We need a system of cooperative public-private infrastructure financing, a national infrastructure bank. But we also need to use that fabric of cooperative investment and output to foster specific areas of major improvement to our national economy. The model could be replicated across the world, but the US is uniquely positioned to deploy this solution and to vastly improve its chances of restoring vibrancy to the wider middle class by doing so.

Two parallel projects are necessary to make the infrastructure redevelopment and economic recovery strategy a success:

• a renewable energy infrastructure bank – to help target some of the wider funding options to the project of building a sustainable, smart energy economy, free of the massive externalized costs of carbon-based fuels
• an economic opportunity bank – to aggressively, specifically and persistently direct funds to businesses that are hiring, building capacity at the community level, and restoring real wage gains to the middle class

The first is our topic here: a national renewable energy infrastructure bank. To build such a bank, we would need to first establish how a cooperative public-private infrastructure financing scheme would work. Ideally, it needs to work much like an investment bank, where individual investors see visible gains, but money is kept in the pot for a long enough period of time to produce gain across the full spectrum of investor contributions.

In other words, there has to be commitment to the project, and that shared commitment of resources will yield shared substantial gains to all parties. In the area of clean energy investment, this is possibly much easier than with other types of infrastructure investment, because the industry is entering into a period of massive, and necessary, prolonged expansion. Big investors understand that big investment will help to secure that prolonged expansion.

If Congress acts to incentivize this investment, massive amounts of private-sector capital will flow to clean energy resources. There are three reasons why this will happen:

1. Fossil fuels carry with them massive production costs that have long been externalized; the economy can no longer afford to continue such a strategy.
2. Clean energy technologies offer a major opportunity for prolonged expansion of business value, as information technologies have shown over the last 30 years.
3. There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital sitting on the sidelines, waiting for directional certainty that fossil fuels cannot provide.

So, how to structure such an operation? The renewable energy infrastructure bank would need the following to reach its full potential:

1. A national price signal or clear set of incentives to direct investment to clean energy
2. An investment strategy that looks at best practices, value to community, prospects for building aggregate demand, and structural resiliency
3. A focus on job-creation, skilled retraining, and positive value feedback loops that favor consumers
4. A legislative charter that sets forth priorities favorable to public-sector, private-sector and start-up investors alike
5. A model for redirecting funding when key elements of a project require support or restructuring
6. A focus on rewarding institutions, individuals and investors who do cutting-edge R&D that is practicable, 100% carbon-emissions-free and scalable
7. Short-, medium- and long-term investment strategies for building, optimizing and utilizing the smart grid

Suggestions for deployment:

1. Implement a national carbon fee and dividend policy, to correct market failures in the pricing of carbon, return control of the energy economy to households and incentivize major private capital investment in the rapidly expanding clean tech sector
2. Identify, build or support and expand, focus facilities in cities and regions across the country, to operate as cooperative laboratories of R&D, start-up incubators, and investment engines (examples might be Brooklyn Navy Yard or Philadelphia Navy Yard, or the Fab Labs project)
3. Motivate scalability planning for distributed clean energy production projects, to ensure sustained investment opportunities, and optimized overlap between community-building, job-creation and investment strategies, for higher overall cost efficiency
4. Ensure legal support for avoiding corrosive business models, favoring generative ones, to ensure Investment flows to the new technologies and collaborative strategies that build future prosperity, not to extraction-oriented investments
5. Reward rapid ramping up of high-efficiency clean energy tech, because this will build structural resiliency, favor the highest-value market-healing technologies, and help to revive the middle class

We can begin doing this nationally tomorrow, if:

• We focus first on wind and solar, due to their naturally occurring US domestic supply far outstripping total demand and all possible demand growth
• We commit to decentralizing innovation, influence and income-growth in the energy sector, so community and regional economies are empowered by the transition
• We recognize the need to fully develop leading-edge infrastructure at all levels
• We identify and elevate the pioneers who already know how to motivate and execute this transition
• We charter public-private partnerships to manage investment flows to stakeholder-defined initiatives

The clean energy economy is coming, and to fully enable its expansion, the US needs to flex the muscle necessry to turn the ship of state, to wrest from entrenched industries and financial investment patterns rooted more in extraction than in generative payoff the ability to decide what comes next. There is nothing beyond clean and renewable in terms of energy production and distribution, except the work of achieving the most advanced efficiency gains and making robust power generation an ever more ephemeral affair, at an ever faster rate.

To lead in that new economy, we need to be the first to build its value.

 - – -

Originally published October 12, 2011, at ProjectQuipu.net

Across the eastern seaboard of the United States, from South Carolina to Maine, there is an intense and well-ordered preparation underway to brace against and limit the fallout from Hurricane Irene. In North Carolina, 300,000 people have been ordered to evacuate the Outer Banks and low-lying coastal areas. The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has ordered the first ever mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas in all five boroughs.

New York City evacuations are underway—the first mandatory evacuation in the city’s history. This afternoon, mass transit will be entirely shut down. 370,000 New Yorkers are in the evacuation zone. With a substantial amount of the city expected to be subject to severe flooding if the storm makes a direct hit, the Bloomberg administration is taking care to do everything that was not done in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina’s arrival in New Orleans.

The highest winds yet recorded were 110 mph, at Cedar Ferry Terminal, North Carolina. MSNBC is reporting that hurricane-force winds are extending 90 miles out from the eye of the storm, even several hours after landfall.

There have been reports of at least one tornado touching down in Maryland, and a federal tornado wach zone now covers eastern parts of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey. The latest satellite modeling suggests the storm’s most intense winds will rake the coasts of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, hitting New York City with winds in excess of 70 mph. Delaware’s governor has ordered mandatory evacuations.

The state of New Jersey is under a blanket state of emergency, with some coastal areas under mandatory evacuation. The counties are issuing evacuation updates, including official state-backed shelters for evacuees. The NJ Office of Emergency Management has posted pdf documents with advised coastal evacuation routes. New Jersey storm surge maps have also been made available through the Office of Emergency Management.

New Jersey Transit will be entirely shut down as of noon today. New York’s public transit will be shut down at noon, as well. Five New York area airports will be closed, with thousands of flights canceled.

Hospitals and nursing homes are also being evacuated, a first for many of them. Some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions are in the mandatory evacuation zone, including Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, Nomura Securities, RBC Capital Markets and the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Map: Click here for a pdf map of New York City’s mandatory evacuation zones.

Planning: Click here for a pdf guide to hurricane readiness, evacuation and response, for NYC.

This morning, Mayor Bloomberg issued the following statements, with a press release:

“During the storm, please stay off streets and sidewalks to prevent injury, and stay away from the windows if you live on the tenth floor of a high rise or above that. The risk of window damage is greater, so it’d be smart to stay away from the windows or go to a lower floor.

“If the low-lying areas of our city begin to flood, I mentioned the Con Ed may have to shut down their power lines. NYCHA buildings will be shutting down their elevators, as will other buildings. And if you’re using generated power, please do not have a generator inside your house or your apartment. Carbon monoxide fumes kill.

“In terms of our city buildings: All construction has been stopped. Our inspectors are working to make sure that construction sites are locked down.

“Homeowners and residents: If you haven’t done so already, please bring outdoor furniture inside – plywood, trashcans, any loose items that can blow around.

“So in conclusion: If you live in a low-lying Zone A areas or in the Rockaways, you have to leave, and you should start right now. Do not delay. Do not wait for the weather to be bad. It’s starting to rain here in Coney Island right now. This is just the beginning. You say it’s a few drops – this is going to be a very serious storm. No matter what the track is, no matter how much it weakens, this is a life threatening storm to people here.”

The city’s maps and readiness guide are also available in the following ten languages:

An additional 470,000 people live in the mandatory evacuation zones on Long Island, one of the most densely populated areas of the country.

Nassau County: Evacuation notice and resources

Suffolk County: Emergency preparedness resources

Most will likely have to evacuate inland or to official shelters, as New York City’s evacuation procedures and public transit shutdown will make it difficult to get through to the mainland. Some ferries may be able to move people from Long Island’s coastal areas to Connecticut, but these services will shut down when heavy winds and rough seas arrive, if they have not already. Evacuees should check with local authorities and transport services.

Fox 29 Philadelphia is reporting that the 8+ inches of rain expected to hit Philadelphia and New York would be equivalent to more than 60 inches of snow, a measure better understood by residents of the northeast. Some worst-case estimates are for twice that amount of precipitation. The National Hurricane Center is warning that before the storm relents, at least 15 inches of rain are expected to have fallen on North Carolina.

FEMA’s Craig Fugate is warning that tornadoes are expected to accompany the storm, and that anyone outside evacuation zones should remain indoors and keep away from doors and windows. The tornado warnings will last longer than usual, because the risk is tied to the full cyclone.

Storm surges have already been seen in North Carolina, roadways are beginning to see serious flooding, and Fugate also reminded the public that some of the worst floods ever seen came with tropical storms, not hurricanes. Hurricane category ratings are linked to wind-speeds and storm surge projections, not to rain volume.

- – -

Hurricane Emergency Maps for New Jersey:

- – -

New York

Suffolk County links:

• To find a list of open shelters, please click here.
• To find a Red Cross Shelter near you, please click here
• To see the coastal evacuation routes for Suffolk County, click here.
• To see the storm surge zones for Suffolk County, click here.

Nassau County:

• Evacuation notice and list of shelters
• Evacuation routes, maps and instructions
• County evacuation route map

- – -

More links and emergency planning and evacuation resources:

Washington, DC, area

• News releases from the Mayor’s Office
• Follow Mayor Vincent C. Gray on Twitter and Facebook
• Register for Alert DC

• DDOT website information and on Twitter
• DPW website information and on Twitter
• HSEMA and 72hours.dc.gov
• DISB provides flood insurance information and tips on storm recovery
• MPD website information
• DCOA offers tips for preparing
• Evacuation route planning tool

Federal Government

• Ready.gov – hurricane preparedness and response resources
• NOAA Watch – tracking maps for Hurricane Irene
• National Hurricane Center – Hurricane Irene Public Advisory
• NOAA / NHC - Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook

Futurismo Verde :: Desde el comienzo de la civilización humana, el proceso de montar sociedades organizadas, formular historias compartidas y diseñar visiones del futuro humano, el ser humano ha buscado maneras de profetizar y de pronosticar. La ciencia moderna ha descubierto indicios fiables que ayudan a describir el mundo, pero para saber qué vendrá después del momento actual, tenemos que aprender a medir la salud de los sistemas naturales que deciden cómo vivimos.

El hecho es que la Tierra es un complejo de sistemas naturales, separados de los ecosistemas terrestres más remotos sólo por la intervención de otros ecosistemas. De alguna forma, todo el material del planeta, orgánico y no orgánico, está en constante comunicación a través de esta red de interacciones. El mundo viviente prospera debido a la interacción sana y sustentable de distintos sistemas naturales, alternando entre competencia y colaboración, y ganando por esa relación sana más flexibilidad de adaptación, más elasticidad.

La crisis vital viene a un ecosistema cuando deja de ser lo bastante elástico como para enfrentar el desafío sistémico del momento. Esa rigidez puede nacer de muchas causas distintas, pero suele arraigarse en una tendencia a la uniformidad y a la reducción de contacto dinámico con otros sistemas contra los que tendrá que competir, en un momento u otro.

La intervención humana, entonces, ¿qué significa para un ecosistema? Eso depende del tamaño y de la intensidad de la huella que deja esa intervención humana. Si se trata de construir una ciudad, es posible que la inmensa mayoría de los ecosistemas naturales desaparecerán o se desplazarán de forma integral y posiblemente fatal. Si se trata de eregir por dos días una tienda de campaña, y comer sólo lo que existe en el ambiente, sin dejar rastros de química sintética o productos industriales, la intervención será mínima, y todos los ecosistemas ambientales seguirán su curso, casi sin interrupción alguna.

Para la mayoría de los seres humanos del planeta, la decisión de intervenir o no en un ecosistema ha vuelto una decisión pasiva: las ciudades ya existen, los pueblos ya tienen su huella física y ambiental, y las decisiones de aumentar el terreno ocupado por un asentamiento humano suelen ser decisiones organizadas y municipales, no de un sólo individuo.

Por lo tanto, es fácil distanciarnos del problema sin darnos cuenta del serio y duradero papel que nuestras actividades tendrán en los sistemas naturales de los que dependemos y de los que depende el medio ambiente más extenso. Esta distancia conceptual influye no sólo en nuestro imaginario cultural y económico, sino además en el futuro tratamiento mutuo entre la economía humana y la naturaleza.

Los servicios naturales más valiosas—producción de oxígeno, agua limpia, ritmos y corredores fiables de lluvia, la corriente global del océano profundo—exceden por mucho todo el valor económico de la actividad humana en conjunto. Privilegiar y promover elasticidad y resistencia en los sistemas naturales es la única manera de prevenir los efectos corrosivos a largo plazo de una industria inconsciente de sus efectos.

Un nivel adecuado de elasticidad y resistencia ecosistémicas es necesario para asegurar el suministro alimenticio global y el suministro de agua limpia. Es necesario para asegurar un promedio de estabilidad climático: la diversidad de influencias promueve la estabilidad sistémica a largo plazo; la reducción de influencias promueve precariedad sistémica.

Una referencia útil sería la inversión financiera: un rango mínimo y más uniforme de inversiones expone a uno a mayor probabilidad de fracaso y pérdida de valor total; un rango más diverso y variado de inversiones protege a uno de la inestabilidad de valores y proporciona mayor estabilidad y mayor probabilidad de aumento de valores.

El futuro económico, a escala global y local, depende definitivamente del nivel de elasticidad y resistencia en los sistemas naturales de los que toda la actividad humana depende. La economía humana se funda en la biología, el organismo humano, y las necesidades vitales del conjunto de todos los seres humanos. El medio ambiente es un sistema en el que participamos, y la elasticidad de ese sistema decide nuestra resistencia ante los cambios emergentes o sorprendentes que pueden presentarse en un momento dado.

El ser humano se ha vuelto tan influyente en los proceso naturales que los científicos ahora temen que la naturaleza ha perdido capacidades vitales de resistencia

Futurismo Verde :: En una reunión de científicos europeos, en Estocolmo, el hombre que inventó el término ‘antropoceno’ para describir una nueva época geológica—en la que la influencia humana domina los proceso naturales—ha anunciado que el término ahora se está aplicando desde múltiples campos de estudio. La importancia real del término es que la información ecológica es cada vez más imprescindible para poder llevar a cabo las ambiciones humanas de una forma responsable y sostenible.

The Financial Times, de Londres, ahora informa que “The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.” [En el foro EuroScience, en Estocolmo, el jueves pasado, escucharon que el cambio climático era el más obvio de un complejo tejido de efectos de la actividad humana, que están cambiando rápidamente la física, la química y la biología del planeta."] Otros efectos tendrán que ver con la resistencia de la cosecha, fertilidad de la tierra, elasticidad de habitat vital para especies de sustento.

El alba de la época Antropocena, en la historia geológica, conlleva una cantidad importante de desafíos y oportunidades. En sentido de llevar a cabo una transición rápida de ubicuos modelos económicos a una metodología sostenible, hay una gran oportunidad de aumentar la producción económica potencial de la economía global. Hacerlo, sin embargo, exigirá cantidades masivas de inversión y de innovación acelerada.

Un grupo de 21 de los científicos e investigadores más respetados ha publicado su estudio de la cronología geológica en GSA Journal, y han confirmado que ocurrió un cambio fundamental a una época geológica definida por el efecto humano en el medio ambiente, a principios del siglo XIX. Lo que ocurre ahora, más allá de eso, es que se está desarrollando una conciencia del impacto severo de 200 años de expansión industrial agresiva, incluyendo explotación de recursos, construcción urbana y remodelación terrenal sin precedentes.

Estamos llegando a un punto de inflexión, después del que la ciencia no podrá evitar la necesidad de reconocer y manejar los impactos de la actividad humana en los sistemas naturales. Se ve ahora alteraciones fundamentales en la sedimentación, calidad de tierra, patrones geológicos y habitat biológico, hasta en la misma flora y fauna que habita los sistemas naturales afectados, y en la atmósfera respirable.

Específicamente:

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present day, global human population has climbed rapidly from under a billion to its current 6.5 billion (Fig. 1), and it continues to rise. The exploitation of coal, oil, and gas in particular has enabled planet-wide industrialization, construction, and mass transport, the ensuing changes encompassing a wide variety of phenomena, summarized as follows. [...]

Humans have caused a dramatic increase in erosion and the denudation of the continents, both directly, through agriculture and construction, and indirectly, by damming most major rivers, that now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude [...]

Carbon dioxide levels (379 ppm in 2005) are over a third higher than in pre-industrial times and at any time in the past 0.9 million years [...]

The projected temperature rise will certainly cause changes in habitat beyond environmental tolerance for many taxa (Thomas et al., 2004). The effects will be more severe than in past glacial-interglacial transitions because, with the anthropogenic fragmentation of natural ecosystems, ‘escape’ routes are fewer.

Los mecanismos principales de resistencia ecológica se ven erosionados, y el medio ambiente natural se encuentra menos capaz de adaptarse a los cambios en los sistemas naturales y su manera de competir dentro de y entre sí. El estudio también cita evidencia de un nivel acelerado de extinción de especies y de la creciente probabilidad de una ola masiva de extinciones, resultado directo de la actividad humana.

La comunidad científica ha comenzado a elaborar modelos informáticos del sistema natural integral, un complejo de ecosistemas e interacciones a nivel planetario. Esos modelos servirán para averiguar hasta qué punto la actividad humana influye en el medio ambiente y cómo se puede actuar para mitigar esos impactos y lograr un futuro más sostenible, y más capaz de seguir proporcionando los beneficios naturales necesarios como base de la civilización humana.

La idea del periodo Antropoceno es más que una clasificación cronológica del momento en el que nos encontramos. Se trata de una conciencia cada vez más desarrollada de la necesidad de modificar nuestras tendencias para colaborar con los sistemas naturales de los que dependemos tanto para la supervivencia. Es un despertar al efecto que tiene nuestro nivel de vida, nuestra producción y consumo industriales, y a lo que significa la integración de las sociedades alrededor del planeta, en una red global de comunicación y un mercado global de intercambio material y cultural.

Es posible ahora hablar de una creciente conciencia global de la necesidad de cambiar las motivaciones básicas de la política estatal, el negocio privado, el consumo y los mercados en general. Es posible ahora hablar de un momento en el que la evidencia existe para darnos cuenta del poder que tiene la industria de una civilización globalizada sobre el medio ambiente.

La época Antropocena existe porque el impacto medioambiental ya no se trata de un impacto local, en un ambiente limitado, sino de un impacto a nivel global, con secuelas en ecosistemas que no parecen tener contacto directo con la causa de su malestar. El cambio de pensamiento que ahora viene tiene que coincidir con una creciente capacidad de imaginación y colaboración, para dejar atrás la dependencia peligrosa que nos ata a los combustibles fósil.

• Geological Society of America: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene”
• Financial Times / MSNBC: “Scientists warn of a new Anthropocene age”
• About.com Geology: “Introducing the Anthropocene”
• Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie: “Anthropocene” [article that coined the term]
• Resilience 2008: “Resilience, Adaptation & Transformation in Turbulent Times” [Conf., Stockholm 14-17 April]
• Albaeco, Sustainability School: “Masking Environmental Feedbacks”

As early as one day after the March 11 tsunami sparked the (still ongoing) nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Japan’s government had advanced radiation fallout and atmospheric modeling showing the area most likely to be hit by fallout from the explosions and the ongoing seepage. The government allegedly concealed this information, to prevent mass panic, but the result may have been the evacuation of large numbers of people to the most dangerous zones.

According to the New York Times:

Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.

The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.

But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.

Officials of the Japanese government have admitted there was a pattern of concealing information, denying known facts, even of releasing data that were modified to achieve more politically expedient outcomes, even as the nation and the world were waiting for a thorough and serious crisis response. The government reportedly withheld crucial modeling projections from the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, also known as SPEEDI.

According to the Times, Seiki Soramoto, a former nuclear engineer who was asked for information by the prime minister, said “In the end, it was the prime minister’s office that hid the SPEEDI data, because they didn’t have the knowledge to know what the data meant, and thus they did not know what to say to the public, they thought only of their own safety, and decided it was easier just not to announce it.”

Though at least three of the six reactors were in meltdown, and were known to be, and the government was permitting the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCo) to dump huge volumes of radioactive waste water into the Pacific Ocean, the status of meltdown was repeatedly denied, and was not acknowledged for several months.

In June, it was revealed that tellurium 132, an isotope that indicates a meltdown has occurred, was detected on the second day of the crisis, but the readings were kept from the public for three months. It is not clear how the alleged campaign of distorted data and concealed modeling might have impacted the crisis response, but scientists and engineers have expressed concern that the nuclear emergency response was stunted by inadequate information and poor decisions.

There are also likely to be new investigations into the public health consequences of the concealed information.

creative prosperity is sustainable prosperity

To build a future of vibrant open democracy and robust and sustainable economic prosperity, it is necessary to privilege creative activities and constructive solutions to the challenges we face. Addressing major challenges in constructive, innovative ways, is the single most significant driver, historically, of sustained economic booms. In short, we need to move deliberately and swiftly toward a creative prosperity agenda.

The first consideration, then, is to examine how the creative prosperity agenda would differ from what we are doing now. At present, we are wrestling with the complex fabric of consequence related to long-running economic distortions, most of which we have not yet corrected. Healthcare reform and financial regulatory reform were comprehensive in scope, but moderate in impact, cautious and rooted in the prevailing model; energy reform needs to move forward rapidly and do more to prioritize innovation.

We are facing a major, civilization-wide transition from one way of conceptualizing political and economic power to another. We stand at the dawn of what should be the global solidification of open democracy as the standard for elevating and defending human dignity and freedom of thought. But we need to build creative prosperity into that future, and this will require a fundamental shift in the dominant view which holds that power is more effective when concentrated in fewer hands.

That view comes from ancient times—from prehistoric times, in fact—when the governing principle of human life was the need to survive in competition with forces far more powerful than any one individual, family or band. Power, then, was a combination of accumulated resources and raw force. In that light, power is a destructive force, requiring intense concentration of resources and the ability to draw a line between the inside and the outside of the power circle.

the feudal (concentration) model

Economically, the fact of human society was that there was not enough technology, enough resources, enough liberty, to deliver real comfort to most or all people. In fact, there was only the material wealth to deliver substantial comfort to about 1 in every 100 people. The model of concentration allowed those in that 1 percent to cling to comfort and fight off would-be attackers.

The only way into the circle in which power, means and comfort were concentrated was to pay the toll for access. That might be done by force of arms, or by handing over significant sums of wealth. Paying the toll perpetuated the model, and won significant privileges for those who helped to make sure that system remained viable.

This developed eventually into authoritarian empires and the medieval elevation of aristocracy. The logic of the model of concentration held: those inside the circle must remain there, and the society must be organized to keep them there. They were, it was presumed, worth more than other people, and so they were able to treat their privilege as if it were part of a life of service—maintaining law and order—to those with less.

the democracy (decentralization) model

Modern democracy posits an entirely different model: the model of decentralization. Modern democracy, according to the ideals of the American revolution and the French revolution, requires a comprehensive departure from the status quo of feudal dominance. It requires the engineering of a model for economic and political activity whereby power cannot be concentrated, and where excessive concentration of power brings disadvantage.

A creative prosperity agenda for public policy and economic renewal would put aside the bias of the old model, once and for all, asking enterprises large and small to join together in a fabric of imaginative competition, prioritizing localization, innovation and service value to the marketplace. It would help to recapture the energy of modern democracy, wherein monopolies and juggernauts sputter and trudge, slowed by their weight, and individuals and small businesses are better able to take the field, to effect positive change, to feed a generalized economic expansion.

The key to that model is the vibrancy of an expanding and upwardly mobile middle class. Achieving that means doing what the United States did so effectively in the 1950s and 1960s, decentralizing the levers for creating wealth, allowing more free people to participate not only as citizens but as leaders and entrepreneurs.

losing our former focus on creative (decentralized) prosperity

A period of intensive deregulation in key industries has led the United States’ economy into a period of prolonged slow growth, because it has led to the hyper-concentration of wealth and of access to the levers of wealth-creation generally. Average household income has dropped by about $2,500 since 2000, even as the gap between average pay and the earnings of the wealthiest has expanded to historic highs.

There is a problematic knock-on effect of this, which is that innovation is no longer a priority, as major conglomerates seek first of all to secure their position. Upstarts like Apple are not emerging at the rate they were during previous periods of economic expansion, and the most powerful, most concentrated interests—Apple now among them—are controlling the field of play.

recapturing momentum: how to build a creative prosperity agenda

There are a couple of key changes that need to take place to move toward a creative prosperity agenda:

1. Move from a bias favoring large conglomerates to one against them;
2. Move away from subsidies for high-polluting, low-yield fossil fuels;
3. Move toward clean energy technologies that favor rapid innovation, brainy startups, more robust job creation, and local economies;
4. Revive national commitment, public and private, to infrastructure redevelopment;
5. Provide direct tax credits for real job creation (payable on a per-job basis);
6. Establish sustainability incentives for municipalities (ref: Sustainable Jersey), states and businesses;
7. Establish an aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standard;
8. Prioritize higher education spending, including post-graduate studies incentives for businesses looking to sponsor their employees;
9. Introduce critical thinking, macroeconomic studies, engineering basics and public policy debate, to public high schools—judge these as more valuable than test scores;
10. Make sure tax reforms are not regressive; make sure they prioritize family and community-level “thriving”, i.e. asset-building, quality of life and spending power;
11. Tax derivative financial instruments at a higher rate than direct capital investments in enterprise, innovation and hiring;
12. Apply national policy to correct market distortions relating to fossil fuel costs.

The outcome of this process of reform would be:

• accelerated, more widespread innovation;
• entree for creative small business models;
• unprecedented opportunities for sustained hiring;
• more vibrant, resilient local economies;
• a consumer-centered smart electricity grid;
• cleaner air and water;
• a sustainable economy where growth is not tied to the promotion of vast negative externalities;
• more robust civic engagement from citizens, communities and creative thinkers…

The United States is perfectly capable of achieving this kind of virtuous cycle between democratization, decentralization, creative thinking, entrepreneurship and the expansion of the middle class. But substantive policy changes need to be made—to remove the incentive for corrosive activities that favor the unhealthy concentration of wealth and productive capacity and motivate the revival of generative activities that favor the healthy decentralization of assets and productive capacity.

A vibrant middle class—where the best ideas can come to the fore and be implemented and the dignity and worth of citizens and communities takes priority over the naked pursuit of profit—is better suited to fostering creative, sustainable prosperity. The first step is to recognize where we favor profit over people, and then work to change the prevailing model and free human creative talent to achieve that goal.

TheHotSpring.net :: Yemen may be where the Arab spring, this sweeping current of democratic upheaval in the Arabic-speaking world, takes a turn definitively toward violence or toward civic solutions. The regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, a tribal dictatorship using feudal power tactics, based in the capital Sanaa, is now waging one war against extremist Islamists and another against non-violent pro-democracy protesters.

Yemen is an intensely poor country, likely to see its dwindling fresh water resources 100% depleted before any nation in the world, and could be the global home-base for jihadist extremists. Yemen could also, however, be a sparkling example of how peaceful democratic change can bring sustainable prosperity and security to an otherwise impoverished society ruled by feudal warlords and kleptocratic dictators.

The gap between the democracy movement and the regime is stark: while protesters are lawyers and doctors, university professors and economists, the dictator Saleh has only a high-school-level education. Saleh’s former allies have tired of his brutality, and are demanding that he immediately cease all violence against civilians, and honor his multiple pledges to leave power, allowing for a peaceful democratic transition.

Much of the country is illiterate, and tribal politics continue to be an easy way to sow division, to justify cold-blooded killing, and to undermine the progress promised by peaceful protesters. Even the government seems unable to comprehensively put down the Islamist militia vying for power in the deep south. And neither the protesters nor Saleh have been able to fashion a secure plan for bringing prosperity back to Yemeni ports on the Gulf of Aden.

The Yemeni democracy movement is well read, well educated and rooted in a commitment to nonviolence. Yet there are grave concerns that if the regime succeeds in applying the tactics of Col. Muammar Qadhafi—the once and possibly former Libyan dictator of four decades—Yemen could descend into a failed state status reminiscent of its neighbor across the water, Somalia.

Heavily armed Somali pirates—linked to a vast black-market criminal network which feeds the ongoing Somali civil war—have become a menace to global shipping through the Gulf of Aden, the main southern route of entry into the Suez Canal. That vast criminal network has expanded the power of Islamist militia in southern Somalia, and has contributed to the intensification of drought, famine and social collapse.

Yemen may be more at risk than Somalia in many ways, should collapse follow the atrocities committed by Saleh against the Yemeni people. The pro-democracy movement needs to maintain its non-violent approach, but plan for significant innovations and improvements in the process of governing and of economic development and planning.

Yemen is strategic enough to warrant major foreign investment, debt forgiveness and development aid, and its ports might be able to benefit from a secure, reliable, democratic challenge to the armed chaos in Somalia and throughout the Gulf of Aden. Mokha (on the Red Sea), Aden and Ta’izz could form a powerful new economic hub for regional trade, facilitating passage from the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea.

Ta’izz, the intellectual capital of Yemen, could develop into the administrative center of power governing the new port industry. Such an outcome would be very much in the interests of the international community, as Ta’izz is the virtual home base of the surprising, liberal and modern pro-democracy movement.

Al Mukallah, in the remote east of the country, could be a first-stop along the coast of safe passage, if such a situation could be cultivated and secured. Mokha could be a Red Sea trading post, bridging the African and Asian continents in ways strategically designed to sow stability, mutual interest and prosperity.

The United Nations would likely need to be involved in helping to secure a fledgling Yemeni democracy against the chaos and sabotage sought by militant groups on the one hand and by regime loyalists on the other. But the development strategy makes sense for the region and for the wider world: instability anywhere inflates risk everywhere, and long-term planning for the Gulf of Aden trading zone is more than worth any time, effort and resources required to lay the groundwork.

An added benefit would come to Yemen, which as a safe harbor state with revitalized, modernized port cities, would be able to more easily gain access to an affordable imported flow of fresh water, and to afford state of the art desalinization facilities. We know that fresh water resource is urgently needed to prevent the total collapse of civil society in Yemen, and brining that resource value to Yemen could raise its profile among Arabian states, building into the fabric of economic cooperation which as of now, eludes it almost entirely.

The road from Mokha to Sanaa, like the road from Aden to Sanaa, should run through Ta’izz, allowing for what could become a virtuous feedback between the ideals of democratic government and the ideals of a vibrant trading culture in which not all wealth flows to or through the hands of the individuals who hold political power. It could create a more balanced and decentralized relationship between the people of Yemen and the power of those who govern them.

In short, the storied and problematic history of Yemen, along with the vast and surging need for new economic development, creates a real opportunity for massive coordinated international assistance to the nonviolent political activists who are seeking to build a modern, democratic civil society, and to build unprecedented cooperative links between Yemeni society and the outside world.

TheHotSpring.net :: The rupture of a pipeline in Montana has caused at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil to spill into the pristine Yellowstone River, raising concerns about the tar sands pipeline planned to pass through the most important fossil aquifer in North America. The spill is precisely the kind of irreversible and unnecessary environmental disaster conservationists, farmers, energy reformers and local activists across the Great Plains seek to prevent.

The initial reports cited Exxon-Mobil spokespeople explaining that only a few hundred barrels of oil had been released into the river, and that the multinational was bringing in top cleanup experts from across the nation to do the most advanced cleanup work possible. But yesterday the news came that the spill had in fact released at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River, threatening pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, and human health, across several states.

Exxon-Mobil now says its expert cleanup effort is being hampered by Mother Nature. The takeaway seems to be that, more than twenty years after the catastrophic Exxon-Valdez spill, the oil giant has used its routine megaprofits to produce no viable cleanup strategy. It also appears there was insufficient maintenance to an insufficiently constructed pipeline, and a near total disregard for the potential impact on the natural and human environment.

The scale of the disaster was revealed when the multinational’s false reports were shown to be false by huge amounts of oil washing up on farmed land and spilling over the banks of the rising river. Critics say Exxon-Mobil’s complaints that rising waters are responsible for hampering the cleanup effort reflect the company’s frustration with how that same phenomenon revealed it had lied to the press and, presumably, to authorities, about the scale of the spill.

The material composition of the nation’s energy markets has a lot to do with this kind of crisis. Unreasoned overreliance on carbon-based combustible fuels continues even now, in the second decade of the 21st century, to incentivize irresponsible practices that threaten other natural resources, as well as animal life, arable land, aquifers and human health.

Hydrocarbon fuels currently comprise such a significant segment of the overall energy landscape, they are clearly built into our energy future, to some extent, but their current dominance does not reflect their viability as resources that produce optimum benefit to our society or our economy. The Yellowstone spill is just the latest in a seemingly unending chain of events that demonstrate the very serious dangers inherent in depending on fossil fuels as the baseload (or “go to”) energy resource.

The combustion-based energy extraction model goes back to the days when fire was first discovered and harnessed. It has served to help human civilization achieve great advances and humanize the planet, both in terms of resource-use and the expression of ideas. But that does not mean it does not bring with it the drawbacks of a primitive technological paradigm.

The amount of waste built into the combustible fuels model of energy extraction is startling. Only 2% of the energy from burning coal reaches the lightbulb in your home. The other 98% is lost, mostly in the form of uncontained heat. But the risk of uncontrolled spills, into pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, groundwater and the food production process, is worst with oil.

The BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, over several months in 2010, showed that across the entire oil industry, there is still a glaring lack of advanced strategy for doing immediate, effective and total cleanup. The Yellowstone spill appears to show that even on a much smaller scale, that lack of understanding and know-how plagues the industry and threatens the natural and human environment.

We don’t, in fact, have to rely on combustible fuels anymore, as the state of the art in clean renewable resources, like wind and solar, is now sufficient to extract enough energy to power the US economy. All that we are lacking is the state of the art energy infrastructure required to harness clean renewable energy on that scale.

That the nation is undergoing a prolonged job-creation slowdown is just one hint that the time is right for a major investment in new state of the art energy infrastructure. The emerging race with China for the global clean energy future (China is now investing an estimated $600 billion in developing, producing and acquiring advanced clean energy technology) is another.

But it is the massive externalized costs (costs passed on by industry to taxpayers and consumers) that pose an immediate and continuing threat to the economic wellbeing of the nation. The externalized costs of oil include not only the massive costs of even small spills, which are far more frequent and numerous than is widely reported, but also the impact of pollution on human health, the impact of heat-trapping emissions on the stability of climate bands on which all human civilization depends.

Wind and solar energy have no cleanup costs, no hidden human health costs, no climate-band dislocation costs, no long-term costs associated with burning and wasting the resource itself, no world-record military spending costs, and need pose no risk whatsoever to groundwater or the human food supply.

The Yellowstone spill has to be a signal to the American people, the United States Congress and to markets, that the time has come to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. The way to phase out that reliance is to incentivize a shift to the construction of state of the art smart grid infrastructure and the proliferation of technologies to harness clean, renewable energy from the environment.

As of this writing, Exxon-Mobil now says the scale of the spill could be worse than has so far been reported, but has not yet released new numbers, beyond the latest estimate of 42,000. It appears the pattern of reporting is following the customary pattern for such spills, where the company involved starts with severe underreporting and little by little increases the estimates until an eventual admission of massive, catastrophic levels of contamination of the environment.

TheHotSpring.net :: Citizens Climate Lobby is an international non-partisan, non-profit volunteer organization, working to build political will for a livable world. To do that, they aim to find an ideologically neutral, democratically viable, market-focused way to reduce the amount of carbon trapped in Earth’s atmosphere and speed the transition to clean, renewable fuels. I am proud to be a member of the organization, and one who is inspired by the passion of its volunteers and fortunate to count so many good friends among its partners.

This past week, the organization took its campaign to Capitol Hill, bringing 85 volunteers to 140 office visits in the United States Congress —both houses, both parties— along with the State Department, the Department of Energy and the World Bank. The project is more than a response to fallout from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide; the CCL project involves connecting citizens with decision-makers on Capitol Hill, to take ideology out of the energy debate, and fashion policy more democratically.

CCL proposes addressing the carbon crisis in a new and different way, which in fact avoids the pitfalls of more complex and unwieldy past attempts at reducing overall emissions: the proposed Carbon Fee and Dividend Act of 2011 would put a fee on carbon-emitting fuels at the source, then deliver 100% of that money directly to American families and households.

The plan avoids the need to create burdensome new regulatory infrastructure, does not deliver any new revenue to the federal government, and turns the power to forge a brighter, more economically efficient energy future back over to the American people, the marketplace. By unmasking the massive externalized costs (not paid by industry) of fossil fuel dependency, but covering consumers so the transition is not traumatic, the fee and dividend proposal allows the virtues of a genuine market to operate.

The CCL mission is guided by the principle that when people remain open to one another, to differences of opinion and to opposing views, they can fashion a dialogue based on common vocabulary and put aside ideological biases. This, then, should allow for intelligent people, working to serve their nation in the most forthright and meaningful way possible, to work together to craft practical solutions to practical problems.

Climate destabilization has been turned into an intensely partisan issue, in which ideological assumptions and partisan strategy trump cooperative civics and negotiated problem solving. This is bad for democracy and bad for the human environment, in which impacts from inaction are mounting, and the economic fallout looks to be accelerating, certainly beyond the current window of opportunity to act.

The challenge of the political moment is to find a way around the intense partisan divide, and that is no small task.

On Capitol Hill, there is frustration on both sides of the aisle with the inability of Congress to work together in a responsible way on practical issues, and much of the gridlock is due to ideological bias interfering with sound policy judgment. But the United States now faces another moment of urgency regarding climate and energy: China is racing ahead with massive investment in clean energy resources, even as it expands at record pace its use of the dirtiest form of fuel, coal.

The Chinese agenda, to take control of the global marketplace for new technologies, not by manufacturing alone, but by developing the newest, most cutting-edge technologies that will build the future economy of the world, means the United States now sees its dominance in technological innovation and research and development threatened. If we, as a nation, do not succeed in building the foundations for the global clean energy economy of the 1st century, our ability to compete internationally, and to thrive domestically, will face constant pressure.

The most advanced intelligence work of Pentagon analysts has found that sustainability and security are now intertwined and cannot be disentangled: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, the sustainability of alliances, of political borders, of nation states, of an economic model that allows us to thrive in relative peace and security, are all linked, and the emerging national strategic narrative [pdf], capable of addressing the complexity of the global environment, needs to rethink the paradigm of threat and risk, and view such challenges as opportunities to shape and influence the landscape of human civilization, for the better.

The great success of this week of CCL lobbying on Capitol Hill was that individual volunteers, the citizen-based movement as a whole, and some of those who sat in meetings with the organization, experienced breakthroughs in terms of openness and interest in dealing with this issue as one of practical problems demanding practical solutions.

It is CCL’s mission to work with members of Congress of all variety of ideological inclinations, many of whom have never been able to share a constructive conversation about climate or energy, with one another, to build a coalition based on citizen interest and a shared vocabulary for building a vibrant and resilient, cutting-edge clean energy economy, through which sustainable American prosperity and quality of life can be secured in this century.

It will be citizens who build, manifest and deliver the political will to achieve these vital goals, and success will mean the strengthening of our democracy and our economic future.

Weekly Address: “Instead of Subsidizing Yesterday’s Energy Sources, We Need to Invest in Tomorrow’s”

WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Obama laid out his plans to address rising gas prices over the short and the long term. While there is no silver bullet to bring down prices right away, there are a few things we can do. This week, the Attorney General launched a task force dedicated to rooting out fraud or manipulations in the oil markets. The President called for finally ending the $4 billion in taxpayer money that the oil and gas companies receive annually. And, we need to continue safe, responsible production of oil at home. But in the long term, we need to invest in clean, renewable energy. That is why the President strongly disagrees with a proposal in Congress that cuts our investments in clean energy by 70 percent.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address on Gas Prices
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Washington, DC

This is a time of year when people get together with family and friends to observe Passover and to celebrate Easter. It’s a chance to give thanks for our blessings and reaffirm our faith, while spending time with the people we love. We all know how important that is – especially in hard times. And that’s what a lot of people are facing these days.

Even though the economy is growing again and we’ve seen businesses adding jobs over the past year, many are still looking for work. And even if you haven’t faced a job loss, it’s still not easy out there. Your paycheck isn’t getting bigger, while the cost of everything from college for your kids to gas for your car keeps rising. That’s something on a lot of people’s minds right now, with gas prices at $4 a gallon. It’s just another burden when things were already pretty tough.

Now, whenever gas prices shoot up, like clockwork, you see politicians racing to the cameras, waving three-point plans for two dollar gas. You see people trying to grab headlines or score a few points. The truth is, there’s no silver bullet that can bring down gas prices right away.

But there are a few things we can do. This includes safe and responsible production of oil at home, which we are pursuing. In fact, last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003. On Thursday, my Attorney General also launched a task force with just one job: rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, including any illegal activity by traders and speculators. We’re going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain. And another step we need to take is to finally end the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies we give to the oil and gas companies each year. That’s $4 billion of your money going to these companies when they’re making record profits and you’re paying near record prices at the pump. It has to stop.

Instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy sources, we need to invest in tomorrow’s. We need to invest in clean, renewable energy. In the long term, that’s the answer. That’s the key to helping families at the pump and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. We can see that promise already. Thanks to an historic agreement we secured with all the major auto companies, we’re raising the fuel economy of cars and trucks in America, using hybrid technology and other advances. As a result, if you buy a new car in the next few years, the better gas mileage is going to save you about $3,000 at the pump.

But we need to do more. We need to harness the potential I’ve seen at promising start-ups and innovative clean energy companies across America. And that’s at the heart of a debate we’re having right now in Washington about the budget.

Both Democrats and Republicans believe we need to reduce the deficit. That’s where we agree. The question we’re debating is how we do it. I’ve proposed a balanced approach that cuts spending while still investing in things like education and clean energy that are so critical to creating jobs and opportunities for the middle class. It’s a simple idea: we need to live within our means while at the same time investing in our future.

That’s why I disagree so strongly with a proposal in Congress that cuts our investments in clean energy by 70 percent. Yes, we have to get rid of wasteful spending – and make no mistake, we’re going through every line of the budget scouring for savings. But we can do that without sacrificing our future. We can do that while still investing in the technologies that will create jobs and allow the United States to lead the world in new industries. That’s how we’ll not only reduce the deficit, but also lower our dependence on foreign oil, grow the economy, and leave for our children a safer planet. And that’s what our mission has to be.

Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend.

After what now looks like significant foot-dragging, for fully one month, Japanese authorities have finally admitted the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is undergoing a level 7 nuclear emergency, the worst possible. There is still an effort to slow-walk this news, with repeated claims the radiation release has not been as significant as Chernobyl, also a level 7, but the Fukushima disaster involves 6 reactors, with at least 4 considered to be at ongoing risk of meltdown.

Last week, radiation levels in water leaking from the plant were found to be at 7.5 MILLION times the legal limit, and it was acknowledged that officials had been deliberately dumping highly radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. The news that, on day one of this emergency, there may have been as much as 10% of the Chernobyl event’s radiation released suggests the still mounting crisis is far from contained, and the evacuation area should be expanded.

There is concern authorities are still making an effort to obscure the true extent of the disaster, and many question why if the American nuclear agency was prescient enough to extend the recommended exclusion zone to a wider radius than what currently surrounds Chernobyl, weeks ago, the Japanese authorities appear to have been cooperating with Tokyo Electric in downplaying the gravity of the crisis.

According to the Guardian newspaper:

“At Chernobyl, the reactor itself exploded while still active, which is completely different from the situation at Fukushima,” Hidehiko Nishiyama said.

He added that the decision had been taken a month after the accident because experts needed time to analyse the data.

Japan’s nuclear safety commission estimated that the Fukushima plant’s reactors had released up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive iodine-131 per hour into the air for several hours after they were damaged in the 11 March earthquake and tsunami.

The pattern of underreporting, adjusted reporting, and moving from aggressive downplaying to ever more contrite admissions, seems for many to parallel the reaction of BP to its own industrial disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the single worst release of oil in world history, aside from Saddam Hussein’s military attempt to destroy Kuwait’s oil infrastructure during the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

To this day, much of what BP knew about how much oil was released during last summer’s catastrophic blowout remains unknown to the public, and the oil giant is now suing to avoid paying the $20 billion it agreed to pay as restitution to the region and for cleanup.

There is good reason to scrutinize the reporting coming from Japan, as both the plant operator and the government appear to view it as in their interest to underreport the magnitude of the catastrophe.

If as much as 10% of the release of just one isotope from the Chernobyl disaster was released just on the first day of the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, and we are now at day 32, and at least 4 o ut of 6 reactors —and/or their exposed spent-fuel cooling pools— are at risk of meltdown, and they have not yet found a way to contain the radioactive water pooling around the reactors, the ultimate release from Fukushima could be far worse.

We do not yet have adequate information to make that determination, but are being given a model whereby the authorities slow-walk the crisis response, downplay the official emergency rating, and appear to be imposing an inadequate radius of exclusion, while scientists study the data, in hopes of being able to produce a less than worst-case reading of the history of this crisis.

That is not adequate effort to protect the local population, the wider public, the human food, water and air supply, beyond Japan’s borders, or the future stability of the Japanese economy. The situation in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture may yet be the most grave, costly, and consequential nuclear disaster in world history, and local officials and world authorities need to organize their response as if it were so.

Reports from Tokyo today have authorities telling residents water is now safe for infant consumption, even as reports from Fukushima show radiation levels may have surged to 10 million times the normal level. Readings taken 30 miles out to sea have found radiation levels in seawater at 1,850 times the normal level. More nations around the Pacific Ocean are expressing concern about the handling of the disaster.

UPDATE on DATA: By this evening, TEPCo had released a revision to its earlier reports of radiation at 10 million times normal, correcting the figure to 100,000 times normal. The reading still constitutes a major, and very worrying radiation spike, and the cause of the misreading has not been isolated.

There appears to be a rising tension between Japanese government officials and the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, TEPCo. When three plant workers were reportedly exposed to highly dangerous levels of radiation, two of them hospitalized with severe radiation burns, government officials suggested the radiation may have come from a breach of the reactor core and TEPCo officials retorted that the leak could be coming from a water-pumping system.

It is unclear whether the high levels of radiation can be confirmed, as there may be, at the moment, too much danger for workers to return to the site where the 10-million-times radiation reading was taken. Officials have said they are not concerned about the seawater radiation levels, because ocean currents will “disperse” the radiation. But concern about seafood, Japan’s seafood industry, food supply and the impact on marine life, is mounting.

As reports of the spike in radiation levels went out this morning, there have been more warnings that even the initial process of containment will last for months. It is now becoming clear that the Fukushima disaster will be similar to the Chernobyl disaster in at least one respect: there will be a need for plant workers to continue going into an environment of extreme danger, for many years after the crisis is more or less brought under control, on a daily basis, to make sure the containment operation is running smoothly.

There are increasing calls for a long-term strategy, designed to roll back and contain the release of radiation, on a permanent basis, along with the permanent cool shut-down of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Critics of the crisis response have suggested government and power-company officials may be hoping to avoid that kind of long-term permanent shut-down, and that this reluctance may be hindering the planning for a comprehensive crisis resolution.

As of this writing, several questions remain unanswered:

1. What is the source of intensely radioactive water that hospitalized at least two plant workers last week?
2. Have one or more reactor cores been breached?
3. Are elevated levels of radiation in the Pacific Ocean a permanent contamination?
4. If so, of how wide an area?
5. Of what sort of marine life?
6. Is there any way to prevent radiation in seawater from entering the human food supply?
7. Has meltdown begun in one or more reactor cores?
8. Is there any way to contain radiation emanating from the spent-fuel cooling pools?
9. Will the Japanese government and TEPCo agree to permanently shut-down, secure and seal the Fukushima reactors and spent-fuel cooling pools?
10. Is there a plan in place to achieve long-term containment?

These are just the most urgent questions. There are others that must be asked, by extension. For instance: how is radiation reaching Tokyo in such levels that drinking water was considered no longer safe for infant consumption last week? Then: how can those radiation levels be considered safer now, as levels measured at the source of the radiation —the Fukushima Daiichi plant— soared?

These are difficult questions. No one could possibly envy the officials forced to deal with them, much less the workers who have to do the most dangerous work on the ground. But they are open questions, and tens of thousands of lives will likely hinge on how well and how swiftly they are answered. It is possible to answer these concerns directly, in a forthright manner, and with a scientifically viable crisis response. But it is not possible to do any of that, if authorities do not fully admit to the radical long-term gravity of what they are dealing with.

A report from the American Medical Association finds the US is not prepared to deal with the public health crisis that would ensue from a major nuclear accident. There is also evidence suggesting that aging nuclear plants are less stable and less secure than the public is led to believe. Indeed, radiation releases are surprisingly and disturbingly common.

Christian Parenti, author of the book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, told MSNBC tonight that at least two aging nuclear plants in the northeast —one in Vermont and one in New York— are presently leaking radiation. And as many as 180,000 gallons of radioactive tritium-laced water may have leaked into ground water in one incident.

According to the study, titled State-Level Emergency Preparedness and Response Capabilities:

The extent of planning for epidemiology and surveillance for the human health effects of radiation was assessed for 5 types: syndromic surveillance, clinician reporting, crisis-phase epidemiology, recovery-phase epidemiology, and other types of statistical surveillance (Table 1). A range between 70% and 84% of states reported minimal to no planning completed on the potential human effects of radiation among any of these 5 types of surveillance.

States reported only slightly better planning for providing advice on exposure assessment and environmental sampling combined (42%–50% reporting none to minimal planning) and little planning to provide advice for biological sampling (14% have none and 60% have minimal). Seventy-four percent of states reported having minimal (53%) or no (21%) plans to conduct population-based exposure monitoring.

In response to accidental release of radiation:

Twenty (53%) states reported having a finalized radiation-specific written response plan (Table 5). Four (20%) of the 20 states did not have a nuclear power plant (data not shown). For unintentional releases, half of the states had written or detailed operations plans for all scenarios except for a waterways incident, for which only 6 (15%) states reported having a written or detailed operations plan.

On just one day in April 2010, two different nuclear plants in New Jersey were visited by nuclear inspectors, to deal with possible radiation seepage. According to New Jersey Newsroom, “State and federal inspectors Friday were searching for the cause of a leak of radioactive water into catch basins at the Salem 2 nuclear power plant in Lower Alloways Creek in Salem County.”

Then, shortly after the Salem 2 release was made public:

the state Department of Environmental Protection announced that it had been notified by Exelon, owner of Oyster Creek nuclear generating station in Lacey, Ocean County, that a monitor that measures radiation emissions from the facility was discovered to be inoperable. It is unknown how long the monitor has been out of service.

Exelon, the operator of that Ocean County plant, was forced to pay for clean-up of an estimated 180,000 gallons of radioactive tritium-laced water that leaked from the plant on 9 April 2009. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection reportedly found evidence that water with contamination levels 50 times legal limits may have reached the Cohansey Aquifer, an important drinking-water source for southern New Jersey.

On Wednesday evening Chris Jansing reported for MSNBC that a report has found that 25% of all nuclear plants in the United States have leaked or are presently leaking radioactive waste.

According to a report from The New York Times, the underregulated practice of hydraulic fracturing (hydro-fracking) is releasing not only high quantities of minerals into the water supply, but also radioactive materials. Regulators are not acting to halt such releases or require full reprocessing of waste water from the drilling sites.

As the four troubled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex continue to deteriorate, the news is breaking this evening that workers at Reactor #4 are being forced to abandon the site, due to the risk of extreme radiation contamination. The evacuation means that at least one of the failing reactors will not have any one in place to manage it; at this hour, it is not clear whether the entire Fukushima complex is being evacuated.

If the entire complex is being abandoned, experts say the radiation would have to be so severe it is now no longer feasible to rotate workers in and out to reduce risk to each individual worker. There are mounting concerns that total evacuation of the plant means authorities are taking a “wait and see” attitude, meaning there will no longer be an opportunity to prevent total meltdown, if that is where the failing reactors are headed.

Japan is a very densely populated island nation, and there are fears the fallout resulting from any major nuclear explosion, fire or prolonged radiation seepage, could spread to other parts of the country. Already, the radiation leaking out appears to have affected conditions in Tokyo and also out to see, where US naval vessels were moored, staging rescue and relief operations.

There were reports throughout the day that Japanese authorities and the US military were being asked by the company that manages the Fukushima site to coordinate airborne delivery of water to cool the reactors. As of 10:00 pm EDT, the news was that Japanese authorities planned to assist in the delivery, overland by pump or from the air, of water and boric acid, to cool the overheating reactors.

But just half an hour later, the situation had, reportedly, deteriorated to the point where a decision was made that it would be safer to evacuate the roughly 50 remaining workers from the site, and possibly to start planning containment measures. If, however, the result of abandoning the site is a total meltdown of the radioactive fuel rods in the reactor cores, the resulting release of radioactivity could render a wide area uninhabitable, as occurred after the Chernobyl disaster more than 20 years ago.

UPDATE, 11:02 pm EDT: There are now reports of white smoke rising from both Reactor #3 and Reactor #4. Two workers are still missing from the explosion yesterday. American military personnel flying aid missions into Japan have been given potassium iodide to protect their thyroids from vulnerability to radioactive particulates.

There is now a report that after the workers were forced to evacuate, some, all or a different crew of workers, returned to the site after 45 minutes, to again attempt to restore the cooling and containment process. Several surrounding countries are now examining all food imported from Japan. There is a surge of demand for flights out of Japan, as foreign nationals seek to return home to escape the release of radiation from the Fukushima plant.

European governments are reportedly drawing up plans for a safety stress testing regime for nuclear plants. Germany has ordered seven nuclear plants in operation since prior to 1980 shut down, and the United States Congress is being pressured to call hearings to examine the safety and disaster preparedness at dozens of nuclear plants across the US.

Christian Parenti, author of the book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, told MSNBC tonight that at least two aging nuclear plants in the northeast —one in Vermont and one in New York— are presently leaking radiation. On one day in April 2010, two different nuclear plants in New Jersey were visited by nuclear inspectors, to deal with possible radiation seepage.

According to New Jersey Newsroom, “State and federal inspectors Friday were searching for the cause of a leak of radioactive water into catch basins at the Salem 2 nuclear power plant in Lower Alloways Creek in Salem County.” Then, shortly after the Salem 2 release was made public:

the state Department of Environmental Protection announced that it had been notified by Exelon, owner of Oyster Creek nuclear generating station in Lacey, Ocean County, that a monitor that measures radiation emissions from the facility was discovered to be inoperable. It is unknown how long the monitor has been out of service.

Exelon, the operator of that Ocean County plant, was forced to pay for clean-up of an estimated 180,000 gallons of radioactive tritium-laced water that leaked from the plant on 9 April 2009. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection reportedly found evidence that water with contamination levels 50 times legal limits may have reached the Cohansey Aquifer, an important drinking-water source for southern New Jersey.

UPDATE, 11:31 pm EDT: Chris Jansing reported for MSNBC that a report has found that 25% of all nuclear plants in the United States have leaked or are presently leaking radioactive waste.

Nuclear power plants, like the one at Fukushima Daiichi, contain 1,000 times more radioactivity to leak than the Hiroshima bomb. Nuclear scientists estimate 1,000,000 people would be killed or injured in a major accident, were one to occur at the San Onofre plant in southern California. But Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) on Monday compared the risk to a bridge collapse or a plane crash.

Alexander literally suggested that the scale by which the people of the United States should measure the potential risk of a catastrophic nuclear disaster should be according to their fear of a highway bridge collapse. A highway collapse could kill people, and is and would be tragic, but it would be very unlikely to kill more than a few dozen people. It would be tragic to lose those lives, but such a tragedy is not comparable in scale to death or severe long-term injury to a million people.

It is one of the most astonishing examples of pathological ignorance displayed by any public official in this country for years. It is a sign that Sen. Alexander is willing to put his allegiance to industry ahead of his service to the people and the nation he has sworn to serve. Only a very cynical and corrupt mind could dare to make such a comparison or be so willing to mock the tragedy experienced by victims of radiation fallout.

Sen. Alexander may have made some astonishingly ignorant remarks in the past, or he may not. By comparison, it hardly seems to matter now. He has gone on the record telling American citizens he would be as concerned about the grave need for nuclear security as he would be about highway construction.

It should be so far beyond the acceptable limit for politically motivated misstatements for any public servant to make a remark of the kind Sen. Alexander has seen fit to interject into the debate about nuclear power that no intelligent adult would ever make such an irresponsible and flagrantly offensive statement. But it is not.

Sen. Alexander clearly holds one of two views: either he views the American people as so hopelessly benighted that there will be no political backlash whatsoever to his manipulative and grossly negligent lie, or he actually is ignorant enough to believe what he said, that a nuclear catastrophe is no worse than a highway accident.

Either way, it would seem the people of Tennessee have some thinking to do about how they plan to replace this senator with an individual who is willing to use genuine intellect and moral conscience to serve the better interests of the people of his state.

Tennessee deserves better, and the people of the United States deserve better, than a senator so deeply in league with a private, for-profit interest that makes its living on taxpayer subsidies, that he would suggest the public should not have a serious discussion about whether it is safe to put the most dangerous scientific process known to man in our communities.

A fourth reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has now reportedly lost its cooling system and is on fire, while a third of the troubled reactors has suffered an explosion. The exclusion zone has been expanded to 19 miles, and international monitors now say the Fukushima nuclear emergency is officially the second worst nuclear disaster in history, after the Chernobyl disaster. 

United States service personnel on the USS Ronald Reagan were reportedly “exposed” to radiation in or near Japan,and the ship is being moved, despite already being 60 miles from the site. A BBC World Service report today cited American pilots that may have been exposed while flying over the site. 

There are now questions being raised about whether Japanese authorities or industry officials have been concealing information about what now appears to be the extreme gravity of the crisis. While worldwide news reports have spread the news that the Fukushima plant could easily be brought under control, the news now coming to light appears to show the crisis has been steadily worsening.

On Monday, much attention was devoted to a failed attempt to cool the failing reactors using a rush of cool sea water, a risky process that was expected to increase pressure and which some suspect could be responsible for the latest explosion. 

Japanese authorities now report radiation leakage beyond legal limits and dangerous enough to cause serious harm to human health. It is not known how much radiation has leaked, but a press conference delivered by the power company running the plant suggested that both the reactor core and the outer containment vessel were breached. 

A graphic shown on Japan’s NHK television, and repeated on CNN was used to illustrate the interior of the reactor that suffered yesterday’s massive explosion. While there had not been a specific admission by operators of a serious radiation leak, it was reported that pressure inside the containment vessel dropped and radiation levels outside the containment vessel reached levels a human being could not safely absorb over an entire year.

UPDATE, 10:01 am EDT: Major aftershocks rock Japan, with several registering more than 6.0 magnitude. The nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi has been elevated to a level 6 nuclear emergency, the only such disaster to reach that level other than Chernobyl. 

Radiation levels outside one of the reactors is now listed as 400 times the level a human being could withstand in one year. While authorities refraining from publishing information they fear could lead to panic, the math seems simple: 400 times 365 days, the radiation exposure at the Fukushima plant could be over 14,000 times acceptable daily limits.

As of 10:00 am EDT, there were reports from two US military bases near Tokyo that background radiation levels were elevated, and precautions might need to be taken to ensure there is no impact on human health.

The condition of the Fukushima plant now appears to be deteriorating. Authorities have confirmed the containment vessel inside at least one reactor was breached, and there are reports the fire at Reactor #4 is releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. 

Ongoing questions about the transparency of the plant operators’ reports regarding the status of the disaster so far are leading to speculation that radiation has been leaking out since well before yesterday’s explosion and fire.

UPDATE, 10:44 am EDT: MSNBC is now reporting radiation levels in Tokyo are at ten times normal, and radiation levels at the Fukushima plant are now elevated enough to kill an adult man in just five hours. The new numbers are a sign of how rapidly the situation is deteriorating. 

The IAEA has reportedly imposed a no-fly zone across a 19 mile or 30 km radius around the plant. The IAEA also reported that the reactors are “safe and stable” and efforts are ongoing to prevent total meltdown. The power company has reportedly requested that the Japanese and US militarize assist by running air drops of water from helicopters. 

This last revelation suggests there is mounting desperation and that no other option seems viable on the ground, at the site of the nuclear release.

Japanese authorities are reporting, just after 3:00 am EDT, that two of the reactor cores at the Fukushima nuclear plant may have begun meltdown. At least nine people are reported to have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. A 20km exclusion zone is being established, and authorities say they are evacuating an estimated 200,000 people from the area.

On Saturday, there was an explosion at the Fukushima complex, and there are reportedly fears of another explosion at the second troubled reactor. The second reactor potentially in meltdown, said to be Fukushima number three, has been reported to be using a plutonium-uranium fuel blend which is much more dangerous than the uranium fuel being used at the other Fukushima reactors.

The mass evacuation has raised discussion of the ultimate security of nuclear energy technology. The nuclear emergency has conjured memories of the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania and of the far worse Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine.

<--more-->Experts on Japan’s nuclear industry say it is the world’s most advanced in terms of earthquake preparedness, but that the technology is really designed to withstand a quake as much as 50 times weaker than this quake, by far the worst in Japanese history.

There are serious disparities between the security planning and the security requirements of the nuclear industry. While the physics dictates that some radioactive waste materials, with half-lives as long as 1 million years, will need to be absolutely secured for that length of time, the industry itself has not established a protocol for protecting waste material reliably verey far beyond the expected operable life of a nuclear power plant, some 30 to 40 years.

UPDATE, Monday 14 March, 12:40 am EDT: Reports from Japan and from the IAEA now put two more nuclear power plants in trouble: in Tokai, there is a cooling system malfunction, and at Onagawa, there is a reactor listed as emergency level one, with fear about the possibility of explosion or radiation leakage.

There was also a second explosion reported today at the Fukushima plant, where there is still concern that reactor number three, which uses a mix of plutonium and uranium fuel, might be in meltdown and release radiation or radioactive material into the environment.

According to the New York Times: The release of radioactive steam, as a stopgap emergency measure of cooling malfunctioning reactors could continue for weeks or months. The scale of the nuclear emergency is now said to be spreading, and there are concerns the logistics of getting all the necessary resources, technology and materials to the reactor sites may prove difficult given the collapse of infrastructure across the tsunami affected region.

The Fukushima nuclear plant contains 5 nuclear reactors, which combine to produce the world’s largest concentrated power generation. At least one of the reactors is reported to have radiation levels 1,000 times normal inside one of its control rooms. Today, RussiaToday is reporting that white smoke seen rising from the plant may be due to an explosion. Authorities have warned that some radioactive material may have seeped out into the environment already. There is an ongoing concern that the plant may be vulnerable to meltdown, as plant operators have not been able to resume cooling of nuclear fuel.

Google yesterday launched a “person finder” for Japan, to help people looking for relatives and loved ones who may be lost in a communications outage or in physical danger, due to the earthquake and tsunami. Facebook also has a disaster relief service at facebook.com/DisasterRelief. There is also a surge in information on Twitter at hash-tags like #tsunami or #sendai or Fukushima.

Two nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, are now reported to be unable to cool the nuclear fuel in their cores, and radioactive materials may have seeped into the environment. The reactors reportedly suffered service interruption after the worst earthquake in Japanese history. The magnitude 8.9 quake unleashed a massive tsunami the pushed far inland at Sendai, northeast of Tokyo.

The tsunami pushed as far as six miles inland. Reports of catastrophic damage from debris pushed along by the massive force of the waves have been pouring in from Sendai. Major oil refineries were on fire throughout the day, and Japan’s ambassador to the US told CNN that six million people are without power. As of 10 pm EST, there were reports that Japanese authorities were concerned the affected nuclear reactors might not be able to resume cooling fuel and that if a remedy is not found, a nuclear meltdown could ensue.

The United States, which has 40,000 military personnel stationed in Japan, is sending ships and troops to the Miyagi Prefecture, where the worst devastation occurred, to provide aid and possibly search and rescue assistance. CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported shortly after 10 pm EST that one or more nuclear power plants in Japan have resorted to radioactive venting —the release of radioactive steam— as an alternative means of cooling the radioactive fuel, to prevent meltdown.

The Kyoto News Agency is reporting temperatures are elevated at one of the malfunctioning nuclear plants. At the other, radiation levels are reported to be eight times normal outside the plant, as much as 1,000 times normal inside a control room inside the plant. There is no direct confirmation available from inside the plants. There are reports Japan’s government is rushing to get new power sources —possibly including generators and batteries— to the plants to resume regular cooling of the nuclear fuel.

The number of people dead or missing is not known, though official reports confirm at least 357 people have been killed. While Japan is thought to be the world’s most prepared nation for dealing with earthquakes, it is not known how thoroughly the nuclear industry there was prepared to deal with the violent aftermath of a major tsunami.

Observers have expressed confidence the industry can deal with the emergency in time to prevent a catastrophic meltdown and release of radiation. Critics, however, say the industry may be little more prepared for this kind of unforeseen disaster than BP was to deal with the unstoppable gusher released by the blowout of its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig last year in the Gulf of Mexico.

The scale of the human tragedy in Japan is already breathtaking, and fears of a nuclear accident have sent chills through world media, world governments and the population of Japan. The power station at Fukushima is reportedly 100 times more powerful than the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, which suffered the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history, more than 20 years ago, and the two power plants combined generate the world’s largest concentrated amount of energy.

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, however:

Farzad Rahnema, a Georgia Tech professor of nuclear engineering, had been reading stories that hinted at the possibility of a meltdown at the plant, which was shaken by the massive earthquake there. But he said the details he’d gleaned from those accounts, and from industry reports, suggested that a meltdown was unlikely.

There are safety and containment measures in place that were not in place at Chernobyl, according to numerous reports, and it is possible the authorities could maintain necessary cooling of nuclear materials using substitute power generation, even if the plant cannot be brought back to full power.

At present, however, the world is watching as Japan deals with its worst natural disaster in decades, facing the prospect of thousands of lives lost and the need to rebuild an entire region, while also facing the most immediate danger of nuclear disaster seen since the 1980s. The Japanese government has requested rescue and humanitarian aid assistance from the US military and it has been granted; it is not clear whether there may be high level security contacts relating to advanced nuclear containment methods.

Conservation activist Tim DeChristopher was found guilty this week of disrupting public business and causing “financial harm” to the government and to private interests, for interfering with a public land auction later found to be inappropriately staged.

DeChristopher told the crowd of supporters gathered at the courthouse that “the sharpest rock on the wildest shore can never break that ocean apart, they can never wear that ocean down, because it’s the ocean that shapes the shore.”

The following is a transcript of the speech he gave after hearing that he had been found guilty…

What the world wanted to see was how you would react. And you have reacted with joy and resolve. You’ve shown that your power will not be intimidated by any power that they have, and that’s the most important thing that’s happened here this week.

Because everything that happened inside that building tried to convince me that I was alone and that I was weak. They tried to convince me that I was like a little finger out there on my own that could easily be broken. And all of you out here were the reminder for all of us that I wasn’t just a finger all alone in there, but that I was connected to hand with many fingers that could be united together as one fist, and that that fist could not be broken by the power that they have in there.

That fist is not a symbol of violence. That fist is a symbol that we will not be mislead into thinking that we are alone. We will not be lied to and told that we are weak. We will not be divided and we will not back down. That fist is a symbol that we are connected and that we are powerful. It’s a symbol that we hold true to our vision of a healthy and just world and that we are building the self empowering movement to make it happen. All those authorities in there wanted me to think like a finger but are children are calling to us to think like a fist.

And we know that now I’ll have to go prison, we know that now that is the reality. But that’s just the job that I have to do. That’s the role that I face. Many before me have gone to jail for justice and if we are going to achieve our vision many after me will have to join me as well.

No one ever told us that this battle would be easy. No one ever told us that we wouldn’t have to make sacrifices. We knew that when we started this fight.

Every wave on the ocean that has ever risen up and refused to lay back down has been dashed on the shore, but it is the very purpose of a wave to rise up, because once it rises up above the horizon it finally has the perspective to see that it’s not just a wave, that it’s a part of a mighty ocean. And the sharpest rock on the wildest shore can never break that ocean apart, they can never wear that ocean down, because it’s the ocean that shapes the shore.

That’s what we’re starting to do here today. That’s what we’re starting to do here this week. With wave after wave after wave crashing against that shore, we shape it to our vision. Thank you all for being a part of that.

(End transcript.)

Robert Redford has written about the verdict:

Part of the statement issued this afternoon by U.S. Atty. Carlie Christensen praising the guilty verdict, alluded to DeChristopher’s actions… “disrupting open public processes and causing financial harm to the government and other individuals.” Really?

There’s something wrong with this picture. Major financial institutions in this country brought the nation’s economy to its knees yet not one person associated with the debacle is in jail. The human consequence of their actions is indescribably profound and not one person responsible for any of it went to jail. And yet the federal government prosecuted this young activist’s act of civil disobedience and he now faces jail time.

Every day, oil, gas, mining and other energy and extractive industries are indiscriminately polluting our air, land and water as the new U.S. Congress works diligently to take away the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate their actions and protect the well-being of the nation’s people. There’s something wrong with this picture.

And when you consider that weeks after DeChristopher bid on his 13 parcels, a federal judge in essence agreed with him and blocked the sale of all the parcels, DeChristopher’s prosecution becomes even more troubling. Add to that the fact that the Obama Administration’s Dept of Interior said the overall sale was improper and pulled all the parcels from auction and DeChristopher’s prosecution borders on absurd.

Redford  is only one of many prominent voices who have expressed support for DeChristopher.

More information about the trial, the legal complications of the auction itself and the protest bid by Mr. DeChristopher, as well as ways to contribute to his defense fund, can be found at www.Bidder70.org.

Oil as a combustible fuel is a 19th-century improvement on the 18th-century paradigm of burning coal to produce steam to run industrial machinery. The efficiency and portability of carbon-based fuels, in terms of the built-in energy they can store and which is released when they are burnt, has long been the driving factor in their popularity as an energy source. But new technologies are now making it possible to produce large amounts of portable energy sustainably, with none of the atmospheric damage resulting from the burning of carbon-based fuels.

In 2008, the five most profitable companies in the world were oil companies, their annual profits ranging from $20 billion to over $45 billion. No commercial entity in the history of humanity had ever made such immense profits. In 2009, two of the top 5 were banks, largely because oil companies’ profits had fallen as prices came back down to earth. In 2010, it again looks like oil companies were the most profitable businesses on the planet. They do not need subsidies to survive.

The United States government provides over $40 billion in subsidies, in the form of direct funding and tax credits, to oil companies. This is money that is designed to make it easier for those companies to provide cheap fuel to the people of the United States, something they are basically failing to do. Prices remain high, even as the companies in question ask for more subsidies and continue to rake in record profits.

FORTY. BILLION. DOLLARS.

Only 38 countries in the world have government budgets larger than $40 billion. Argentina, one of the wealthier countries in the developing world, with a population of 40.7 million people, does not spend that much on running its entire government. In fact, there are 192 nations that spend less on running their country than the United States does in free giveaways to the most profitable companies in the world.

Does this make any sense? Supporters of the oil subsidies say the oil companies are profitable, yes, but that without these subsidies, they could not be. That is, usually, the logic of providing subsidies to businesses: they provide a needed service and so we need to support them. But let’s look more closely at this idea, with respect to oil…

What if the removal of those subsidies would mean the oil industry is not profitable? That would seem to suggest the entire logic of the industry —that it’s the cheapest, best way to produce energy— is a lie. Even if we are not concerned with that, we might argue that we could use just enough in subsidies to make oil profitable, maybe even very profitable, without having to donate tens of billions of dollars to making companies that would not know how to make a profit without getting free taxpayer money the most profitable in history.

In short:

• The $40 billion in subsidies are immensely wasteful
• 192 nations spend less running their countries than the US does funding big oil
• The industry should, by now, be mature enough to make its own money
• If it is not, there is no way to justify the record profits it takes in

If fiscal conservatives in the United States are serious about cutting the federal budget in ways that will be constructive for building long-term prosperity and eliminating fraud, waste and abuse, it seems clear that giving enough money to oil companies to fund the world’s 39th largest government is not something they should be doing.

We could save whole agencies, avoid cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, avoid cuts to home heating fuel cost assistance to underprivileged seniors, avoid depriving the infant children of low-income mothers of baby formula, avoid eliminating funding for public broadcasting (that’s media that belongs to you and me, not to multinational corporations).

We could make sure veterans’ benefits are not cut, as is proposed in the House Republicans’ “cut to grow” budget proposal. We could actually support the hard work of innovation being done by small business start-ups and entrepreneurs, instead of just telling them to fend for themselves. We could assist those entrepreneurs by making sure they have access to the best quality of publicly funded research, so they are not boxed out of the marketplace by ultra-wealthy multinationals with an interest in slowing the pace of progress.

We could expand funding for student loan programs, transportation infrastructure and the development of the much-needed renewable energy sector and smart grid, and we could do all of this without spending the $40 billion handed out to oil companies.

Where is the ideology in opposing these subsidies? What principle of American conservatism says the most profitable multinational corporations in the history of humanity should have the largest subsidies as well, even as the government plans to systematically roll back services and benefits people across the country have worked for and rely on?

Is it conservative to tell senior citizens they don’t need to have medicine, because ExxonMobil wants to add a few billion dollars more to its bloated profit statement? Is it conservative to tell working mothers they need to live in homeless shelters and spend only minutes a day with their kids, because BP wants taxpayers to fund its operations in the Gulf of Mexico?

Is it conservative to tell veterans who have put their lives at risk and possibly suffered serious wounds that they need to give up some of their benefits, or be barred from having sustained treatment for brain injury or PTSD, because the US government needs to ensure that oil companies don’t have to work too hard, diversify or innovate, to meet their quarterly profit projections?

Does any of this make any sense? Will any principled conservative come forward to explain why the United States government needs to devote $40 billion to subsidies for an outdated technology, while the recipients of those subsidies refuse to participate in building a more prosperous, more sustainable future for all Americans?

There’s one thing no one supporting the oil subsidies seems willing to discuss openly, which is that the reduction in those subsidies doesn’t have to deprive Americans of access to affordable energy: the same subsidies can be redirected to alternative energy technologies, and the same companies could participate in that contest for major innovation, and actually earn the subsidies, if they produce the best alternatives.

We need a 21st-century energy subsidy model, which considers the need to innovate, to move away from combustible fuels altogether, to achieve alternatives that, like wind and solar, allow us to dramatically increase the productive potential of the technology, as the technology advances, and leave static energy sources like fossil fuels in the past.

This is the common-sense thing to do. And we should not waste any more money trying to buy back an inefficient past from companies that will not cooperate in building the future. We are better than that. The hard working people of the United States deserve better.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: There is nothing ideological about the issue of renewable energy resources. Proponents tend to care about the health of the natural environment, which motivates their wish to see renewables replace high-polluting fuel sources like oil and coal, but the technologies, the fact of their economic viability and their usefulness for society at large, are not in any way a matter of ideology.

Neither is there anything ideological about the allegiance of some to carbon-based fuels. The considerations are entirely practical on all sides, and we need to remember this as we try to find consensus on how to move forward, responsibly, as a civilization, in terms of our relationship to energy and the environment.

For some people in the political arena, it would appear to make more sense to continue to support carbon-based fuels as the primary resource for energy production, for a number of practical reasons, each of which can be refuted on practical grounds: 1) because those entities that profit from carbon-based fuels donate to one’s campaign; 2) because those entities that profit from carbon-based fuels “create jobs”; 3) because burning things to release energy is easier to understand than more advanced technologies.

There are real ideologically-rooted reasons why the passions can run so deep on either side: for environmentalists, it is morally unconscionable that we continue burning dirty fuels and eroding the natural systems on which all life depends, no matter the reasons; for the pro-petroleum segment of the political spectrum, there are patriotic roots, hearkening back to two world wars and the Cold War, with oil seen as a guarantor of security.

Oil is no longer that, and passions aside, thinking people have to acknowledge that the root of those passions is really practical and not ideological anyway. It makes practical sense to be good stewards of the environment on which we depend for everything that we have, and it was a practical consideration that linked industrial production and national security to the availability of carbon-based fuels.

But now, national security has become so closely linked to energy supply issues that we can no longer rely —again, in strictly practical terms— on a commodity as volatile, finite and problematic as petroleum. The costs to society are too great, whether we are talking about war-fighting —and war-funding, for that matter—, the loss of freedom in terms of shaping our foreign policy, or our economic choices, costs in terms of human health or the destabilization of major climate systems.

And coal, while abundant in North America, is so dirty a resource that the environmental fallout alone makes it less than reasonable as a foundational resource for long-term future planning. There may come a time when carbon itself is a resource, required for its chemical properties, but not necessarily as useful as we now pretend, as a combustible fuel. Places where the coal industry has its roots may have to change focus or find technologically cutting-edge ways to justify the exploration for coal.

The reasons for this are hard to understand, if one starts from the assumption that there is something traditional or sacredly local or productive about coal. But if we step back and consider the real adaptability of human populations, we find that no community really needs the coal industry, having no chance of survival or prosperity in its absence, in the way the coal industry lobby pretends.

Communities are made up of human beings and are as adaptable as those human beings’ minds, hearts and relationships. The relationship to powerful coal interests is not always a happy one, and this alone can open doors for the development of resources that are more sustainable, more local-friendly, and respectful of future human need in ways that older technologies simply cannot be.

Even the coal industry itself could innovate, diversify, and find ways to turn its operations into major sources of clean renewable energy. At least three renewable resources come to mind: geothermal energy production, wind and solar. Mining companies in many cases own or lease land for which they have not yet devised a marketable use or long ago abandoned, and these can be converted to solar farms, wind farms or geothermal fields.

While international mining companies are outsourcing administrative jobs and moving to more “cost effective” mining sites overseas, some are beginning to use disused mining sites in the US to build part of the new clean-energy infrastructure. Across the southwest, such projects are already in development or being implemented. According to the Arizona Republic:

Both the Bureau of Land Management and Environmental Protection Agency are studying the potential to put renewable-energy projects on mines, landfills and other disturbed lands.

Mines can help avoid many of the expenses solar plants face on pristine desert, experts said, such as environmental rules that require relocating saguaros and other protected plants.

There is no reason why environmentalists seeking to promote clean energy and communities steeped in a long tradition of coal mining or oil drilling cannot come together, free of ideological constraints, to craft the solutions that will make the US a global leader in efficient, profitable, mass-produced clean energy. The ideology that claims this issue is one of ideology is simply a rhetorical framework that serves the interests of the most stagnant and unimaginative coal and oil interests.

Major oil producers could easily invest billions in renewable R&D and become global pioneers in the rush to achieve a fully self-sustaining clean-energy economy. Their resistance is perhaps more linked to a short-sighted ideological prejudice than to a lack of will to be part of the future, but they do not have any real ideological framework to back up their position, and the logic that favors a transition to renewables does not require one.

From a strictly economic standpoint, it does not make sense to continue being near totally reliant upon a way of doing business that carries the wildly exorbitant potential costs of an Ixtoc, anExxon Valdez, Texaco in Ecuador, or a Deepwater Horizon disaster. If we want to be intelligent about how we achieve “energy independence”, we have to first assess and confront the real costs of doing business the way big oil does business.

It’s not a matter of “a tax on energy” or “a tax on carbon”, it’s a matter of making sure the responsible parties pay their share. Subsidies on an unprecedented scale, have made the oil business look and feel profitable in ways that it actually is not, when the health of the wider economy is considered. Were those wider costs built into the business itself, big oil would not be nearly as attractive an investment as it seemed to be until the Deepwater Horizon well blew out in April.

While an “ideology” that values the natural environment over the right of the oil industry to make profits may rejoice at the opportunity to use such a failure as BP has experienced in the Gulf of Mexico to make the case against oil, that political motive does not make it any less true that BP had no responsible or credible action plan for dealing with an environmental catastrophe of this magnitude, despite deliberately doing everything necessary —reportedly cutting corners and ordering the suppression of good information— to bring about the catastrophe.

That such risks can be avoided with a transition to clean, renewable energy resources that do not require combustion and do not require oil or coal to achieve the efficiency gains they aim to achieve, is just as honestly not a matter of ideology. It’s the way it is. And science is now demonstrating that we can produce more than enough electricity, nationally, to power our entire domestic energy consumption through wind and solar alone, if we build the infrastructure.

At the point where the renewable energy infrastructure is pervasive and functional enough to outpace carbon-based fuels in total power generation capacity, there will be no question, practically speaking, whether or not renewables are a more effective method of promoting long-term economic health and prosperity. Where is the ideology inherent in planning for such a virtuous moment of future achievement?

• Discussions on Zero-combustion Energy Research
• Economic Report: Building a Green Economy
• Futurismo Verde: debate sobre un futuro energético limpio y renovable

TheHotSpring.net :: Climate change means “global warming”, so how can severe winter storms and excessively cold breezes be evidence of a warming climate? The key is in the word “global”: the warming of the overall global average temperature need not manifest in all places at all times as warmer weather. Throughout the history of human civilization, the Earth’s climate has remained relatively stable, due to optimal global average temperatures; as global average temperatures slip outside that optimal range, the warmer air makes the interaction between climate systems more inconsistent and more severe.

So, while monsoons are failing across Africa and southern Asia, and major rivers are starting to run dry for part of the year, failing to reach the sea, in northern climate bands, storms are getting to be more severe and winter weather is hitting harder. This is because climate bands themselves are blurring, becoming less rigid, less reliable, and so in traditionally temperate climate zones, arctic and tropical air are coming together more often than before, both demonstrating and exacerbating the ongoing destabilization of major climate patterns.

On Sunday in New York City, freezing temperatures, dense snowfall and high winds all coincided with thunder, to the surprise of many, who had never observed this phenomenon before. As explained on the local news, such events can happen when the right combination of factors create a storm with some of the characteristics of summer storms. That means thunder can accompany snowfall if the cloud patterns are being fed by the right mix of freezing air and warmer southerly sea air.

The concern climate scientists have about global warming is not warm days as such, or mild winters, but rather the cumulative effect of warmer global average temperatures. That effect is widespread destabilization of vital climate patterns, and the resulting feedback loop, which would turn warmer high-altitude temperatures into melting glaciers, reduced precipitation and rising sea levels.

If the weather you’re seeing in your hometown is colder than usual, it is not evidence that the global average temperature is not warming. It is, however, consistent with a warming global climate to see weather that is more extreme in temperature or precipitation than has historically been the case in a given region.

One blizzard is not itself proof of global climate destabilization, but a mounting pattern over several years, where tornadoes converge on New York City (September 2010), more than 20% of Pakistan’s entire territory is inundated (summer 2010), hurricanes are more frequent, more numerous and more intense on average (2004-2010), and crops are under increased threat from frost in places like Brazil, Florida and India (1998-2010), are evidence of the destabilization of major climate patterns.

The persistent and mounting melt of Antarctic ice shelves, and their calving into the planet’s oceans, is further evidence of a persistent and mounting global increase in annual average temperatures. No system on Earth is entirely closed. Systems interact, which means chemical compositions of regional air and water flows, temperature adjustments, and frequency and precision of ecosystem services all interact and affect one another.

Such processes honor no political borders, recognize no economic zones and respect no observable boundaries. The warming of waters in the Gulf of Mexico means the Gulf Stream carries that warmer water to northwestern Europe, gradually warming the chill arctic waters, which then become less effective at rapidly cooling the Gulf Stream waters. This is important, because that rapid cooling generates the world’s most massive and powerful waterfall, as the cooled water plunges to the bottom, and flows around Europe and Africa into the Indian Ocean.

That Deep Ocean Current relies on the proper balance of warm and cool water at the precise point where falling water can push the right volume of water around the globe, at the right temperature to maintain key surface temperatures and major climate bands. To understand climate destabilization, it’s more instructive to think about the snowflake than the thermometer: cool temperatures don’t always bring snow, because weather is highly variable from moment to moment; but the fragile, tiny snowflake, of itself harmless, can become a paralyzing force across an entire region. Little incremental ticks of climate relevant data can mount to generate catastrophic change.

Today, we are digging out from under 25 inches of snow that fell in less than 24 hours. Digging out from under comprehensively destabilized global climate systems will not be so easy. The smart money tends to flow toward the more rational approach to problem solving. Having no plan but wait-and-see leads to transit collapse, states of emergency and regional collapse. The smart money for future investment wants to support more rational behavior, the kind that honors human need, human rights and the logic whereby democracy is highly capable of coordinated human brilliance.

In Brazil’s hotly contested presidential election, to decide the successor to the hugely popular Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, founder and leader of the Workers Party of Brazil (PT), the failure of any candidate to win more than 50% of the vote has set up a second round between the two leading candidates. But for many, the big news is that the Green Party (PV) candidate, Marina Silva, won nearly 20% of the vote, which means neither of the two leading candidates has a lot of freedom to govern without her support. Silva will now clearly demand that whichever candidate she backs for the runoff agree to enact much of the Green Party’s sustainability platform.

With traditional sympathies often cited between environmental groups, green parties and the labor-focused political left, many believe the PT candidate Dilma Rousseff, an economist who has served in Lula’s cabinet throughout his tenure, will have enough support to win a majority, but Marina Silva and the Greens are intensely critical of many of the government’s development projects in the Amazon region, which they say ignore fundamental principles of sustainability and environmental responsibility.

Ms. Silva’s performance in the voting, winning 19.3% of the vote, is a landmark moment for the ecological movement worldwide. In one of the world’s largest democracies, where many experts across the world believe the keys to deciding the specifics of international cooperation on environmental sustainability, climate change mitigation and emissions reduction, may reside, such support for the Green Party shows the population is willing to say to the ruling elite: development at any cost is not acceptable.

Whether Silva will have the political savvy to leverage her 19.3% of the vote against the popularity of Lula’s administration and the likely progressive support for Rousseff is a complicated question. Rousseff, like Silva, seeks to become the first female president in Brazil’s history, and on many social issues, her policies overlap with the Green Party agenda. Rousseff is waging a campaign against poverty, which also means a campaign for development.

Lula’s government has been successful at implementing an aggressive public works agenda, and Silva is likely to seek to roll back what is seen by many as unfettered depletion of the ecological balance of sensitive regions like the Amazon rainforest. The specifics of how Rousseff proposes to extend that development agenda may now need to be re-evaluated, if Green Party support is needed to reach majority support among the voting public.

José Serra, candidate for the Social Democratic Party of Brazil (PSD), may also now seek to set himself apart from Rousseff and Lula’s PT by courting the environmental vote. The PSD is described as a coalition of liberals, social democrats and centrist progressives, and demonstrates the degree to which Brazil’s electorate is one of the least right-of-center in the world. Serra could feasibly revise his electoral strategy to design a new development agenda that would further the platform focus of the Green Party, or even include Marina Silva as a top minister to ensure sustainability in Brazil’s rapidly growing economy.

This complex multi-party centrist-to-liberal dynamic may be what has candidate Rousseff less than enthused about her performance in the first round of voting. Though Lula himself always won by going to a second round, and Rousseff herself has had to fight through tough allegations and political attacks, there had been a home among PT faithful that she could ride Lula’s coat-tails to a first-round victory. In a nation with three dominant center to left-of-center parties, Dilma Rousseff cannot be assured of winning the progressive support currently held by the Silva’s PV candidacy.

She may find herself having to explain how to alter economic plans that have significant momentum behind them, and answer criticism of development programs under Lula that the Greens say are eroding the natural balance of systems in the Amazon. There is also sure to be a new-conservative line of attack against Rousseff and the PT, rooted in the green conservative model proposed by British PM David Cameron. Rousseff faces a significant challenge to her frontrunner position, if she does not negotiate some kind of ecologically sustainable agenda with Silva and the Greens.

Former Pres. Bill Clinton told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, in an interview before a live audience this week at the Clinton Global Initiative, in New York City, that a commitment to clean energy is required to drive job growth, cut unemployment and boost the economy. He noted that the four countries who are projected to beat their clean energy targets under the Kyoto Protocol —Denmark, Germany, Sweden and the U.K.— all have lower unemployment, and less economic inequality than the U.S., due to the green tech boom.

The United States has committed more resources than ever before, under Pres. Obama, to promoting clean energy, but there is still significant pressure from powerful corporate interests tied to oil, coal and natural gas, to slow the transition to a clean-energy economy. Those interests might lose out, if subsidies are shifted from carbon-based fuels to clean energy, but only if they refuse to innovate along with the rest of the economy. The cost-effectiveness of subsidizing clean energy, however, far outstrips the cost-effectiveness of subsidizing the burning of carbon-based fuels.

The fact is: there is no single area of near-term economic development with as much potential to heal the economic wounds that afflict our nation or to create new jobs and make for vibrant thriving communities than clean energy innovation. In part, this is because the job is so big. In part, it is owing to the fact that energy is everywhere; there is no corner of the society that can ably do without it in at least some small dose for very long. The interconnectedness and fast pace of 21st century America requires a booming energy sector, and the energy sector has critical weaknesses.

Among these are: the finite nature of carbon-based fuels and the geologic time-scales required to create new reserves; the intense fallout to human and environmental health from pollution; the massive, ongoing and still growing contribution to destabilization of global climate patterns, from the burning of fossil fuels; negative externalities of even local impact: where coal-intensive communities suffer chronic endemic poverty and an over-dependence on one industry; the cost transport will impose on our economic activity if we don’t innovate away from combustible fuels.

Pres. Clinton’s announcement comes at a crucial time, as electoral battles over how to solve the jobs crisis raise not just ideological points of contention but serious confusion over what the cost implications would be for a transition to clean energy. The standard retort, for decades, has been that clean energy “is just too expensive”, that renewable resources like wind and solar energy are “intermittent” and so unreliable, that we cannot afford to stop using oil, despite our mounting dependence on nations whose interests may be in direct conflict with our own.

The fact is, rapid and widespread innovations in energy technology mean solar power is expanding its productive capacity more rapidly than any other resource. Wind is now capable, were the infrastructure already built, to supply more than 100% of the entire energy demand of the United States, and innovations in biofuel planning mean new strains of algae are now potentially 3x more efficient at turning light into energy.

Building the infrastructure for a truly efficient, clean and low-cost renewable energy economy will take time, and resources. The fossil fuel industry continually seeks to paint this fact as a sign that doing so would be prohibitively expensive, but precisely the contrary is true. In fact, not aggressively investing in this infrastructure overhaul, technological innovation and job-training, will render many of our basic economic underpinnings prohibitively expensive, within a generation. The fallout across our economy could be devastating.

Compare to that the effect of heavily investing in the clean energy transition: a relatively small but stable (year-after-year) commitment of resources from the federal government would spur over $100 billion in private-sector clean-energy investment, which would in turn create millions of new jobs, reforming local and regional economies, cleaning the air, stabilizing climate patterns around which our entire civilization is organized, and building resilience, knowledge, innovation and economic vibrancy into communities large and small.

Not only is it eminently affordable for the United States to make this transition now, in a committed and robust way, it is in fact an issue of far-reaching implications for national security. The Pentagon views the destabilization of global climate patterns and rival nations’ out-competing us on clean energy as potentially threatening our political and economic security in the coming decades, and so has embarked on a program to transform its use of energy; the nation would be wise to do the same, so we can get on the road to real, prolonged recovery, and build a stable, clean, sustainable energy future.

TheHotSpring.net :: Buckminster Fuller was one of the 20th century’s most visionary architects, whose philosophy of socially responsible planning and design has influenced cutting-edge technology research and public policy the world over, through the UN’s development programs and pioneering entrepreneurship aimed at lifting billions out of poverty. His vision was, in his own words, “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

So Buckminster Fuller made it his mission as thinker and designer to aim for a new paradigm in the use of technology, wherein the ancient and medieval assumption that the world could only provide for 1 in every 100 people to live comfortably could be discarded by the self-evident power of more advanced technology and economic balance, in which 100% of people could live in comfort, freedom and dignity. Metropolis magazine has called the prize “socially responsible design’s highest award”.

According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute website:

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is an annual international design Challenge awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. It attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.

The complexity of Fuller’s vision is daunting, because it entails as a foundational principle finding a way to transcend the more primitive tendencies of human socio-political organization which lead us to believe that we can only gain by displacing our costs to terrain inhabited by others. But the embrace of constructive complexity is part of what makes Fuller’s vision so relevant and so important today. The U.S., for instance, must find a way to not only reduce its dependency on “foreign oil”, but in doing so must realize that there is no genuine economic resilience gained by simply causing poorer societies to carry the environmental costs of our carbon-based economy.

So there is a deep optimism, firmly rooted in reason and in scientific imagination, that guides the work of those who seek to carry out Fuller’s vision, by which humanity can only achieve long-term sustainability by also doing something like achieving the ideal. The “challenge” is very much the same challenge Fuller put to himself, and which he demanded all people everywhere rise to comprehend and to pursue. The prize given in his name is a way of driving that optimistic approach to problem-solving forward.

This year’s winner, Operation Hope, describes its function as demonstrating “how to reverse desertification of the world’s savannas and grasslands, thereby contributing enormously to mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide”. Solving multiple problems related to a complex and evolving crisis situation is key to why Operation Hope was able to win this year’s Fuller Challenge prize.

To submit ideas for 2011, applicants are asked to

Please choose two of the following issues your entry primarily addresses:

communication and media
community and social systems
economy and livelihood
education
energy
environmental health
food systems
human health
human rights
materials and resources
shelter and built environment
transportation
water

And to answer nine questions such as: “How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key social, cultural, economic, ecological, and technological issues which shape the condition you are seeking to transform? Why is your strategy a breakthrough and what makes it a preferred state model? (300 words)*”

For more, or to apply or recommend an applicant, click here

Well integrity test on new cap for Deepwater Horizon well shows no oil escaping. At 3:25 pm EDT, BP announced there was no more oil leaking from the well. But as BP, local politicians and Pres. Obama all noted, this is just the beginning of the test. They were able to successfully close the well without leakage, but they now need to do more substantive pressure testing inside the well to determine if there might be any oil escaping from the wellb0re beneath the sea floor.

This success does not mean a definitive end to the crisis. There is still need to confirm structural integrity, using pressure measurements to verify that there is no oil escaping elsewhere in the structure of the well. BP has warned it may have to open the valves again this week as part of the testing of the new capping system.

There has been speculation about the political effects of the well finally being closed, with some analysts remarking that Pres. Obama’s approval ratings seemed to be slipping in proportion to the volume of oil leaking from the well. The tentative moment of relief also corresponds with the president winning a heated legislative battle over financial regulatory reform.

The president expressed cautious optimism but said only that it was a positive sign and that further testing would need to be done before anyone could know if the cap is an effective seal.

The well’s temporary closure will stop the flow of oil adding to the worst oil spill in US history, but the environmental catastrophe is ongoing, and emergency clean-up and recovery efforts will persist for years, even if not another drop of oil flows from the well.

Testing continues, as 24 hours have now passed since the valves were successfully closed, and there is talk about how BP can now work with states and communities to help restore economic activity and to deal, with after-effects of the 3 month spill.

TheHotSpring.net :: Scientists in Mississippi say they have discovered microscopic globules of hydrocarbons, i.e. petroleum, inside the outer shells of blue crab living along the Gulf coast. This discovery appears to show that oil has now entered the food chain. This process cannot be reversed, though measures may be taken to limit the spread of the oil deeper into the local and regional ecosystem.

According to Harlan Kirgan, of the Mississippi Press:

Oil droplets have been found beneath the shells of tiny post-larval blue crabs drifting into Mississippi coastal marshes from offshore waters.

The finding represents one of the first examples of how oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is moving into the Gulf of Mexico’s food chain. The larval crabs are eaten by all kinds of fish, from speckled trout to whale sharks, as well as by shore birds.

The finding is of crucial importance, because it means the oil dispersed from the massive, and growing, spill, has penetrated into the biological fabric of the Gulf coast ecosystem, and will now likely migrate further inland and into the wider food web, across the region. There had already been concern that seabirds could carry the pollutants inland after feeding on fish from the spill zone, though this has not yet been detected.

Science magazine is reporting that the contamination of the food chain by way of post-larval crabs could be “widespread”. That contaminated crab larvae were found in Texas only shortly after the first landfall of visible oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill on the Texas coast is a clear sign that the crab larvae were likely landing there before the visible oil, and so such organic contamination can spread beyond the reach of the main spill zone.

Reporting for Science, Erik Stokstad writes:

Two groups of scientists, funded by NSF rapid response grants, have been looking for changes in abundance of tiny crab larvae as they swim to estuaries along the U.S. Gulf Coast. One team, led by population ecologist Caroline Taylor of Tulane University in New Orleans, first found mysterious yellow-orange droplets in May while collecting blue crab larvae off Grand Isle, Louisiana. “We didn’t expect to find anything [like this] inside them,” Taylor says.

Subsequent surveys by Taylor’s team have turned up droplets in larvae in several genera of crabs in sites including Pensacola, Florida, and Galveston, Texas. In some places, up to 100% of larvae contain these droplets. The composition of the droplets is currently being analyzed, and Taylor expects results next week.

Having reached both the Florida panhandle and coastal Texas, the contamination of post-larval crabs signals a regional ecological disaster only beginning to unfold. It is unclear how toxic the droplets found inside the crabs are, but with 100% contamination in some areas, concern about penetration of more complex coastal fauna is warranted.

Harriet Perry, director of the Center for Fisheries Research and Development at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, told the press:

Fish are going to feed on (crab larvae). We have also just started seeing it on the fins of small, larval fish — their fins were encased in oil. That limits their mobility, so that makes them easy prey for other species. The oil’s going to get into the food chain in a lot of ways.

It is expected such a process of contamination will take years to reverse, not months. There are many questions about how best to counter the spread of molecular residue of dispersed oil from the spill. Oil contamination of this kind has never been faced in so pervasive a way, and the National Science Foundation’s emergency response projects, funded by “rapid response grants”, will be studying new methods and best practices, in hopes of preventing the oil’s spread deeper inland.

Sustainable security is a paradigm shift in foreign policy, economic and defense planning: it entails considering that not only diplomatic relations and military preparedness or alliances, but the full spectrum of connections between our society and the world abroad, determine the degree to which our future security and prosperity can be reasonably guaranteed.

Practices and relations that promote insecurity of the food supply in remote areas of foreign nations, or which drive unstable nations like Yemen toward total persistent clean water scarcity —the total collapse of the fresh water supply— pose a serious and measurable threat to both security and economic stability back home.

The US Department of Defense has recognized this, specifically calling for concerted national action to combat emissions-induced climate destabilization and to promote the protection of ecological systems across the world, as a matter of promoting stability and human prosperity, in order to prevent a domino effect of failing states from destabilizing the global political sphere.

Share ideas here for how to promote sustainable security, including cases where sustainability thinking is creating a framework for sustainable food, water, political and economic security…

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