While this may be a short-term solution to our problems (oil dropped $10 a barrel today), what evidence is there that drilling will provide a long-term solution to our problems? And why not use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and pass laws improving oversight of the petroleum markets?
Last week, Congress refused - for a second time - to fund the Bush administration's demand for a new nuclear weapon system, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). However, cutting funding for the RRW is one of those big moves destined to generate little fanfare.
It is a little too technical and incremental to be heralded as a decisive step towards nuclear abolition, and yet the RRW program - which over the next decade or so would have upgraded the core workings of all U.S. nuclear warheads - was a life line for the nuclear weapons complex at a time when President George W. Bush was one of the few holdouts on the global consensus on disarmament.
So, cutting $10 million for the nascent program could very likely be the beginning of the end of the flow of resources into new nuclear weapons development.
The move "reflects a broad rejection of President Bush's aggressive nuclear doctrine, and may also signal a new opportunity for true American leadership away from nuclear weapons," notes Cara Bautista, deputy political director for Peace Action West.
Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. "The doldrums," sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.
The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.
It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.
How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the "Eastern Garbage Patch," Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.
Records stretching back to 1960 prove what climate models had predicted: warmer oceans contain less oxygen. Oceanographer Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany and his colleagues report in Science that an analysis of historical records and recent samples show that as the globe has warmed, waters with low oxygen content have expanded in the tropical Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans.
"The oxygen concentrations in these oxygen-minimum zones have decreased with time," says oceanographer and study coauthor Gregory C. Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash. "The regions of low oxygen have also expanded vertically by both extending deeper into the ocean and closer to the surface."
Fish and other sea life cannot survive in such waters—and this expansion reduces the area where fish can thrive, says oceanographer Janet Sprintall of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who also coauthored the study. She notes that fisheries may be affected as well.
Imagine a society where simply speaking out of turn or saying the "wrong thing" was openly discussed as a crime against humanity, and where sceptics or deniers of the truth were publicly labelled "criminals", hauled before the press and accused of endangering humanity with their grotesque untruths.
Imagine a society where even some liberals demanded severe restrictions on freedom of movement; where people campaigned for travelling overseas to be made prohibitively expensive in order to force people to stay at home; and where immigration was frowned upon as "toxic" and "destructive".
Imagine a society so illiberal that columnists felt no qualms about demanding government legislation to force us to change our behaviour; where the public was continually implored to feel guilty about everything from driving to shopping – and where those who refused to feel guilty were said to be suffering from a "psychological" disorder or some other species of mental illness".
First of all, since when did any environmentalists demand laws restricting the freedom of movement here or anywhere for that matter? Since when did environmentalists call for passing laws forcing changes in personal behavior? And since when do environmentalists think that people who think differently have some kind of psychological disorder? Examples, please.
In the current debate on liberty, we hear a lot about the attack on our democratic rights by the government's security agenda, but little about the grave impact of environmentalism on the fabric of freedom. It seems to me that green thinking – with its shrill intolerance of dissenting views, its deep distaste for free movement and free choice, and its view of individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters – poses a more profound threat to liberty even than the government's paranoid anti-terrorist agenda.
So, is Mr. O'Neill really saying that corporations are just as human as us peons are? Because last time I checked, it was corporations that pollute. Is he really saying that Exxon is a living breathing human being as opposed to an oil company?
Environmentalists are innately hostile to freedom of speech. Last month James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate change scientists, said the CEOs of oil companies should be tried for crimes against humanity and nature. They have been "putting out misinformation", he said, and "I think that's a crime". This follows green writer Mark Lynas's insistence that there should be "international criminal tribunals" for climate change deniers, who will be "partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths". They will "have to answer for their crimes", he says. The American eco-magazine Grist recently published an article on deniers that called for "war crimes trials for these bastards... some sort of climate Nuremberg."
Now, even if you grant that this is over the top (for instance, how can you put together a case based on that), what is the difference between Mr. O'Neill and the people he says he is against?
It is the mark of shrieking authoritarianism to look upon dissenting views not simply as wrong or foolish, but as criminal. Throughout history inquisitors and censors have sought to silence sections of society by labelling their words as "dangerous" and a threat to safety and stability; now environmentalists are doing the same. Their demonisation of sceptics as "deniers" has had a chilling effect on public debate. The environmentalist ethos is hostile to free movement, too. Behind the greens' attacks on road-building and cheap flights there lurks an agenda of enforced localism. What most of us experience as a liberty – the ability to drive great distances or to travel overseas, something our forebears only dreamt of as they spent their entire lives in the same town – has been relabelled under the tyranny of environmentalism as a "threat to the planet".
And Mr. O'Neill's piece is not shrill? It is not shrieking authoritarianism? And on top of that, this section amounts to nothing more than a crackpot conspiracy theory that has no basis in reality. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the evidence, Mr. O'Neill?
Then, he goes on to equate environmentalists with extreme elements such as the British National Party. But the fact that a particular extremist element holds particular views in order to make themselves look more respectable does not mean that the view itself is not valid.
But perhaps the main way that environmentalism undermines the culture of freedom is by its ceaseless promotion of guilt. In the environmentalist era, we are no longer really free citizens, so much as potential polluters. We are continually told – by government, by commentators, by radical activists – that everything we do, from wearing disposable nappies to using deodorant to allowing ourselves to be cremated, is harmful to our surroundings.
That is simply not true. Rather than appealing to guilt, modern environmentalism brims with possibilities. Millions of jobs be created and millions of people lifted out of poverty when wind and solar become a reality in communities. Schools will have enough to pay their teachers a minimum wage, counties and cities will have enough to take care of their roads and bridges, and wages will rise because the number of jobs in this country will go up, requiring companies to raise their wages to attract more workers.
Liberty – true liberty – requires that people see themselves as self-respecting, self-determining subjects, capable of making free choices and pursuing the "good life" as they see fit. Today, by contrast, we are warned that we are toxic, loaded, dangerous specimens, who must always restrain our instincts and aspire to austerity. This is not conducive to a culture of liberty; indeed, it represents a dangerous historic shift, from the Enlightenment era of free citizenship to a new dark age where individuals are depicted as meek in the face of more powerful, unpredictable forces: the gods of the sea, sky and ozone layer.
Republicanism has always been about false choices, so it is pretty ironic that a hit piece that purports to be about free choice seeks to deprive people of ways of balancing freedom and environmentalism. Since when did public policy have to be a choice between individual liberty and environmentalism? And I would add that it is pretty ironic that Mr. O'Neill talks about freedom when his lord and master, George Bush kidnapped and held people in Guantanamo and other jails around the world without the right of trial, passed the Patriot Act, classified contraception with abortion, and propagates the illegal wiretap program with a little help from the whipped puppies that constitute Congress.
Some greens openly admit they are on the side of illiberalism. George Monbiot describes environmentalism as "a campaign not for more freedom but for less". Environmentalism is instinctively and relentlessly illiberal, and it is doing more to inculcate people with fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could. If you believe in freedom, you must reject it.
Not true, as I said above. But it is pretty ironic that O'Neill rests with this kind of mindset that he says environmentalism promotes when his lord and master George Bush propagates the notion that sex is evil. If that does not induce fear, self-loathing, and a religious-style sense of meekness, then I want to know what does.
A walk in the intensively farmed countryside near my home in Cambridgeshire is a good place to assess what environmentalists have achieved in recent decades, and to think about the challenges ahead. Not so long ago, you would have been lucky to see a buzzard or a hobby, let alone a marsh harrier. But if you go to the right places now, you can easily see these birds. Improved habitat and species protection, ecosystem restoration, and the phase-out of toxic pesticides are among the reasons why. It's not all positive on the environment front these days, but it's certainly better than many would have hoped for in the 1970s.
The damage being caused by acid rain has also improved, because of new laws to reduce sulphur emissions from large power stations. Positive action continues, with EU law requiring the closure of Europe's most polluting power stations. Because of this, forests and lakes across the continent are recovering. Even on the global stage there has been progress. The chemicals that depleted the planet's ozone layer have been largely phased out, and it is hoped that this atmospheric shield will be largely restored later in the 21st century.
I was once involved in work to prevent the extinction of endangered parrots. Many of them were critically endangered, down to a last few birds. Twenty years later, none of them are extinct, most have increased in number, and a couple of species that were feared lost have been "rediscovered".
For more than six years, Hugh Kaufman has been battling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), his employer for 37 years, with a whistleblower lawsuit. He has been aided by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a D.C.-based group that represents workers who expose corruption in agencies that oversee environmental quality and public health.
"We get people calling us all the time, but in this administration, more than ever," says Paula Dinerstein, PEER senior counsel.
In June, Kaufman made his case before a Department of Labor administrative law judge, testifying that former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman closed down the agency’s National Ombudsman Office in an effort to stop investigations that Kaufman was conducting.
As the chief investigator for the agency’s National Ombudsman Office — which investigated public complaints about the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response — Kaufman had a bird’s eye view of how the public health and safety were routinely subordinated to corporate interests.
"The Reagan, Bush I and Clinton EPAs, were all pretty much the same," he says. "The Bush administration took a bad EPA and made it worse."
In February 2001, Kaufman alerted the Denver Post to the fact that Whitman had not recused herself from the negotiations involving a radioactive Superfund site in Denver in which she had a conflict of interest. (Superfund sites are contaminated areas that threaten public health and the environment.) Specifically, Kaufman noted that at the same time Whitman was negotiating the settlement with Citigroup, which owned the site, she held between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in the company, and her husband, John, was the president of a Citigroup-owned company.
Australia is hopeful that its proposal for a new multi-national whale research program -- in which whales are not killed -- announced at the recent International Whaling Commission meeting in Chile will place considerable pressure on Japan’s controversial whaling programme.
"This new Australian-led research partnership will provide the world with a non-lethal approach to gathering scientific information on whale populations in the Southern Ocean, helping improve our understanding of whales and cetaceans and enhancing our approach to their conservation and management," Australia’s Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, told delegates at the 60th IWC meeting held in Santiago in late June.
Under the proposal, Australia will host a workshop early next year -- open to all scientists and groups interested in participating in the programme -- aimed at developing a plan for the research.
Australia and Chile have agreed to establish a steering committee to assist with the workshop’s implementation, with the two nations also looking to extend their collaboration in terms of a plan for conservation management.
"This new collaborative approach offers a new way to conduct whale research and I would urge nations, including Japan, to participate," said Garrett.
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times each reported that "Democrats and environmental groups" say that allowing new offshore drilling would not have an effect on oil and gas prices in the next several years. They did not note that it is not just Democrats and environmental groups that say this: The Bush Energy Department has determined that production from offshore drilling "would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030" and that such production is expected to have an "insignificant" effect on "average wellhead prices."
Under siege from the flies, some towns have enlisted exterminators to treat larvae-infested streams with an organic pesticide. One year a petition calling for this measure circulated in Johnsburg, where McKibben lived. But he and some of his neighbors balked at signing it, even if they had trouble accounting for their qualms. McKibben ultimately arrived at this explanation: the black flies "remind me day after day in their season that I'm really not the center of the world, that I'm partly food, implicated in the crawl and creep of things." The petition failed, and the annual plague continued.
This vignette goes a long way toward illuminating McKibben's ethos. He reveres what is natural, even if he doesn't like it. Indeed, he welcomes visceral reminders that the world is not designed to serve his interests. These reminders jolt him out of the solipsism he dislikes in himself and that he sees as rampant among Americans. For this he largely blames consumer culture, where, he notes, every commercial ingratiatingly addresses "you" and your pettiest desires. Rejection of the consumer mentality--which can prevail in the woods as well as at Wal-Mart--is central to McKibbenism. And yet, as any ascetic knows, renunciation can breed its own manner of self-indulgence, just as humility can engender pride. McKibben recognizes these ironies. "I consume inconvenience," he writes in "Consuming Nature," "turning it into a pleasurable commodity; it becomes the fuel for my own sense of superiority."
The author of a dozen books and countless magazine articles, McKibben is ubiquitous on the sustainability scene--the go-to environmentalist for keynote speeches, forewords, blurbs and anthologies. He has now compiled a collection of selected work, The Bill McKibben Reader, and it reveals a writer whose environmentalism runs deeper than the mainstream versions he's helped to inspire. The contemporary "green" resurgence is still largely limited to small-bore economic and personal adjustments--hybrid vehicles, cap-and-trade proposals, solar panels. McKibben's environmentalism, by contrast, is essentially religious: a guiding set of beliefs about what humans owe to a sacred source of life.
In a press conference today previewing a House Republican trip to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that’s meant to promote drilling, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) doubted the existence of actual wildlife in the refuge. "We’re going to look at this barren, Arctic desert where I’m hoping to see some wildlife," said Boehner. "But I understand there’s none there." Boehner repeated his skepticism during an interview on CNN, telling Wolf Blitzer, "I’ll be looking for all that wildlife." Ironically, CNN paired Boehner’s interview with b-roll of actual wildlife moving around the refuge.
