[Mb-civic] The Reality-Based Environment + America's war on itself

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are two hard-hitting essays on the great U.S. empire vs the reality 
of global warming.  This is really important stuff for sane citizens to 
understand and disseminate and act upon......


The Reality-Based Environment

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on December 16, 2004,

<http://www.alternet.org/story/20772/>

 "The aide (a senior adviser to President Bush) said
 that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-
 based community,' which he defined as people who
 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious
 study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured
 something about enlightenment principles and
 empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the
 world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an
 empire now, and when we act, we create our own
 reality. And while you're studying that reality –
 judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating
 other new realities, which you can study too, and
 that's how things will sort out. We're history's
 actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just
 study what we do." – Ron Suskind, New York Times
 Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004.

This is the quote that now has some noted bloggers
identifying themselves as, "Proud Member of the Reality-
Based Community."

Of all the problems that arise from having an
administration that chooses not to believe in reality,
the ones most likely to have irretrievably disastrous
consequences are environmental.

The Bush solution to global warming is to declare it
does not exist. While this solves the problem for him in
the short term, global warming is highly unlikely to be
impressed by the news that we are now an empire and can
change history.

Just lately, "history's actors" have made a couple of
singular contributions to our future that we in the
reality-based community will doubtless be studying for
some time to come.

The first allows sewer operators to dump inadequately
treated sewage into the nation's waterways. The
Environmental Protection Agency (a name that becomes
more ironic daily) currently requires sewer operators to
fully treat their waste in all but the most extreme
circumstances, like during a hurricane. The new plan
will allow operators to dump sewage routinely any time
it rains.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council: "For
the last 50 years, standard sewage treatment has
involved a two-step process: solids removal, and
biological treatment to kill bacteria, viruses and
parasites. The new policy allows facilities to routinely
bypass the second step and to 'blend' partially treated
sewage with fully treated wastewater before discharging
it into the waterways."

NRDC predicts more Americans – especially the elderly,
very young and those with weakened immune systems – will
get sick and die. That's on account of the fact that
bacteria, viruses and parasites are also part of the
reality-based community and have no respect for
history's actors or empires.

Next, in one of those under-the-radar moments so beloved
of the Bushies, the Pentagon has simply exempted itself
from environmental law. A new Department of Defense
directive changes a Clinton-era order on "Environmental
Security" by eliminating the following policies:

 * Reducing risk to human health and the environment
 by identifying, evaluating and, where necessary,
 remediating contamination resulting from past DoD
 activities.

 * Protecting, preserving and, when required,
 restoring and enhancing the quality of the
 environment.

 * Conserving and restoring, where necessary, the
 natural and cultural heritage represented on DoD
 installations within the United States.

There has been no public debate or congressional review
of the new policy. The policy was written by the man who
watched the looting of Baghdad and said, "Stuff
happens."

To add to the global warming festivities now comes a new
novel by Michael Crichton, who has made a fortune by
scaring us about nonexistent threats – the Japanese
taking over the world, rampant sexual harassment by
predatory females and dinosaurs recreated by insane
scientists. This time, Crichton claims to be working
against the fear-mongers, because the premise of his new
novel is that global warming is much overrated and
actually the product of a sinister group of villains –
the environmentalists. Enviros, by and large a pacific
bunch of vegetarians and birders, must make
unsatisfactory villains (I haven't read the book).

But in fact, the "villains" in global warming are not
environmentalists, but scientists. They are the ones
trying to "scare" us by making us aware of the problem,
which is reality-based. Yet another study – by 300
scientists with the International Arctic Science
Committee – finds:

 * Average winter temperatures in the Arctic are up
 by 4 to 7 degrees over the past 50 years and now
 projected to rise by 7 to 14 degrees over the next
 100 years.

 * Polar ice during the summer is projected to
 decline by 50 percent by the end of this century.

 * Warming over Greenland will lead to substantial
 melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, contributing to
 global sea level rise at an increasing rate.
 Greenland's ice sheets contain enough water to raise
 the sea level by about 23 feet.

Scientists, a reality-based bunch of empiricists if ever
there was one, are in no doubt about global warming. The
only question is about how fast it's happening. And many
of the small minority who argue it is coming slowly are
themselves in the pay of oil companies and industry
groups.

As Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a
man to understand something when his salary depends upon
his not understanding it." And that is not conspiracy-
mongering. That is reality.

----------------

The Guardian - Dec 21, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5090120-103677,00.html 

America's war on itself

Bush's wrecking tactics over climate change follow an 
established pattern of self-destruction

by George Monbiot

I have a persistent mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me
even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the
globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance,
retreating from it. It opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own
rear.

Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
were groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion of Iraq,
there were no links between the Ba'athists and al-Qaida: now Bush's
government has created the monster it claimed to be slaying. The US army
developed high-grade weaponised anthrax in order, it said, to work out
what would happen if someone else did the same. No one else was capable of
producing it: the terrorist who launched the anthrax attacks in 2001 took
it from one of the army's laboratories. Now US researchers are preparing
genetically modified strains of smallpox on the same pretext, and with the
same likely consequences. The Pentagon's space-based weapons programme is
being developed in response to a threat which doesn't yet exist, but which
it is likely to conjure up. The US government is engaged in a global war
with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in its assaults on the multilateral
institutions and their treaties. Listening to some of the bunkum about the
United Nations venting from Capitol Hill at the moment, you could be
forgiven for believing that the UN was a foreign conspiracy against the
United States. It was, of course, proposed by a US president, launched in
San Francisco and housed in New York, where its headquarters remain. Its
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, characterised by Republicans as a
dangerous restraint upon American freedoms, was drafted by Franklin D
Roosevelt's widow. The US is now the only member of the UN security
council whose word is law, with the result that the UN is one of the
world's most effective instruments for the projection of American power.

The secret deals in Iraq for which the United Nations is currently being
attacked by US senators were in fact overseen by the US government. It
ensured that Saddam could evade sanctions by continuing to sell oil to its
allies in Jordan and Turkey. Republican congressmen are calling on Kofi
Annan to resign for letting this happen, apparently unaware that it was
approved in Washington to support American strategic objectives. The US
finds the monsters it seeks, as it pecks and flutters at its own image.

So we could interpret the activities of Bush's government at the climate
talks in Buenos Aires last week as another vigorous attempt to destroy its
own interests. US economic growth depends on the rest of the world's
prosperity. The greatest long-term threat to global prosperity is climate
change, which threatens to wreck many of America's key markets in the
developing world. Coastal cities in the US - including New York - are
threatened by rising sea levels. Florida could be hit by stronger and more
frequent hurricanes. Both farms and cities are likely to be affected by
droughts.

In February, a leaked report from the Pentagon revealed that it sees
global warming as far more dangerous to US interests than terrorism. As a
result of abrupt climate change, it claimed, "warfare may again come to
define human life... As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient
pattern re-emerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food,
water, and energy supplies." The nuclear powers are likely to invade each
other's territories as they scramble for diminishing resources.

So how does George Bush respond to this? "Bring it on." The meeting in
Buenos Aires was supposed to work out what the world should do about
climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. Most of the
world's governments want the protocol to be replaced by a new, tougher
agreement. But the Bush administration has been seeking to ensure both
that the original agreement is scrapped, and that nothing is developed to
replace it.

"No one can say with any certainty," Bush asserts, "what constitutes a
dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided." As
we don't know how bad it is going to be, he suggests, we shouldn't take
costly steps to prevent it. Now read that statement again and substitute
"terrorism" for "warming". When anticipating possible terrorist attacks,
the US administration, or so it claims, prepares for the worst. When
anticipating the impacts of climate change, it prepares for the best. The
"precautionary principle" is applied so enthusiastically to matters of
national security that it now threatens American civil liberties. But it
is rejected altogether when discussing the environment.

The Kyoto protocol is flawed, the Bush team says, because countries such
as China and India are currently exempted from cutting their emissions.
But instead of helping to design a treaty that would eventually bring them
in, the US teamed up with them in Buenos Aires to try to sink all
international cooperation. It even supported Saudi Arabia's demand that
oil-producing countries should be compensated for any decline in the
market caused by carbon cuts.

The result is that the talks very nearly collapsed. On Saturday, 36 hours
after they were due to have ended, and while workmen were dismantling the
rooms in which the delegates were sitting, the other countries managed to
salvage the barest ghost of an agreement. The US permitted them to hold an
informal meeting in May, during which "any negotiation leading to new
commitments" is forbidden. According to the head of the US delegation, the
time to decide what happens after 2012 is "in 2012". It's like saying that
the time to decide what to do about homeland security is when the plane is
flying into the tower.

Wrecking these talks is pretty good work for a country which, as it
refuses to ratify the protocol, doesn't even have negotiating rights. But
this is now familiar practice. The US tried to sink the biosafety protocol
in 1999, even though, as it hadn't signed, it wasn't bound by it. It
sought to trash the 2002 Earth Summit, though Bush failed to attend. This
isn't, as some people suggest, isolationism. It is a thorough and
sustained engagement, whose purpose is to prevent the world's most
pressing problems from being solved.

And the result, of course, is that the catastrophe described by the
Pentagon is now more likely to happen. The US has just spent millions of
dollars in Buenos Aires undermining its own peace and prosperity. Of
course we know that its delegation was representing the interests of the
corporations, not the people, and that what's bad for America is good for
Exxon. But this does not detract from the sheer, self-immolating stupidity
of its position.

The US has every right to beat itself up. But unfortunately, while chasing
itself around the world, it tramples everyone else. I know that appealing
to George Bush's intelligence isn't likely to take us very far, but surely
there's someone in that administration who can see what a monkey he's
making of America.

see also http://www.monbiot.com



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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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