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February 2008, Volume 59, Number 9 c o n t e n t s Twenty years ago climatologist James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, widely considered to be the world’s leading authority on global warming, first brought the issue into the public spotlight in testimony before the U.S. Congress. Recently, Hansen published an article entitled “Climate Catastrophe” in the New Scientist (July 28, 2007), http://www.newscientist.com. There he presented evidence suggesting that under “business as usual,” in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase unchecked, a rise in sea level by several meters during the present century due to the melting of polar ice sheets is a “near certainty.” A sea level rise of this extent (up to five meters or sixteen feet) would mean the loss of land areas on which much of the earth’s population lives at present (10 percent of the world’s population live less than ten meters above the mid-tide sea level.). Yet, most scientists, even glaciologists, still downplay the full extent of the danger, failing to acknowledge probable nonlinear processes associated with climate change, and are especially reticent when it comes to making public statements in that regard. Why? | more |
Review of the Month: Rachel Carson was born just over 100 years ago in 1907. Her most famous book Silent Spring, published in 1962, is often seen as marking the birth of the modern environmental movement. Although an immense amount has been written about Carson and her work, the fact that she was objectively a “woman of the left” has often been downplayed. Today the rapidly accelerating planetary ecological crisis, which she more than anyone else alerted us to, calls for an exploration of the full critical nature of her thought and its relation to the larger revolt within science with which she was associated.
The Health Care Crisis in the United States Michael Moore’s film, Sicko, dramatically illustrated how problems in access to health care in the United States have escalated to the point of a crisis for all but the richest Americans. The problems include the fact that many citizens are uninsured, health care costs are increasing faster than inflation and wages, and more of those costs are being passed on from employers to employees. Many indices of health care effectiveness show that the United States fares very poorly in comparison to other developed capitalist countries. Almost all the other developed capitalist countries have universal health care. All their citizens are insured and their per capita costs are much lower.
Who Really Won the Space Race? Last October’s anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik artificial satellite has led to much discussion as to who won the space race. Usually it is argued that the United States unproblematically “won.” But this is a very simplistic picture and one that should be challenged. Above all, the focus on nations “winning” or “losing” needs to be rejected. It is the rich and powerful who are doing the winning. And they can come from any country.
The Future of Nuclear Power The challenge posed by global warming and concerns about the future availability of oil have recently given a boost to nuclear power, which is finding supporters even among prominent environmentalists. Last year Al Gore declared that nuclear energy could play a “small part” in plans to avert global warming. James Lovelock, best known for his Gaia hypothesis, advocates the building of new nuclear power plants as the solution to impending ecological catastrophe. Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, says that, “to deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power.” Even the Union of Concerned Scientists suggests that nuclear power despite the risks it poses might play a role as a “longer-term option” in combating global warming. At the same time many environmentalists and most environmental organizations remain adamantly opposed to nuclear power. For Barry Commoner, who warned of the dangers of both nuclear energy and global warming more than forty years ago in his Science and Survival, the fact that some individuals who have established reputations as environmentalists see nuclear power as a weapon against global warming is nothing short of “appalling” (New York Times, March 22 and June 19, 2007; Christian Science Monitor, July 19, 2007; http://www.ucsusa.org).
Reprise: Considerations of Environmental Protection Criteria for Radioactive Waste, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Radiation Programs, Waste Environmental Standards Program, Washington, D.C. 20460, February 1978. Most government reports make dull reading, and this one is no exception. But it contains a message which needs to be taken in by everyone even minimally concerned about the future of the human race. That message, quite simply, is that there is not and cannot be a safe program for disposing of radioactive wastes. The reasons are basically simple, do not depend on any complicated scientific arguments, and cannot be refuted or made irrelevant by any conceivable increase in scientific knowledge or technological capability. They can be summed up in a series of quotations from the report:...
Proper Disposal of Hazardous Ideas (For authorized persons only. If you do not know whether you are an authorized person then you are probably not, and should stop reading right here.) The office of Occupational Safety and Health has ruled that the proper disposal of hazardous materials is required under regulation 1.848 section b of the Clean Minds Act. Our lawyers have ruled that in academic settings hazardous ideas can be included under these regulations because although they are not obviously materials, as Marx wrote, ideas become a material force when they grip the masses. When they haven’t gripped the masses they may still be regarded as hazardous materials under the talmudic principle of building a wall around the Torah: something already is what it may potentially become in the wrong hands and may be treated as such. Thus a centrifuge might concentrate uranium and therefore is practically a nuclear weapon, or teaching geography in a Bad Country may train children to pick targets.
Review: Steven Hiatt, ed., with introduction by John Perkins, A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption (San Francisco: BK Currents, 2007), 310 pages, paper $24.95. Just before John Perkins, author of the bestselling Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, decided it was no longer possible to remain silent about his intimate involvement in the economic warfare waged against the Global South, he sat despondently before the ruins of Ground Zero, totally incapable of visualizing the tragedy: all he could see was a U.S. contractor delivering millions of dollars of weapons to the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Perkins understood himself—a former economic advisor for a multinational utilities contractor, similar to Bechtel—and others like him, to be products of a “system that promotes the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever witnessed.”1 Mainstream commentators addressing Perkins’s book ignored the vivid recounting of his own personal involvement as an economic hit man. This is undoubtedly because Perkins used this experience to emphasize the substantial connections between U.S. intelligence agencies, multinational corporations, and political elites of the Global South, laying bare the true motives of “development.” As an “economic hit man,” Perkins fabricated nearly every economic forecast he was asked to produce—as his bosses clearly expected him to do. This led him to repeatedly attack U.S. economic dogma in Confessions...
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