Biofuelling Poverty - EU plans could be disastrous for poor people, warns Oxfam

EU plans to increase the use of biofuels could spell disaster for some of the world's poorest people warns international agency, Oxfam in a new briefing published today:
Oxfam briefing note: Biofuelling poverty

EU proposals will make it mandatory by 2020 for ten per cent of all member states' transport fuels to come from biofuels. In order to meet the substantial increase in demand, the EU will have to import biofuels made from crops like sugar cane and palm oil from developing countries. But the rush by big companies and governments in countries such as Indonesia, Colombia, Brazil, Tanzania and Malaysia to win a slice of the 'EU biofuel pie' threatens to force poor people from their land, destroy their livelihoods, lead to the exploitation of workers and hurt the availability and affordability of food.

"In the scramble to supply the EU and the rest of the world with biofuels, poor people are getting trampled. The EU proposals as they stand will exacerbate the problem. It is unacceptable that poor people in developing countries should bear the cost of questionable attempts to cut emissions in Europe," said Robert Bailey from Oxfam.

Biofuels may offer the potential to reduce poverty by increasing jobs and markets for small farmers, and by providing cheap renewable energy for local use, but the huge plantations emerging to supply the EU pose more threats than opportunities for poor people. The problem will only get worse as the scramble to supply intensifies unless the EU introduces safeguards to protect land rights, livelihoods, workers rights and food security.

EU member states agreed that the ten per cent target must be reached sustainably, but Oxfam warns that the current proposals contain no standards on the social or human impact.

"The EU set its biofuel target without checking the impact on people and the environment. The EU must include safeguards to ensure that the rights and livelihoods of people in producing countries are protected. Without these, the ten per cent target should be scrapped and the EU should go back to the drawing board," said Bailey.

"Let's be clear, biofuels are not a panacea - even if the EU is able to reach the ten per cent target sustainably, and Oxfam doubts that it can, it will only shave a few per cent of emissions off a continually growing total."

Published reports show that as much as 5.6 million square kilometres of land - an area more than ten times the size of France - could be in production of biofuels within 20 years in India, Brazil, Southern Africa and Indonesia alone. The UN estimates that 60 million people worldwide face clearance from their land to make way for biofuel plantations. Many end up in slums in search of work, others on the very plantations that have displaced them with poor pay, squalid conditions and no worker rights.

Women workers are routinely discriminated against and often paid less than men.

In Indonesia almost a third of palm oil is produced by smallholders most of whom lost their land to advancing plantations and were 'rewarded' with a two hectare plot. These smallholders are bonded to the palm oil companies which provide them with credit and are required to sell to them - which means they do not get the best price for their oil.

Abet Nego Tarigan, deputy director of Sawit Watch which represents communities, farmers and plantation workers affected by palm oil development in Indonesia, said:

"Decisions on biofuels made in Europe are directly affecting millions of people in Indonesia. In the relentless pursuit of biofuel gold, big powerful palm oil companies are callously clearing communities from land they have farmed for generations, workers and small holders are shamefully exploited and we are losing valuable agricultural land to grow the food we need to feed ourselves and make a living. The proposed EU policy will only make this worse - pushing more people into poverty and concentrating land in the hands of a few."

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Al Gore

In a Sunday afternoon, two days after Al Gore received the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I sat down with him in the leafy, wooded back yard of his Nashville home. Following a lunch of steak he barbecued with Tipper, his wife of thirty-seven years, he spoke with passion and confidence about the future. Gore these days is unleashed. He is fully comfortable with his decision to not run for president – which he discusses in detail here – now that an even more important mission is at hand.

What are the most profound changes the country is going to face in the next twenty years, and how would you define the key issues?

It’s a mistake to think of the climate crisis as one in a list of issues that will define our future. It’s the issue. Everything else has to be viewed through that lens. Many other challenges are important, some of them are critical, and there’s more than one issue we have to get right in order to survive in a way that honors the idea of America. Our democracy has been weakened. The core ideas of our founders have been disrespected and violated. HIV/AIDS and other pandemics threaten to ravage tens, even hundreds of millions. The global ecological system has been utterly devastated. Millions of children die every year for lack of clean water and penicillin and basic preventive-health measures. In too many parts of the world, the levels of persecution and suffering are far beyond what the conscience of humankind should tolerate. Sexual slavery, the oppression of minority groups, the struggles of people to overcome the yoke of dictatorship – all of these challenges and others as well cry out for attention. But none of them can be solved unless we solve the climate crisis.

The climate crisis must be seen as pre-eminent, because it is necessary for us to safeguard the ecological basis for human civilization. And in solving it, we will gain the moral authority and capacity for longer-term vision that will help us solve these other crises. The newest evidence shows that unless we act boldly and urgently, the entire north polar ice cap could be completely gone in one generation – less than twenty-two years. That’s shocking to those who, like me, have spent three decades trying to understand the dimensions of this crisis. Every time you immerse yourself in the core research data, you come back up with the conclusion “Oh, my God, it’s even worse than I thought.”

How bad is it?

We’ve quadrupled the human population in a hundred years, we have magnified a thousand fold the power of the common technologies that we use. That combination has made us the bull in the china shop, and the china shop is the only home we have – Earth. And we’re now dumping more than 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere every twenty-four hours. That is trapping more and more heat from the sun, melting the ice, making the storms stronger, parching the land and threatening to

destroy the climate equilibrium that has been friendly to human civilization. The north polar ice cap is melting, the fires are burning, the sea level is rising, living species are going extinct. These and many other manifestations, including half the U.S. being in drought last year, are visible to the naked eye. We have got to recognize that even though it’s never happened before, it is happening right now.

Do you ever worry that it might be too late?

No. It’s a fair question, and I’ll admit that part of my defiant answer, no, is rooted in hope. But I’m comforted by the fact that the handful of scientists who have mastered the multiple disciplines needed to answer that question all say, “No, it is not yet too late, we have time. We don’t have much time, but we do have time.”

Even if we crossed the negative tipping point beyond which it becomes irretrievable – and I don’t think we will – we would still have the moral obligation to act quickly, because then we’d be dealing with degrees of irretrievability. Take the north polar ice cap: Even if it disappeared in the summertime, we could, over the course of a few centuries, shift back into a positive balance and begin to grow the amount of ice that refreezes each winter. We’d have a chance, some centuries from now, to grow back multiyear ice.

So how do we engineer the sweeping social and political and industrial change that we need in a short period of time, from top to bottom?

Einstein once said, “The problems that face us cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them. What we need is a shift in consciousness.”

How do we get there?

Forty-five years ago, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Twenty years before that, Joseph Schumpeter wrote about the way changes in consciousness take place in business. Both Kuhn and Schumpeter described a process whereby our current way of thinking about the world – who we are, how we live – is challenged by new facts that don’t seem to fit the old explanations. When enough unexplainable new phenomena pile up, there is sometimes a shift in consciousness that moves us quickly and suddenly to recognize a new pattern that explains all of these things that have been mysterious in the context of the old way of thinking. That’s what we’re on the cusp of right now.

Still, you need laws enacted, you need to confront extraordinarily powerful interests that are entrenched with billions of dollars of profits and hundreds of thousands of jobs. How do you get there? It can’t be just consciousness – there’s more to it than that.

Of course there is, and bills are introduced all the time in the U.S. Congress that embody the specifics of many of the changes that are needed. The reason they go nowhere is that public opinion has not yet changed, because the shift in consciousness has not yet occurred. But the new way of thinking will soon reach a critical mass – and when it does, you’re going to see a flip.

Look at Texas, where TXU wanted to build eleven new coal plants. Mayors all across that state, Republican and Democratic alike, were spurred by their grassroots supporters to rise up and say, “No, you don’t. We will not allow you to build all of these dirty coal plants here.” The entire deal collapsed, until it was reworked by an environment-minded group that said, “Wait a minute, let’s rejigger this whole thing and apply green standards.” All across the world, you’re seeing developments like that. You’re also going to see people practicing civil disobedience, lying in front of the bulldozers and the dump trucks to physically prevent the building of any new coal-fired plants.

Where does nuclear energy fit in the solution?

I’m not a reflexive and automatic opponent of nuclear power. I used to represent Oak Ridge in Tennessee, where we’re immune to the effects of radiation [laughs]. But I’ve become skeptical that it will play more than a limited role in solving the climate crisis. I’ve been to Chernobyl, and I’ve been to Three Mile Island. Moreover, even if the risk of accidents and the problem of storing long-term waste can be solved, that still leaves two other problems. Number one, Iran and North Korea developed their nuclear weapons programs through their reactor programs. If we put tens of thousands of these reactors worldwide in places like Cambodia and Burma and Sudan, the world would be a much more dangerous place.

The second problem is economics. There have been no nuclear power plants ordered in the United States since 1973, mainly because they take the most money to build, they take the longest time to build, and they only come in one size, extra large. And when you have a lot of uncertainty over the future price of energy, utility executives don’t want to bet all their chips on something that won’t be ready for another fifteen years.

If you were a historian, how would you describe the Bush administration from that point of view?

They have done so much damage to the spirit of America, to the worldwide reputation of America, to the morale of our people, to the core belief that we’re capable of managing our fears without sacrificing our freedom. But nobody’s going to be surprised to hear me give a thumbs-down rating to Bush and Cheney.

What is the worst damage they’ve done, other than the climate crisis?

They have promoted the idea that freedom and security are mutually exclusive, that you can have one only to the extent that you’ve sacrificed the other. That is an un-American idea. When our founders framed our Constitution, they understood the reality of war. When the Declaration of Independence was written, it was written by Americans who were in danger of being hung. They had reason to fear for their very lives, every single one of them, but they insisted on the protection of habeas corpus and freedom of speech and freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, and the separation of self-government from the establishment of a religious dogma as an official set of beliefs. They had real courage that bridged their devotion to freedom and their need for security.

But instead of courage, this administration has used fear to undermine that system of checks and balances and the carefully balanced relationship between separate branches of government and the principle that all of the operations of our self-government should be accountable to the people. The arrogance and unaccountability of absolute power is corrupting, and our founders knew that so well. They embodied in our nation a universal principle derived from a millennium and a half of history, from Athens to Rome through the Enlightenment to the American Revolution. But all of that has been blithely ignored by this administration because of their lust for power.

It’s not just the excesses of Bush and Cheney – it’s the failure of our Congress, our courts, our free press, and all of us, to speak up and prevent this degradation of the American idea.

Let’s talk about the failure of the Congress. Even with the current leadership, we have failed to deal with Iraq, we are on the edge of passing another wiretapping law, we can’t seem to increase the taxes on billionaires. What’s going on with the Congress, what’s wrong in there? Where’s the failure?

It is way premature to say the Democrats in the Congress have proven to be failures in bringing about what so many of us want to see. I will grant you that there is a distressingly large group within the Democratic majority that too frequently gives their votes to the special interests that finance their campaigns, the same way they finance the Republicans’ campaigns. As a result, many of those who we have sweated blood to elect end up joining with Republicans too much of the time. But that’s the way our system works, and it’s up to we the people, forgive the cliché, to redouble our passion for the kind of change that’s needed.

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are doing heroic work and should be cut some slack for the fact that they can’t get instant results. They’ve made significant progress, even though our Founding Fathers gave us a system that is designed to make change by means of passing laws quite a difficult thing. Those of us who want change have to give them sixty reliable votes in the Senate – and the way this election is trending, we have an excellent chance of getting those sixty votes. We’ve had Republican incumbent after Republican incumbent announcing retirement in the face of what is clearly shaping up as a tidal wave of disgust and rejection of the unprecedented arrogance and failures of the ideology that has created such destruction for the American landscape.

The wind is at our backs – make no mistake about that. If we keep our wits about us, we have a chance in this election to really bring about historic change.

What do you think the Democratic Party ought to be standing for right now?

First and foremost, a definitive solution to the climate crisis. I say with disappointment, they’re nowhere close to that right now, but I think they will get there. I know it sounds unrealistic right now, but there’s going to be a grass-roots uprising that results in the climate crisis rising to the top of the agenda.

We have to restore the American idea to its preeminent place. We need to protect the dignity and freedom of individuals, we need to respect our ability as free citizens to use the instruments of government to lift up those who have been left behind. In this globalized, outsourcing world, we need to redouble our commitment to education and training and infrastructure, and, most importantly, to the aggressive development of an entirely new generation of clean

energy technologies and sustainable communities that will position us to lead the world in the dramatic transition we have to make in this decade.

What should the next president’s agenda be? Climate change is at the top of it, but what should we be expecting out of new leadership in concrete terms?

The next American president should see the position of the United States in the world community in terms that are very similar to those seen by Harry Truman, who saw us as the only nation capable of leading the world and establishing a set of conditions that can promote the general advance of prosperity and justice everywhere on this planet. With the United States leading the entire world community toward a new era of sharply reduced global-warming pollution, we will see a transformation of our civilization in a way that makes it possible for us, like the World War II generation, to see the other moral imperatives we have to undertake: ending the genocide in Darfur, ending the devastation of the ocean fisheries and the destruction of the tropical forests, ending the hunger and reducing the grinding poverty that now prevails in so much of the world. Those challenges are currently seen as political problems, but they’re actually moral imperatives in disguise, and we have to focus on enhancing our capacity for dealing with them.

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to go into politics now?

Go into it, and use the Internet. Focus on authentic, passionate communication of exactly what you believe, and wait for people to come to it.

What does it take to get good leadership?

A change in consciousness.

Is that possible in the current political climate?

Yeah. As I argue in The Assault on Reason, we are in between eras. The age of print, which lasted for 500 years, gave way sixty years ago to the dominance of television. The Internet age and the digital world is clearly the world of the future, but we are in this time warp where the most powerful medium, by far, is still TV. In the last election, candidates in both major parties spent eighty percent of their campaign budgets not on the Internet, not on newspaper ads, but on thirty-second television commercials.

The most urgent task right now in terms of communications law is to make absolutely certain that the Internet remains free – Net neutrality is seen as kind of an arcane issue. But we should be promoting and defending Net neutrality and the freedom of the Internet with just as much passion as our founders brought to the challenge of securing the freedom of the printing press. It is just that important. The survival of democracy depends upon it.

How has your perspective on politics changed since you left office?

Let me count the ways. I respect the profession, and I honor those who are engaged in pursuing elective office, and I encourage young people to get involved. But what politics has become requires a tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I personally find I have in short supply. That’s not to say that at some point in the future I might not see a situation that convinced me it was worthwhile to get involved in politics again. But that’s extremely unlikely. I keep that caveat in place, by the way, not to be coy, and not to signal to anybody that I’m thinking about doing it. I’m just being honest. I’m only fifty-nine years old – and fifty-nine is the new fifty-eight.

There is a feeling abroad right now, especially ith the Nobel Prize, that the presidency could be yours for the asking. Do you feel sad or guilty about saying no to that?

No, not at all.

There are obviously people asking you all the time. You don’t feel an obligation to the historical moment?

Well, I understand that point of view. But I personally don’t feel as if I have to apologize for devoting so much of my life to a different kind of campaign to bring about a change in consciousness and an elevated sense of urgency about solving the climate crisis. It’s a global challenge, and I’m working around the world to try to bring about this change in thinking.

At the same time, I fully understand and appreciate the point of view that there really is no position in the world with as much potential impact and influence as that of the president of the United States, and I totally respect that. But I’m not sure that the highest and best use of whatever talents and experiences I’ve gained isn’t best focused on solving the climate crisis, instead of doing all of the many things that a candidate for president has to do. I think it’s conceivable that a president of the United States could redefine every challenge as something that needs to be seen through the prism of solving the climate crisis and, in that way, rally the nation and the world to rise to solve this existential crisis. But I don’t think our country or the world are at that point right now. Some countries are farther along than we are, and I think we’ll get there, but we’re not there yet.

So you don’t think that if you stepped into it and crusaded on that subject, that it would be enough to elect you?

Well, I don’t even get to the point where I analyze the political instrumentality of it.

That being your passion, that being what you want to accomplish, that moment is not at hand?

That’s different from what I said. I just don’t think I can say that’s the best use of the talents I have right now.

If you got involved in a presidential campaign, it’s too distracting, there’s too much other stuff going on, and you’re not able to make climate change the fundamental issue.

I’ve been through enough now and I’ve lived long enough to know that I wouldn’t be distracted. I would do this regardless. But my job is to create the conditions to make that a strategy that succeeds. And I don’t think we’re at that point yet.

The current presidential candidates call me from time to time, and I talk to them. I’m not going to use any names here, because this could apply to three or four candidates who have said similar things, and I’m not going to use their exact words. Basically the question was, “Al, do you have any advice on how I could tweak my position on the climate crisis?” I always respond, “Look, we’re way beyond tweaking – we have to have fundamental change. We ought to eliminate the payroll tax and replace it with a CO 2 tax. We ought to have a complete ban on any new coal-fired generating plants that don’t completely capture and store the carbon. We ought to have a full investment tax credit for all advanced solar-thermal power plants, which could supply most of the electricity this country needs. We ought to change the utility laws so that every person and every business in the United States can install photovoltaic panels and small windmills and sell unlimited quantities of electricity into the grid.”

And you don’t think it’s doable, really?

I think I have a pretty realistic view of how the American political system operates. I’ve been around it a long time, and I think I see it pretty clearly. The only way it will become doable is if I and others continue to plow and plant and cultivate the political environment to where it becomes possible. If that means that I see it over the horizon and somebody else gets there and I don’t, then I would still feel, under those circumstances, that I had lived a useful life.

Do I rule out the possibility that that set of conditions emerges before I’m too old to still be a leader capable of making hourly decisions in a crisp and effective way? No, I don’t think it’s impossible.

Look, I’m content. I’m not content with where the world is right now, I’m not content with where my country is right now, but I am content that I am doing what I ought to be doing. In terms of my career path, I’m doing what feels like the right thing to do right now.

So no twinges about not being in a Holiday Inn in Iowa right now?

[Laughs] No. Look, the fear of defeat holds no terrors for me whatsoever. The burden of staying in Holiday Inns and traveling all the time and making speeches all the time is not something that is a factor.

In fact, a couple of my friends have said recently, “Al, why don’t you take a break and run for president?” This is not a life of luxury and ease that I’m leading. I have the opportunity now to be successful in the private sector, and I’m grateful for that, but I’m working my ass off damn near ever y day.

You remain the vessel of a lot of people’s hopes. What do you say to those people?

Well, thank you for feeling that way about me. Please trust me to make good decisions about where I can do the most good, and don’t automatically assume that running for president again is the right thing for me to do. If you feel that way and I decide for sure not to be a candidate again – well, sorry. If I do get back involved in the political system at some point in the future – well, keep that energy stored up and let’s have a go at it then.

What would it take to make politics responsive to the people’s will?

So long as the ability to buy thirty-second TV ads is the key to getting elected, special interests are going to find ways to put way too much money into politics. I would try to use the Internet to mobilize millions of people at the grass-roots level, and I think that’s coming. As I said earlier, we have the wind at our backs. This is going to be an American century – we’re going to come back strong.

In 1988, when you were running for president, you visited “Rolling Stone” for the first time and said that our generation faced two challenges – saving the environment and ending the nuclear-arms race – and that you wanted to lead it. How did you do?

[Laughs] I want to be careful not to take credit for anything – my role was small and limited. But I will claim credit to being a part of a group of six members of Congress who joined a half-dozen people or so in the Reagan administration in the Eighties to co-create the intellectual capital that formed the basis of the INF Treaty in Europe and the START Treaty with the former Soviet Union. And those two agreements fundamentally changed the course of the nuclear-arms race.

On the climate crisis, I feel like I’ve failed so far. But I’m not done yet. Even though we’ve made progress, we have not yet seen the increased sense of urgency that is appropriate to this challenge. We’ll get there, but only when we have a sea change in public opinion, because only then will politicians in both parties respond.

How do you think this time will be remembered forty years from now?

Future generations will look back at the beginning of the twenty-first century and they will ask themselves, “How did they” – meaning us – “how did they find the moral courage to change the pattern of history, to break through to a new way of thinking about the place of human beings on this planet, and successfully solve a crisis on a planetary scale that so many people were telling them was impossible to solve? What happened? How did they break free of the political sclerosis and spiritual catatonia that paralyzed them for decades and quickly realize that the survival of human civilization was at stake? How did they then, with great imagination, creativity and spiritual courage, put in place the sweeping reforms that saved the ecological basis for human civilization, restored the balance essential for human survival and lay the foundation for the rewarding and beautiful civilization that we enjoy here in the future?”

by Janns Wenner / Rolling Stone

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We Can't Wait for Politicians to Embrace Clean Energy

Politicians in Washington are years away from embracing a massive investment in clean energy. We must start an energy revolution ourselves.

Conventional wisdom among environmentalists today says it would be unwise to pass a major climate change bill too soon. As long as the Bush veto looms and Republicans retain the filibuster club in the Senate, any climate change bill that passes through that birth canal is likely to be a stunted, shriveled thing. Better to wait until a strong bill can be passed than establish a weak policy now.

But energy is supposed to be different. President Bush has admitted that America is "addicted to oil," and he is a big booster of technology as the solution to global warming. At his major economies meeting on climate change in September, Bush called for an international fund to help developing nations finance clean-energy projects to stem climate change. But when he refused to offer a funding commitment or any other mechanism to implement the plan, international delegates turned up their noses and said they would wait till 2009 to engage the US on climate.

You might expect that Bush would be more willing to put his money where his mouth is where the US is concerned, but that does not seem to be the case.

Both houses of Congress passed energy bills last summer. The Senate, in particular, made a big effort to produce a bi-partisan consensus. Environmentalists are calling the new energy bill "a down payment on efforts to combat global warming." But President Bush has not come out in support of either the House or Senate version of the bill.

Meanwhile, getting both houses of Congress to sit down and reconcile what are two very different bills has been difficult. In early September, Democrats sent discouraging signals about any bill passing this session. Perhaps they heard from their constituents, because by the end of the month, Senator Reid was promising to appoint conferees soon. It was to have been last week and has now been postponed until after the Senate gets back from its Columbus Day recess. On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with other Democrats to discuss bringing an energy bill directly to the floor.

There is no question that public support for clean renewable energy is at an all time high. This is showing up at the state level where 31 states have now passed some sort of mandate to produce energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources. The National Governor's Association is proceeding to coordinate programs as best it can in the vacuum of federal energy policy. At an NGA forum on renewable energy, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (a Republican) said, "Energy is the defining issue of our time. The public is way ahead of the politicians ... there is enormous running room for policy makers to make significant advances ... there's an urgency to this issue, and none of us, Democrats, Republicans, politicians and the public have acted as urgently as we need to."

With such strong public support, why have the Democrats found it so difficult to produce an energy bill?

Cars, Coal and Nukes

One problem has been Michigan Rep. John Dingell, who chairs the House energy committee. Backing the position of Detroit automakers, Dingell refused to allow any increase in CAFE fuel mileage standards.

And while the House bill has no CAFE increase, the Senate bill lacks a Renewable Energy Standard (RES). The House passed an RES requiring utilities to generate 15 percent of their power from renewable sources (mostly solar, wind and biomass) by 2020. The US is one of the few nations left that has not adopted such a standard, but Bill Wicker, on the staff of Senate energy committee Chair Jeff Bingaman, said that the Republicans "blocked every effort" to include a national RES in the Senate energy bill.

Matt Letourneau, energy policy aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, the ranking member of the Senate energy committee, said that a national RES would be unfair to some regions of the country that don't have abundant renewable resources, particularly the Southeast. He said the standard is too high and it is "not possible" to get 15 percent of the region's power from renewable energy.

But Scott Sklar, a solar energy lobbyist, said that there is plenty of renewable energy in the Southeast. "The Southeast is biomass rich and solar rich. Solar could provide 5-6 percent of the region's power, wind, 1-2 percent, and biomass, 10-15 percent. The waste biomass from Hurricane Katrina alone could provide power for 30 years." Utilities can also substitute up to 4 percent of the target with increases in efficiency.

Lynn Hargis, a former attorney with FERC, who now works for Public Citizen monitoring energy regulation, said that the real problem is giant utility companies in the South like Duke, Entergy and Southern Company that want to make huge profits selling cheap coal-generated power in unregulated markets.

The Senate bill also includes loan guarantees of up to 50 billion dollars for nuclear power. Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen calls that "an unprecedented financial obligation" and says that inclusion of those loan guarantees in a final bill would "overwhelm any benefits" from the other provisions.

Analysts say that loans to build nuclear plants are distinctively "sub-prime" with the risk of utilities defaulting running well over 50 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Taxpayer billions wasted on boondoggle nuke plants are taxpayer billions that can't be spent putting solar panels on roofs or developing better batteries for electric cars.

Scott Sklar is less concerned about the loan guarantees. He says that any energy bill able to get past a Republican filibuster and a Bush veto will include loan guarantees for nuclear power, so there's no point in fighting it. He predicts that the Democrats will pass an energy bill by January or they "won't survive" the pressure from constituents, and that the bill will include lighter versions of the RES and CAFE standards along with renewed production tax credits for solar and wind power.

But if the RES and CAFE provisions are watered down even more than the current versions, what will that do to our climate policy down payment?

A new analysis released by Environmental Defense shows that if we do nothing, US greenhouse gas emissions will rise 35 percent by 2030. If all of the best provisions from both House and Senate versions pass and are vigorously implemented, emissions would climb only 4 percent above today's levels by 2030. But because many of the provisions allow flexibility, if they are not implemented aggressively, they will allow emissions to grow 22 percent by 2030.

Combine this flimsy "down payment" with the sub-prime nuke loans, and you don't end up with much value. We need to do a lot better than this if we are going to prevent the worst ravages of global warming and hang on to our planetary home.

Scott Sklar says it is possible that Democrats could produce a final energy bill that is stronger than both current versions, but they would have to "ram" it through.

Democratic leaders could bypass a formal conference committee and strike a bicameral deal to put an energy bill directly on the floor in both houses at once. Nancy Pelosi indicated on Wednesday that she would pursue that option. A strongly progressive energy bill might not survive a Bush veto, but at least it would energize the progressive constituency that is ready for a real energy revolution.

Struggle Behind the Scenes

Meanwhile, a series of skirmishes over coal between utilities, politicians, agencies and environmental groups is taking place right now.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Henry Waxman sent a letter to the US EPA objecting to their permitting of a coal-fired power plant in Deseret, Utah. Waxman said that the recent Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court decision requires EPA to address the coal plant's greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Sierra Club is following up with a lawsuit.

On September 14, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed five of the country's largest energy companies, demanding that they disclose the financial risks of their greenhouse gas emissions to shareholders.

Some environmental groups are targeting banks that invest in coal power plant construction. Rainforest Action Network is planning protests at Citi Group and Bank of America branch offices around the country on November 16. "We're going upstream," said a RAN spokesperson. "Without bank financing, utilities can't actually build any of those plants."

Peter Montague of Environmental Research Foundation reports that since the beginning of 2006 at least two dozen new coal-fired plants have been cancelled. Montague says, "A small but effective citizen's movement has managed to box in Big Coal."

Politicians are starting to declare themselves against coal. Barack Obama released his energy and global warming plan this week, saying he would oppose all new coal-fired generation that did not include carbon capture and storage technology.

Just last week, Tampa Electric Co., a Florida utility, announced it was canceling plans to build a coal plant with carbon capture and storage because of uncertainties around the technical feasibility. Florida is one state that has been very clear that it won't allow any new coal-fired generation without carbon capture and storage. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that it will take ten years of testing for the technology to mature, if we start today. But today there is not even one demonstration plant anywhere in the world that incorporates the complete cycle of carbon capture and storage.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid also opposes new coal plants and has introduced a far-reaching bill (S. 2076 -- the Clean Renewable Energy and Economic Development Act) that limits the federal financing of power transmission lines to those that carry at least 75 percent renewable energy. It applies the same standard to new power lines crossing federal land. This would keep Big Coal out of some of the new energy corridors that may be established under the Energy Policy Act (EPACT) of 2005.

But King Coal is hardly down for the count.

In early September, FERC designated a set of new national power corridors in the Northeast under the EPACT. State regulators and environmentalists are suspicious about the location of the corridors which seem designed to funnel cheap coal power from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast -- where states have already committed to reducing greenhouse gasses, but power demand is high. Under the EPACT, federal regulators can override state concerns. Environmental Defense is considering a lawsuit.

Power to the People

Michael Peevey, the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said in a recent opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle that the old energy paradigm, where large centralized generators convert fossil fuels to electricity which is sent over transmission lines to homes and businesses, is over. Solar, he says, is a "disruptive technology" that is changing everything. He says the California Solar Initiative passed last year is on track to power one million homes by 2017.

And in California, it is not just homes getting powered; it is also people who are getting empowered.

Van Jones, an environmental and social activist and cofounder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, was interviewed on the radio program Living on Earth last week about the impact of solar jobs on the American workforce:

There's a wonderful program, which I just can't stop bragging on, called 'Solar Richmond,' where they got a modest amount of money, got 20 guys -- you know low-income African American, Latino, Phillipino, one African-American woman. For nine weeks these guys got up, this young woman got up, every morning. They had to be there at nine o'clock. They had to learn these skills. Nine weeks later they did their first installation. There were local TV cameras there, solar employers were there saying, 'Hey, we need workers.' And you know, the look on these young people's faces. Often these are the young men who are always seen as the villains and yet here they are, nine weeks later, African American, Latino, with the baggy pants, the hair or whatever, but they've got their work boots on, they've got their orange jerseys on, and they're doing this work. And they are the ecological heroes.

One of the stupidest news stories on energy I've seen was a piece on CNN Money last week that said economists were "split" on whether renewable energy would create millions of new jobs. The article quoted experts at the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley affirming that installing solar arrays, building wind farms and producing biomass would create at least a million new jobs, not vulnerable to offshore outsourcing. To counter them, the article quoted the chief economist at a Manhattan consultancy, who said it would be unrealistic to count on job gains in the solar sector since the technology hasn't taken off yet and there is no way of knowing if it ever will. "You certainly don't want to move all sorts of money into an area that's not going to be viable," he said.

Sadly, there are still too many people like this brain-dead economist running things in this country. And there are still too many unfortunates living in the past, like the auto workers who have given up almost everything to hang on to production lines making Detroit Dinosaurs -- those gas guzzlers no one will want in a few years time when oil supply peaks and gas prices shoot up to the moon.

The future belongs to "Solar Richmond," and all we are waiting for now is for those who think they are in charge to catch up with rest of us so we can build this beautiful new future together.

Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor.

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Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again

When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore during Campaign 2000.

by Robert Parry

That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.

But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.

Lies and distortions about Al Gore remain an easy political commodity to sell, as we have seen in the renewed assault on Gore in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the news spread about the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore’s work publicizing the threat from global warming, both the right-wing media and major news outlets geared up to hype criticism of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in a ruling by an obscure English judge.

Hours before the Nobel Prize announcement, the Washington Post ran a news story quoting High Court Judge Michael Burton as detecting “nine errors” in the documentary and asserting that the alleged mistakes “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.”

Burton ruled that English schools could show the film but only with a cautionary advisory for students.

Burton’s ruling became a cause celebre for the American Right’s powerful media, which used it to discredit both Gore and the movement seeking to stop global warming. Mainstream news outlets, such as CNN, quickly fell into line, citing Burton’s ruling almost every time Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was mentioned on Oct. 12.

Right-wing Internet postings soon added the word “significant” between the words “nine” and “errors,” albeit without quotes around those three words together.

Lo and behold, on Oct. 13, the Washington Post ran a snarky editorial about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize claiming that Burton’s ruling had found “nine significant errors” – now put together in quotes. The editorial faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”

For his part, Gore has sought to play down the significance of Burton’s ruling, much as he tried to finesse press misstatements about him during Campaign 2000. Rather than confronting false quotes then about him claiming to have “invented the Internet” and to be the one who “started” the Love Canal clean-up, Gore tried to make light of the misunderstandings so he wouldn’t be further bashed as “defensive.”

Similarly now, Gore’s spokesman Kalee Kreider cited the positive side of Burton’s ruling, saying Gore was “gratified that the courts verified that the central argument of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by the scientific community.” [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2007]

However, like the “invented the Internet” canard and the press misquotes about Love Canal, Burton’s ruling quickly became the supposedly definitive judgment in dismissing the Gore documentary as the “Inconvenient Untruth.

Who Is Judge Burton?

Yet, regardless of where the Post editorial writers lifted the phrase “nine significant errors” – clearly not from their own news story – the more significant question should be: Why is Judge Burton suddenly the arbiter of truth on the complicated subject of global warming and on Gore’s lectures about the topic.

Burton, in his early 60s, is best known as an “employment appeal tribunal judge.” Though his career has attracted little public notice, he earned praise from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National Party for issuing a ruling in 2005 that applied the nation’s Race Relations Act “to cover the racial rights of White people.”

Hailing what it called Burton’s history-making ruling, the BNP said, “This now means that any organisations or companies that discriminate against a member of the British National Party are guilty of anti-white racism.” [BNP statement on Aug. 10, 2005]

Burton’s criticisms of Gore’s power-point presentation also read more like quibbles than anything “significant.”

At one point, for instance, Gore shows a photo of flooding on a Pacific island and in reference to rising sea levels states, “That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”

Gore’s brief remark doesn’t spell out exactly which islands he was referring to or whether the evacuations were permanent or temporary.

But Burton took Gore to task over the sentence. As recounted by the Telegraph (U.K.), Burton’s ruling states that “An Inconvenient Truth” claims that low-lying Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but that there is no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

While Gore’s single sentence could be criticized as imprecise or confusing, Burton is not entirely correct either.

The leaders of Tuvalu, a string of islands between Hawaii and Australia, announced in 2001 that they had no choice but to abandon their island-country because of rising sea levels and asked permission to relocate all 11,000 inhabitants to New Zealand. [See article by the Earth Policy Institute, Nov. 15, 2001.]

Since then, New Zealand has agreed to a plan for the gradual evacuation of Tuvalu and other Pacific islands facing environmental catastrophe. [See report from Friends of the Earth International.]

Evacuation Begun

Contrary to Burton’s ruling, the evacuation of Tuvalu already has begun, according to travel reporter Janine Israel in a 2004 story about the expected loss of these picturesque islands to potential tourists.

“Over recent decades, the remote Pacific nation [of Tuvalu] has been beset by frequent floods, cyclones, and rising sea levels.” Israel wrote. “Tuvalu’s 10,500 inhabitants have already begun the dreaded process of evacuating to New Zealand, which has agreed to accept 75 Tuvaluans per year as environmental refugees. …

“Tuvalu has been given 50 years before it sinks beneath the waves. Although the melting of glaciers and icecaps is partly responsible for the rise in sea level, it is also due to the warming of the seawater, which expands when heated.

“And it isn’t alone. Other low-lying island nations are at the frontline of climate change. Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Palau, Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Republic of the Marshall Island, Tokelau, and the Republic of Maldives are all gearing up for a Noah’s Flood. For intrepid travelers, these are the countries to visit before they slip off the map for good.”

Given this unfolding tragedy, Burton’s querulous point would seem to be finicky at best.

Judge Burton also blasts Gore for supposedly suggesting that “in the near future” a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland.

“This is distinctly alarmist,” the judge wrote, arguing that sea levels may indeed rise that much “but only after, and over, millennia” and the idea that the melting would occur “in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus,” the Telegraph reported.

But in “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore never said the 20-foot rise in sea level would occur quickly or even at all.

Referring to Antarctica’s giant ice cap, Gore said, “If this were to go, sea levels world wide would go up 20 feet.” A similar rise could result from the complete thawing of Greenland’s ice cover, Gore said.

“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of west Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” Gore said as slides showed what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would do to coastlines around the world.

While Burton’s ruling fits with the characterization of Gore’s comments as popularized in the right-wing news media, it doesn’t match up with what Gore actually said.

Gulf Stream

Judge Burton also puts words in Gore’s mouth in other alleged “errors.” For instance, he notes that Gore’s documentary refers to the danger of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” which powers the Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures in Western Europe.

Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. agency which shared the Nobel Prize with Gore, Burton said it’s “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, though it might slow down.

Again, however, Burton is adopting a contentious interpretation of Gore’s comments. Gore refers to the shutting down of the Ocean Conveyor in a historical context, when a vast reservoir of North American ice melted and flooded into the North Atlantic, causing a disruption of the Gulf Stream and an ice age in Europe.

Gore’s description of this historic event suggests that something similar could occur if the Greenland ice cap melted, but again Burton is exaggerating Gore’s comments before attacking them.

Similarly, Burton asserts that Gore claimed that two graphs – one representing CO2 levels and the other global temperatures – showed “an exact fit.” The judge ruled that while there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”

But what did Gore actually assert and where did the judge get the words “an exact fit”?

In that segment of the film, Gore doesn’t use the phrase “exact fit,” although he does joke that a sixth-grade classmate who once asked a teacher if the continents of Africa and South America ever “fit together” might have a similar comment about the two graphs.

Gore then states, “The relation is actually very complicated but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this, when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun.”

While there are legitimate questions about the precise correlation between past changes in CO2 and earth temperatures, Burton ignores Gore’s admission that “the relation is actually very complicated” and instead puts the words “exact fit” into Gore’s mouth.

Judge Burton plays a similar trick regarding Gore’s references to the destruction from Hurricane Katrina and other powerful storms. Burton claims that there is “insufficient evidence” to support Gore’s supposed claim that global warming caused Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans.

But Gore never makes that direct connection. He does show footage of extreme weather from around the globe, which many scientists believe has been made worse by rising temperatures, but Gore never specifically attributes Katrina or the other examples of flooding to global warming.

Again, Burton has set up a straw man and knocked it down.

Disappearing Snow

Burton faults Gore, too, for attributing the disappearance of snow caps on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The judge ruled that scientists haven’t established that the receding of ice and the worsening of droughts are primarily attributable to human-caused climate change.

Regarding Lake Chad, Burton said “it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability,” the Telegraph reported.

While Burton is entitled to his scientific opinions, Gore’s concern that warming temperatures have reduced snow cover and contributed to faster evaporation of water is not a particularly controversial point of view.

Burton’s other cited “errors” are even more trivial. Gore is taken to task for saying that polar bears have been drowning because they face swims of up to 60 miles through open ice. Burton asserts that the confirmed cases show four bears drowning during storms, though he acknowledges that it makes sense to expect future drowning-related deaths of bears if ice caps continue to melt.

Gore’s last “error” supposedly was to warn that coral reefs were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. While agreeing with Gore that rising temperatures could increase coral bleaching and fatality, Burton ruled that it was difficult to separate the impact of climate change from other problems, such as pollution.

[For the full list of Burton’s alleged “errors,” see Telegraph (U,K.), Oct. 11, 2007.]

In other words, Burton appears to be a quirky judge who is prone to quibbling over minor nuances. But the larger significance of Burton’s ruling – as it is now championed by right-wing and mainstream U.S. news outlets – is that the vilification of Al Gore is not likely to cease, even with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize.

That also should be a cautionary lesson to Democrats seeking the White House. The political/media dynamic of Washington has changed little since Campaign 2000. The powerful right-wing news outlets still can make little controversies big and big controversies little.

Plus, major news outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, continue to fall into line.

The Washington insider community also shows no serious readiness to reexamine its failures in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency and the devastating Iraq War, which now even retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces, calls a “nightmare with no end in sight.”

It’s all so much easier to continue making fun of Al Gore.

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Gore to recieve Sierra Club's highest award

Former Vice President Al Gore, who has spent 30 years making the world aware of the dangers of global warming, will receive the Sierra Club's top award this year, the environmental group announced today.

Between his earliest political career in 1976 as a representative of Tennessee's Fourth District, and his two-term vice presidency beginning in 1993, Gore helped set the political and popular stages for prime-time environmentalism, the Sierra Club said today.

He was one of the first politicians to grasp the seriousness of climate change and to call for a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. He held the first congressional hearings on the subject in the late 1970s.

Since then, he has presented the science behind global warming and its predicted catastrophic effects more than 1,000 times. His message reached the general public with the 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." The film has won numerous awards, including two Academy Awards. His paperback book of the same name reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller list.

On July 7, 2007, Gore reached a global audience with his Live Earth Concerts, when he orchestrated 24 hours of concerts on seven continents asking for each person watching to make a pledge to take action for the environment. He has been nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change.

The award Gore will receive, the John Muir Award, commemmorates Sierra Club founder John Muir, who lived from 1838 to 1914. His letters, essays, and books about the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California are still read today. His direct actions helped to save the Yosemite Valley and other wilderness areas.

"Al Gore is the embodiment of the principles for which John Muir passionately devoted his life: to protect a place for its own sake, for our sake, and even in spite of us; a place we call Earth," said Sierra Club President Dr. Robbie Cox.

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John Gofman's Nuclear Courage

John Gofman 1918 - 2007

The life of eminent nuclear scientist and physician John Gofman ended last month just short of age 89. The New York Times obituary recounted his scientific résumé but ignored the backlash he faced from industry and government, simply describing him as a "nuclear gadfly." Gofman should be remembered for his brilliance and integrity, which are critical factors in the current debate over the future of nuclear power.

Gofman's brilliance was evident early. His doctoral dissertation described co-discoveries of radioactive uranium-232 and -233, and protactinium-232 and -233, and the ability to transform uranium-233 into an atomic bomb. Soon after graduation, Gofman joined the Manhattan Project to help win the race with Nazi Germany for the first atomic bomb. His team at the University of California, Berkeley, made more than one milligram of plutonium--the most created to that point--leading to the plutonium bombs tested in New Mexico and used at Nagasaki.

After the war, Gofman settled in at Berkeley as a teacher and researcher, focusing not on radiation but coronary disease. His pioneering work on lipoproteins in the blood--HDL and LDL cholesterol--remains a cornerstone of cardiology. In 1974 the American College of Cardiology named him as one of the twenty-five leading researchers in the field over the previous quarter-century.

But the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union pulled Gofman back into the nuclear world. In the early 1950s the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) set up a nuclear weapons research lab at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, fifty miles from Berkeley. Gofman formed the lab's medical department and worked part-time for several years, helping with calculations on health effects and problems of nuclear war before returning to Berkeley.

In late 1962, during the depths of cold war tensions, Livermore beckoned again. Massive atomic bomb testing by both superpowers was spreading fallout across the globe in unprecedented amounts, and the world came perilously close to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Gofman headed a biology and medicine lab; with an annual budget of more than $3 million, he formed a crackerjack staff of 150.

With scientists like Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov warning about hazards of bomb fallout, and with the government issuing repeated denials, a moral crisis was imminent for Gofman. Soon after he took over the lab, an official at Livermore asked him to help suppress publication of the work of AEC scientist Harold Knapp, who concluded that doses of radioactive iodine from bomb tests in Utah were much higher than the AEC had publicly admitted. Despite the warning that "we can't afford to have him publish that evidence," Gofman reviewed Knapp's analysis with his staff, and found it accurate. Refusing to yield to political heat, Gofman urged publication of the data, which the AEC reluctantly allowed.

Nuclear tensions eased after the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, signed by President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, banned atmospheric nuclear tests. But the treaty did not mean the end of the battle over fallout's harm. In 1969 University of Pittsburgh physicist Ernest Sternglass startled many when he published an article in Esquire magazine showing that for the first time in the twentieth century, the steady rate of decline in US infant death rates had halted as bombs were tested in the atmosphere. Sternglass calculated that 400,000 additional American infants died in the 1950s and early '60s, and suggested that fallout was the cause.

The AEC called on Gofman and his colleague Arthur Tamplin to debunk the article. Although Gofman later acknowledged that "Sternglass may have been right," the two estimated that excess infant deaths were about 4,000, not 400,000. But even that wasn't enough for AEC officials, who told them to publish only a critique with no estimates. They ignored the AEC and published the paper using the 4,000 figure.

By now, Gofman had built a reputation for being an obstacle to the AEC party line, but he had yet to be disciplined. A more cautious person might have stopped insisting that nuclear power was harming people, to preserve his professional status. But that wasn't John Gofman. Just months after the Sternglass controversy, he turned to radiation routinely emitted by nuclear power reactors, the darlings of the nuclear industry, heralded as a "peaceful" use of the atom.

In late 1969 Gofman and Tamplin were among the first scientists to oppose nuclear power in a paper asserting that even low-dose radiation harmed humans. "I realized that the entire nuclear power program was based on a fraud--namely that there was a 'safe' amount of radiation, a permissible dose that wouldn't hurt anybody," recalled Gofman. The duo calculated a worst-case scenario in which 32,000 additional Americans would die of cancer each year if everybody received the permissible AEC dose from reactors.

He proposed a five-year moratorium on new nuclear plants, declaring that "licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder." Gofman had now become too much for the establishment. In 1972 the AEC removed funding for twelve of thirteen of Tamplin's staff members. Later, it threatened to remove Gofman's $250,000 in funds for cancer research at Livermore. He applied to the National Cancer Institute for replacement funding but was rejected, as the blacklist extended throughout the federal government. Gofman resigned and went back to Berkeley.

Being ousted from Livermore didn't stop Gofman from investigating radiation risks. His 1985 book X-rays: Health Effects of Common Exams, co-written with Egan O'Connor, stated that 75 percent of cancer cases are caused by medical radiation, including X-rays, mammograms and CT scans. Doctors howled about how wrong and inflammatory Gofman was--while giving no evidence proving safety. He had now incurred the wrath of both of his chosen professions: physics and medicine. But he never stopped speaking out against the human toll radiation exacts, predicting that nearly 1 million people would develop cancer from Chernobyl, far more than any other estimate.

Gofman was certainly a courageous scientist. But was he right, and is his work relevant?

Are even small radiation doses harmful? A 2005 blue-ribbon panel of the National Academy of Sciences examined hundreds of articles and concluded that no safe threshold exists. The panel used reports from up to fifty years ago, when pelvic X-rays to pregnant women were found to raise the chance that the fetus would die of cancer as a child.

Could up to 32,000 Americans a year die from cancer from reactor emissions? A 1994 General Accounting Office report to Senator John Glenn estimated that the maximum exposure permitted by the government to every American would result in a lifetime premature cancer death risk of one in 300--or 1 million deaths, or about 14,000 cancer deaths a year--which fits Gofman's prediction, made when limits were higher.

Will 1 million people develop cancer from exposure to Chernobyl radiation? For years the International Atomic Energy Agency insisted that only 4,000 would die. But in 2006 a Greenpeace report from scientists who reviewed statistics from Belarus projected that 270,000 would develop cancer. Research continues, but with 5 million to 8 million people still living in highly contaminated areas, Gofman's estimate may yet prove to be correct.

Did thousands of infants die from bomb fallout half a century ago? The period 1950-1963 remains as the only part of the twentieth century in which infant deaths did not fall sharply, and is still unexplained. In 1992 British scientist R.K. Whyte published a paper in the British Medical Journal concluding that bomb fallout was the likely reason.

Do medical X-rays give people cancer? A storm of protest is growing over the number of X-rays, especially CT scans, administered to children, who are most susceptible to harm from radiation. The National Cancer Institute cautions that physicians should only conduct pediatric CT scans when necessary, adjust exposure parameters, minimize use of multiple scans in a single examination and consider alternatives to CT scans.

Validation of Gofman's findings is vital to the current debate over nuclear power. After a long decline, the nuclear industry has seized on concerns over global warming and costs of fossil fuels to tout reactors as a "clean and safe" alternative. Bush Administration regulators have thus far granted permission for more than half of US reactors to operate twenty years past their expected life span of forty years. Just last month the first order for a new US reactor since 1978 was made (at the Calvert Cliffs plant near Washington, DC). Congress is considering $50 billion in loan guarantees for construction of other new reactors.

Utility companies and the Bush Administration claim that reactors are safe--without furnishing any hard evidence backing their claim. They turn a blind eye to potential risks of a major meltdown and actual risks of ongoing radioactive emissions. Objective research and educating people of these risks regardless of political fallout was Gofman's legacy. There is no time like now for citizens and scientists to embrace this legacy to protect public health.

Joseph A Mangano - The Nation

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No to nukes

It's tempting to turn to nuclear plants to combat climate change, but alternatives are safer and cheaper.

JAPAN SEES NUCLEAR POWER as a solution to global warming, but it's paying a price. Last week, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake caused dozens of problems at the world's biggest nuclear plant, leading to releases of radioactive elements into the air and ocean and an indefinite shutdown. Government and company officials initially downplayed the incident and stuck to the official line that the country's nuclear plants are earthquake-proof, but they gave way in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Japan has a sordid history of serious nuclear accidents or spills followed by cover-ups.

It isn't alone. The U.S. government allows nuclear plants to operate under a level of secrecy usually reserved for the national security apparatus. Last year, for example, about nine gallons of highly enriched uranium spilled at a processing plant in Tennessee, forming a puddle a few feet from an elevator shaft. Had it dripped into the shaft, it might have formed a critical mass sufficient for a chain reaction, releasing enough radiation to kill or burn workers nearby. A report on the accident from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was hidden from the public, and only came to light because one of the commissioners wrote a memo on it that became part of the public record.

The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. No U.S. utility has ordered a new nuclear plant since 1978 (that order was later canceled), and until recently it seemed none ever would. But rising natural gas prices and worries about global warming have put the nuclear industry back on track. Many respected academics and environmentalists argue that nuclear power must be part of any solution to climate change because nuclear power plants don't release greenhouse gases.

They make a weak case. The enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste ensure that ramping up the nuclear infrastructure will be a slow process — far too slow to make a difference on global warming. That's just as well, because nuclear power is extremely risky. What's more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

Glowing pains

Modern nuclear plants are much safer than the Soviet-era monstrosity at Chernobyl. But accidents can and frequently do happen. The Union of Concerned Scientists cites 51 cases at 41 U.S. nuclear plants in which reactors have been shut down for more than a year as evidence of serious and widespread safety problems.

Nuclear plants are also considered attractive terrorist targets, though that risk too has been reduced. Provisions in the 2005 energy bill required threat assessments at nuclear plants and background checks on workers. What hasn't improved much is the risk of spills or even meltdowns in the event of natural disasters such as earthquakes, making it mystifying why anyone would consider building reactors in seismically unstable places like Japan (or California, which has two, one at San Onofre and the other in Morro Bay).

Weapons proliferation is an even more serious concern. The uranium used in nuclear reactors isn't concentrated enough for anything but a dirty bomb, but the same labs that enrich uranium for nuclear fuel can be used to create weapons-grade uranium. Thus any country, such as Iran, that pursues uranium enrichment for nuclear power might also be building a bomb factory. It would be more than a little hypocritical for the U.S. to expand its own nuclear power capacity while forbidding countries it doesn't like from doing the same.

The risks increase when spent fuel is recycled. Five countries reprocess their spent nuclear fuel, and the Bush administration is pushing strongly to do the same in the U.S. Reprocessing involves separating plutonium from other materials to create new fuel. Plutonium is an excellent bomb material, and it's much easier to steal than enriched uranium. Spent fuel is so radioactive that it would burn a prospective thief to death, while plutonium could be carried out of a processing center in one's pocket. In Japan, 200 kilograms of plutonium from a waste recycling plant have gone missing; in Britain, 30 kilograms can't be accounted for. These have been officially dismissed as clerical errors, but the nuclear industry has never been noted for its truthfulness or transparency. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained six kilograms.

Technology might be able to solve the recycling problem, but the question of what to do with the waste defies answers. Even the recycling process leaves behind highly radioactive waste that has to be disposed of. This isn't a temporary issue: Nuclear waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. The only way to get rid of it is to put it in containers and bury it deep underground — and pray that geological shifts or excavations by future generations that have forgotten where it's buried don't unleash it on the surface.

No country in the world has yet built a permanent underground waste repository, though Finland has come the closest. In the U.S., Congress has been struggling for decades to build a dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but has been unable to overcome fierce local opposition. One can hardly blame the Nevadans. Not many people would want 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood or transported through it on the way to the dump.

The result is that nuclear waste is stored on-site at the power plants, increasing the risk of leaks and the danger to plant workers. Eventually, we'll run out of space for it.

Goin' fission?

Given the drawbacks, it's surprising that anybody would seriously consider a nuclear renaissance. But interest is surging; the NRC expects applications for up to 28 new reactors in the next two years. Even California, which has a 31-year-old ban on construction of nuclear plants, is looking into it. Last month, the state Energy Commission held a hearing on nuclear power, and a group of Fresno businessmen plans a ballot measure to assess voter interest in rescinding the state's ban.

Behind all this is a perception that nuclear power is needed to help fight climate change. But there's little chance that nuclear plants could be built quickly enough to make much difference. The existing 104 nuclear plants in the U.S., which supply roughly 20% of the nation's electricity, are old and nearing the end of their useful lives. Just to replace them would require building a new reactor every four or five months for the next 40 years. To significantly increase the nation's nuclear capacity would require far more.

The average nuclear plant is estimated to cost about $4 billion. Because of the risks involved, there is scarce interest among investors in putting up the needed capital. Nor have tax incentives and subsidies been enough to lure them. In part, that's because the regulatory process for new plants is glacially slow. The newest nuclear plant in the U.S. opened in 1996, after having been ordered in 1970 — a 26-year gap. Though a carbon tax or carbon trading might someday make the economics of nuclear power more attractive, and the NRC has taken steps to speed its assessments, community opposition remains high, and it could still take more than a decade to get a plant built.

Meanwhile, a 2006 study by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research found that for nuclear power to play a meaningful role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the world would need to build a new plant every one to two weeks until mid-century. Even if that were feasible, it would overwhelm the handful of companies that make specialized parts for nuclear plants, sending costs through the roof.

The accelerating threat of global warming requires innovation and may demand risk-taking, but there are better options than nuclear power. A combination of energy-efficiency measures, renewable power like wind and solar, and decentralized power generators are already producing more energy worldwide than nuclear power plants. Their use is expanding more quickly, and the decentralized approach they represent is more attractive on several levels. One fast-growing technology allows commercial buildings or complexes, such as schools, hospitals, hotels or offices, to generate their own electricity and hot water with micro-turbines fueled by natural gas or even biofuel, much more efficiently than utilities can do it and with far lower emissions.

The potential for wind power alone is nearly limitless and, according to a May report by research firm Standard & Poor's, it's cheaper to produce than nuclear power. Further, the amount of electricity that could be generated simply by making existing non-nuclear power plants more efficient is staggering. On average, coal plants operate at 30% efficiency worldwide, but newer plants operate at 46%. If the world average could be raised to 42%, it would save the same amount of carbon as building 800 nuclear plants.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government spends more on nuclear power than it does on renewables and efficiency. Taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear industry amounted to $9 billion 2006, according to Doug Koplow, a researcher based in Cambridge, Mass., whose Earth Track consultancy monitors energy spending. Renewable power sources, including hydropower but not ethanol, got $6 billion, and $2 billion went toward conservation.

That's out of whack. Some countries — notably France, which gets nearly 80% of its power from nuclear plants and has never had a major accident — have made nuclear energy work, but at a high cost. The state-owned French power monopoly is severely indebted, and although France recycles its waste, it is no closer than the U.S. to approving a permanent repository. Tax dollars are better spent on windmills than on cooling towers.

Source: Los Angeles Times Editorial, July 23, 2007

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No future for nuclear energy

Here they go again. After thirty years without a firm order, the atomic power companies are pushing their radioactive, costly technology for a comeback on the backs of you the taxpayers.

The old argument in the Seventies was that nuclear powered electricity would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. With only three percent of our electricity coming from burning petroleum, the pro-nuke lobby is now jumping on the global warming bandwagon. Uranium, they argue, does not release greenhouse gases like coal or oil.

What nuclear lobbies ignore is all the coal and oil that needs to be burned to enrich uranium, to transport radioactive wastes with protective highway and rail convoys and provide security since they would be a priority target for sabotage.

Apart from that, let’s start with the technological insanity of the nuclear fuel cycle-from uranium mines and their deadly tailings, to the refining and fabrication into fuel rods, to the multi-shielded dome-like nuclear plant, to the necessity for perfect operation of the facility, to the still unresolved problems of the location and containment of hot radioactive wastes and contaminated material for the next 200,000 years!

All this for one objective-to boil water into steam. A pretty complex chain of events in order to boil water. There are far better, cheaper ways to meet the electricity needs of today’s generation without burdening future generations for centuries with the deadly waste products.

Back in the Seventies, before the public rose up and said no to nuclear power, helped by Wall Street’s reluctance to finance these trouble-prone plants, the Atomic Energy Commission projected the construction of 1000 atomic power plants in the U.S. by the year 2000. There are today 103 plants.

Placing the predicted 100 plants up and down the California coastline would have been an act of peerless recklessness, especially given the earthquake faults.

Just this week, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck Kashiwazaki, Japan and disabled a gigantic nuclear power plant which the New York Times reported, “raised new concerns about the safety of the nation’s accident-plagued nuclear industry.” It turns out that this plant, owned by Tokyo Electric Power, may be sitting directly above an earthquake fault line.

Each day, reports show damage greater than believed the day before, including radiation leaks, damage to exhaust ducts, burst pipes and other “malfunctions” beyond the fires. Several hundred barrels of radioactive waste were toppled.

The problem with nuclear power is that it gets one bite of the apple.

Just one major meltdown could provoke a demand to close the industry down by overwhelming adverse public outrage. You see, way back in the Fifties and Sixties, the Atomic Energy Commission, a booster-regulatory agency for atomic power plants, estimated that an “area the size of Pennsylvania” would be contaminated in such a disaster.

Remember, Chernobyl in Ukraine is still surrounded by vacant towns and villages following the 1986 tragedy. Radioactivity found its way as far as sheep in England, nuts grown in Turkey and elsewhere.

Do you know any other industry producing electricity that has to have specific evacuation plans for miles around it, is inherently a national security risk, cannot be privately insured without Congress mandating severe limited liability in case of massive casualties and requires massive taxpayer subsidies?

A most concise, authoritative case against the electric atom was recently released titled “Why a Future for the Nuclear Industry is Risky” by a group of environmental health and social investment groups. (See www.cleanenergy.org)

In the introduction to the report, the case against nuclear energy was summarized this way: “Wind power and other renewable technologies, combined with energy efficiency, conservation and cogeneration can be much more cost effective and can be deployed much sooner than new nuclear power plants.”

Yes indeed, efficiency or conservation, with a national mission, can cut in half the waste of energy, using currently available technology and know-how, before the first privately capitalized nuclear plant opens. One scientist once described the primary output of electric generating plants as “heating the heavens.”

If this insensitive industry cannot be revived by Uncle Sam’s tax treasury, Wall Street certainly has given no indication that private investment would take on the risk. Investment money is pouring presently into wind power, solar and other renewables and this is just the early springtime for these benign sources of energy.

The International Energy Agency sees a 25% cost reduction for wind power and a 50% cost reduction for solar photovoltaics from 2001 to 2020. Without Wall Street’s private capital and with rising construction and operating costs in other countries, the prospect for nuclear power being competitive, even deducting decommissioning costs, and the many
millennia of waste storage costs, is not there.

Add a major accident and you’ll see, in addition to casualties and contaminated land and property, every private investor running for cover while the bill is passed on to taxpayers.

Here is a suggestion to put the industry’s propaganda to rest. Will any high nuclear industry executive debate physicist Amory Lovins at the National Press Club filled with electric company leaders? If so, please visit http://www.rmi.org and contact Mr. Lovins.

by Ralph Nader, July 21, CommonDreams.org

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Liquid Coal Getting the Smashing it Deserves

Two proposed amendments to the federal energy bill have been soundly defeated.

The first, proposed by Sen Bunning (R-KY), would have set requirements that the U.S. use six billion gallons of coal-derived fuel by 2022. On June 19 this amendment went down 55-39 - click here to see how your Senator voted. A 'nay' vote is the vote for the environment, and I have to give credit where credit is due, Sen. Obama, long a proponent of liquid coal voted against this amendment.

The second amendment, proposed by Sen. Tester (D-MT), allowed for $10 billion in loan guarantees to produce liquid coal for uses beyond just transportation fuel. This one went down 61-33. You can check out the vote count here. Again, a 'nay' vote is the right vote, though here, Sen. Obama voted 'yea'. Admittedly, this amendment would be less horrible than the other, since it does offer some language on fighting global warming, but the simple reality is that with current technologies, any form of liquid coal is going to be dirtier than what we've got. And that doesn't even mention the insane cost inherent in getting liquid coal up and running.

Kudos to the Senate for shutting down these two amendments!

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