you should hear this Canadian medical expert Dr. Mike Brauer. He explains big advances in predicting the smoke plumes, so people with breathing difficulties can be warned. It's almost like tornado warnings, only more accurate. Pharmacies can know to stock up on inhalers. And Brauer ends with tips you can use to protect yourself, if smoke fills your air.
Mike was introduced by session organizer Charmaine Dean, of Simon Fraser University.
In the radio program, you hear major excerpts from Mike's speech.
In the first part, Mike explains several methods to predict where fire smoke will go. That's important to know if you are a health planner, a hospital worker or doctor, if you have health problems like asthma, - and if you just want to protect the lungs of yourself and your family.
I became even more interested in the second segment, as Brauer explains the public health efforts, and personal things we can do to protect ourselves. If there are going to be more fires, and more smoke, we all need to learn about this.
A smoke plume can travel hundreds of miles over a place like California, or New England (from Canadian fires). Whole parts of Asia have been covered in smoke - like the times Malaysia and Singapore went under a smoke cloud from fires in Indonesia.
We know, from Brauer's study, that in Western-style economies, visits to doctors’ offices and pharmacies will go up. Those places need to stock up on inhalers and other medicines.
People with certain ailments or low lung function need to stay indoors, with the windows closed. Driving around does not help, as Brauer says the smoke is actually worse inside the car.
Brauer struck a chord with me when he recommended simple HEPA air filters for people's homes. I have had one running for the past five years, because we live in a high traffic area. We used to need to dust the place way too often, now much less.
That air filter was running when the wave of radioactivity hit the West Coast about a week after the Fukushima nuclear plants blew up. About a month later I changed out the filters, which were no doubt radioactive. It saved our lungs a bit.
These filters also reduce indoor smoke from fires by about 65% Brauer says. That's better for everybody.
Once again, this is another reason to have at least a few days’ worth of food stocked up too. Nobody needs to go out to the store.
DR. FAY JOHNSTON
Our final presenter in this week's special on fire and climate change is Dr. Fay Johnston, a physician and environmental epidemiologist at the Menzies Research Institute in Tasmania, the Down Under of Australia. Here is a link to one of her smoke assessment projects. And here is a link to a public article "Fire Smoke Important Contributor to Deaths World-Wide".
Her topic for this session of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science is: "The Estimated Global Mortality Burden Attributable to Landscape Fire Smoke".
Let's find out who really pays the ultimate price for advancing fires in a crowded warming world. We only have time for a few excerpts.
First, what is a "landscape fire" and who is studying it?
Dr. Fay Johnston describes the first attempts to quantify the impacts of global wildfires.
As she says: "a world without fire does not exist." It is natural, but not when humans create the fire conditions, and then set those fires. Her team estimated about 90% of "landscape fires" around the world are set purposely by humans. We do it to clear new land for things like soy beans or palm oil.
Africa is a central location for fires. It is part of their agricultural cycle. The old crop is burned off to prepare for the new one. Radio Ecoshock has had other guests explain that method of agriculture is adding to global warming.
As far as deaths go, we find out there has hardly been any study in the developing world, where most of the fires are, and most of the death happen. To measure health impacts, Johnston's group had to use pollution studies generated in major smoggy cities. It turns out those impacts on lungs work pretty well for people smoked out in the jungle as well. Still, just like medical research, we take studies from the First World and apply them to developing countries, hoping it will work. There's no money to do the research in the heavily populated places where it is needed most.
Isn't that always the case, in this unfair world? Whether its medicine or smoke, almost all research is funded and performed in the developed world, where a minority of Earth's population live and die. It may take another generation to see how climate change and fire do their dance in the most populated, and the most plant rich places on the planet.
To be honest, this study finds smoke deaths from landscape fires are far less serious than deaths from smoking tobacco.
Whereas several millions die because of tobacco, this study estimates about 340,000 people a year die from landscape fires. Around 10,000 of those are in South America, where relative population is low. Over a hundred thousand are in the Sahel region of northern Africa. More than a hundred thousand die each and every year from air-borne smoke in Asia but that is still fewer than die from cooking over smoky fires indoors in Asia.
Two weeks after broadcast, you can find the full speeches by Mike Flannigan, Mike Brauer, and Fay Johnston on the Climate 2012 downloads page at ecoshock.org. My thanks to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science for allowing me to record on February 19th, and to Simon Fraser University for organizing this session on forest fires, smoke, and climate change.
Our music in this program was from the 1968 hit "Fire" by Arthur Brown. News clips were from NBC12 Richmond, and CBS evening news.
I'm Alex Smith.
Tune in next week for our next big adventure into the future - on Radio Ecoshock.
Nature isn't waiting. From the first week of April major television networks like CBS reported wildfires all the way from New England, Long Island, down through Virginia, into Georgia - the whole East Coast.
This follows a winter with very little snow. New York got 20 inches less than normal. It's all gone, as places like Boston sizzled into the 90's at the very end of winter. Gardeners started to feel like planting a month early. Farmers feared a continuing drought, with no snow to water the land before seed time.
Forget about normal. Wildfire season started ridiculously early this year in North America, in the first week of April.
TV and news reported thousands of heat records set in the Eastern United States, without ever mentioning "global warming".
It's time for the Radio Ecoshock special, my recordings of a special session on fire and climate. The fire experts gathered at the February conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver 2012.
You'll hear how fires make a hotter climate which feeds more fires, the cycle of positive feedback. An internationally recognized wildfire expert, Dr. Michael Flannigan reports on the latest science and experience in the field. Flannigan also describes a new risk that could tip the climate of the world.
You may have a personal stake in this. Anyone with lungs does. From the University of British Columbia School of Medicine, Dr. Mike Brauer explains new ways of tracking dangerous smoke, which can travel thousands of miles, across international boundaries. I like Brauer's talk, because he also tells us how citizens can protect themselves during a smoke event.
Finally we'll hear from Dr. Fay Johnston from the University of Tasmania. She was part of a team asking the big question: how many people die from fire smoke every year? The answer, and the places most at risk, may surprise you.
DR. MIKE FLANNIGAN
Let's get the big picture, from one of my favorite wildfire experts. Dr. Mike Flannigan is a Professor of the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta, and Senior Research Scientist at the Canadian Forest Service. His PHD is from Cambridge. He also trained in meteorology. Flannigan is Editor-in-chief of International Journal of Wild land Fire, and part of the U.S. Assessment on Global Change. Mike is a leader in newly formed Western Partnership for Fire Science.
In the program you hear excerpts from my recording of Mike Flannigan's presentation at "Forest fires in Canada: Impacts of Climate Change and Fire Smoke" delivered Sunday morning, February 19th, 2012, in a special workshop at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science general meeting in Vancouver.
Nobody says more in fewer words than Flannigan. When huge fires erupt, in Canada or internationally, Mike often gets called in. He begins by exploring the fire in Northern Alberta, Canada, where a town called Slave Lake had one third of the place burned out, including the municipal buildings the libraries. Video of that fire appoaching the town here. Photos of the aftermath here. And this could happen to any town or city. Hundreds of homes were burned in Kelowna British Columbia in 20003. I don't have to tell anyone in California or Texas about the huge risks from out-of-control wild fires.
Australians know how deadly fires can be.
Slave Lake had to be evacuated. There was no way to fight such fires, and they moved fast with ferocity. Satellite images show the Slave Lake fire was actually the smallest of four infernos raging at the time.
Remember the fire leader in Texas who said "No one alive has seen fires like this". Except we are seeing them more and more, especially after heat events.
Mike Flannigan makes it clear that climate change is a contributing factor to these fierce fires. The underbrush is tinder dry, even in spring-time. The hotter weather creates a longer fire season. Heat also induces more lightening, which ignites the wild fire.
It's a positive feed-back cycle, at least in the near-term. The burning forests release all the carbon previously held in vegetative matter. Tree trunks are mostly carbon. That release of carbon, and the extra black soot, all drive more warming.
A few years after the fire, perhaps 7 years later, new growth will re-absorb some of the carbon back from the atmosphere. The fire zone changes from a carbon source to a carbon sink. But in the meantime, climate change has been further ramped up.
If you ever wanted to know the basics of wild fires, and why we hear more about them, or get hit with smoke from faraway places, Mike Flannigan is the man to learn from.
You can download my Radio Ecoshock interview with Mike Flannigan in May 2011 from the program titled "FLOOD FIRE WIND - Climate Shift" at ecoshock.org. (13 minute interview)
About two weeks after this broadcast, you can download a free mp3 of Mike Flannigan's full speech at the triple AS from our Climate 2012 page. All of today's speakers will be there in full.
HOW DO THESE FIRES COMPARE TO PAST AGES?
Can we say there are more fires now than at any time in human history? What about fires in the past hot ages, in previous greenhouse worlds? I listened to two presentations on the history of fire by Douglas Woolford, from Canada's Wilfred Laurier University, and Richard Routledge, Simon Fraser University.
The science was too complicated for radio broadcast. I came away thinking the field of fire archeology is still very young. Do we know enough to answer those questions, to compare our future to the distant past of fire?
I came away from these American Academy presentations thinking we just don't know enough yet. You can dig further into the research that has been done, by downloading those two speeches (for a fee) from aven.com.
We do know that fire smoke travels huge distances, sometimes smudging out part of a continent. In the soot below, human lungs don't do very well. As we'll hear in our third speaker, hundreds of thousands of humans die every year from inhaling smoke from natural and agricultural fires.
DR. MICHAEL BRAUER
But first, you should hear this Canadian medical expert Dr. Mike Brauer. He explains big advances in predicting the smoke plumes, so people with breathing difficulties can be warned. It's almost like tornado warnings, only more accurate. Pharmacies can know to stock up on inhalers. And Brauer ends with tips you can use to protect yourself, if smoke fills your air.
Mike was introduced by session organizer Charmaine Dean, of Simon Fraser University.
In the radio program, you hear major excerpts from Mike's speech.
In the first part, Mike explains several methods to predict where fire smoke will go. That's important to know if you are a health planner, a hospital worker or doctor, if you have health problems like asthma, - and if you just want to protect the lungs of yourself and your family.
I became even more interested in the second segment, as Brauer explains the public health efforts, and personal things we can do to protect ourselves. If there are going to be more fires, and more smoke, we all need to learn about this.
A smoke plume can travel hundreds of miles over a place like California, or New England (from Canadian fires). Whole parts of Asia have been covered in smoke - like the times Malaysia and Singapore went under a smoke cloud from fires in Indonesia.
We know, from Brauer's study, that in Western-style economies, visits to doctors’ offices and pharmacies will go up. Those places need to stock up on inhalers and other medicines.
People with certain ailments or low lung function need to stay indoors, with the windows closed. Driving around does not help, as Brauer says the smoke is actually worse inside the car.
Brauer struck a chord with me when he recommended simple HEPA air filters for people's homes. I have had one running for the past five years, because we live in a high traffic area. We used to need to dust the place way too often, now much less.
That air filter was running when the wave of radioactivity hit the West Coast about a week after the Fukushima nuclear plants blew up. About a month later I changed out the filters, which were no doubt radioactive. It saved our lungs a bit.
These filters also reduce indoor smoke from fires by about 65% Brauer says. That's better for everybody.
Once again, this is another reason to have at least a few days’ worth of food stocked up too. Nobody needs to go out to the store.
DR. FAY JOHNSTON
Our final presenter in this week's special on fire and climate change is Dr. Fay Johnston, a physician and environmental epidemiologist at the Menzies Research Institute in Tasmania, the Down Under of Australia. Here is a link to one of her smoke assessment projects. And here is a link to a public article "Fire Smoke Important Contributor to Deaths World-Wide".
Her topic for this session of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science is: "The Estimated Global Mortality Burden Attributable to Landscape Fire Smoke".
Let's find out who really pays the ultimate price for advancing fires in a crowded warming world. We only have time for a few excerpts.
First, what is a "landscape fire" and who is studying it?
Dr. Fay Johnston describes the first attempts to quantify the impacts of global wildfires.
As she says: "a world without fire does not exist." It is natural, but not when humans create the fire conditions, and then set those fires. Her team estimated about 90% of "landscape fires" around the world are set purposely by humans. We do it to clear new land for things like soy beans or palm oil.
Africa is a central location for fires. It is part of their agricultural cycle. The old crop is burned off to prepare for the new one. Radio Ecoshock has had other guests explain that method of agriculture is adding to global warming.
As far as deaths go, we find out there has hardly been any study in the developing world, where most of the fires are, and most of the death happen. To measure health impacts, Johnston's group had to use pollution studies generated in major smoggy cities. It turns out those impacts on lungs work pretty well for people smoked out in the jungle as well. Still, just like medical research, we take studies from the First World and apply them to developing countries, hoping it will work. There's no money to do the research in the heavily populated places where it is needed most.
Isn't that always the case, in this unfair world? Whether its medicine or smoke, almost all research is funded and performed in the developed world, where a minority of Earth's population live and die. It may take another generation to see how climate change and fire do their dance in the most populated, and the most plant rich places on the planet.
To be honest, this study finds smoke deaths from landscape fires are far less serious than deaths from smoking tobacco.
Whereas several millions die because of tobacco, this study estimates about 340,000 people a year die from landscape fires. Around 10,000 of those are in South America, where relative population is low. Over a hundred thousand are in the Sahel region of northern Africa. More than a hundred thousand die each and every year from air-borne smoke in Asia but that is still fewer than die from cooking over smoky fires indoors in Asia.
Two weeks after broadcast, you can find the full speeches by Mike Flannigan, Mike Brauer, and Fay Johnston on the Climate 2012 downloads page at ecoshock.org. My thanks to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science for allowing me to record on February 19th, and to Simon Fraser University for organizing this session on forest fires, smoke, and climate change.
Our music in this program was from the 1968 hit "Fire" by Arthur Brown. News clips were from NBC12 Richmond, and CBS evening news.
I'm Alex Smith.
Tune in next week for our next big adventure into the future - on Radio Ecoshock.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
The Worst Problems In The World
The nuclear accident at Fukushima Japan is far from over. Three reactors continue to melt-down and now there is a storm of international worry about nuclear fuel pools tottering in blown up buildings. The whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk right now.
I'm Alex Smith for Radio Ecoshock. We are joined again by nuclear industry expert Arnold Gundersen, of Fairewinds Associates.
Arnie Gundersen, a year ago, warned us here on Radio Ecoshock, and to anybody who would listen, that a world-scale catastrophe was lurking in the nuclear fuel storage pools of both reactors Three and Four, at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan.
Why is this story finally getting wider attention, a year later?
The Japanese press, which has been following the government line, is starting to break out. On April 2nd, Takao Yamada, Expert Senior Writer for the Mainichi paper, said, quote: "The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building’s third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk."
We also had the unusual case of Japan’s former ambassador to Switzerland, Mitsuhei Murata, speaking at a public hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on March 22, 2012. He told the Swiss if the Reactor 4 fuel pool collapses, the cooling water for all six reactors would be shut down, as well as for the nearby spent fuel pool with another 6,000 fuel rods.
Another Japanese diplomat, Akio Matsumura is also blogging about this.
It is very surprising that Japanese officials are speaking out. Why now? Do they know something we don't?
It seems to me, and many Radio Ecoshock listeners from all over the world have written me about this - that the whole world is sleep-walking through this potential global catastrophe. They want to know: Why isn't there an international emergency action plan, to save us from a nuclear disaster which would make Chernobyl look small in comparison?
The average person thinks the Japanese could just dig an in-ground pool, move the fuel rods into a safer place, and then cover all that with a containment building. Why aren't they doing that?
So we have debris over the fuel rods, a broken crane, broken fuel rod assemblies, and a building so shaky any attempts to fix things might cause the building to fall. Is it possible we have a situation which cannot be solved?
Over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow says Reactor 2 is an example of a technology which has no solution. Humans can't get near such high radioactivity. Even robot electronics fail in such circumstances. The Japanese require a technology that hasn't been invented yet. Should we even be using nuclear technology, if unsolvable accidents can happen?
It is time to think the unthinkable. Arnie walks us through what could happen if we wake up one day, and the Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor 4 fuel pool collapses.
Arnie tells us the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S. issued a study on the impacts of a nuclear fuel pool fire.
Here is a good article summary of that 1987 Brookhaven study by Stuart Staniford.
In this article from the New England Centre for Investigative Reporting, we find "A 1997 [actually it was 1987] study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island concluded that a pool fire at a plant like Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Connecticut or Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station in Massachusetts could kill 100 people instantly and another 138,000 people eventually. Some $546 billion in damage would result, the study said, and 2,170 square miles of land could be contaminated."
From the selfish point of view of someone living on the West Coast of North America, and for everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, it seems the key point is whether there is a major explosion, driving radioactive materials into the stratosphere. That's what it takes to spread these poisons right around the world.
Gundersen says it is unlikely there would be an explosion if the #4 Fuel pool collapses. But dangerous "hot" particles would still be sent around the world, because within two days of the collapse, the Zirconium and radioactive metals (like Cesium and Plutonium) would burn at a very high temperature, sending particles high into the air. The result would be an everlasting disaster for Japan. Arnie thinks it could create a no-man's land 50 miles across the country, perhaps destabilizing the government.
The famous anti-nuclear activist and pediatrician Dr. Helen Caldicott just said in a speech: if there is a major nuclear release from Fukushima, she would evacuate her family from Boston, and head back to her native Australia, or anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Would it be safer south of the equator? Likely, as there is much less mixing of air from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern. All the countries in the Northern Hemisphere would suffer radioactive fallout if this happens.
We can't evacuate the Northern Hemisphere. The explosion at Reactor 3 showed we have 5 to 7 days before radiation hits the Pacific Coast of North America. Personally, I would definitely leave Vancouver. We get a lot of rain here, so the hot stuff is going to wash into our open water reservoirs. They would be poisoned for hundreds of years. I would try to get east of the Rocky Mountains, to a drier place, with a source of fossil water from deep underground.
What would you do?
In the 1950's, all children were trained in civil defense in case of nuclear attack. It was lame, but it was something. Do you think world governments should be teaching everyone the basics of trying to avoid the worst exposure to radiation, in case Fukushima blows? We would all have to stay indoors, with the windows shut. You should buy a couple of HEPA air cleaners right now, I think. The economy would collapse. Do you have food stored for such an emergency? I hope so.
Surely there must be a better way to reduce our risk of having an accident that would damage the Planet more or less forever in human timescales. What can be done at Fukushima?
Arnie says the nuclear power game is set up so each country handles safety and any accident as an internal affair. But when an accident threatens us all, we need to pressure our own governments to formulate an international response, to help the Japanese acts as fast as they can.
In the interview, Arnie Gundersen, who was an executive at a company which installed nuclear fuel racks in those very same types of reactors, lays out three ways to handle this emergency. None of them are great, but his suggestion to make a smaller fuel canister, and start moving the rods out to an already existing in-ground pool on the site, sounds best to me. It would be slow and painstaking, but would begin to make us all safer every day.
Maybe an earthquake won't strike near Fukushima in the next few years. However, on February 14th, Dapeng Zhao, geophysics professor at Japan’s Tohoku University, published a paper in "Solid Earth", a journal of the European Geosciences Union.
Here is a good article summarizing that paper, in Common Dreams.
Zhao said the giant earthquake in March of 2011 had reactivated a seismic fault close to the Fukushima nuclear plant. Using the latest scientific techniques and measurements, the paper warns another big earthquake could strike even closer to the plant.
Washington's blog concludes "Scientists say that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hitting Fukushima this year, and a 98% chance within the next 3 years."
In a radio interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott in early February, Gundersen estimated a quake of 7.0 or greater could cause the Reactor 4 fuel pool to collapse.
What have the Japanese done so far to strengthen the building, and could they be doing more?
We have to remind ourselves, we might just get lucky. Maybe the Reactor 3 and 4 buildings will keep standing for few years, while the Japanese invent a solution. We didn't have a major nuclear war so far, maybe we'll squeak through this one. But are our chances good, or not so good, the way things are going?
Robert Alvarez, an expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, has tried again and again to warn us: this isn't just a problem in Japan. The American reactors have built up even more stored fuel rods, some of them over earthquake fault lines, all of them requiring non-stop cooling, and none of the storage pools have containment if there is an accident.
The spent fuel risk in America is even greater in Japan. Why is no one talking about this?
Arnie Gundersen has not heard of government meetings or plans to get faster action to protect the world against yet another giant nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. We need citizens organizing everywhere, pushing their governments to stop ignoring the threat, or playing along with Japan, to stop being polite about the danger. I'm sure many people in Japan would welcome international pressure to get faster action.
We could compare this reactor accident to the horror of thermo-nuclear war, hanging over our heads. It took a generation of protests, and a fallen empire, to reduce that threat. A nuclear war is still possible, but it's less likely.
But we don't have a long-time frame, 30 years, to stabilize the Reactor 4 fuel storage pond. I'm surprised we got through this year, and I'm not sure about the next one. Can we scrape through again?
Listen to/download the Arnie Gundersen interview (26 minutes) in CD Quality... or Lo-Fi.
THE SCANDAL OF THE TAR SANDS
I'm Alex Smith and I'm angry. There are lots of sick and ugly things in this world, along with tremendous beauty and love. But there are two giant projects which I know offend God, if there is one.
The first is blowing the tops of mountains, and plowing the rubble into Nature's valleys. The second is the largest and most polluting industrial project on Earth: the Canadian Tar Sands.
The big oil companies are spending millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars, to convince you they produce what they call "ethical oil". It's everywhere. News columnists blather on about the wonderful "oil sands" and why we can't live without them. Never mind the full page ads from tar sands companies in the same newspapers.
I can't even go to a movie without seeing Hollywood-quality ads with butterflies and forests all around the new clean green Tar Sands operations.
Here is the other side of the story - a quick clip of a talk by Mike Mercredi, an aboriginal man from Fort Chipewyan, downstream from the Tar Sands.
(In the audio, Mike lists out his relatives that are dead or dying of cancer, which was unknown to them in previous generations, before the Tar Sands came upstream of their drinking water and fishing grounds)
I recorded that in 2008, when we had no experts to back him up. Listen to the whole Radio Ecoshock program "Climate Terrorism: The Tar Sands" 3 speakers recorded December 5th in Vancouver, listed on our 2008 show archive page at ecoshock.org.
As you will hear in this program, they are lying about being able to reclaim land to their former natural state. The oil companies and the governments who collude with them are faking and hiding the health effects.
The whole tar sands operation is a world-scale Ponzi scheme which will bankrupt future generations with the costs of clean-up, - if any remediation is possible. Or they will do what most mining companies do: leave a massive open scar upon the earth, all for the quick quarterly profits of foreign multinationals.
Why says so? According to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and his Environment Minister, anyone who criticizes the Tar Sands is just a foreign-funded radical - unpatriotic environmentalists.
Let's meet one of those radicals. Here is the introduction to Dr. David Schindler, before his speech in Vancouver, on March 28th, 2012. The intro is by John Pierce, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Simon Fraser University.
(audio: Schindler helped discover that phosphorus from detergents and water treatment plants was killing the Great Lakes; he proved acid rain was coming from coal plant pollution; he's recently done a study of Tar Sands pollution. Schindler has an Order of Canada, is a member of the Royal Society, and has many, many honors.)
That's the wild-eyed radical the Prime Minister fears. A life-long scientist who helped clean up the Great Lakes from phosphorus, who proved the source of acid-rain, a world-recognized and heavily awarded expert, David Schindler.
David is no fly-in academic from New York. He lives in Northern Alberta. He's fished in the many streams threatened by the proposed Enbridge northern pipeline. He's measures the water and the air, finding pollution governments denied.
In the program I summarize some of the surprising revelations in this speech, bolstered by selected audio. For example, did you know the tiny amounts of supposedly reclaimed lands can never be returned to their previous state, because the mine tailings are too salty?
I also didn't realize the biggest source of pollution is actually air-borne. We'll learn all that and more in this work-shop from Canada's top Tar Sands expert, a quiet but devastating critic of the world's dirtiest source of oil.
* Tar Sands chemicals flood local rivers, probably explaining higher levels of cancer in aboriginal Canadians downstream. The government won't investigate the many deaths there.
* The former Alberta caribou herds will never return.
* The forests are being stripped in an area projected to be larger than the state of Florida.
* Countless tons of methane are burned and released just to get oil out of the sands. More global warming gases.
* The corrosive raw oil is carried in a network of pipelines, tankers, trucks, and famous spills. It's an industrial spider web reaching down into the United States, indeed all over North America.
* Wherever you live in the world, the Tar Sands are wrecking your atmosphere, as the single largest industrial source of greenhouse gases on the planet.
* The damage can be seen from space, and will last for thousands of years.
Welcome to your secure energy source, your damned "ethical" oil.
-------------------
David begins with the tailing ponds, some of which are just meters away from the Athabasca River. According to Tar Sands Watch, every square meter of oil-bearing bitumen mined creates six square meters of tailing. These are tossed into toxic lakes now covering more than 55 square kilometers, over 13,000 acres and growing rapidly. The tailing dyke of just one company, Syncrude, is the second largest dam in the world. Only the Chinese Three Gorges Dam is larger.
Here is David Schindler...
[SH1_TailingsAthabasca etc. 1:38]
David then makes several key points.
First, development in both the Tar Sands operations, and in the surrounding town and infrastructure has far outstripped any planning process or regulation. It's a wild-west anything-goes oil rush. As that building boom grew, the size of planning and regulatory bodies needed to keep pace. Instead successive governments have cut funding, to the point that hardly anything is monitored, regulated, or planned.
Second: while the many foreign corporations make obscene multi-billions in profits, the Canadian public gets less and less of the revenues. Governments, with political parties heavily funded by oil companies, kept reducing the percentage going to the Canadian public. Later, we'll find the whole cleanup bill is mounting, as reclamation is stalled for decades. Young Canadians will pay those astronomic bills.
[SH2_FastDevleopment_massiveprofits 4:43]
From the recording March 28th, in Vancouver, here is what David Schindler says about "ethical oil".
[SH3_Ethical_Oil 2:58]
OK, now we are going for a long walk through David Schindler's presentation. He talks about cancer in the Native people; how the industry-sponsored river testing found NOTHING, no contaminants from super-polluting smoke stacks. His own team of scientists found a wide range of heavy metals and toxic polycarbonates the industry and government somehow failed to detect.
David Schindler all along gives you the big picture references that nobody else is talking about. For example, there are two giant chemical complexes called "the upgraders" which process the raw bitumen. These are sending out pollution for 50 miles around. It accumulates on the snow, and on the frozen rivers, until the fast Spring melt supercharges all the waters with toxic chemicals. It's the quiet science of the horrific.
[SH4_ScienceTesting 17 min]
That was Dr. David Schindler, an internationally renowned scientist working in Canada, talking about his team research into pollution from the Tar Sands. This was recorded by Alex Smith at the Simon Fraser University Wosk Centre in downtown Vancouver on March 28, 2012.
LISTEN TO/DOWNLOAD THIS RADIO ECOSHOCK SEGMENT ON DAVID SCHINDLER (31 minutes) in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
I hope you got one of the stories Schindler explained. As I understand it, Dr. Schindler and other scientists could not accept the industry-funded government approved study saying that NONE of the dirty pollutants from the tar sands operations could be measured in the Athabasca River or its tributaries. They found the alleged testing set up measuring stations either upstream of the operations, or far down river near the river mouth at Lake Athabasca, where dilution would be greatest. The testing method had a baseline, or used techniques, which eliminated low levels of contaminants.
Three scientists, David Schindler, Jeff Short of NOAA, and Peter Hodson, a toxicologist at Queens University took their own samples. These included sites near the Tar Sands operations.
This independent team used better testing methods. They found low levels of many, many toxic substances, especially near the so-called upgrader plants, where air pollution is strong and obvious. This is a scandal! The First Nations people living downstream from the tar sands complained for years their families were dying of cancer. Industry and the government told the victims there was no pollution in their water.
After the not-so-mysterious cancer deaths of the First Nations people, and after two decades of warnings from scientists, here are the results of the health impacts study done by the Canadian government: nothing!
They don't investigate. They don't care. There are billions of dollars of profits to be made every year. That is what matters.
You aren't going to hear the dirty truth about the tar sands from any authority, and certainly not from the millions spent on propaganda by the multinational oil companies digging out the tar.
We are out of time for this week, but not out of ammunition. In an upcoming Radio Ecoshock show, you'll hear more from famous scientist David Schindler. He'll tell us why the heavily advertised "restoration" of the scoured landscape is fake. Remaking nature is not possible, and it's not going to happen.
The native people like Mike Mercredi know. They live there, eating the polluted fish, breathing the polluted air.
[Mike Mercredi clip 2]
Keep your ears out for more on the Canadian Tar Sands, the world's single largest source of pollution, on Radio Ecoshock.
OUR GLOBAL WARMING COMEDY RANT - FROM LEE CAMP
We also have a short rant by New York Comedian Lee Camp. Here is a comedian who knows that global warming is not all that funny, but it's real. We run a short 2 minute clip from Lee's podcast "A Moment of Clarity" available on You tube.
I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for getting real about your world.
I'm Alex Smith for Radio Ecoshock. We are joined again by nuclear industry expert Arnold Gundersen, of Fairewinds Associates.
Arnie Gundersen, a year ago, warned us here on Radio Ecoshock, and to anybody who would listen, that a world-scale catastrophe was lurking in the nuclear fuel storage pools of both reactors Three and Four, at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan.
Why is this story finally getting wider attention, a year later?
The Japanese press, which has been following the government line, is starting to break out. On April 2nd, Takao Yamada, Expert Senior Writer for the Mainichi paper, said, quote: "The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building’s third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk."
We also had the unusual case of Japan’s former ambassador to Switzerland, Mitsuhei Murata, speaking at a public hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on March 22, 2012. He told the Swiss if the Reactor 4 fuel pool collapses, the cooling water for all six reactors would be shut down, as well as for the nearby spent fuel pool with another 6,000 fuel rods.
Another Japanese diplomat, Akio Matsumura is also blogging about this.
It is very surprising that Japanese officials are speaking out. Why now? Do they know something we don't?
It seems to me, and many Radio Ecoshock listeners from all over the world have written me about this - that the whole world is sleep-walking through this potential global catastrophe. They want to know: Why isn't there an international emergency action plan, to save us from a nuclear disaster which would make Chernobyl look small in comparison?
The average person thinks the Japanese could just dig an in-ground pool, move the fuel rods into a safer place, and then cover all that with a containment building. Why aren't they doing that?
So we have debris over the fuel rods, a broken crane, broken fuel rod assemblies, and a building so shaky any attempts to fix things might cause the building to fall. Is it possible we have a situation which cannot be solved?
Over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow says Reactor 2 is an example of a technology which has no solution. Humans can't get near such high radioactivity. Even robot electronics fail in such circumstances. The Japanese require a technology that hasn't been invented yet. Should we even be using nuclear technology, if unsolvable accidents can happen?
It is time to think the unthinkable. Arnie walks us through what could happen if we wake up one day, and the Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor 4 fuel pool collapses.
Arnie tells us the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S. issued a study on the impacts of a nuclear fuel pool fire.
Here is a good article summary of that 1987 Brookhaven study by Stuart Staniford.
In this article from the New England Centre for Investigative Reporting, we find "A 1997 [actually it was 1987] study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island concluded that a pool fire at a plant like Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Connecticut or Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station in Massachusetts could kill 100 people instantly and another 138,000 people eventually. Some $546 billion in damage would result, the study said, and 2,170 square miles of land could be contaminated."
From the selfish point of view of someone living on the West Coast of North America, and for everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, it seems the key point is whether there is a major explosion, driving radioactive materials into the stratosphere. That's what it takes to spread these poisons right around the world.
Gundersen says it is unlikely there would be an explosion if the #4 Fuel pool collapses. But dangerous "hot" particles would still be sent around the world, because within two days of the collapse, the Zirconium and radioactive metals (like Cesium and Plutonium) would burn at a very high temperature, sending particles high into the air. The result would be an everlasting disaster for Japan. Arnie thinks it could create a no-man's land 50 miles across the country, perhaps destabilizing the government.
The famous anti-nuclear activist and pediatrician Dr. Helen Caldicott just said in a speech: if there is a major nuclear release from Fukushima, she would evacuate her family from Boston, and head back to her native Australia, or anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Would it be safer south of the equator? Likely, as there is much less mixing of air from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern. All the countries in the Northern Hemisphere would suffer radioactive fallout if this happens.
We can't evacuate the Northern Hemisphere. The explosion at Reactor 3 showed we have 5 to 7 days before radiation hits the Pacific Coast of North America. Personally, I would definitely leave Vancouver. We get a lot of rain here, so the hot stuff is going to wash into our open water reservoirs. They would be poisoned for hundreds of years. I would try to get east of the Rocky Mountains, to a drier place, with a source of fossil water from deep underground.
What would you do?
In the 1950's, all children were trained in civil defense in case of nuclear attack. It was lame, but it was something. Do you think world governments should be teaching everyone the basics of trying to avoid the worst exposure to radiation, in case Fukushima blows? We would all have to stay indoors, with the windows shut. You should buy a couple of HEPA air cleaners right now, I think. The economy would collapse. Do you have food stored for such an emergency? I hope so.
Surely there must be a better way to reduce our risk of having an accident that would damage the Planet more or less forever in human timescales. What can be done at Fukushima?
Arnie says the nuclear power game is set up so each country handles safety and any accident as an internal affair. But when an accident threatens us all, we need to pressure our own governments to formulate an international response, to help the Japanese acts as fast as they can.
In the interview, Arnie Gundersen, who was an executive at a company which installed nuclear fuel racks in those very same types of reactors, lays out three ways to handle this emergency. None of them are great, but his suggestion to make a smaller fuel canister, and start moving the rods out to an already existing in-ground pool on the site, sounds best to me. It would be slow and painstaking, but would begin to make us all safer every day.
Maybe an earthquake won't strike near Fukushima in the next few years. However, on February 14th, Dapeng Zhao, geophysics professor at Japan’s Tohoku University, published a paper in "Solid Earth", a journal of the European Geosciences Union.
Here is a good article summarizing that paper, in Common Dreams.
Zhao said the giant earthquake in March of 2011 had reactivated a seismic fault close to the Fukushima nuclear plant. Using the latest scientific techniques and measurements, the paper warns another big earthquake could strike even closer to the plant.
Washington's blog concludes "Scientists say that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hitting Fukushima this year, and a 98% chance within the next 3 years."
In a radio interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott in early February, Gundersen estimated a quake of 7.0 or greater could cause the Reactor 4 fuel pool to collapse.
What have the Japanese done so far to strengthen the building, and could they be doing more?
We have to remind ourselves, we might just get lucky. Maybe the Reactor 3 and 4 buildings will keep standing for few years, while the Japanese invent a solution. We didn't have a major nuclear war so far, maybe we'll squeak through this one. But are our chances good, or not so good, the way things are going?
Robert Alvarez, an expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, has tried again and again to warn us: this isn't just a problem in Japan. The American reactors have built up even more stored fuel rods, some of them over earthquake fault lines, all of them requiring non-stop cooling, and none of the storage pools have containment if there is an accident.
The spent fuel risk in America is even greater in Japan. Why is no one talking about this?
Arnie Gundersen has not heard of government meetings or plans to get faster action to protect the world against yet another giant nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. We need citizens organizing everywhere, pushing their governments to stop ignoring the threat, or playing along with Japan, to stop being polite about the danger. I'm sure many people in Japan would welcome international pressure to get faster action.
We could compare this reactor accident to the horror of thermo-nuclear war, hanging over our heads. It took a generation of protests, and a fallen empire, to reduce that threat. A nuclear war is still possible, but it's less likely.
But we don't have a long-time frame, 30 years, to stabilize the Reactor 4 fuel storage pond. I'm surprised we got through this year, and I'm not sure about the next one. Can we scrape through again?
Listen to/download the Arnie Gundersen interview (26 minutes) in CD Quality... or Lo-Fi.
THE SCANDAL OF THE TAR SANDS
I'm Alex Smith and I'm angry. There are lots of sick and ugly things in this world, along with tremendous beauty and love. But there are two giant projects which I know offend God, if there is one.
The first is blowing the tops of mountains, and plowing the rubble into Nature's valleys. The second is the largest and most polluting industrial project on Earth: the Canadian Tar Sands.
The big oil companies are spending millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars, to convince you they produce what they call "ethical oil". It's everywhere. News columnists blather on about the wonderful "oil sands" and why we can't live without them. Never mind the full page ads from tar sands companies in the same newspapers.
I can't even go to a movie without seeing Hollywood-quality ads with butterflies and forests all around the new clean green Tar Sands operations.
Here is the other side of the story - a quick clip of a talk by Mike Mercredi, an aboriginal man from Fort Chipewyan, downstream from the Tar Sands.
(In the audio, Mike lists out his relatives that are dead or dying of cancer, which was unknown to them in previous generations, before the Tar Sands came upstream of their drinking water and fishing grounds)
I recorded that in 2008, when we had no experts to back him up. Listen to the whole Radio Ecoshock program "Climate Terrorism: The Tar Sands" 3 speakers recorded December 5th in Vancouver, listed on our 2008 show archive page at ecoshock.org.
As you will hear in this program, they are lying about being able to reclaim land to their former natural state. The oil companies and the governments who collude with them are faking and hiding the health effects.
The whole tar sands operation is a world-scale Ponzi scheme which will bankrupt future generations with the costs of clean-up, - if any remediation is possible. Or they will do what most mining companies do: leave a massive open scar upon the earth, all for the quick quarterly profits of foreign multinationals.
Why says so? According to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and his Environment Minister, anyone who criticizes the Tar Sands is just a foreign-funded radical - unpatriotic environmentalists.
Let's meet one of those radicals. Here is the introduction to Dr. David Schindler, before his speech in Vancouver, on March 28th, 2012. The intro is by John Pierce, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Simon Fraser University.
(audio: Schindler helped discover that phosphorus from detergents and water treatment plants was killing the Great Lakes; he proved acid rain was coming from coal plant pollution; he's recently done a study of Tar Sands pollution. Schindler has an Order of Canada, is a member of the Royal Society, and has many, many honors.)
That's the wild-eyed radical the Prime Minister fears. A life-long scientist who helped clean up the Great Lakes from phosphorus, who proved the source of acid-rain, a world-recognized and heavily awarded expert, David Schindler.
David is no fly-in academic from New York. He lives in Northern Alberta. He's fished in the many streams threatened by the proposed Enbridge northern pipeline. He's measures the water and the air, finding pollution governments denied.
In the program I summarize some of the surprising revelations in this speech, bolstered by selected audio. For example, did you know the tiny amounts of supposedly reclaimed lands can never be returned to their previous state, because the mine tailings are too salty?
I also didn't realize the biggest source of pollution is actually air-borne. We'll learn all that and more in this work-shop from Canada's top Tar Sands expert, a quiet but devastating critic of the world's dirtiest source of oil.
* Tar Sands chemicals flood local rivers, probably explaining higher levels of cancer in aboriginal Canadians downstream. The government won't investigate the many deaths there.
* The former Alberta caribou herds will never return.
* The forests are being stripped in an area projected to be larger than the state of Florida.
* Countless tons of methane are burned and released just to get oil out of the sands. More global warming gases.
* The corrosive raw oil is carried in a network of pipelines, tankers, trucks, and famous spills. It's an industrial spider web reaching down into the United States, indeed all over North America.
* Wherever you live in the world, the Tar Sands are wrecking your atmosphere, as the single largest industrial source of greenhouse gases on the planet.
* The damage can be seen from space, and will last for thousands of years.
Welcome to your secure energy source, your damned "ethical" oil.
-------------------
David begins with the tailing ponds, some of which are just meters away from the Athabasca River. According to Tar Sands Watch, every square meter of oil-bearing bitumen mined creates six square meters of tailing. These are tossed into toxic lakes now covering more than 55 square kilometers, over 13,000 acres and growing rapidly. The tailing dyke of just one company, Syncrude, is the second largest dam in the world. Only the Chinese Three Gorges Dam is larger.
Here is David Schindler...
[SH1_TailingsAthabasca etc. 1:38]
David then makes several key points.
First, development in both the Tar Sands operations, and in the surrounding town and infrastructure has far outstripped any planning process or regulation. It's a wild-west anything-goes oil rush. As that building boom grew, the size of planning and regulatory bodies needed to keep pace. Instead successive governments have cut funding, to the point that hardly anything is monitored, regulated, or planned.
Second: while the many foreign corporations make obscene multi-billions in profits, the Canadian public gets less and less of the revenues. Governments, with political parties heavily funded by oil companies, kept reducing the percentage going to the Canadian public. Later, we'll find the whole cleanup bill is mounting, as reclamation is stalled for decades. Young Canadians will pay those astronomic bills.
[SH2_FastDevleopment_massiveprofits 4:43]
From the recording March 28th, in Vancouver, here is what David Schindler says about "ethical oil".
[SH3_Ethical_Oil 2:58]
OK, now we are going for a long walk through David Schindler's presentation. He talks about cancer in the Native people; how the industry-sponsored river testing found NOTHING, no contaminants from super-polluting smoke stacks. His own team of scientists found a wide range of heavy metals and toxic polycarbonates the industry and government somehow failed to detect.
David Schindler all along gives you the big picture references that nobody else is talking about. For example, there are two giant chemical complexes called "the upgraders" which process the raw bitumen. These are sending out pollution for 50 miles around. It accumulates on the snow, and on the frozen rivers, until the fast Spring melt supercharges all the waters with toxic chemicals. It's the quiet science of the horrific.
[SH4_ScienceTesting 17 min]
That was Dr. David Schindler, an internationally renowned scientist working in Canada, talking about his team research into pollution from the Tar Sands. This was recorded by Alex Smith at the Simon Fraser University Wosk Centre in downtown Vancouver on March 28, 2012.
LISTEN TO/DOWNLOAD THIS RADIO ECOSHOCK SEGMENT ON DAVID SCHINDLER (31 minutes) in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
I hope you got one of the stories Schindler explained. As I understand it, Dr. Schindler and other scientists could not accept the industry-funded government approved study saying that NONE of the dirty pollutants from the tar sands operations could be measured in the Athabasca River or its tributaries. They found the alleged testing set up measuring stations either upstream of the operations, or far down river near the river mouth at Lake Athabasca, where dilution would be greatest. The testing method had a baseline, or used techniques, which eliminated low levels of contaminants.
Three scientists, David Schindler, Jeff Short of NOAA, and Peter Hodson, a toxicologist at Queens University took their own samples. These included sites near the Tar Sands operations.
This independent team used better testing methods. They found low levels of many, many toxic substances, especially near the so-called upgrader plants, where air pollution is strong and obvious. This is a scandal! The First Nations people living downstream from the tar sands complained for years their families were dying of cancer. Industry and the government told the victims there was no pollution in their water.
After the not-so-mysterious cancer deaths of the First Nations people, and after two decades of warnings from scientists, here are the results of the health impacts study done by the Canadian government: nothing!
They don't investigate. They don't care. There are billions of dollars of profits to be made every year. That is what matters.
You aren't going to hear the dirty truth about the tar sands from any authority, and certainly not from the millions spent on propaganda by the multinational oil companies digging out the tar.
We are out of time for this week, but not out of ammunition. In an upcoming Radio Ecoshock show, you'll hear more from famous scientist David Schindler. He'll tell us why the heavily advertised "restoration" of the scoured landscape is fake. Remaking nature is not possible, and it's not going to happen.
The native people like Mike Mercredi know. They live there, eating the polluted fish, breathing the polluted air.
[Mike Mercredi clip 2]
Keep your ears out for more on the Canadian Tar Sands, the world's single largest source of pollution, on Radio Ecoshock.
OUR GLOBAL WARMING COMEDY RANT - FROM LEE CAMP
We also have a short rant by New York Comedian Lee Camp. Here is a comedian who knows that global warming is not all that funny, but it's real. We run a short 2 minute clip from Lee's podcast "A Moment of Clarity" available on You tube.
I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for getting real about your world.
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