This is the latest video from Noam Chomsky. “Contours of Global Order: Domination, Stability, Security in a Changing World: The rise of Xenophobia in the West” recorded on March 13, 2011, in Amsterdam. Chomsky discusses many things but also the environmental throwbacks in our government, including one elected official who said that we didn’t have to worry about global warming or climate change. His reasoning is that it won’t happen because God promised Noah that there would never be another flood. Apparently this Congressman has not noticed that there have been many incredible and devastating floods just in the last 10 years. That is what passes for logic in the U.S. Congress. That Rep. was John Shimkus (R-Ill., a right-wing extremist in the model of James Inhofe and Michele Bachmann.) On that note, it’s amazing that in a country of 300 million people, we can’t find 600 or so people adequately smart enough to serve intelligently in government. As usual, Noam Chomsky tells it like it is. Worth the view — enjoy.

“To date, agroecological projects have shown an average crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects.” From Climate and Capitalism: Small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions by using ecological methods, a new UN report shows. Based on an extensive review of the recent scientific literature, the study calls for a fundamental shift towards agroecology as a way to boost food production and improve the situation of the poorest. “To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available,” says Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report. “Today’s scientificevidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live — especially in unfavorable environments.” Agroecology applies ecological science to the design of agricultural systems that can help put an end to food crises and address climate-change and poverty challenges. It enhances soils productivity and protects the crops against pests by relying on the natural environment such as beneficial trees, plants, animals and insects. “To date, agroecological projects have shown [...]

What do Republicans want America to become?  From their recent actions, it appears they envision a polluted country where mercury and other pollutants are a daily hazard, threatening human health.  It’s not clear why Republicans want a country full of dangerous pollution, under constant threat of growing storm frequency due to climate change. They seem to believe that corporate profits will make our lives better than anything else, and clean air and water are secondary to corporate profits.  It’s hard to imagine such backwards, anti-health thinking.  The GOP legacy from this Congress is becoming more and more threatening to everyone in the U.S.  Think Progress sums this up well in this article below, but they blame the Tea Party, when it’s really the entire GOP doing this, not just the Tea Party faction. We really have to fight back against the right-wing attitude that the environment and our health are secondary to corporate profits, because our very lives depend on it. “The rise of the Tea Party in Congress has inspired an all-out assault on public health and a clean environment. Several freshman Republicans have joined Newt Gingrich’s call to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans in the House Energy Committee unanimously [...]

1900-1961. Arte Italiana nelle Collezioni Guggenheim

February 26 – June 5, 2011
Arca, Chiesa di San Marco, Vercelli
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero
Catalog
Video Tour

Dal 26 febbraio al 5 giugno 2011 l’Arca di Vercelli ospita la mostra 1900-1961. Arte Italiana nelle Collezioni Guggenheim, a cura di Luca Massimo Barbero.

Dopo la trilogia dedicata alla figura di Peggy Guggenheim – che in tre anni ha portato circa 120.000 visitatori a Vercelli, riconoscendole a pieno titolo il ruolo di città d’arte – la rinnovata collaborazione tra Regione Piemonte, Comune di Vercelli e Collezione Peggy Guggenheim di Venezia consentirà di ammirare oltre 40 opere di artisti italiani amati e collezionati dai mecenati americani.

La mostra è un omaggio all’arte italiana del XX secolo, con una selezione di capolavori che descrivono la genesi, la maturazionee gli sviluppi della ricerca artistica d’avanguardia in Italia dal 1900 al 1961. L’allestimento permetterà di osservare come l’arte italiana sia stata recepita, nel corso di questi sessant’anni, dalla criticae dal gusto del collezionismo americano e arricchita da importanti collezioni private, prima fra tutte la Collezione Gianni Mattioli, significativo prestito a lungo termine alla Collezione Peggy Guggenheim di Venezia.

Simbolicamente, nell’anno delle celebrazioni dei 150 anni dell’Unità d’Italia, il percorso espositivo parte dal 1961, anno del primo centenario, con una tela di Giuseppe Capogrossi. Attraverso le opere di artisti italiani riconosciuti a livello internazionale, la mostra ripercorre a ritroso la storia dell’arte italiana del XX secolo.

Tra gli autori in mostra Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo De Pisis, Arturo Tosi, Amedeo Modigliani, Arnaldo Pomodoro. Particolare attenzione viene prestata all’opera di Mario Sironi, uno degli artisti italiani più rappresentati nella collezione newyorkese, presente in Arca con otto lavori. L’ultima parte del percorso espositivo è dedicata al Futurismo, movimento che da subito catturò l’attenzione del collezionismo pubblico e privato americano: opere di Medardo Rosso, Gaetano Previati e Adolfo Wildt, fino ai grandi nomi di Giacomo Balla e Umberto Boccioni.

La mostra è realizzata con la collaborazione produttiva di Giunti Arte mostre e musei, che ne pubblica anche il catalogo. È previsto inoltre un intenso programma di iniziative di promozione e di supporto informativo e didattico. Tra le novità di quest’anno, il visitatore di Arca avrà a disposizione gratuitamente il servizio di audioguidache fornirà informazioni sia sul percorso espositivo sia sul ciclo di affreschi recentemente restaurati nelle navate lateralidella ex chiesa di San Marco. La mostra rientra nel calendario di Esperienza Italia, programma di mostre ed eventi promossi a Torino e in Piemonte per le celebrazioni del 150°anniversario dell’Unità d’Italia.

There will soon be 7 billion people on the earth. How will the earth be able to support that many people? National Geographic is spending an entire year writing about this alarming population growth and its impacts on the earth and the rest of us. According to them, there is no reason to panic — yet. Even though: “With the population still growing by about 80 million each year, it’s hard not to be alarmed. Right now on Earth, water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing. Close to a billion people go hungry each day. Decades from now, there will likely be two billion more mouths to feed, mostly in poor countries. There will be billions more people wanting and deserving to boost themselves out of poverty. If they follow the path blazed by wealthy countries—clearing forests, burning coal and oil, freely scattering fertilizers and pesticides—they too will be stepping hard on the planet’s natural resources.” It’s hard to imagine how the earth can support 7 billion people when it could not handle 6 billion, without loads of people starving and lacking clean water and energy.  It’s not the number of people, [...]

Rolling blackouts are beginning this week in Japan after their devastating earthquake and tsunami. The energy situation there is dire as several of their nuclear plants have been shut down and two are having much more serious problems. A potential meltdown is an ongoing threat at the second reactor on Japan’s east coast. “Tokyo – A Japanese public broadcasting station reports three people randomly chosen from a hospital that’s located near the damaged nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi have tested positive for exposure to radiation. NHK World is reporting that the three patients, who were chosen from the ninety hospital patients awaiting airlift from a local high school, were exposed to radiation and will undergo decontamination. The remaining eighty-seven patients have not been tested for radioactivity. “The hospital is located in Futaba Town about 3 kilometers north of the Fukushima Number One Nuclear Power Plant. It is within 10 kilometers of the quake-damaged plant,” said NHK, citing a statement from Fukushima Prefecture. “They have not yet shown any reaction or physical signs of the radioactive exposure.” The designated evacuation area surrounding Fukushima Daiichi has been increased to 20 kilometers following today’s explosion at the Toyko Electric Power Plant. “Fukushima Prefecture [...]

There was a massive workers rally on Saturday, March 12th, in Madison, Wisconsin in response to the governor’s signing of a bill that takes away public workers’ rights to collective bargaining. Unfortunately, most media coverage ignored this important story until the following morning. Even then, not a lot of media coverage occurred due to the constant obsession with one or two topics that our corporate media continues to display — in this case, the tsunami in Japan. Sure, that is a massive news story, but it should not drown out all other news. The fear is that it will over take all other important news all week long and Americans will be even less informed than usual. More coverage should be granted to other news, such as the recent inhumane budget cuts at all levels, and the losing of the legal and civil rights of public workers in Wisconsin. As a result of the ‘government takeover’ of workers rights in Wisconsin, Saturday’s rally crowd in Madison was estimated to be about 100,000 or even more. The Wisconsin 14 state senators also returned to Wisconsin on Saturday and received a “hero’s welcome”. Here’s a video of the size of the crowd, [...]

Few people and hardly anyone in the media are making a connection between climate change and high food prices.  This article explains the connections. “New commission formed to look at climate-food links From Reuters Leaps in food prices linked to drought in Brazil or floods in Australia may be a foretaste of ever greater shocks to be caused by climate change, according to a commission named on Friday to find ways to fix the problems. The international group of 13 experts will try to come up with ideas in the next 10 months to help agriculture cope with global warming, blamed by the U.N. panel of climate experts mainly on mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases. John Beddington, Britain’s chief scientific adviser who will chair the commission, said it would advise governments on issues such as U.N. climate negotiations and in preparing an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in mid-2012. “Extreme weather like the droughts in Russia, China and Brazil and the flooding in Pakistan and Australia have contributed to a level of food price volatility we haven’t seen since the oil crisis of 40 years ago,” he said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this could be just a taste of [...]

Uncertainty is not an excuse for inaction. As Climate Progress reports, Sandia National Laboratory assessed the risk of precipitation patterns affected by climate change, and concluded: …compelling risk derives from uncertainty, not certainty. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the risk. It is the uncertainty associated with climate change that validates the need to act protectively and proactively. The same point is made in “Degrees of Risk”, a report issued last month by Third Generation Environmentalism: In managing conventional security risks both policy makers and the general public accept that uncertainty is no excuse for inaction. Indeed it is hard to imagine a politician trying to argue that counter-terrorism measures were unnecessary because the threat of attack was uncertain. In a working paper circulated through the environmental community this week, Andrew J. Hoffman of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business argues that the two poles in the climate debate – the “skeptics” and the “convinced” – already think about risk, but from entirely different perspectives. As a result, the two camps are talking past each other. Hoffman based these conclusions in part on an extensive review of articles on the different perspectives at play in the climate debate. [...]

Charles and David Koch are worth a reported $21.5 billion each. | Reuters

Many people wonder why the U.S. has made little progress on passing climate change mitigation laws with real power, and the answer is simple:  Money.  The billionaires don’t like restrictions on their ability to make money (greed) so they are against anything, including the EPA’s focus on clean air and the health of all Americans, restricting their actions.

Big fossil fuel companies and their power, and people like the Koch Brothers and T. Boone Pickens are also stopping positive action on climate change.  The main way they do this is by aggressively protecting and funding fossil fuels.  The Koch Brothers and Pickens are powerful oil billionaires who made their dirty money from dirty fossil fuels that have polluted the U.S. for decades.

The difference between the Koch Brothers and Pickens is who they are influencing in our government:  The Kochs target the GOP with their money and their hatred of government and regulations.  Pickens targets the Democrats with his “Pickens Plan”.  The Pickens Plan is designed to make many members of Congress very wealthy while destroying the environment with gas fracking and Alberta tar sands, and some of the top beneficiaries of that wealth will be the Democrats who have invested in natural gas and oil sands in recent years.  The Kochs and Pickens have had resounding success, much to the detriment of our climate and our environment.

“Wichita-based Koch Industries and its employees formed the largest single oil and gas donor to members of the panel, ahead of giants like Exxon Mobil, contributing $279,500 to 22 of the committee’s 31 Republicans, and $32,000 to five Democrats.

Nine of the 12 new Republicans on the panel signed a pledge distributed by a Koch-founded advocacy group ” Americans for Prosperity ” to oppose the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases. Of the six GOP freshman lawmakers on the panel, five benefited from the group’s separate advertising and grass-roots activity during the 2010 campaign.”  Source

Few people are writing about Pickens and his connections to environmental tragedies like the Alberta tar sands (he’s a major investor) but plenty of people are writing about the Koch brothers.  The Koch brothers are also involved in our media (FOX News) and Republican special interests, like union busting.

Every year the Koch brothers hold financial summits, which are secret meetings.  They swear the attendees to secrecy, and plan how to subvert the EPA and our government.  Read more about that here.

Last week brought really bad environmental news in New Hampshire, thanks to the Koch brothers:

“New Hampshire’s newly elected veto-proof Republican majority is swiftly consolidating the pro-pollution agenda provided by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch, the heads of Koch Industries.

The New Hampshire House passed HB 519 by 246-104 on Wednesday, repealing its membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), after a successful robocall campaign fronted by Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, one of the national Tea Party groups created [...]

If you watch American TV media, the relentless oil, coal and gas ads never stop.  The fossil fuel industries advertise on TV at least 12 hours a day. Most of the ads come during national news broadcasts from the American Petroleum Industry and during prime time viewing. They air on MSNBC and NBC very heavily; but also on CNN and other cable news channels.  They air literally 8-10 times an hour on any given major network 1/2 hour news broadcast.  It’s a veritable barrage of oil and fossil fuel propaganda; yet the stories of peak oil are nowhere to be found. (Below is a parody of these ads).  The U.S. corporate news media is blaming all gas prices on “unrest” in Libya.  None of these “news broadcasters” mention peak oil or the fact that all the easy to get oil is gone.

Where are the environmental equal-time ads? They don’t exist. No environmental group advertises on U.S. TV media. No wonder people think there’s nothing wrong with using oil and gas until it all runs out and we choke to death on the fumes and pollution and CO2 permanently alters the climate. With this kind of barrage, coinciding with political push backs against the EPA, we are in a lot of environmental trouble this year. Instead of making progress environmentally under President Obama, we seem to be fighting for every little concession we get on clean air and clean water. To say nothing of climate change.

Fossil fuels proponents are even claiming that hydraulic fracturing does not harm water supplies, which is provably false. This statement was made on E&E TV today, by Bruce Vincent, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and President of Swift Energy. Obviously, he’s going to lie about the pollution from what his interests do, because that is how American corporations operate these days.

“I’m not concerned about the contamination of fresh water resources caused by hydraulic fracturing, because that’s never occurred. But, as an industry, we need to be sure that we can continue to hydraulically fracture wells in a safe way and in an environmentally friendly way.”

How can progress be made on anything if energy industry leaders continue to lie about the situation? He claims there isn’t even a problem and thousands of homeowners and the EPA would disagree with that.

Nothing will happen this year on climate change mitigation in the U.S. government, and that may be true next year too. The U.S. is punting this again and shifting blaime;  using the old “problems” of India and China.  These are old excuses but American politicians keep recycling them.   At this rate, there will be no climate change action taken by the U.S. ever (until the situation is dire) because no other country can ever live up to the demands of our politicians, prior to our taking action on it ourselves.

The cards are actually laid out openly in this article from [...]

Now that actor Charlie Sheen has taken over American media, you wouldn’t think much else is going on in the world. (Imagine if climate scientists were interviewed as often as Charlie Sheen has been interviewed lately!)

It’s amazing how a celebrity or minor issue can cause American corporate media to obsess about that one thing to the exclusion of most everything else.   Another example — the unrest in Libya gets a lot of media attention because it affects the cost of oil. The unrest in Wisconsin (still ongoing) gets much less attention because it only affects the paychecks of middle class public employees — a much less interesting topic to our corporation media.

Who is directing and determining the content of much of American corporate media?  The various fossil fuel industries.  They are experts in distracting the American people, to say nothing of outright lying to us.  The other biggest media influencer is the Republican political machine backed by Wall Street. These influences are also the same groups and organizations trying to halt meaningful pollution regulations and climate change mitigation.

The Koch Brothers are two of these ‘influencers” — oil billionaires,  involved in polluting the world and condemning future generations to a very dangerous, difficult existence in dealing with climate change.  They are two of the main funders of the corporate climate change denier machine.   Rachel Maddow of MSNBC describes it all below.

Many stories are pointing out lately just how much trouble the world really is in and the environmental challenges we face due to human activity.  Human activity dangerous to the environment includes not just transportation and inefficiency in buildings but also outright pollution; air pollution and literally, garbage.  These things also threaten the actual viability of the ocean to support life.

Shouldn’t this be discussed more on American corporate media?  (After all, eventually it will negatively impact the fishing and tourism industries, if it hasn’t already.)

A recent study has found that all of the world’s coral reefs could be gone by 2050. If lost, 500 million people’s livelihoods worldwide would be threatened.

The World Resources Institute report, “Reefs at Risk Revisited,” suggests that by 2030, over 90 percent of coral reefs will be threatened. If action isn’t taken soon, nearly all reefs will be threatened by 2050. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states, “Threats on land, along the coast and in the water are converging in a perfect storm of threats to reefs.”

The AFP suggests that these threats include overfishing, coastal development, pollution, and climate change. Warming sea temperatures lead to coral bleaching, a stress response where corals expose their white skeletons. In 2005, the Caribbean saw the most extensive coral bleaching event ever recorded, often attributed to rising ocean temperatures. CO2 emissions are also making the oceans more acidic. Because of the rising acidity levels, some scientists claim we will see conditions not witnessed since the period of dinosaurs.

Lauretta Burke, one of the report’s [...]

There have been a lot of EPA-Congressional fireworks lately.  Today Lisa Jackson testified in front of Congress on the EPA’s budget.  The Republicans in our Congress are trying to diminish the role of the EPA in our government and take away their regulatory powers.  This would be an obvious disaster for the environment, and the health of all Americans, but more pollution is on the agenda of the Republicans for 2011.   (Did you really think they wanted to create jobs?).

Jackson’s 3-hour testimony today before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was about the EPA’s fiscal year (FY) 2012 budget.

From the EPA:  In February, President Obama proposed an FY 2012 budget of $8.973 billion for EPA. This proposal reflects President Obama’s commitment to ensuring the government lives within its means while ensuring that EPA can carry out its core mission: protecting public health and our environment while reducing air and water pollution in communities across America.

You can watch it on C-Span.org.

“The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Lisa Jackson is testifying on the proposed 2012 budget at a House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Environment. The nearly $9 billion dollar budget is a 13%  percent decrease from the previous year.

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) has recently said that he would seek to slash more than $1.6 billion the EPA budget request. Under his proposal, programs dealing with air pollution, drinking water, energy efficiency, renewable energy and Energy Star products would be affected.

Jackson is also answering questions on the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases and cut ozone pollution, which could save $2 trillion by 2020, and prevent about 230,000 deaths, according to an EPA report.” — C-Span.

Some politicians, mostly Republicans, think that we can somehow live without drinkable, clean water and clean breathable air.  They seem to feel that air and water aren’t important to health and life in the U.S.

Testifying today, Jackson said, “No one wants contaminated water.”  Is that really true?  It does seem like some members of Congress do want contaminated water, because they are busy trying to defund much of what the EPA does.  One congressman actually said that during meetings with business people, “Defund the EPA” is the only applause line they get.  How can that be true?

The battles between the EPA and Congress have been going on all week.  It seems to me that the EPA should not have to constantly explain the basics of what it does to Congress, but that’s what Lisa Jackson seems to be constantly called on to do.

Here is the March 2nd statement by EPA head Lisa Jackson for her testimony before Congress:

Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

. . . . . Thank you for inviting me to testify about President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget request for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and America’s other bedrock environmental protection laws on [...]

This is Robert Naman, an analytical chemist with over 30 years of experience and the president of Act Laboratory Inc in Mobile, AL. ACT is a private environmental testing laboratory. . . . .   In the latest Project Gulf Impact video, Naman discusses the EPA’s role in determining acceptable PAH levels, and how those acceptable limits are set higher than what is safe for children and the average adult. He also addresses recent water testing performed in Orange Beach, AL, which found some of the highest levels of oil and grease to date. Naman also has an interesting viewpoint on seafood consumption — he has personally decided to not eat seafood out of the Gulf.

From the Huffington Post regarding one of his most recent samplings: “Naman tested various samples for petroleum, and said he expected to find no more than 5 parts per million (ppm). Instead, Naman found results that far exceed his expectations: 16 ppm from waters at Katrina Key, and 29 ppm at Orange Beach.

The most shocking results came from a sample of water collected near boom at Dauphin Island Marina. When Naman combined the sample with an organic solvent that separates the oil from the water, which he did for all the other samples as well, it exploded in his lab, breaking the container and destroying the sample in the process. Naman thinks the reaction was caused by the presence of methane gas or Corexit, the dispersant that BP has been using in the Gulf.” — Source

It’s interesting that he notes that the BP disaster of last year was the first time ever that dispersants had been injected under the surface of the water and mixed with water at all levels.  Previously, it was used only on the surface of the water.  Why did the EPA allow BP to do that in our waters off our coast?

Besides seafood, this brings up another question — how has the severe pollution affected the living wildlife in the waters in the Gulf? Recently over 90 bottlenose dolphins were washed up dead on the beaches in the Gulf states, which is far more than usual for this time of year. The Guardian has concluded they were probably poisoned by the dispersant Corexit, and oil that remains in the water.

Since the start of the year, 87 bottlenose dolphins have washed up on the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and along the Florida panhandle, Kim Amendola, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. That’s about 12 times higher than typical strandings at this time of year.

Forty-six of those were infants or still-born.

The coastal areas were the worst affected by BP’s blown-out well, which spewed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The die-off had prompted fears that exposure to toxins from the BP spill had interfered with last year’s calving season, causing miscarriages.

However, scientists at the Dauphin Island sea lab [...]

Mark Hertsgaard is the author of the new book  “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years.”

He cornered [James] Inhofe near a bank of members-only elevators at the Dirksen Senate Office Building to ask how he could remain the Senate’s most adamant climate change denier when every noted scientific organization agrees the planet and its inhabitants are destined for a world of hurt unless heat-trapping gases are tamed.

“Yeah, are you kidding?” he told SolveClimate News when asked if it was worth it to wait 85 minutes in a windowless Dirksen hallway until Inhofe emerged from a fourth-floor committee hearing room. “For my daughter’s sake I want to know why he thinks he can do that.”

“Hot,” the most recent of his six environmental tomes, is dedicated to his 5-year-old daughter Chiara. She has inspired the 54-year-old’s fatherly concern toward what he calls Generation Hot, the two billion youngsters worldwide now forced to cope with climate disruption. . . . . Tuesday’s event to confront “climate cranks” — coordinated by partners including the Sierra Club, 350.org, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and The Nation — offered a lesson to budding activists on staking out politicians and a chance for Hertsgaard to vent.

Throughout the day, the energetic author was trailed by four young local organizers, a couple of communications specialists and three videographers.  “I think he knows his lines,” Hertsgaard said about trying to push the envelope with Inhofe. “He should. He’s been saying the same thing for 20 years.”

Frustration with Media Coverage

On Tuesday, he confronted Inhofe on each of his points about the science being “mixed,” the dire impact of carbon controls on the economy and what little difference EPA action will have on global emissions.

“It’s important to say, ‘No senator, the science is not mixed.’ But a lot of mainstream reporters don’t argue back,” Hertsgaard said in an interview, adding that a sense of false balance can be attributed to a Washington press corps not familiar with environmental issues. “But virtually every science organization tells us climate change is real and very dangerous. It’s a matter of demonstrable science not opinion. To pretend otherwise borders on journalistic malpractice.”

Read More at Solve Climate

Wisconsin’s new Gov. Walker has decided that Wisconsin should not participate in the growing midwest “green renaissance”.

This cross-post discusses how Governor Walker’s backwards, Republican ideology is devoted to destroying jobs and clean energy in his state, and in the U.S. as a whole.  Why do these throwbacks keep getting elected?  There is no time to waste in moving forward on clean energy.

For more on the Koch brothers and their plan to buy and control all the power plants in Wisconsin (it’s one theory) see this story.

Gov. Walker Assaults Jobs, Innovation, and Clean Energy in Wisconsin

Newly elected Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker held an event called “Wisconsin is Open for Business” the day he was inaugurated. But every move the governor makes shows him to be an antibusiness, anti-innovation politician intent on running the state into the ground.

Let’s take clean energy. Clean energy industries offered a glimmer of hope during the past two years in the midst of a national recession that has hit the Midwest particularly hard. In Michigan, for example, total private employment dropped 5.4 percent from 2005-2008, while during the same period employment increased by 7.7 percent among the state’s 358 “green” firms. Michigan’s new governor, Rick Snyder, recognized the growth potential of these industries when he ran on a 10-point plan that emphasized the need to invest in clean energy sectors such as advanced batteries.

In Ohio, too, the green writing is on the wall. New Gov. John Kasich initially sounded off against clean energy, running on a platform that included rolling back the state’s renewable energy standard. But he reversed this position soon after his election when multiple business leaders told him how important green industries were in the Toledo area in particular. The city, which ranked in the bottom 10 by per capita income in 2000, has seen a renaissance as a hub for solar innovation and production. Over 6,000 individuals are employed in these industries in Toledo today, and the city is home to several major solar panel exporters including First Solar and Xunlight.

Gov. Walker, however, has apparently decided that Wisconsin should take a back seat to the Midwest’s green renaissance. The state has enormous potential to generate homegrown energy from renewable resources. Wisconsin has enough wind, solar, and biomass energy resources to produce power equivalent to the entire state’s electricity needs according to Environment America. But the new governor recently proposed a wind turbine siting law that would effectively shut down most wind power production. The new law, if put into effect, would require wind turbines to be set back at least 1,800 feet from any nearby property unless all affected property owners agree to the turbine in writing.

Only one-fourth of Wisconsin’s current wind turbines would ever have been built if this rule had been in place in the past. In other words, 2,250 fewer people would have construction or maintenance jobs, over a million fewer dollars would be flowing to rural communities [...]

It’s official! The First Yearbook of International Futurism Studies has been sent to press.

Downlaod Table of Contents, Volume 1

Download Table of Contents, Volume 2

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

YEARBOOKS 3-5:

Yearbook 3 (2013) will be dedicated to Iberian Futurisms. It will contain a mixture of studies on well-known individuals and artist of lesser renown who were inspired by Futurism. The volume will give due consideration to the regions often overlooked and examine how artists and writers from Portugal, Castile, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country interacted with Marinetti and other Italian Futurists. This will include a discussion of the Iberian brands of Futurism (or Futurist inclined avant-garde movements) such as Ultraísmo, Creacionismo and Sensacionismo

Yearbook 4 (2014) will be an open issue and include some 16-18 essays on various aspects of the international dimensions of Futurism with a special focus on architecture, interior design, ceramics, fashion design, typography and graphic design

Yearbook 5 (2015) will be dedicated to Futurist influences on women writers and artists outside Italy. Artists currently considered include Maud Gonne, Rougena Zatkova, Aleksandra Ekster, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, Mina Loy, Valentine de Saint Point, Eva KÃŒhn, Edyth von Haynau, Alice Bailly, Siri Derkert , Agnes Cleve , Hilda Doolittle, Kate Lechmere, Jessica Dismorr , Helen Saunders, Concha Espina, Maruja Mallo, Tatiana Vechorka (Tolstaia), and Norah Borges.

For more information and offers of contributions please contact Günter Berghaus.

We need a lot of political change in this country, and a lot of media change too. Both modern media and politics focus far too much on contentious debate, and not enough on facts.  Starting now, everyone reading this has to devote some time every day fighting  the lies and the false statements coming out of the mouths of media pundits, right-wing politicians, and their fans, online and everywhere else, or we’re going to have an even worse climate crisis than we have now. We have to call them out on their misleading or deliberately false statements on climate change,  especially their attacks on the EPA.   Climate change deniers are not armed with the facts — we are.   Climate change deniers are like Bill O’Reilly of FOX News.   He’s a person so uninformed he didn’t  even know that tides are caused by the moon, and he has no idea how the moon got where it is.  (He thinks tides, and the moon, were created by magic, outside of the normal realm of science and facts.)  We can’t let people like O’Reilly and others like him (and there are many others) continue to say ridiculously  ignorant things and go unchallenged. If they go unchallenged, people will believe them.

Climate Cranks is a new term used to describe people who deliberately mislead the public about climate change for political reasons. Some of them even get paid for it.  Some of them even send bloggers like myself offers to write “guest articles” in order to lie about fossil fuels.  Some of them simply want the EPA to fail so oil and coal profits remain intact.  They stand for the worst things you can think of:  pollution that leads to serious health problems, including asthma and cancer.  Overall, they are a deceptive lot and they need to be fought against much harder than has been the case in the last couple of years.   The health of Americans and everyone is literally at stake.  It’s important to note that many of these “climate cranks” are in our government and actually deny obvious things happening in the world around them (their slim grasp on reality versus fantasy should be remembered for the next election.)

Here is an excerpt from The Nation on dealing with climate and science deniers.  This article is adapted from Mark Hertsgaard’s HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my daughter was born at a momentous turning point in history. She arrived on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in April 2005. All the nurses kept remarking on how alert this baby was, so her mother and I decided to name her Chiara, which means “clear and bright” in Italian.

I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British government’s chief science adviser. The interview changed my [...]

Food shortages and rising food prices are getting more intense  around the world.  What will it take for prices to stabilize?  The answer to that is probably “a stable climate”, and we don’t have that anywhere on earth.

Global food supplies will face “massive disruptions” from climate change, Olam International Ltd. predicted, as Agrocorp International Pte. said corn will gain to a record, stoking food inflation and increasing hunger.

“The fact is that climate around the world is changing and that will cause massive disruptions,” Sunny Verghese, chief executive officer at Olam, among the world’s three biggest suppliers of rice and cotton, said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. “We’re friendly to wheat, corn and soybeans and bearish on rice.” — Bloomberg

Yesterday on the “Morning Joe” show on MSNBC, the group of pundits that gather every morning were discussing rising food prices around the world. They decided there was no explanation for it, it’s just happening.   It really had them stumped.  That’s because  “climate change” is not in their vocabulary — yet.  Soon, it should be unavoidable.

The food shortages are only beginning and it will get much worse over the next 10 years unless something is done as soon as possible.  All my reading has led me to believe that adapting to a 4 degree C rise in global average temps is not something we can expect to be able to do.

The analysis below was recently written, and it’s about this question: could we actually adapt to a 4 degree C temp. rise, or even worse, and should we believe that we can? If we can, can animals? Can plants? Can insects? It’s probably not reasonable to assume anything alive today could necessarily adapt to such extreme changes.  If adaption is unlikely, countries have to act fast to try to stop the instability of the climate, which is beginning to be noticed by nearly everyone at this point. It’s important to note that the survival of the rich is not the same thing as “adaptation” for the rest of us. Individual wealth will be a factor in “adaptation” because it will determine if a person can move to another location or not, and afford food and water.

From 4 Degrees Hotter, a new report by David Spratt of Climate Code Red, Australia.

Global political failure to reach agreement on greenhouse gas reduction measures in accord with the scientific imperatives will result in 4 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100, if only the present levels of commitments by nations are achieved.

But is talk of, and planning for, adaptation to a 4-degree warmer world realistic, or delusional?

4 degrees became a sensitive issue in 2008 when an influential and controversial paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows of the UK Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research concluded that:

“…it is increasingly unlikely any global agreement will deliver the radical reversal in emission trends required for stabilization at 450 parts per [...]

There has been a lot of speculation lately about what kind of a President Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican, would be.  From my research, it’s clear he would not support any EPA action on climate change, and in fact the EPA is a part of our government that he wants to eliminate.  He’s not in favor of EPA authority, even that given to them by the Supreme Court. Paul even wants to eliminate the Department of Energy.  He won the CPAC straw poll vote last weekend, for the second time, so it’s clear he has quite a bit of grass roots support within the Republican party, but he would not be good for the country’s environment as a whole because he relies almost entirely on a philosophy of “free markets”. Free markets is where the climate change problem started in the first place.

Ron Paul would be a good alternative to Obama and most other candidates in a couple of respects, such as ending war. Our current wars are not just wrong and counterproductive, they are incredibly damaging to the environment. These military adventures also waste an awful lot of money that could be spent on scientific and technological research for renewable energy and other things.  (The Afghanistan “war” is costing American taxpayers over $2 billion dollars a week, or about $10 billion a month). Congressman Paul would put an end to the wars we are in as well as the hundreds of military bases we have all over the world. That is a big plus in his column.  (See Raw Story’s article).

There are many negatives to Paul’s philosophy, especially on the environment and on women’s reproductive rights. On the environment, Paul says he wants to protect clean air and clean water, but he doesn’t support any sort of government power or EPA power to enforce that.  That would be a huge problem.  In this video, he discusses some of his viewpoints on environmental issues.

Because climate change is such an important issue, most environmentalists will not support Ron Paul in 2012.  See his previous statements and votes on environmental matters below:

From On the Issues

Big Oil profits ok; Big Oil subsidies are not. (Jun 2007)
Voted NO on enforcing limits on CO2 global warming pollution. (Jun 2009)
Voted NO on tax credits for renewable electricity, with PAYGO offsets. (Sep 2008)
Voted NO on tax incentives for energy production and conservation. (May 2008)
Voted NO on tax incentives for renewable energy. (Feb 2008)
Voted NO on criminalizing oil cartels like OPEC. (May 2007)
Voted NO on removing oil & gas exploration subsidies. (Jan 2007)
Voted NO on keeping moratorium on drilling for oil offshore. (Jun 2006)
Voted YES on scheduling permitting for new oil refinieries. (Jun 2006)

Voted NO on passage of the Bush Administration national energy policy. (Jun 2004)
Voted NO on implementing Bush-Cheney national energy policy. (Nov 2003)
Voted NO on raising CAFE standards; incentives for alternative fuels. (Aug 2001) [...]