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
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
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.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Relapse and Recovery
A fresh update on Japan after the tsunami and nuclear accident with Warren Karlenzig. Is it a chance to build new green cities, or a vision of what we all face as the oil runs out? Then a quick interview with anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott, and Marsha Coleman-Adebayo at the Occupy the EPA protest in Washington. We conclude with an invitation by Susanne Moser to "get real" about our difficult future as we destabilize the climate.
BACK FROM POST NUCLEAR JAPAN - WITH WARREN KARLENZIG
Download this 24 minute interview... in CD Quality or faster download in Lo-Fi.
Do you worry about an energy shortage, a nuclear accident, or a severe economic hit? Welcome to Japan, which is dealing with all three, following the deadly Tsunami and nuclear accident in March 2011. PCI Fellow Warren Karlenzig just returned from the damage zone, with this radio report.
We have a new report from Warren Karlenzig, who just toured Japan with a United Nations group. As the founder of Common Current, Warren advises city and national governments on sustainability. He's a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. In 2009, Radio Ecoshock broadcast Warren's speech at a Vancouver panel on building green cities.
We can't get to the impact of the nuclear accident, or Japan's exciting prospects for green energy, without first giving respect to the people who live with the tragic loss of more than 20,000 lives, of whole towns, and a large part of the country. Warren gives us some insight on how are people in Japan are handling unimaginable stress.
Are there immediate lessons we can learn about surviving a large-scale disaster? How much help comes from government, and how much from self-organization by the citizens?
One of the hot button issues in Japan is the national government's plan to redistribute tsunami wreckage, including material contaminated with radioactive waste, all over the country.
With almost all nuclear reactors out of service, how are the Japanese dealing with the lack of energy? Fifty two out of fifty four reactors were out of service when Karlenzig toured Japan, and the 53rd was shutting down the day of our interview.
The Japanese are scrambling to import more LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) - and burning more coal - but there is still a massive energy short-fall.
It turns out their response could be very close to our future as oil becomes too expensive for most uses, if we can get oil at all.
The Japanese generally were either not heating buildings, or just keeping the pipes from bursting, while wearing winter coats inside. For a special meeting, a kerosene heater was brought in. Only the most necessary energy was used.
Karlenzig says the sudden failure of the Japanese energy supplies is comparable to a peak oil shock.
There an opportunity in Japan to rebuild new green cities and towns. Two cities have proposed "smart growth" models. One is pursuing ideas for renewable energy, and zero emissions. Find the details, and photos from the tour of Japan, in Warren's blog article here.
This reminds me of the astounding Japanese recovery after World War Two. Most cities were flattened, and energy was in short supply. Yet Japan rebounded with new factories, new technologies, and more efficient production.
But there are still major roadblocks to recovery in the region hit by both a tsunami and a triple nuclear melt-down. For one thing, young people were already leaving the central East coast region, which was known mainly for tourism, fishing, and agriculture. Young people were going to larger cities, seeking more modern employment, in computing for example.
This disaster has made the youth drain much more serious. With no work, hardly a place to live, and few prospects, many of the young people needed for rebuilding have left.
Warren raises another challenge. Japanese society tends to organize with male administrators. Women, and the elderly, did not attend most planning meetings, and appear not to be consulted about the new vision for a future. Karlenzig says experience shows real planning has to involve everyone, with meetings, questions, and working through the process. That is not happening in Japan, yet.
I was surprised to learn that after one year reconstruction has not yet begun! One reason is shocking: the land has not yet settled enough to rebuild. Many parts of the Eastern coast are still sinking. Land is sinking anywhere from a few inches, to several feet. With continuing aftershocks, in fact with a continuing wave of serious earthquakes ranging over 6.0, still happening, things are not yet settled for rebuilding.
One personal note: Warren Karlenzig was offered home-made meals with organic food. But should he eat things grown in a radioactive area? All the tour members were concerned. One official told Karlenzig the local mushrooms were much more radioactive than Tokyo was admitting. There are also reports that rice, the staple of Japanese food, is also contaminated.
The simple act of eating can feel threatening, after a nuclear accident.
Be sure and listen to this interview with sustainable cities expert Warren Karlenzig. Keep track of Warren at commoncurrent.com.
FROM THE OCCUPY EPA PROTEST
On March 30th, various groups united to march on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They were protesting the lack of regulations and enforcement to protect the environment, and people's health.
One of the co-organizers was a former EPA employee, and whistleblower, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. You can hear our previous Radio Ecoshock interview with Marsha here.
This time our Washington D.C. correspondent was on the scene for the march. She interviewed Coleman-Adebayo. We only had time to run this short selection.
MARSHA COLEMAN-ADEBAYO
Gerri Williams: "I'm speaking with Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, one of the co-organizers of the Occupy EPA march that is going to be taking place. Doctor could you tell me about your motivation for this march, the reason behind it, and what you hope to accomplish."
Marsha Coleman-Adebayo: “I think it's incumbent upon our entire community to really start fighting for an environment that's healthy. And not an environment, and particularly not an EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], that's not controlled by corporations. One of the problems that we have in our community is that the EPA is not taking care of its business.
It's important for African Americans and people of color to become involved with the environmental movement. We are really the first victims of environmental injustice. Our homes are sited closer to environmental facilities than any other homes. Our children are more likely to have lead poisoning or neurotoxic levels of lead in their brains. Our children are more likely to have learning disabilities. Breast cancers in African American women tend to be a bit more stubborn than in Caucasian women. So we are really the first victims of environmental injustice, and it is so important that we become involved.
Recently a report was issued by Deloitte consulting firm that said it takes EPA 15 years - 15 years! - to handle a Title Six complaint.
Now a Title Six complaint, it's a complaint by a community about a facility in their community. Fifteen years is a lifetime in the history of a family. Which means that the agency has turned its back on communities of color that are suffering under the weight of industrialization.
So we have decided to say 'Enough is enough'. We are going to fight for our families and for our communities, and fight for our health. And as far as we are concerned this Administration has really not heard yet the voice of the people on this issue."
DR. HELEN CALDICOTT
An important guest speaker at the Occupy EPA rally was the famous anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott. She never fails to warn us that the two headed nuclear dragon still waits to attack us, much worse than terrorism.
Vast nuclear weapons systems are still on hair-trigger alert in many countries. New nations are still joining the nuclear club.
This weapons complex is married to nuclear power - one supports the other. Here is a short transcript, just part of the seven minute interview with Dr. Caldicott speaking to Gerri Williams of Radio Ecoshock.
ON NUCLEAR POWER IN AMERICA
"I don't think people are accepting it [nuclear power] now after Fukushima. In fact I saw a poll yesterday in the New York Times that said that about 60% of Americans now are cautious and wary and concerned about nuclear power. That's post-Fukushima, which shows that the nuclear industry have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years, saying that they are the answer to global warming - even though they cause global warming in their own right because they are undergirded by huge industrial infrastructure, mining, milling, enriching uranium and building reactors - that produce a huge amount of CO2 and global warming gases.
They advertise in Scientific American, on NPR [National Public Radio] all over the place. Which was really wicked. I rang NPR and said 'Why are you taking these ads from the nuclear energy industry?' And they couldn't really answer me. Money. 'Underwriting' they call it but it's advertising.
But now the Fukushima accident I predict will lead to the end of nuclear power, not just in Japan, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, which have all said 'No'. But China, America... and also when you have a meltdown, and I tell you when you have Americans dying either of acute radiation illness and leukemia - that's it. So it hasn't hit you yet. Do you have to wait until it hits you until you develop some common sense, and do the right thing?"
ON NEW REACTOR TECHNOLOGY
"The new reactors are much, much more dangerous, by orders of magnitude that the present light water reactors. Because they are fueled with Plutonium, where one millionth of a gram is a carcinogen. They are cooled by liquid sodium which explodes when exposed to air. So if you get a hole in a pipe you get a meltdown. And five kilos or ten pounds of is critical mass [the level required for a nuclear explosion]. So if you've got a hundred tons of plutonium in a nuclear reactor, and you lose the coolant, and there's a meltdown, and you get ten pounds of plutonium together, and you get critical mass, and a massive nuclear explosion scattering tons and tons of plutonium to the four winds. It's the most ghastly, hideous machine I could ever imagine. They are the new 'safe' reactors."
There is more. Download this 7 minute interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.
GETTING REAL WITH SUSANNE MOSER
Let’s get real about our situation.
As David Orr put it: "This is not the time for illusion or evasion; it is time for transformation".
In our Radio Ecoshock interview we talk about an article, part of an upcoming book. The title is: "GETTING REAL ABOUT IT: MEETING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL DEMANDS OF A WORLD IN DISTRESS".
Our guest is the author, Dr. Susanne C. Moser. She is a researcher and consultant from California, associated with Stanford University. Susanne was previously a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and with the Union of Concerned Scientists. She currently has her own research and consulting company in California.
I learned about Susanne's article from a link provided by Carolyn Baker, at carolynbaker.net.
I've looked forward to our talk, ever since I read her refreshing look at where we really are. I ask you a few impossibly difficult questions, but only because Susanne was brave enough to raise them.
Before we get to her prescriptions for living in a sick civilization, she picks out one particular illness as a case study. We could be talking about mass extinctions, or running out of fresh water - but Moser chose the problem of climate change as her example. That is her area of expertise, where she can make the best case study of the ways we fail to look at reality.
After making a convincing case we are hurtling toward completely unknown lives, in a climate never seen by any human, Moser suggests there are two roads ahead. She calls them two kinds of transitions.
But first, I hit a real stumbling block. Moser writes about "environmental leaders".
I wonder if there are any. I see environmentalists, who are more or less powerless in the current political economy. I see leaders who are mostly bought by big fossil fuel companies, and other corporate interests. An "environmental leader" sounds like a hybrid that doesn't exist yet. Who is she you talking about?
Listen to the interview for her answer. For one thing, she is writing a chapter for the upcoming "Sage Reference Handbook of Environmental Leadership." But Moser goes much deeper, looking at the roles we all can play.
Let's imagine that whole populations realize we are in a biosphere on life-support. They elect leaders to save us from more losses, if not extinction. Moser doesn't pull any punches. She says any new system will have to live through, "enormous losses, human distress, constant crisis, and the seemingly endless need to remain engaged in the task of maintaining, restoring, and rebuilding - despite all setbacks - a viable planet..."
Here is another thorny issue we discuss: once people realize a couple of generations have ruined the known natural world, what the heck are we going to do with all the blame? Do we hang a bunch of geriatric "climate criminals"; do we declare an amnesty, or what?
I think the world of mass media, especially advertising, but also the industrial consumer system, has infantilized the whole population - all of us. We don't know how anything is produced, we just wait for it to come, and we don't count all the costs. So how do we transition a whole species away from being irresponsible children, to become responsible adult Earthlings?
Even though Moser's article "Getting Real About It" is aimed at environmental leaders, it is useful for everybody. I think that's why it's bouncing around the Net so quickly.
Download this 23 minute interview with Susanne Moser in CD quality or Lo-Fi
Under our program ending, you can hear the international artist Ariel Kalma, with "Spirit Dancer". Check out his work, as the father of disco, and electronica. Good stuff.
As always, thank you for listening, for daring to think about the tough problems of our times.
Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock
BACK FROM POST NUCLEAR JAPAN - WITH WARREN KARLENZIG
Download this 24 minute interview... in CD Quality or faster download in Lo-Fi.
Do you worry about an energy shortage, a nuclear accident, or a severe economic hit? Welcome to Japan, which is dealing with all three, following the deadly Tsunami and nuclear accident in March 2011. PCI Fellow Warren Karlenzig just returned from the damage zone, with this radio report.
We have a new report from Warren Karlenzig, who just toured Japan with a United Nations group. As the founder of Common Current, Warren advises city and national governments on sustainability. He's a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. In 2009, Radio Ecoshock broadcast Warren's speech at a Vancouver panel on building green cities.
We can't get to the impact of the nuclear accident, or Japan's exciting prospects for green energy, without first giving respect to the people who live with the tragic loss of more than 20,000 lives, of whole towns, and a large part of the country. Warren gives us some insight on how are people in Japan are handling unimaginable stress.
Are there immediate lessons we can learn about surviving a large-scale disaster? How much help comes from government, and how much from self-organization by the citizens?
One of the hot button issues in Japan is the national government's plan to redistribute tsunami wreckage, including material contaminated with radioactive waste, all over the country.
With almost all nuclear reactors out of service, how are the Japanese dealing with the lack of energy? Fifty two out of fifty four reactors were out of service when Karlenzig toured Japan, and the 53rd was shutting down the day of our interview.
The Japanese are scrambling to import more LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) - and burning more coal - but there is still a massive energy short-fall.
It turns out their response could be very close to our future as oil becomes too expensive for most uses, if we can get oil at all.
The Japanese generally were either not heating buildings, or just keeping the pipes from bursting, while wearing winter coats inside. For a special meeting, a kerosene heater was brought in. Only the most necessary energy was used.
Karlenzig says the sudden failure of the Japanese energy supplies is comparable to a peak oil shock.
There an opportunity in Japan to rebuild new green cities and towns. Two cities have proposed "smart growth" models. One is pursuing ideas for renewable energy, and zero emissions. Find the details, and photos from the tour of Japan, in Warren's blog article here.
This reminds me of the astounding Japanese recovery after World War Two. Most cities were flattened, and energy was in short supply. Yet Japan rebounded with new factories, new technologies, and more efficient production.
But there are still major roadblocks to recovery in the region hit by both a tsunami and a triple nuclear melt-down. For one thing, young people were already leaving the central East coast region, which was known mainly for tourism, fishing, and agriculture. Young people were going to larger cities, seeking more modern employment, in computing for example.
This disaster has made the youth drain much more serious. With no work, hardly a place to live, and few prospects, many of the young people needed for rebuilding have left.
Warren raises another challenge. Japanese society tends to organize with male administrators. Women, and the elderly, did not attend most planning meetings, and appear not to be consulted about the new vision for a future. Karlenzig says experience shows real planning has to involve everyone, with meetings, questions, and working through the process. That is not happening in Japan, yet.
I was surprised to learn that after one year reconstruction has not yet begun! One reason is shocking: the land has not yet settled enough to rebuild. Many parts of the Eastern coast are still sinking. Land is sinking anywhere from a few inches, to several feet. With continuing aftershocks, in fact with a continuing wave of serious earthquakes ranging over 6.0, still happening, things are not yet settled for rebuilding.
One personal note: Warren Karlenzig was offered home-made meals with organic food. But should he eat things grown in a radioactive area? All the tour members were concerned. One official told Karlenzig the local mushrooms were much more radioactive than Tokyo was admitting. There are also reports that rice, the staple of Japanese food, is also contaminated.
The simple act of eating can feel threatening, after a nuclear accident.
Be sure and listen to this interview with sustainable cities expert Warren Karlenzig. Keep track of Warren at commoncurrent.com.
FROM THE OCCUPY EPA PROTEST
On March 30th, various groups united to march on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They were protesting the lack of regulations and enforcement to protect the environment, and people's health.
One of the co-organizers was a former EPA employee, and whistleblower, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. You can hear our previous Radio Ecoshock interview with Marsha here.
This time our Washington D.C. correspondent was on the scene for the march. She interviewed Coleman-Adebayo. We only had time to run this short selection.
MARSHA COLEMAN-ADEBAYO
Gerri Williams: "I'm speaking with Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, one of the co-organizers of the Occupy EPA march that is going to be taking place. Doctor could you tell me about your motivation for this march, the reason behind it, and what you hope to accomplish."
Marsha Coleman-Adebayo: “I think it's incumbent upon our entire community to really start fighting for an environment that's healthy. And not an environment, and particularly not an EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], that's not controlled by corporations. One of the problems that we have in our community is that the EPA is not taking care of its business.
It's important for African Americans and people of color to become involved with the environmental movement. We are really the first victims of environmental injustice. Our homes are sited closer to environmental facilities than any other homes. Our children are more likely to have lead poisoning or neurotoxic levels of lead in their brains. Our children are more likely to have learning disabilities. Breast cancers in African American women tend to be a bit more stubborn than in Caucasian women. So we are really the first victims of environmental injustice, and it is so important that we become involved.
Recently a report was issued by Deloitte consulting firm that said it takes EPA 15 years - 15 years! - to handle a Title Six complaint.
Now a Title Six complaint, it's a complaint by a community about a facility in their community. Fifteen years is a lifetime in the history of a family. Which means that the agency has turned its back on communities of color that are suffering under the weight of industrialization.
So we have decided to say 'Enough is enough'. We are going to fight for our families and for our communities, and fight for our health. And as far as we are concerned this Administration has really not heard yet the voice of the people on this issue."
DR. HELEN CALDICOTT
An important guest speaker at the Occupy EPA rally was the famous anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott. She never fails to warn us that the two headed nuclear dragon still waits to attack us, much worse than terrorism.
Vast nuclear weapons systems are still on hair-trigger alert in many countries. New nations are still joining the nuclear club.
This weapons complex is married to nuclear power - one supports the other. Here is a short transcript, just part of the seven minute interview with Dr. Caldicott speaking to Gerri Williams of Radio Ecoshock.
ON NUCLEAR POWER IN AMERICA
"I don't think people are accepting it [nuclear power] now after Fukushima. In fact I saw a poll yesterday in the New York Times that said that about 60% of Americans now are cautious and wary and concerned about nuclear power. That's post-Fukushima, which shows that the nuclear industry have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years, saying that they are the answer to global warming - even though they cause global warming in their own right because they are undergirded by huge industrial infrastructure, mining, milling, enriching uranium and building reactors - that produce a huge amount of CO2 and global warming gases.
They advertise in Scientific American, on NPR [National Public Radio] all over the place. Which was really wicked. I rang NPR and said 'Why are you taking these ads from the nuclear energy industry?' And they couldn't really answer me. Money. 'Underwriting' they call it but it's advertising.
But now the Fukushima accident I predict will lead to the end of nuclear power, not just in Japan, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, which have all said 'No'. But China, America... and also when you have a meltdown, and I tell you when you have Americans dying either of acute radiation illness and leukemia - that's it. So it hasn't hit you yet. Do you have to wait until it hits you until you develop some common sense, and do the right thing?"
ON NEW REACTOR TECHNOLOGY
"The new reactors are much, much more dangerous, by orders of magnitude that the present light water reactors. Because they are fueled with Plutonium, where one millionth of a gram is a carcinogen. They are cooled by liquid sodium which explodes when exposed to air. So if you get a hole in a pipe you get a meltdown. And five kilos or ten pounds of is critical mass [the level required for a nuclear explosion]. So if you've got a hundred tons of plutonium in a nuclear reactor, and you lose the coolant, and there's a meltdown, and you get ten pounds of plutonium together, and you get critical mass, and a massive nuclear explosion scattering tons and tons of plutonium to the four winds. It's the most ghastly, hideous machine I could ever imagine. They are the new 'safe' reactors."
There is more. Download this 7 minute interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.
GETTING REAL WITH SUSANNE MOSER
Let’s get real about our situation.
As David Orr put it: "This is not the time for illusion or evasion; it is time for transformation".
In our Radio Ecoshock interview we talk about an article, part of an upcoming book. The title is: "GETTING REAL ABOUT IT: MEETING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL DEMANDS OF A WORLD IN DISTRESS".
Our guest is the author, Dr. Susanne C. Moser. She is a researcher and consultant from California, associated with Stanford University. Susanne was previously a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and with the Union of Concerned Scientists. She currently has her own research and consulting company in California.
I learned about Susanne's article from a link provided by Carolyn Baker, at carolynbaker.net.
I've looked forward to our talk, ever since I read her refreshing look at where we really are. I ask you a few impossibly difficult questions, but only because Susanne was brave enough to raise them.
Before we get to her prescriptions for living in a sick civilization, she picks out one particular illness as a case study. We could be talking about mass extinctions, or running out of fresh water - but Moser chose the problem of climate change as her example. That is her area of expertise, where she can make the best case study of the ways we fail to look at reality.
After making a convincing case we are hurtling toward completely unknown lives, in a climate never seen by any human, Moser suggests there are two roads ahead. She calls them two kinds of transitions.
But first, I hit a real stumbling block. Moser writes about "environmental leaders".
I wonder if there are any. I see environmentalists, who are more or less powerless in the current political economy. I see leaders who are mostly bought by big fossil fuel companies, and other corporate interests. An "environmental leader" sounds like a hybrid that doesn't exist yet. Who is she you talking about?
Listen to the interview for her answer. For one thing, she is writing a chapter for the upcoming "Sage Reference Handbook of Environmental Leadership." But Moser goes much deeper, looking at the roles we all can play.
Let's imagine that whole populations realize we are in a biosphere on life-support. They elect leaders to save us from more losses, if not extinction. Moser doesn't pull any punches. She says any new system will have to live through, "enormous losses, human distress, constant crisis, and the seemingly endless need to remain engaged in the task of maintaining, restoring, and rebuilding - despite all setbacks - a viable planet..."
Here is another thorny issue we discuss: once people realize a couple of generations have ruined the known natural world, what the heck are we going to do with all the blame? Do we hang a bunch of geriatric "climate criminals"; do we declare an amnesty, or what?
I think the world of mass media, especially advertising, but also the industrial consumer system, has infantilized the whole population - all of us. We don't know how anything is produced, we just wait for it to come, and we don't count all the costs. So how do we transition a whole species away from being irresponsible children, to become responsible adult Earthlings?
Even though Moser's article "Getting Real About It" is aimed at environmental leaders, it is useful for everybody. I think that's why it's bouncing around the Net so quickly.
Download this 23 minute interview with Susanne Moser in CD quality or Lo-Fi
Under our program ending, you can hear the international artist Ariel Kalma, with "Spirit Dancer". Check out his work, as the father of disco, and electronica. Good stuff.
As always, thank you for listening, for daring to think about the tough problems of our times.
Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock
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