An operation with potentially "apocalyptic" consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now - "as early as November 8" - at Fukushima's damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor's upper floor.

While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event.

The Japan Times explained:

To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a 273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely from a separate room.

[...] spent fuel rods will be pulled from the racks they are stored in and inserted one by one into a heavy steel chamber while the assemblies are still under water. Once the chamber is removed from the pool and lowered to the ground, it will be transported to another pool in an undamaged building on the site for storage.

Under normal circumstances, such an operation would take little more than three months, but TEPCO is hoping to complete the complicated task within fiscal 2014.

A chorus of voices has been sounding alarm over the never-been-done-at-this-scale plan to manually remove the 400 tons of spent fuel by TEPCO, who so far has been responsible for mishap after mishap in the ongoing crisis at the crippled nuclear plant.

Arnie Gundersen, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, warned this summer that "They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods," and said that "To jump to the conclusion that it is going to work just fine is quite a leap of logic." Paul Gunter, MD, Director of the Reactor Oversight Project with Takoma Park, Md.-based Beyond Nuclear, also sounded alarm on Thursday, telling Common Dreams in a statement that "Given the uncertainties of the condition and array of the hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel assemblies, it will be a risky round of highly radioactive pickup sticks." Gundersen offered this analogy of the challenging process of removing the spent fuel rods:

If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out — but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing. […]

I suspect we’ll have more airborne releases as they try to pull the fuel out. If they pull too hard, they’ll snap the fuel. I think the racks have been distorted, the fuel has overheated — the pool boiled – and the net effect is that it’s likely some of the fuel will be stuck in there for a long, long time.

The Japan Times adds:

Removing the fuel rods is a task usually assisted by computers that know their exact location down to the nearest millimeter. Working virtually blind in a highly radioactive environment, there is a risk the crane could drop or damage one of the rods — an accident that would heap even more misery onto the Tohoku region.

As long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman explained, the

Spent fuel rods must be kept cool at all times. If exposed to air, their zirconium alloy cladding will ignite, the rods will burn and huge quantities of radiation will be emitted. Should the rods touch each other, or should they crumble into a big enough pile, an explosion is possible.

"In the worst-case scenario," RT adds,

the pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and cause an explosion many times worse than in March 2011.

Wasserman says that the plan is so risky it requires a global take-over, an urging Gunter also shared, stating that the "dangerous task should not be left to TEPCO but quickly involve the oversight and management of independent international experts."

Wasserman told Common Dreams that

The bring-down of the fuel rods from Fukushima Unit 4 may be the most dangerous engineering task ever undertaken. Every indication is that TEPCO is completely incapable of doing it safely, or of reliably informing the global community as to what's actually happening. There is no reason to believe the Japanese government could do much better. This is a job that should only be undertaken by a dedicated team of the world's very best scientists and engineers, with access to all the funding that could be needed.

The potential radiation releases in this situation can only be described as apocalyptic. The cesium alone would match the fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs. If the job is botched, radiation releases could force the evacuation of all humans from the site, and could cause electronic equipment to fail. Humankind would be forced to stand helplessly by as billions of curies of deadly radiation pour into the air and the ocean.

As dire as Wasserman's warning sounds, it is echoed by fallout researcher Christina Consolo, who told RT that the worst case scenario could be "a true apocalypse." Gunter's warning was dire as well.

"Time is of the essence as we remain concerned that another earthquake could still topple the damaged reactor building and the nuclear waste storage pond up in its attic," he continued. "This could literally re-ignite the nuclear accident in the open atmosphere and inflame it into hemispheric proportions," said Gunter.

Wasserman says that given the gravity of the situation, the eyes of the world should be upon Fukushima:

This is a question that transcends being anti-nuclear. The fate of the earth is at stake here and the whole world must be watching every move at that site from now on. With 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the place, as a ceaseless flow of contaminated water poisoning our oceans, our very survival is on the line.

Andrea Germanos is a CommonDreams.org Staff writer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

The planet could face irreversible and potentially catastrophic levels of global warming in just over 20 years unless the world commits to a much higher rate of decarbonisation.

A new report from leading consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions countries can release is likely to be blown by 2034.

This bank of carbon – around 270GtC even according to conservative estimates – will have been emptied if the global economy continues at its current decarbonisation rate of just 0.7% per year.

PwC have calculated that even doubling the current rate of decarbonisation to 1.4% per year will set the world on course to hit a 4C increase in global temperatures by 2100.

A World Bank report released in June described the extreme heat waves, sea level rise and severe droughts and floods that will hit the poorest and most vulnerable nations in a 4C world. It noted that some of the worst consequences could be avoided if temperatures were limited to under 2C.

Carbon budget

The UN-backed IPCC report, which brings together the most recent findings of climate science, found that in total the world can emit a total of 800GtC if there is to be even a 66% chance of remaining below the 2C mark. By 2011, 531GtC of this had already been emitted.

“The IPCC has included it as quite a central part of its report this year, and that is why we focused on it,” Jonathan Grant, director of PwC sustainability and climate change told RTCC.

He adds that it could play an important part in the UN talks on climate change between now and 2015, when governments will try to achieve a legally binding deal on emissions reductions.

“I think in theory we should move towards negotiations about which country gets which share of the carbon budget.

“I think the only way to say whether or not we’re on track for two degrees is if we convert these pledges into actual carbon budget numbers, but there are huge political challenges to trying to carve up the carbon budget in that way.”

Decarbonisation

The deadline of 2034 as the year at which the world could exceed its carbon budget means that businesses will have to factor it into any decisions on major infrastructure and capital investments. “Climate risks are now business risks,” the report warns.

Grant says: “The results raise real questions about the viability of our vast fossil fuel reserves, and the way we power our economy. The 2 degrees carbon budget is simply not big enough to cope with the unmitigated exploitation of these reserves.”

If the planet is not going to blow its carbon bank, the carbon intensity – the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP produced – will have to reduce by 6% every year up to 2100, the report finds.

This will not be an easy task, considering that no country has so far managed to sustain any high level of reductions, despite a similar alert from PwC in 2008 that the G20 needed to increase its decarbonisation rate by 3.5% per year to avoid dangerous warming. Currently, the rate stands at just 0.7%. The 6% figure now gives attempts to compensate for this shortfall.

The report points to the fact that, although the shale gas revolution in the US has significantly reduced the country’s emissions, the consequent reduction in coal price has simply increased emissions elsewhere. The percentage of the UK energy mix derived from coal increased from 30% in 2001 to 39% by 2012, while China has tripled its coal consumption since 2000.

Economic growth

The 6% figure for the rate of necessary decarbonisation based upon the projected growth of the global economy, which is forecast to triple in size between now and 2050 – although some economists have questioned whether such predictions can be counted on, should climate change continue unfettered.

“Our analysis assumes long term moderate economic growth in emerging economies, and slow steady growth in developed economies.
“But, failing to tackle climate change is unlikely to result in such a benign scenario of steady growth,” said Grant.

This means decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. Both developed and developing countries will have to challenge the notion, entrenched since the industrial revolution, that a nation’s wealth depends on the amount of fossil fuels it can burn.

The report says: “Unless economic growth is decoupled from carbon emissions we would face significant global warming which will have serious and far reaching implications.”

To be in a body is to hear the heartbeat of death at every moment. ~Andrew Harvey~

As I write these words in early November, 2013, humanity is confronting an unprecedented and horrific challenge which it may or may not survive. I’m referring to two uncanny realities about which we are not being told the unmitigated truth.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant which suffered a catastrophic meltdown on March 11, 2011 is poised to inflict death and disastrous illness on millions, if not billions of people, as a result of ghastly amounts of contaminated water that is gushing daily into the Pacific Ocean and has already been detected on the West coasts of Canada and the United States. (28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Fried By Fukushima Radiation)

A short video entitled Fukushima: Beyond Urgent, provides a complete explanation of what happened at Fukushima and the consequences in terms of atmospheric and oceanic pollution and ultimately, the life and death of species affected by those. According to physician, Helen Caldicott who has been researching nuclear radiation for decades, we are in a nuclear crisis and have been since March 11, 2011.

We have never been told the full extent of the effects of the Fukushima tragedy, nor can we easily grasp the incompetence of TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, that owns and manages the Fukushima plant. Throughout the duration of this incomprehensible nightmare, TEPCO has proven itself phenomenally inept and corrupt. The most extensively damaged reactor at Fukushima, Reactor 4, contains spent fuel rods that are highly radioactive and if not removed from the reactor, will continue to catch fire and spread pollution through the air.

Within the next few weeks, TEPCO is planning to remove some of the more than 1400 damaged fuel rods. Professor Emeritus, Guy McPherson noted last month that:

Fukushima represent a major threat to humanity. If they fail in moving the spent fuel rods next month, according to nuclear researcher Christina Consolo, if one of those MOX fuel rods is exposed to the air, one of the 1565, it will kill 2.89 billion people on the planet in a matter of weeks, so nuclear catastrophe is right there on the horizon.

Even if TEPCO is able to remove these unfathomably dangerous rods without a glitch, that will not stop thousands of gallons of radiated water from being released daily into the Pacific Ocean.

In addition to the horrors of Fukushima, our planet is also confronting catastrophic climate change. Guy McPherson’s latest updated compilation of climate change science demands our attention. Meanwhile, ignoring the ghastly realities of Fukushima, some of the top climate scientists in the world, including James Hansen, are embracing nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels and a silver bullet for reversing climate change. This is unequivocally insane.

Dear reader, I hate to break the news, but there is NO silver bullet for catastrophic climate change. Please watch Guy McPherson’s stellar presentation on climate change at Bluegrass Bioneers, November 22, 2012 in Louisville, Kentucky. Climate change now has a life of its own, and even if we were to cease tomorrow doing everything that has caused climate change, it is essentially irreversible. Moreover, research increasingly suggests that by mid-century, there will be few habitable places left on this planet that can actually sustain life. This is another truth that we have not been told.

The Lessons For Conscious Humans

What are the lessons for those who wish to be awake at this moment in human history? Scientists such as Guy McPherson, Arnie Gundersen, and Dr. Helen Caldicott can provide a number of lessons having to do with energy, economics, and environmental issues, but the real issue at this moment is: What is the spiritual lesson for humanity?

To his credit, McPherson is positing that humanity has now put itself in a hospice situation. Between the dire consequences of Fukushima and catastrophic climate change, we are confronting near-term extinction, not only of the human species, but perhaps all species on earth.

The fundamental question that McPherson asks is: How Do We Act In The Face Of Climate Chaos? Furthermore, I would ask: How do we now act in the face of possible impending meltdown and radiation poisoning of billions of living beings on this planet? How we act will be determined by our perspective—by our consciousness.

These unprecedented, unthinkable events compel us to consciously admit ourselves, emotionally and spiritually to “hospice for humanity.” Obviously, we all die at some point in time. However, few civilized humans, especially those of us who grew up in America, have ever really grasped, on every level, that we are going to die. Some part of us believes we are exceptional and invincible—which is precisely what has caused the crises with which we are now confronted.

Moreover, we now need the love and support of each other as never before in the history of our planet. Kurt Vonnegut often spoke of his son who somewhere between being a patient in a mental hospital and becoming a student at HarvardMedicalSchool said, “We have to help each other through this, whatever this is.”

It is time to stop trying to “do” things to reverse the cataclysm in which we are embroiled—to stop looking for “answers” and start asking the right questions. The most important one we can ask in this moment is: How do we live in the face of the possible near-term extinction caused by the Fukushima nightmare and catastrophic climate change?

As a two-time breast cancer survivor, I offer these suggestions:

>> Begin working consciously on the reality of your own death. Do whatever emotional and spiritual work is necessary to accept your mortality.

>> Recognize that you have been admitted to hospice whether you are aware of it or not.

>> Utilize every spiritual practice and every spiritual tool of which you are aware.

>> If you do not have a spiritual practice, spend as much time in nature as you possibly can.

>> If you DO have a spiritual practice, spend as much time in nature as you possibly can.

>> When you are in nature, commune with it. Listen to the trees, the wind, the water, and the sounds of creatures. Talk to them as if you were speaking with another human.
Do everything you can to make this crisis easier on other species.

>> Allow yourself to feel the deep, deep grief that invariably occupies your body. Talk about it with trusted allies. Take yourself out into nature and mourn—cry, wail, scream, laugh, and dance. William Blake wrote, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.”

>> Look within yourself and look around you and see where you are meant to be serving in this moment. As we live in hospice, our three main functions are to love, to serve, and to create.

>> Focus on how you can give, not what you can get.

>> Give love as often as you can. My friend Mike Ruppert says, “It is time that we spent our love fully and completely, as though it were fiat currency on an unlimited line of credit.”

>> Every moment of your life from this moment forward is sacred. Every person you meet or interact with is sacred. Every animal, every tree, every insect is sacred.

Some people living in hospice do not use the time wisely. Many other people living in hospice have discovered that it is the best time of their lives. They begin to savor every moment of life as if it were their last. Often they laugh, read good books, eat well, and experience a quality of life they had never known previously.

Death As A Spiritual Advisor

One of my spiritual teachers, Leslie Temple-Thurston writes that “we must take death as an advisor—that when we live with the awareness that death could overtake us at any time and fully let that realization in and accept it, our life becomes more real and fulfilling.” In other words, when we allow death to be our constant “advisor,” we become completely alive.

People who are committed to facing their death consciously do a great deal of reflecting. Here are a few key questions for reflection in our hospice situation: How can I best hold onto you and you to me, and how can we help each other through this? How can I really, really see you and listen to you, and how can I tell you my deepest truth from the depths of my heart? Are there people I need to make amends to? (Now is the time to do it. It’s time to take a searching and fearless inventory of how we’ve lived our lives.) What was really good and decent and precious about our lives? Where did we fail ourselves? Where did we fail others? Where were we less than we could have been? How do we wish to be remembered, even if no one is there to remember?

Life and death are inextricably connected, and ironically, a conscious, clear-eyed preparation for death often results in people living richer, fuller, more meaningful lives than they have ever lived. Both the poet Rumi and Buddha said, “Die before you die.” It’s time to let go—let go of control, let go of resentments, let go of anything and everything that does not really matter in the face of death. This is an exquisitely sacred time. Let us mentally greet everyone we encounter with a deep, sincere

“Namaste”—the sacred in me salutes the sacred in you.

Namaste, dear reader, and when death comes, may we be fully, passionately, vitally alive, doing the work we came here to do and sharing the love we came here to share.

In addition to the above suggestions, you can read my new book Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths For Turbulent Times. The 52meditations contained in the hard copy and the 313 meditations in the e-book will fortify, inspire, and enliven you as you navigate your hospice journey.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., was an adjunct professor of history and psychology for 11 years and a psychotherapist in private practice for 17 years. (She is not, and never has been, a licensed psychologist.) Her latest book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, is unique in its offering of emotional and spiritual tools for preparing for living in a post-industrial world. Carolyn’s forthcoming book is Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition. Her other books include: Coming Out From Christian Fundamentalism: Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred (2007) , U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You (2006) and The Journey of Forgiveness, (2000) All may be purchased at this site. She is available for speaking engagements and author events and can be contacted at carolyn@carolynbaker.net. Her blog is http://carolynbaker.net

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to a record high ? again, says the World Metereological Organisation.

For the past nine years the WMO has produced an annual bulletin, the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, with each year notching up a record high for average annual levels, and figures published on November 6, 2013 show 2012 was no exception.

The current WMO bulletin (The State of Greenhouse Gases in the Atmosphere, Based on Global Observations through 2012, No. 9) shows that GHGs are heating the climate more and more every year. The rate of increase appears to be accelerating, too. 2012 was already above average for the last decade, but 2013's rate of increase looks almost certain to be higher still. 

The bulletins report the latest trends and atmospheric burdens of the most influential, long-lived greenhouse gases (LLGHG); carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), as well as a summary of the contributions of the lesser gases.

The bulletins represent the consensus of a consortium of networks operated since the mid- 1980s. These three major gases alone contribute about 88% of the increase in radiative forcing of the atmosphere by changes in LLGHG occurring since the beginning of the industrial age (since 1750).

The bulletin shows that between 1990 and 2012, there was a 32 per cent increase in radiative forcing ? the warming effect on the climate ? because of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and other heat-trapping long-lived gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. Carbon dioxide, mainly from fossil fuel-related emissions, accounted for 80 per cent of this increase, WMO stated in a news release.

It should be mentioned that:

A UNEP report showed on November 5, annual worldwide emissions from power plants, cars and other human activities are currently several billion tonnes too high to keep temperatures rises below 2C, the 'safe' level governments have agreed to limit rises to.

In September, the IPCC told atmospheric CO2 concentrations were at levels "unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years." 

In May this year, CO2 levels briefly passed the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million (ppm), considerably higher than the average for 2012 of 393.1ppm.

The bulletin said:

The latest analysis of observations from the WMO Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) Programme shows that the globally averaged mole fractions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) reached new highs in 2012, with CO2 at 393.1±0.1 ppm, CH4 at 1819±1 ppb and N2O at 325.1±0.1 ppb. These values constitute, respectively, 141%, 260% and 120% of pre-industrial (before 1750) levels. The atmospheric increase of CO2 from 2011 to 2012 is higher than the average growth rate over the past 10 years. For N2O the increase from 2011 to 2012 is smaller than the one observed from 2010 to 2011 but larger than the average growth rate over the past 10 years. Atmospheric CH4 continued to increase at a rate similar to the one observed over the past 4 years.

It said:

Atmospheric CO2 reached 141% of the pre-industrial level in 2012, primarily because of emissions from combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation and other land-use change.

?As a result of this, our climate is changing, our weather is more extreme, ice sheets and glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising,? said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

?According to the IPCC, if we continue with ?business as usual,' global average temperatures may be 4.6 degrees higher by the end of the century than pre-industrial levels ? and even higher in some parts of the world. This would have devastating consequences.?

He added: ?Limiting climate change will require large and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. We need to act now, otherwise we will jeopardize the future of our children, grandchildren and many future generations.

?Time is not on our side.?

Everyone has issues. I have issues. People can find a million reasons to be dissatisfied with the government.  This is a good thing. Still, the people that believe they have the answer to everything that is going on should take their focus off of the shenanigans that the government is pulling on the people and focus on something that is happening now. Something that will eventually kill everyone that is living on the northern hemisphere of this planet.   

I'm talking about Fukushima. I'm talking about Cesium 137, a radioactive isotope pouring into the pacific:

"Radioactive water from Fukushima Is Systematically Poisoning The Entire Pacific Ocean? (*), which claimed that every day and for 750 days (now over 800) tons of toxic materials have been pouring into the Pacific Ocean"

Fukushima continues to leak, and leak at ever increasing rates and the latest prediction is that this contamination will continue until 2015, at the earliest. Until then, will the Pacific Ocean be poisoned beyond repair (if this has not happened already)?

That little tidbit was from Global Research. I'm sure they are just trying to scare us, right? I mean how can a little radioactive water do any damage?

Let me tell you a little about ionized radiation. I worked on a missile site that had radars for the fire control section I worked with. I went up to those radars and opened the back of those radars to make adjustments every day. Green hazy magnetrons would glow while I worked. Little did I know that ionized radiation from those radars would cause cancer in me 20 years later. I lost part of my tongue, some of my gums and the floor of my mouth to squamous cell cancer. I found out that there were many people that worked on those radars that developed cancer.

I found this information from a Turkish national that had worked on the same system I worked on. Turkey was one of the last countries that used this air defense system. He steered me straight to the Lawyers that brought the suit against the manufacturers that built the system. We won the suit. That is all I can tell you due to a non-discloser statement I had to sign.

So serving in the Army gave me cancer. I know about radioactive isotopes and it is not a pleasant thing to go through. I can only thank my surgeon who after two operations, saved my life.

Today is my 63rd birthday. I have three Grandchildren and some Nephews and Nieces. The situation for me is this, by the time the radiation from Fukushima reaches me, it will take some time to affect my wife and I. My Grandchildren and other young people will not be so lucky. Already on the West Coast the milk is radioactive. It is below the "safety threshold" right now so you don't really hear about it. Still, the plume from the contaminated reactors is still pouring out and I'm sure that the Geiger counter will show a rise in contamination as the months go by.

The problem here is that the entire Northern Hemisphere is being poisoned by the radiation coming from Japan. It is already showing up in Alaska fisheries. According to Global Research :

More than a year ago, 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna tested in California waters were contaminated with radioactive cesium from Fukushima.

Bluefin tuna are a wide-ranging fish , which can swim back and forth between Japan and North America in a year.

But what about other types of fish?

Sockeye salmon also have a range spanning all of the way from Japan to Alaska, Canada, Washington and Oregon:

We all know too much exposure to nuclear waste can cause cancer. And many understand that certain chemicals, such as cesium-137 and strontium-9, contained in said waste products can accumulate in fish by being deposited in bones and muscle permanently.

We are concerned our Alaska salmon are being slowly tainted with nuclear waste. We are worried about the impact this waste could have on our resources, and especially the people who consume them.

This all brings us to the most urgent question. A question that should be in the minds of everyone that gives a damn about their children and grandchildren and if you are under 50 years old you also should worry about your own health. So the question is, what is our government and Canada's government doing about the radiation that Japan has loosed upon us all?

TEPCO can't contain it and the Japanese Government that has stepped in can't seem to be able to contain it either . I want to know, where is the rest of the World while the entire Northern Hemisphere is being destroyed by radiation? Why isn't this problem being reported by the mainstream media? Why hasn't this "exceptional" nation stepped in to help the Japanese from destroying the planet courtesy of General Electric ? GE has seemingly found a gift that keeps on giving, death by thyroid cancer and other cancers that will eventually kill every living person and every animal that lives in the Northern Hemisphere.

I'm not kidding here. I have a good insight into ionized radiation. It's not something you want to fool around with. While everyone screams and yells about the crappy healthcare system that is based on corporate ideology, farming people into insurance companies that will eat people alive, we ignore the real threat to our existence. I mean WTF?

People better start screaming about this radiation being leaked into the Pacific. Forget about the bullshit the media is spinning as news. The real news is that something is coming our way that will kill all of us.

Yes, it's my birthday so I took some liberties with my own views on this subject. Still, I'm not kidding around. These people are going to kill us, one way or another. Meanwhile the nuclear energy companies are touting the "benefits" of nuclear power. Is everyone crazy?

Here are some links you can go to so that you can read about this on your own:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-the-ticking-nuclear-bomb-over-800-tons-of-radioactive-material-pouring-into-pacific-ocean/5356276

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/01/fukushima-radiation-levels-higher-japan

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/cynical-uss-hidden-agenda-in-offer-to-help-ja/blog/47246/

http://rt.com/usa/fukushima-debris-island-texas-266/

Tim Gatto is former Chairman of the Liberal Party of America, Tim is a retired Army Sergeant. He currently lives in South Carolina. He is the author of "Complicity to Contempt" and "Kimchee Days" available at Oliver Arts and Open Press. Tim Gatto's new book "Contempt to Outrage" will be available soon from Oliver Arts and Open

The mankind is fraught with sorrows and pains of institutionalized animosities and wars. When fear of unknown animosities and killings overwhelm the daily thinking process, a society - a nation no matter how normal claims to be, cannot function as normal beings to co-exist with their own self, the surroundings - in the human culture and make any positive contributions to human change and progress. This state of affairs reflects complete societal breakdown and march towards self-annihilation. We are witnessing and living in that delusional culture of human degeneration. Animosity and wars are not outgrowth of celestial bodies but essentially man-made follies throughout the history. All human acts are subject to change and reformation. Over the decades, this vital concern has occupied my scholarly thoughts, human interactions with so many other beings (both in the industrialized West and with people in the developing nations) to find out, how can we safeguard the ?succeeding generations from the scourge of wars? and maintain normal societal living and co-existence in diversity. Had this concern and priority been in the thoughts and commitments of the governance of the modern institutions evolved more than half of century ago for global peace and security, it would have supported the sustainable movements for global peace and harmony. To great surprise, looking at the modern history of international affairs, every new man-made conflicts takes new approaches and time and resources to ponder and new agenda as if we have wasted decades in doing nothing except giggling, laughing and lying about peace and the ideals of the mankind in competitive and hilarious animosities and blame games. Is it part of the human nature to look for animosity and madness of war? Wars kill people ? the living human beings, destroy humanity of the man enforcing barbarism and cruelty, practically denying all prospects of peace and co-existence. Previous wars of centuries were aimed at annihilation of political and economic enemies but the 21 st century conflicts are ready-made recipes not only to eliminate the mankind but also the environment in which human beings survive and the planet Earth that sustains life. Given the strategic know-how and the scientific-technological developments, it is an established fact that any futuristic global warfare could end the very existence of man and humanity on this planet. The United States , West Europeans and Russia placed unknown sophisticated Weapons of Mass Destruction on Earth and in space are ready-made menaces to the survival of mankind. Wars appear to be the outcome of sinister minds, devilish individual plans and monstrous scheme of things against the very humanity of which these people are a member of the construct.

Professor Richard Falk is a reputable international jurist and academia and UN Human Rights Council to offer some concerns on the deplorable human conditions in Gaza , Occupied West Bank and Jerusalem , Palestine . ??the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink U.S. relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East .? The global mankind is not obsessed with any loss of rational sense of the facts of life that the United States and Israel both suppress any disclosure or international discussions of the issue of human rights violation in Palestine . Author B. Fantina (? Hostility toward a Nation: What is the Source?? " Information Clearing House " -" War Is A Crime " 5/03/2013 ), spells out what happens when you try to reason the unreason . ?This thoughtful, reasonable statement was met with a typical unreasonable response by the United States . Via Twitter , U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said this: ?Outraged by Richard Falk's highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go.?

B. Fantina adds: ?What, one might ask, in Mr. Falk's statement was ?highly offensive'? Where, in what he said, is the ?vitriol'? Is it not reasonable that there might be anger by people victimized by periodic bombings of their country by the U.S. ? Would U.S. citizens not feel anger if some other nation continually bombed them? U.S. policy in the Middle East has been drastically skewed to support Israel 's interests, disregarding completely the basic human rights of any of Israel 's supposed enemies. The American Israeli Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) basically owns the U.S. Congress, which dances to its tune without hesitation, knowing that doing so will ensure further campaign donations, funneled into their individual coffers by AIPAC??.. The Israeli government targets Palestinians for no other reason than their ethnicity.?

You wonder if some West Europeans conscious of their nationalism and superior ethnicity went to the Muslim world in search of freedom, to preserve human dignity and justice or was it a planned encroachment of all that humanity could imagine to be valuable and enshrined in the League and UNO Charter, French Revolution, Immanuel Kant's ideals for peace and what European themselves claim to be following through. History reveals that for centuries the European scheme of colonization - the so called freedom time after the WW2, Arabs and other Muslim societies had neither educated and intelligent leadership nor institutions to analyze the global affairs objectively and to develop a policy of mutual interests and strategic equilibrium in relations with the former Masters of the Western world. They were naïve and coward then, and they are proven dummy and stupid to this day. They willingly followed the George Bush dictum of military threats unless they should fully submit to the American doctrine of War on Terror. The US bogus War on Terror used the false pretext of the 9/11 attacks to pursue its pre-planned wars against the Muslim world.

Across America and in some West European circles, 9/11 terrorist attacks on America assume an epic center of hatred and wooing against Muslim world. There is no known and official evidence anywhere to indicate that Muslims and Islam were engaged in making the 9/11 attacks on the US . Those who were alleged to have carried out the attacks had no claim or relationship to Muslim thinking or States. Whatever they did, were individual acts and not sponsored by Islam or Muslims. It is common throughout the Western democracies when individuals commit crimes; they are treated by law in the same context not assuming the beliefs and religious characteristic of the person accused in any crimes. How come the official American policies and practices exhibit dubious and often self-negating constructs in global affairs? What Ms. Rice, the America Ambassador at the UN alleged did not appear to be case in Professor Falk's statement:

Professor Falk statement seemed rational and reasonable and did not appear to be ?offensive' or full of ?vitriol', as Ms. Rice suggested . The former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to blame that the terrorists of 9/11 "came here and killed us because of our freedom of religion, freedom for women, because they hate us." B. Fantina wonders: ?Why, one might ask, do they hate us? As stated by the 9/11 Commission Report, it is at least partly due to the U.S. 's policy choice?? The U.S. goes around dropping bombs, ostensibly to ?protect freedom' and ?liberate' oppressed peoples. There seems to be a belief that everyone throughout the world wants to be just like the U.S. , with its limited liberties and skewed definition of freedom. Yet the U.S. doesn't often consider the wishes of those it attempts to ?liberate,' resulting in quagmires such as Vietnam a generation ago, and Afghanistan today.?

Stephen Lendman (? America's Permanent War Agenda ? 3/01/2010 ), an American political intellectual and a man of universal conscience puts the history in one nutshell:

?America glorifies wars in the name of peace, what historian Charles Beard (1874 - 1948) called "perpetual war for perpetual peace" in describing the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' foreign policies - what concerned the Federation of American Scientists when it catalogued about 200 post-1945 conflicts in which America was, and still is, the aggressor?

H untington (?The Clash of Civilizations?, 1993) warned of the coming of new age of disharmony is dawning and that the West lacked an ?ennobling animosity'- from an economic perspective, the ?golden age' of low birth rates and aging population as reasoning contributing to Western moral and cultural decadence. But the match-maker political opportunists have come up with many answers to Huntington 's concerns and curiosities. Few sadistic minds try interpreting wars against humanity as act of heroism and glorification. There is no sense of holistic values in killing the fellow human beings. Strangely enough, warmongers hire war propagandists to classify wars as ?noble?, ?good?, necessity of the ruling nobility and to protect the flag, borders and national interests. George Bush claimed being ?Man of God? who started the day with the Bible, to orchestrate the bogus war on terrorism. These are cynical notions implied to enforce the monstrous viewpoints of the few warlords in every age. There is no quality criterion except falsification of information and facts of human life. The global political affairs are not managed by rational people, with rational thinking, doing the rational practices for the interests of global citizenry.

The 1% global elite ? men of king operate the international institutions - the perverted insanity lacking basic understanding of the Human Nature and of the working of the splendid Universe in which we enjoy coherent co-existence. The mankind continues to be run down by the cancerous ego and cruelty of the few superpower warlords. Killing unjustifiably one innocent human being is like killing of the whole of the humanity. The global warlords represent cruel mindset incapable to see the human side of the living conscience. Madness of the perpetuated war on terrorism and its triggered insanity knows no bound across the global spectrum. Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and species, nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the humanity have and continue to do so at an unparallel global scale without being challenged by any global organizations or leaders. Torture and massacres of innocent civilians are convenient fun games to be defined as ?collateral damage? and a statistic. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral, spiritual and intellectual values and progressive agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most powerful nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap to EH Carr's precious thoughts of human history . Einstein (?The World as I see it?) made it known that he was against military campaigns, killings and destruction of the natural environment: "This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!.?

American historian Harry Elmer Barnes ("Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and It's Aftermath?) offered this stern warning to American politicians if the US led wars continue leading to man's annihilation from this planet:

"If trends continue as they have during the last fifteen years, we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace. Such an era could only culminate in a third world war which might well, as Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested, leave only the pygmies in remote jungles, or even the apes and ants, to carry on 'the cultural traditions' of mankind."

If a hate crime results in killing of the innocent people in American society, America foreign policy is actively doing the same to other nations - Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and others as if they were not entitled to be human beings.

Chris Hedges - author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (?How to Think?, Common Dreams, 7/9/2012 ) offers a global context to perpetual animosity and dreadful notion of hatred encouraging the few warmongers to undermine the very existence of humanity of which they are an essential part:

And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one's own country, than an outcast from one's self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

Can we THINK to be human in all of our moral, political and intellectual endeavors? Can we critically look at ourselves - why have come to be on a cliff to destroy the cause of freedom, equality and justice for all? Can we see the Mirror with a collective conscience - why have we been pushed to resort to animalistic characteristics and behaviors that those who seem to be most educated and morally and intellectually intact but act like agents of the Draconian age as if there were no people of REASON and accountability populating the Planet Earth? I wait to learn more from your inner conscience, your sense of humanity, your deep insight to human thinking as once Alexis Carrel noted: Man, The Unknown .

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Publishing Germany , May 2012

Thousands of people are protesting against climate crisis reality while the Warsaw climate crisis talks are faltering. The protests were held in Poland and Canada.

Media reports said:

Climate activists expressed their anger at a lack of progress at the COP19 talks in a Climate Justice Protest march through the streets of Warsaw.

Amid a heavy police presence, 3000 people walked from the Palace of Culture in the centre of the city to the National Stadium, where the UN conference is taking place.

Climate activists are concerned at the level of business engagement with the talks, and also a decision by UN climate chief Christiana Figueres to attend a coal summit hosted by Poland on Monday.

“Governments have come here and we’re moving backwards,” WWF’s head of Climate and Energy Samantha Smith told RTCC at the protest.
“We’re super frustrated, we’re hoping this process next week can make some forward movement, but if it doesn’t, we really have to question why are governments here, why are we here, and what is the UNFCCC Secretariat doing about this?”, she added

In RTCC, Sophie Yeo’s report from Warsaw said:

Pressure is mounting on the European Union to make up for the lack of ambition shown by fellow developed countries Japan, Australia and Canada at UN talks in Poland.

Japan has attracted the brunt of fury after reducing its international emissions reduction targets, but negotiators from developing countries have told RTCC of their disappointment that the EU has failed to set out a clear and ambitious pathway to a climate change deal in 2015.

Seychelles Ambassador Ronald Jumeau, a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), said he hoped that the actions of Japan and Australia would not lead to other developed countries easing off on their ambitions.

Speaking in Warsaw, he said that for AOSIS to be reassured that the EU was maintaining its leadership position, he would like to hear greater ambition coming forward at the ministerial level meetings taking place next week.

This should be directed towards the development of a loss and damage mechanism and pre-2020 commitments, on top of emissions reductions targets for a 2015 agreement.

He admitted that the EU was not in a position to offer a concrete increase on its pre-2020 ambition next week, as any decision would have to be passed through the European Commission back in Brussels.

“We’re not asking necessarily for more commitments,” he said. “We’re asking for more support for things that we’re already doing, so that we can between now and 2020 show an increase in ambition through not necessarily pledges and commitments but in practical things that can be done on the ground in our countries, so that’s what we would look forward to.”

Many developing countries say they are still concerned the EU has not ratified the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, agreed at UN talks in Doha last December.

Nicaragua’s delegation head Paul Oquist Kelley told RTCC this had created an atmosphere of distrust at the talks.

“We need to emphasise to our partners the need for them to fulfil their commitments, and that we can see no way to assume further commitments if they do not assume their mitigation and finance commitments.

Domestic targets

Sophie Yeo added:

Research by Climate Tracker Action coming out next week will show that the EU will have to increase its domestic 2020 target to a 45% emissions reduction target by 2020 if it is to maintain its position as a role model. This is an unlikely target, considering its current target of 20% emissions reductions.

The EU also needs to commit to the upper end of its target of an 80-95% emissions reduction by 2050, said Wendel Trio, director of the European branch of the Climate Action Network, speaking today at a panel in Warsaw.

This is a realistic target he said, as “continuing with this pathway of what we’ve done over the last five years will bring us to 95%.” This would involve a 2% reduction per year of emissions.

Discussions over a 2030 package are still ongoing, but the EU is due to release its preliminary decisions in January, which will be finalized in March.

Marion Vieweg-Mersmann of Climate Analytics told RTCC: “There is a strong link between the domestic discussions and the international discussions.

“The fear of many is that if we lock ourselves into non-ambitious targets until 2030 it’ll be too late, and the willingness of countries to increase their targets once they’ve made them official, we’ve seen in this process there’s not a great appetite for that.”

But Jakub Koniecki, a member of the Climate Action cabinet within the EU, told RTCC that he disagreed with the perception that the EU had taken a back seat in the current international negotiations, and that it continued to set an example to other countries.

He said: “Looking at what we do domestically and looking not only at the headline reduction targets, we are delivering on the Kyoto commitments obviously, but the instruments we have developed such as the emissions trading scheme, such as the way we finance things… these are things you can really easily copy if you like, so I think it is quite good leadership.”
Protest

Coping plan by the poorest

Nilima Choudhury’s report in RTCC said:

The poorest nations have released their plans to cope with climate change, as a debate over who pays for damage caused by extreme weather events rages at UN talks in Warsaw.

The 48 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) submitted their climate change adaptation programs to the UN’s climate change department, and say they will require $1.4bn to implement the plans.

“The preparation of these plans has served as a major catalyst for climate change action in the poorest countries, helping them to systematically undertake various activities towards climate change adaptation,” said Prakash Mathema, Chair of the LDC Group under the UNFCCC process.

“Awareness has been raised across all levels, and poor countries have gained human and institutional capacity for adaptation.”

The idea of the National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) is to allow poor countries to assess the immediate impacts of change, for example drought and floods, and what they need in the way of support to become more resilient to climate change impacts.

For example, Angola is seeking to adapt its fisheries to climate change. Cambodia is looking to make its water supplies and agriculture more resilient. And Samoa is seeking to strengthen the infrastructure of communities which are dependent on tourism.

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres welcomed the country submissions, adding that it was clear the “support to countries is presently inadequate and must urgently be stepped up.”

She added: “Now and in the future, the poorest and most vulnerable countries urgently require predictable finance and technology to become more resilient. Good planning is essential to empower poor countries to deal with climate change.”

Protests across Canada

A CBC report said:

Nearly 1,000 people gathered outside Vancouver's Science World to protest pipelines and oilsands expansion on Saturday.

Organizers say more than 130 protests against climate change were staged across Canada Saturday, with the largest gathering held in Vancouver where participants showed their opposition to Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.

The protests were part of a national day of action to "Defend Our Climate." Outside Vancouver's Science World, nearly 1,000 participants held colorful signs while chanting and singing slogans, while others pounded on drums and played the bagpipes.

Rally participants said they fear Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline would wreck havoc on the environment, bring tankers that would disrupt and endanger rare species along B.C.'s coast, and open oil shipments to Asia.

"It's about our world, our future, our children, our children's future," said Tamiko Suzuki, who rode her bike to the event.

"My children are really passionate about this. It's given me a renewed sense of hope, that there is a lot of energy and we can get that critical mass of people and we can rise up and say things and change things."

If approved, the almost 1,200-kilometre twin pipeline would carry about 525,000 barrels of petroleum per day from the Alberta oilsands to the B.C. coast for shipment by tankers.

"Politicians might give the permits, but the people give the permission. And the people are saying 'no' to the Enbridge Gateway pipeline and others projects like that," said Ben West, oilsands campaign director for ForestEthics Advocacy.

"People who have pipelines in their backyard are definitely on the front lines of this fight ... But there are also many other Canadians who are concerned about climate change, they're concerned about Canada's role in the world, and they're concerned about doing the right thing."

Smaller rallies held across Canada

In Montreal, about 300 demonstrators gathered at Oka National Park on Saturday to protest against the expansion of oilsands production and pipelines bringing the oil east from Alberta.

And in Edmonton, about two dozen people braved the snow to rally against oilsands expansion and climate change at the Alberta Legislature.

In the northern B.C. city of Prince George, about 100 people participated in another anti-pipeline rally.

Murray Minchin, spokesman for the Kitimat-based conservation group Douglas Channel Watch, said his group is at "ground zero" for the proposal.

He wants the federal government to know that many people in northern communities are still against the Northern Gateway pipeline.

"Essentially, this is the last chance for us to send a message to Prime Minister Harper that he really has to rethink this," Minchin told CBC News.

"It's been a long process. People are understandably fatigued by the whole thing, but a lot of people have come up to me and mentioned that, 'You know, if there's anything happening and you need us to turn — just call and we'll be there.'"

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A week after the most powerful “super typhoon” ever recorded pummeled the Philippines, killing thousands in a single province, and three weeks after the northern Chinese city of Harbin suffered a devastating “airpocalypse,” suffocating the city with coal-plant pollution, government leaders beware!  Although individual events like these cannot be attributed with absolute certainty to increased fossil fuel use and climate change, they are the type of disasters that, scientists tell us, will become a pervasive part of life on a planet being transformed by the massive consumption of carbon-based fuels.  If, as is now the case, governments across the planet back an extension of the carbon age and ever increasing reliance on “unconventional” fossil fuels like tar sands and shale gas, we should all expect trouble.  In fact, we should expect mass upheavals leading to a green energy revolution.

None of us can predict the future, but when it comes to a mass rebellion against the perpetrators of global destruction, we can see a glimmer of the coming upheaval in events of the present moment.  Take a look and you will see that the assorted environmental protests that have long bedeviled politicians are gaining in strength and support.  With an awareness of climate change growing and as intensifying floods, fires, droughts, and storms become an inescapable feature of daily life across the planet, more people are joining environmental groups and engaging in increasingly bold protest actions.  Sooner or later, government leaders are likely to face multiple eruptions of mass public anger and may, in the end, be forced to make radical adjustments in energy policy or risk being swept aside.

In fact, it is possible to imagine such a green energy revolution erupting in one part of the world and spreading like wildfire to others.  Because climate change is going to inflict increasingly severe harm on human populations, the impulse to rebel is only likely to gain in strength across the planet.  While circumstances may vary, the ultimate goal of these uprisings will be to terminate the reign of fossil fuels while emphasizing investment in and reliance upon renewable forms of energy.  And a success in any one location is bound to invite imitation in others.

A wave of serial eruptions of this sort would not be without precedent.  In the early years of twentieth-first century, for example, one government after another in disparate parts of the former Soviet Union was swept away in what were called the “color revolutions” -- populist upheavals against old-style authoritarian regimes.  These included the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (2003), the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine (2004), and the “Pink” or “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan (2005).  In 2011, a similar wave of protests erupted in North Africa, culminating in what we call the Arab Spring.

Like these earlier upheavals, a “green revolution” is unlikely to arise from a highly structured political campaign with clearly identified leaders.   In all likelihood, it will erupt spontaneously, after a cascade of climate-change induced disasters provokes an outpouring of public fury.  Once ignited, however, it will undoubtedly ratchet up the pressure for governments to seek broad-ranging, systemic transformations of their energy and climate policies.  In this sense, any such upheaval -- whatever form it takes -- will prove “revolutionary” by seeking policy shifts of such magnitude as to challenge the survival of incumbent governments or force them to enact measures with transformative implications. 

Foreshadowings of such a process can already be found around the globe.  Take the mass environmental protests that erupted in Turkey this June.  Though sparked by a far smaller concern than planetary devastation via climate change, for a time they actually posed a significant threat to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his governing party.  Although his forces eventually succeeded in crushing the protests -- leaving four dead, 8,000 injured, and 11 blinded by tear-gas canisters -- his reputation as a moderate Islamist was badly damaged by the episode.

Like so many surprising upheavals on this planet, the Turkish uprising had the most modest of beginnings: on May 27th, a handful of environmental activists blocked bulldozers sent by the government to level Gezi Park, a tiny oasis of greenery in the heart of Istanbul, and prepare the way for the construction of an upscale mall.  The government responded to this small-scale, non-violent action by sending in riot police and clearing the area, a move that enraged many Turks and prompted tens of thousands of them to occupy nearby Taksim Square.  This move, in turn, led to an even more brutal police crackdown and then to huge demonstrations in Istanbul and around the country.  In the end, mass protests erupted in 70 cities, the largest display of anti-government sentiment since Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002.

This was, in the most literal sense possible, a “green” revolution, ignited by the government’s assault on the last piece of greenery in central Istanbul.  But once the police intervened in full strength, it became a wide-ranging rebuke to Erdogan’s authoritarian impulses and his drive to remake the city as a neo-Ottoman showplace -- replete with fancy malls and high-priced condominiums -- while eliminating poor neighborhoods and freewheeling public spaces like Taksim Square.  “It’s all about superiority, and ruling over the people like sultans,” declared one protestor.  It’s not just about the trees in Gezi Park, said another: “We are here to stand up against those who are trying to make a profit from our land.” 

The Ningbo Rebellion

The same trajectory of events -- a small-scale environmental protest evolving into a full-scale challenge to governmental authority -- can be seen in other mass protests of recent years.

Take a Chinese example: in October 2012, students and middle class people joined with poor farmers to protest the construction of an $8.8 billion petrochemical facility in Ningbo, a city of 3.4 million people south of Shanghai.  In a country where environmental pollution has reached nearly unprecedented levels, these protests were touched off by fears that the plant, to be built by the state-owned energy company Sinopec with local government support, would produce paraxylene, a toxic substance used in plastics, paints, and cleaning solvents. 

Here, too, the initial spark that led to the protests was small-scale.  On October 22nd, some 200 farmers obstructed a road near the district government’s office in an attempt to block the plant’s construction.  After the police were called in to clear the blockade, students from nearby Ningbo University joined the protests.  Using social media, the protestors quickly enlisted support from middle-class residents of the city who converged in their thousands on downtown Ningbo.  When riot police moved in to break up the crowds, the protestors fought back, attacking police cars and throwing bricks and water bottles.  While the police eventually gained the upper hand after several days of pitched battles, the Chinese government concluded that mass action of this sort, occurring in the heart of a major city and featuring an alliance of students, farmers, and young professionals, was too great a threat.  After five days of fighting, the government gave in, announcing the cancellation of the petrochemical project.

The Ningbo demonstrations were hardly the first such upheavals to erupt in China.  They did, however, highlight a growing governmental vulnerability to mass environmental protest.  For decades, the reigning Chinese Communist Party has justified its monopolistic hold on power by citing its success in generating rapid economic growth.  But that growth means the use of ever more fossil fuels and petrochemicals, which, in turn, means increased carbon emissions and disastrous atmospheric pollution, including one “airpocalypse” after another.

Until recently, most Chinese seemed to accept such conditions as the inevitable consequences of growth, but it seems that tolerance of environmental degradation is rapidly diminishing.  As a result, the party finds itself in a terrible bind: it can slow development as a step toward cleaning up the environment, incurring a risk of growing economic discontent, or it can continue its growth-at-all-costs policy, and find itself embroiled in a firestorm of Ningbo-style environmental protests. 

This dilemma -- the environment versus the economy -- has proven to be at the heart of similar mass eruptions elsewhere on the planet.

After Fukushima

Two of the largest protests of this sort were sparked by the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants on March 11, 2011, after a massive tsunami struck northern Japan.  In both of these actions -- the first in Germany, the second in Japan -- the future of nuclear power and the survival of governments were placed in doubt.

The biggest protests occurred in Germany.  On March 26th, 15 days after the Fukushima explosions, an estimated 250,000 people participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations across the country -- 100,000 in Berlin, and up to 40,000 each in Hamburg, Munich, and Cologne.  “Today’s demonstrations are just the prelude to a new, strong, anti-nuclear movement,” declared Jochen Stay, a protest leader.  “We’re not going to let up until the plants are finally mothballed.”

At issue was the fate of Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants.  Although touted as an attractive alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear power is seen by most Germans as a dangerous and unwelcome energy option.  Several months prior to Fukushima, German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that Germany would keep its 17 operating reactors until 2040, allowing a smooth transition from the country’s historic reliance on coal to renewable energy for generating electricity.  Immediately after Fukushima, she ordered a temporary shutdown of Germany’s seven oldest reactors for safety inspections but refused to close the others, provoking an outpouring of protest.

Witnessing the scale of the demonstrations, and after suffering an electoral defeat in the key state of Baden-Württemberg, Merkel evidently came to the conclusion that clinging to her position would be the equivalent of political suicide.  On May 30th, she announced that the seven reactors undergoing inspections would be closed permanently and the remaining 10 would be phased out by 2022, almost 20 years earlier than in her original plan.

By all accounts, the decision to phase out nuclear power almost two decades early will have significant repercussions for the German economy.  Shutting down the reactors and replacing them with wind and solar energy will cost an estimated $735 billion and take several decades, producing soaring electricity bills and periodic energy shortages.  However, such is the strength of anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany that Merkel felt she had no choice but to close the reactors anyway. 

The anti-nuclear protests in Japan occurred considerably later, but were no less momentous.  On July 16, 2012, 16 months after the Fukushima disaster, an estimated 170,000 people assembled in Tokyo to protest a government plan to restart the country’s nuclear reactors, idled after the disaster.  This was not only Japan's largest antinuclear demonstration in many years, but the largest of any sort to occur in recent memory.

For the government, the July 16th action was particularly significant. Prior to Fukushima, most Japanese had embraced the country’s growing reliance on nuclear power, putting their trust in the government to ensure its safety.  After Fukushima and the disastrous attempts of the reactors’ owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), to deal with the situation, public support for nuclear power plummeted.  As it became increasingly evident that the government had mishandled the crisis, people lost faith in its ability to exercise effective control over the nuclear industry.  Repeated promises that nuclear reactors could be made safe lost all credibility when it became known that government officials had long collaborated with TEPCO executives in covering up safety concerns at Fukushima and, once the meltdowns occurred, in concealing information about the true scale of the disaster and its medical implications.

The July 16th protest and others like it should be seen as a public vote against the government’s energy policy and oversight capabilities.  “Japanese have not spoken out against the national government,” said one protestor, a 29-year-old homemaker who brought her one-year-old son.  “Now, we have to speak out, or the government will endanger us all.”

Skepticism about the government, rare for twenty-first-century Japan, has proved a major obstacle to its desire to restart the country’s 50 idled reactors.  While most Japanese oppose nuclear power, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe remains determined to get the rectors running again in order to reduce Japan’s heavy reliance on imported energy and promote economic growth.  “I think it is impossible to promise zero [nuclear power plants] at this stage,” he declared this October.  “From the government’s standpoint, [nuclear plants] are extremely important for a stable energy supply and economic activities.”

Despite such sentiments, Abe is finding it extremely difficult to garner support for his plans, and it is doubtful that significant numbers of those reactors will be coming online anytime soon.

The Explosions Ahead

What these episodes tell us is that people around the world are becoming ever more concerned about energy policy as it affects their lives and are prepared -- often on short notice -- to engage in mass protests.  At the same time, governments globally, with rare exceptions, are deeply wedded to existing energy policies.  These almost invariably turn them into targets, no matter what the original spark for mass opposition.  As the results of climate change become ever more disruptive, government officials will find themselves repeatedly choosing between long-held energy plans and the possibility of losing their grip on power.

Because few governments are as yet prepared to launch the sorts of efforts that might even begin to effectively address the peril of climate change, they will increasingly be seen as obstacles to essential action and so as entities that need to be removed.  In short, climate rebellion -- spontaneous protests that may at any moment evolve into unquenchable mass movements -- is on the horizon.  Faced with such rebellions, recalcitrant governments will respond with some combination of accommodation to popular demands and harsh repression. 

Many governments will be at risk from such developments, but the Chinese leadership appears to be especially vulnerable.  The ruling party has staked its future viability on an endless carbon-fueled growth agenda that is steadily destroying the country’s environment.  It has already faced half-a-dozen environmental upheavals like the one in Ningbo, and has responded to them by agreeing to protestors’ demands or by employing brute force.  The question is: How long can this go on? 

Environmental conditions are bound to worsen, especially as China continues to rely on coal for home heating and electrical power, and yet there is no indication that the ruling Communist Party is prepared to take the radical steps required to significantly reduce domestic coal consumption.  This translates into the possibility of mass protests erupting at any time and on a potentially unprecedented scale.  And these, in turn, could bring the Party’s very survival into question -- a scenario guaranteed to produce immense anxiety among the country’s top leaders.

And what about the United States?  At this point, it would be ludicrous to say that, as a result of popular disturbances, the nation’s political leadership is at any risk of being swept away or even forced to take serious steps to scale back reliance on fossil fuels.  There are, however, certainly signs of a growing nationwide campaign against aspects of fossil fuel reliance, including vigorous protests against hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

For environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben, all this adds up to an incipient mass movement against the continued consumption of fossil fuels.  “In the last few years,” he has written, this movement “has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone pipeline, convinced a wide swath of American institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel stocks, and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas.”  It may not have achieved the success of the drive for gay marriage, he observed, but it “continues to grow quickly, and it’s starting to claim some victories.”

If it’s still too early to gauge the future of this anti-carbon movement, it does seem, at least, to be gaining momentum.  In the 2013 elections, for example, three cities in energy-rich Colorado -- Boulder, Fort Collins, and Lafayette -- voted to ban or place moratoriums on fracking within their boundaries, while protests against Keystone XL and similar projects are on the rise.

Nobody can say that a green energy revolution is a sure thing, but who can deny that energy-oriented environmental protests in the U.S. and elsewhere have the potential to expand into something far greater?  Like China, the United States will experience genuine damage from climate change and its unwavering commitment to fossil fuels in the years ahead.  Americans are not, for the most part, passive people.  Expect them, like the Chinese, to respond to these perils with increased ire and a determination to alter government policy.

So don’t be surprised if that green energy revolution erupts in your neighborhood as part of humanity’s response to the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.  If governments won’t take the lead on an imperiled planet, someone will. 

Two weeks ago we began to look very closely at what is happening at Fukushima and produced an article that tells you  what you need to know about this three-part nuclear crisis.  In it we urge a global solution to this global threat.  If you agree, take action by signing this petition.

We will describe further what is happening at Fukushima, what needs to be done and how that relates to the broader struggle; but first, here are a number of important news items from the past week:

• Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued a report on drones that questions their use against civilians as equivalent to war crimes,  CODEPINK exposed that the fund for drone victims is going to US NGOs instead and a former official stated that every drone strike creates 40 new enemies.
• The UN torture investigator wants to visit hunger striking prisoners in Pelican Bay and is meeting with their families.
• Recent successes include Denver activists who pressured the ritzy Palm Restaurant to drop its support for an urban camping ban that is hurting the homeless and Occupy court victories against the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge.
• NSA spying on US allies around the world was exposed as well as how government corruption (donations) leads to bipartisan support for spying and a report that NSA spying has not thwarted terrorism.
• Bankers, both Bank of American and JPMorgan, are finally being held (a little) accountable.

These are a few examples of many activities in the movement this week that you can see on Popular Resistance (and receive in your mail every morning in our daily digest).

But, the crisis at Fukushima has our attention. The disaster at Fukushima created three challenges to which there are no easy solutions, and which have never occurred before:

(1) Three nuclear reactor cores melted down and no one knows where they are, but they are still creating heat and TEPCO is pouring water where they think they are to cool them;

(2) TEPCO finally admitted 300 tons of radioactive water has been leaking into the Pacific Ocean daily for 2.5 years with no end in sight. The water problem could easily get much worse. The fresh water supply for much of Japan could be poisoned through underground water tables and the 1,000 storage containers holding 330,000 tons of toxic water, some of which are leaking, could break and add to the poisoning of the Pacific; and

(3) The 11,000 spent fuel rods, considered to be the most dangerous things ever created by humans, must be secured. There is a particular focus on the 1,533 rods that are stored 100 feet above ground in the Reactor 4 building that is buckling and sagging. These rods can ignite into a radioactive storm if they break, touch each other or are not kept cool and are exposed to air.

The corporation responsible for this mess, TEPCO, has a terrible history of lying to the public about both the risks and what has occurred, treating their employees poorly and cutting corners. What are the risks?  They are massive, really cataclysmic; they could easily affect millions, perhaps even billions of people. For example, just the 1,533 spent fuel rods in Reactor 4 contain 14,000 times more radiation than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  If they combust into a nuclear fire, the radiation cloud created will repeatedly circle the globe. And, if the water leaks affect the major aquifer, it could mean that Tokyo, a city of 40 million, would need to be evacuated.

If that is not enough, Fukushima is located in an earthquake zone. And last weekend, a massive Typhoon brushed by and resulted in more leaks. Another hurricane could hit the area this weekend.

The solution that has been put forward by leading experts is a 15-point plan calling for an independent engineering firm to perform the clean-up with oversight by an international group of experts and a civilian panel. We hope you will join us in pushing this proposal by signing a petition to make this solution a reality. Click here to sign. We will help deliver the petition to the United Nations on November 11, Armistice Day and the 32nd month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami.

The crisis at Fukushima reminds us that the US needs to end its carbon and nuclear based energy economy.  Rather than making an intentional transformation to an economy based on solar, wind, thermal and ocean energy, President Obama and leaders of both parties are pushing an “all of the above” strategy that is permitting extreme energy extraction. This is unnecessary, environmentally destructive and undermines public health. We can move to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy.  There is no question we can do this, the only question is when.

It is time to view nuclear power and the destructive uranium mining that feeds it as part of the broader movement against extreme energy extraction. And, extraction of uranium and fossil fuels are connected to the struggle against corporate power and imperialism. The current conflict in New Brunswick exemplifies these struggles very clearly.

The Mi'kmaq and Elsipogtog First Nations in Canada and their allies have been working to stop a Houston-based company, SWN Resources, from hydro-fracking on their land throughout the year. They blockaded access to the land beginning in late September. Last week, hundreds of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) entered the camp aggressively with guns out, sharp shooters in position, and pepper spray, attack dogs and abusive acts. See this video of the events.

After the RCMP attack, people across the world showed solidarity with the Mi’kmaq and Elsipogtog. Dozens of solidary actions were held in Canada and the United States; other tribes sent their support. The First Nation protesters and their allies returned to the protest site two days after the raids.

The conflict between the first nations and the Canadian government is a long-term one that is 400 years in the making. It raises long-term disputes about the control First Nations peoples have over their own lands; and whether they can control the resources on that land and protect the environment.  After the raid, a court lifted the injunction against the protests – it was the injunction that justified the RCMP attack on the peaceful protesters.

The Mi’kmaq and Elsipogtog were not the only protests against hydro-fracking this week. There was a nationwide day of action “The World Unites Against Fracking” during the annual Global Frackdown on October 19th. Activists from 26 countries participated in 250 protests against fracking because it contaminates groundwater, the air and land and hastens climate change. In our home city of Baltimore, activists set up a “Wheel of Misfortune” and light show  that could be seen for blocks to highlight the risks of the gas drilling technique. Maryland sits in the Marcellus Shale. This coming week, there will be an Earth First! Action Camp! to stop Marcellus Shale drilling.

Tar sands and mountain top removal are other forms of extreme energy extraction that are being strongly opposed. This past week was the four-day Power Shift Conference in Pittsburgh which highlights the youth-driven climate justice movement. They opened the conference with solidarity protests in support of First Nation protesters and concluded their weekend with a protest focused on bankers and financiers of extreme energy extraction.  Thousands demanded “Fund Solutions, Not Pollution.”

And, in an open letter to the Anti-Tar Sands Movement, activists in Michigan clarified the issues – it is not just about stopping pipelines. They point out that while many have been focused on the Keystone Pipeline, political leaders have “allowed the production, transportation, and refinement of this toxic substance in more and more places across the continent.” They recognize that to build a powerful grassroots movement against tar sands, we must focus on the “root causes of this issue and unites communities and groups in a common goal to stop tar sands in its entirety.” They express concern about focusing on the president as the sole decision-maker while ignoring activity at the local community level.  They see our strength coming from the community, from the grassroots where the impact is being felt.  They conclude:

“With urgency and strength, we implore all tar sands activists and organizations to reframe this movement to something that is more than a convenient political symbol and into something that can stop the amoral and unlawful devastation of life and our responsibility to it.”

The call of these Michigan activists resonates with us. We urge the climate justice movement to go further, to link all of the extreme energy extraction activities, along with the polluting refinement, transportation and use of this energy.  This would include not only tar sands, but methane gas from hydro-fracking, uranium for nuclear energy, mountain top removal for coal and off-shore oil drilling that threatens our oceans and coastal communities.  By bringing all of these together we will see a powerful, community-based grass roots movement that will transform the nation to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy.

Efforts in the United States are part of a global battle for environmental justice and we were reminded of that this week.  Activists in Guatemala took a Canadian mining company to court, and in Brazil the military attacked activists protesting the auction of oil land.  The challenges being faced in Russia by Greenpeace off-shore oil drilling activists were highlighted when one of the Arctic 30 wrote about the challenges of her incarceration. After international protests for the Arctic 30 were held and a sailor’s union issued a statement saying that the activists did not commit piracy, charges were dropped from piracy to hooliganism – still too extreme as the Arctic 30 face up to 7 years in prison. It is also important to recognize that journalists who expose environmental crime and activists who oppose it sometimes take extreme risks in their important work.

Similar to the environmental issues, we are also all affected by the attack on our food supply by profit seekers like Monsanto and other agribusiness corporations.  Scientists are speaking up against GMO foods.  People see how the government and corporate media are shills for Monsanto and are protesting and taking action.  In Mexico, farmers blocked the roads because of grain prices. 

The pressure is building and even GMO advocates are saying it is time for the industry to accept labeling, but the industry is fighting hard.  The largest donations in the history of voter initiatives in Washington State have turned an initiative requiring labeling of GMO’s into a neck and neck race. With just over a week to go, the pro-labeling side is 4 points ahead – but they need financial and other types of support from everyone.  Click here to help win this pivotal vote.

The corporations and their allies in government are constantly working to rig the system to put corporate profits ahead of the people and the environment.  We’re already seeing the impact of the phony corporate court system known as “Trade Tribunals” that allow corporations to sue governments when court decisions or new laws protect the environment, workers or consumers.  These rigged trade tribunals have been used to undermine environmental protection.  That is why it is so important for all of us to join together in solidary to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  It affects everything the resistance movement is working for.  Defeating the TPP is the top priority of many of us, and all of us should be working on it.  These next two months are critical because the President is pushing to have the agreement signed by the end of this year. To get involved, visit www.FlushTheTPP.org.

Another important aspect of resistance is creating the kind of world in which we want to live.  Here are examples of urban agriculture around the world to produce food locally.  There is a school in New York City that could not find healthy meat, so they decided to go vegetarian.  After one year: obesity dropped by 2% and there was improved attendance, test scores and energy. And, this inspiring video shows how a city that had been choked with cars has now become a city of bikers, a beautiful transformation.  These are parts of a new economy that is being created. In fact, last week was new economy week and there were 75 events highlighting how communities can foster strong and sustainable local economies held across the nation.

There is no question that the culture is changing because of the actions of people in the resistance movement – whether it is protesting what we do not like or creating what we want, we are changing the zeitgeist. Change the culture and economy and the politics follows. 

Of course, we have to push against key issues pushed by the bi-partisans in Washington, DC. We’ve mentioned the Trans-Pacific Partnership as one; another is the extreme austerity, including threats to Social Security and Medicare that need our attention. Both these issues should unite all of us because they affect each of us and everything we are working for. Building alliances and creating solidarity across the movement are critical ingredients to our success. These mistaken tendencies of the two parties need to be stopped. When we work to stop them, we need to be consciously building a mass movement that sets the tone for the society so that we build our strength and have a bigger impact than winning one battle.

Some political commentators still criticize the movement for not running for office or focusing on elections – not understanding the systemic corruption in a money-dominated two corporate party system with managed elections.  As comedian and political commentator Russell Brand describes in his current essay on revolution, “the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites” 

We are starting to see how the movement is in fact changing the political system without focusing on elections, but instead by focusing on the big issues of a failed economic system that creates inequity and puts profits before the people and the planet.

In the end, we are confident that it is not who is in office, but the environment we create for them to operate in.  We need to continue to protest when elected officials go off in the wrong direction – which is too often – but always build a mass national movement of communities across the country networked together and working to end the rule of money in each of its manifestations and to shift power to the people.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are cohosts of Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC. They also codirect Its Our Economy and are organizers of the PopularResistancew.org. 

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As the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has worn on -- and it’s now well over two years old -- it’s illuminated the Obama presidency like no other issue. It offers the president not just a choice of policies, but a choice of friends, worldviews, styles. It’s become an X-ray for a flagging presidency. The stakes are sky-high, and not just for Obama. I’m writing these words from Pittsburgh, amid 7,000 enthusiastic and committed young people gathering to fight global warming, and my guess is that his choice will do much to determine how they see politics in this country.

Let us stipulate at the start that whether or not to build the pipeline is a decision with profound physical consequences. If he approves its construction, far more of the dirtiest oil on Earth will flow out of the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and reach the U.S. Gulf Coast. Not just right away or for a brief period, but far into the future, since the Keystone XL guarantees a steady flow of profits to oil barons who have their hearts set on tripling production in the far north.

The history of oil spills and accidents offers a virtual guarantee that some of that oil will surely make its way into the fields and aquifers of the Great Plains as those tar sands flow south.  The greater and more daunting assurance is this, however: everything that reaches the refineries on the Gulf Coast will, sooner or later, spill into the atmosphere in the form of carbon, driving climate change to new heights.

In June, President Obama said that the building of the full pipeline -- on which he alone has the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down -- would be approved only if “it doesn’t significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”  By that standard, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get.

These days, however, as no one will be surprised to hear, brainless things happen in Washington more often than not, and there’s the usual parade of the usual suspects demanding that Keystone get built. In mid-October, a coalition that included Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell, not to mention the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, sent Obama a letter demanding that he approve Keystone in order to “maintain investor confidence,” a phrase almost guaranteed to accompany bad ideas. A report last week showed that the Koch brothers stood to earn as much as $100 billion in profits if the pipeline gets built (which would come in handy in helping fund their endless assault on unions, poor people, and democracy).

But don’t think it’s just Republican bigwigs and oil execs rushing to lend the pipeline a hand. Transcanada, the pipeline’s prospective builder, is at work as well, and Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn is now on the Transcanada dime, producing TV ads in support of the pipeline.  It’s a classic example of the kind of influence peddling that knows no partisan bounds. As the activists at Credo put it: “It's a betrayal of the commitments that so many of us worked so hard for, and that Dunn herself played a huge role in shaping as top strategist on the 2008 campaign and communications director in the White House.”

Credo’s Elijah Zarlin, who worked with Dunn back in 2008, wrote that attack on her. He was the guy who wrote all those emails that got so many of us coughing up money and volunteering time during Obama’s first run for the presidency, and he perfectly exemplifies those of us on the other side of this divide -- the ones who actually believed Dunn in 2008, the ones who thought Obama was going to try to be a different kind of president.

Forty years ago this month, Syria and Egypt launched a Yom Kippur surprise attack on Israel to regain land and prestige lost in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israeli forces were nearing Damascus and Cairo when a ceasefire took hold. But as the Soviet Union resupplied its Arab clients and President Nixon resupplied Israel, Arab members of the OPEC oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia, announced a 5% monthly cut in oil output, then embargoed oil exports to the U.S. and later others. OPEC provided 35% of America’s oil at the time.

Prices soared and deliveries faltered. “No gas today” signs spread. People waited in line for gasoline, risking scuffles and occasional gunshots. America had lost her energy innocence.

Relaxed regulations and massive subsidies tried to expand fossil, unconventional fossil, and nuclear energy. (In 1975 oil fueled 15% of U.S. electricity vs.less than 1% today.) Most such efforts proved far too costly, but President Carter’s shift toward renewables and especially energy efficiency was strikingly successful.

On his watch, President Ford’s 1975 auto standards took effect in 1978, raising new domestic cars’ efficiency 7.6 mpg during 1977–85. They drove 1% fewer miles on 20% fewer gallons, and became lighter, cleaner, safer, but scarcely smaller and no less peppy, saving fuel even when 55-mph top speed limits were abandoned 13 years later.New federal and state policies also made buildings and factories more frugal. Appliance efficiency standards passed Congress without a single nay vote.

The results were stunning. During 1977–85, the U.S. economy grew 27%, oil use fell 17%, oil imports fell 50%, and imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87%; they’d have reached zero in 1986 had President Reagan not reversed the policy. Oil burned per dollar of GDP fell by 35% in eight years, or an average of 5.2% per year—enough to displace a Persian Gulf’s worth of net imports every two and a half years.

OPEC’s oil sword was shattered in a dozen years as customers saved oil faster than OPEC could conveniently sell less oil. It sales plummeted 48%, breaking its pricing power for a decade. Then in 1985–86, as massive new energy supplies belatedly arrived to meet needs efficiency had already filled, energy gluts crashed prices. Policymakers, instead of finishing the job, hit the snooze button for a decade.

By the 1991 Gulf War, we put our kids in 0.56-mpg tanks because we hadn’t put them in 32-mpg cars (enough to displace Persian Gulf oil). Yet oil imports continued to soar, reaching 60% of oil use in 2005 and returning to 1973-level dependence only this year. Thus today, America pays $2 billion a day for oil, plus $4 billion a day for its hidden economic and military costs.

Four times since 1980, U.S. forces have intervened in the Persian Gulf to protect not Israel but oil. The Gulf hasn’t become more stable. Readiness for such interventions costs a half-trillion dollars per year—about ten times what we pay for oil from the Gulf, and rivaling total defense expenditures at the height of the Cold War. And burning oil emits two-fifths of fossil carbon, so abundant oil only speeds dangerous climate change that destabilizes the world and multiplies security threats.

Yet practical, profitable solutions are at hand. Producing a dollar of GDP now uses less than half the energy and one-third the oil it took in 1973. Last year, wind and solar power, now cheaper than gas-fired power in favorable sites, added half of new U.S. generating capacity, and making a dollar of GDP took 3.4% less electricity than a year earlier.

That’s just the start. By 2050, the U.S. could triple its energy efficiency, switch supplies from one-tenth to three-fourths renewable, and run a 158% bigger economy with no oil, coal, or nuclear energy and one-third less natural gas. This could cost $5 trillion lessthan business-as-usual, emit 82–86% less fossil carbon, need no new inventions nor Acts of Congress, and be led by business for profit. The 2011 book Reinventing Fire by Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) details how.

America’s two-ton steel autos use nearly half our nation’s oil. In the past quarter-century, they gained weight twice as fast as we did, yet their weight causes two-thirds of the energy needed to move them. Moreover, each unit of energy saved at the wheels saves six more units that needn’t be lost getting that energy to the wheels, saving seven units of fuel in the tank—huge leverage.

Making cars 2–3 times lighter with today’s ultralight but ultrastrong materials can make them safer, sportier, buildable more simply with four-fifths less capital investment, affordable to electrify (because they need 2–3 times fewer costly batteries or fuel cells), and more profitable for automakers and dealers. The first such carbon-fiber electric cars have entered production at VW (a 235-mpg two-seat plug-in hybrid) and BMW (a ~110-mpg battery-electric 4-seater). Other automakers, including Audi and Toyota, have shown equally impressive concept vehicles. And such electrified autos’ batteries add distributed storage to the grid, helping integrate varying solar and windpower that could get electricity off coal.

Such 125-to-240-mpg-equivalent autos, 2–4 times today’s best standards, can run on any mix of electricity, hydrogen, and advanced biofuels needing no cropland; superefficient trucks and planes, on the latter two (or trucks on natural gas). Thus a far more mobile U.S. economy could need no oil. Global competition can spread these technologies, not forced by policy but demanded by customers.

Displacing or saving each barrel for $25 rather than buying it for over $100 would save the U.S. $4 trillion in net present value. That’s $12 trillion including our curable oil addiction’s hidden economic and military costs—plus any damage to climate, environment, health, global development and stability, or our nation’s independence and reputation.

That’s why my RMI colleagues have assembled a supply chain to scale Detroit’s production and adoption of carbon-fiber auto parts and developed technology to make them at automotive cost and speed. It’s why RMI’s Electricity Innovation Lab convenes industry leaders to devise the next electricity industry, and why we’re cutting solar power’s installation cost, simplifying its financing, and helping utilities and customers pay each other fairly for the services they exchange. It’s why our RetroFit program is helping real estate portfolio owners triple or quadruple energy productivity. (U.S. buildings’ energy use costs more than Medicare, but their energy efficiency opportunities offer $1.4-trillion net savings with a juicy 33% internal rate of return.) It’s why we’ve redesigned over $40 billion worth of industrial plants for radical energy efficiency at juicy profits.

This hard work’s growing success is exhilarating. And we’d be doing it even if the 1973 oil embargo hadn’t happened, because the energy system’s other existential threats, from climate change (a known threat even in the late 1960s) to nuclear proliferation, compel the same actions. But the oil embargo did concentrate the mind wonderfully. Many smart people rose to the challenge. Their efforts are making oil uncompetitive even at low prices even before it becomes unavailable even at high prices. 

The rotted residue of primeval swamp goo—a cubic mile of oil costing $3.5 trillion that the world burns each year, plus three cubic miles of coal and gas—is becoming no longer economic. Fracked oil and gas, Canadian tar sands, Saudi oil—none can beat modern efficiency and renewables on direct cost, price stability, or impacts. Now-worth­less old energy studies long claimed we’re fated to burn oil forever. We’re not, and we won’t. The end of the conflict-creating, climate-threatening Oil Age is coming clearly into view, and not a moment too soon.

Amory B. Lovins, a member of the National Petroleum Council, is cofounder and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org), an independent nonprofit think-and-do tank that transforms global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure energy future.

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.

Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012,Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.

Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s melting ice sheet.

 “I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also.”

This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems – particularly the climate system – is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.

Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.

But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.

Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target – an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 – has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no scientific basis”. That’s because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future – rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately – there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° “carbon budget” and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.

Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreedupon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

 Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).

So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:

 . . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.

In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).

We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.

But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.

If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.

But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.

It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.

Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Logo”, is working on a book and a film about the revolutionary power of climate change. You call follow her on twitter @naomiaklein

Who killed nuclear power? Hint: It’s not the people who actively supported placing a high and rising price on carbon pollution.

Four of the country’s top climate experts have distributed an open letter “To those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear power.” I have the greatest respect for James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Tom Wigley, and Ken Caldeira — and have written dozens of blog posts about their vital climate work.

But I think their letter is mis-addressed and also misses the key point about nuclear power — because it is so expensive, especially when done safely, the industry has no chance of revival absent a serious price on carbon.

While solar power and wind power continue to march down the experience curve to ever lower costs — solar panels have seen a staggering 99% drop in cost since 1977 — nuclear power has been heading in the opposite direction.

Nuclear power appears to have a negative learning curve:

Average and min/max reactor construction costs per year of completion date for US and France versus cumulative capacity completed.

Amazingly, in the past few few years utilities have told state regulators that the cost of new nuclear plants is in the $5,500 to $8,100 per kilowatt range (seeNuclear power: The price is not right and Exclusive analysis: The staggering cost of new nuclear power).

The letter opens:

To those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear power:

As climate and energy scientists concerned with global climate change, we are writing to urge you to advocate the development and deployment of safer nuclear energy systems. We appreciate your organization’s concern about global warming, and your advocacy of renewable energy. But continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.

If every major environmental group in this country stopped whatever objections to nuclear power they have been offering, I suspect the industry would be in pretty much the same exact shape it is now. And whatever modest short-term benefit it might have for the industry would pale in comparison to the enormous, long-term benefit to the industry a national climate bill and global climate treaty would bring about.

As a practical matter, environmental groups have had little impact on the collapse of nuclear power in America. The countries where nuclear has dead-ended are market-based economies where the nuclear industry has simply been unable to deliver a competitive product (see “Two Years After $500 Billion Fukushima Disaster, Nuclear Power Remains Staggeringly Expensive”). Indeed, despite having U.S. taxpayers swallow most of the risk for the high-cost of new nukes through the loan guarantee program and most of the risk of a major nuke disaster through the Price Anderson act, the industry has been unable to provide a competitive product.

Objectively, then, the groups who have been most successful in thwarting the much-hyped nuclear renaissance are those who blocked efforts to make nuclear power more cost-competitive. And the best, most market-based way to make nukes more cost competitive is to put a serious and rising price on carbon pollution that starts to reflect the harm it does to public health and a livable climate.

So those like Hansen, Emanuel, Wigley and Caldeira who want nuclear power to be a major contributor to solving the climate problem should be addressing themselves to those who are blocking serious climate action, not those who have been devoting vast resources to trying to put a price on carbon.

The letter continues:

We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem. Global demand for energy is growing rapidly and must continue to grow to provide the needs of developing economies. At the same time, the need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions is becoming ever clearer. We can only increase energy supply while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions if new power plants turn away from using the atmosphere as a waste dump.

Here the letter conflates the issue of opposition to the current crop of nuclear power plants — which are simply uncompetitive quite separate from the very legitimate issues of safety, waste disposal, proliferation, and water consumption — with a supposed lack of support for next generation nuclear power plants (that will be magically cheaper, despite all trend data to the contrary).

I am entirely in favor of developing a next-generation of nuclear power plants — and most of the climate-concerned environmentalists I know are also. But a major effort to develop such reactors does not guarantee they will suddenly become economically competitive.

The letter continues:

Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.

I think it is quite safe to say that renewables will do more than “play roles” in a climate constrained world — they will play the major role.

It would be astounding if a technology that exists only in PowerPoint presentations — magical small, cost-effective, fail-safe nuclear reactors — could possibly be researched, developed, demonstrated, and then scaled up fasterthan a host of carbon-free technologies that are already commercial today. And remember, most of those technologies, like solar and wind, have actually demonstrated a positive learning curve, unlike nuclear reactors!

A 2007 Keystone report concluded that just one wedge of nuclear power “would require adding on average 14 plants each year for the next 50 years, all the while building an average of 7.4 plants to replace those that will be retired” — plus 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste.

But we need at least 12 to 14 wedges to avert catastrophic climate change. So it’s pretty safe to say that most of those wedges will be non-nuclear — and most of those can begin aggressive deployment now.

I wish politicians and opinion makers had the same understanding of climate science as Hansen, Emanuel, Wigley, and Caldeira. If they did, carbon pollution would have a high price, and the marketplace would quickly figure out the most cost-effective way to slash pollution.

Canada's rush to  exploit its tar sands and shale  gas resources will destroy the environment "as fast as possible", according to  Noam Chomsky.

In an interview with the Guardian, the linguist and author criticised the  energy policies of the Canadian government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

He said: "It means taking every drop of hydrocarbon out of the ground, whether it's shale gas in New Brunswick or tar sands in Alberta and trying to destroy the environment as fast as possible, with barely a question raised about what the world will look like as a result."

But indigenous peoples in Canada blocking fossil fuel developments are taking the lead in combatting climate change, he said. Chomsky highlighted indigenous opposition to the Alberta tar sands, the oil deposit that is Canada's fastest growing source of carbon emissions and is slated for massive expansion despite attracting  international criticism and protest.

"It is pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advanced' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction," said Chomsky.

Chomsky expressed concern about an indigenous community in New Brunswick whose encampment blockading shale gas exploration  was raided by a heavily armed Canadian police force two weeks ago.

Those protests come on the heels of the indigenous-led Idle No More movement that  sprang up in late 2012 in response to the Harper government's repeal of numerous environmental protections and aggressive promotion of resource projects, often on indigenous lands.

Chomsky was in Montreal last weekend to give a lecture and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the magazine Canadian Dimension.

He told the Guardian that progressives "should work climate change into their efforts to organise," but in a way that emphasises how addressing climate change can improve rather than worsen peoples' lives.

"If it's a prophecy of doom, it will act as a dampener, and people's reaction will be ok, I'll enjoy myself for a couple of years while there's still a chance. But as a call to action, it can be energising. Like, do you want your children, and grandchildren, to have a decent life?"

While supporting the principles of the "degrowth" movement that aims to reign in over-production and over-consumption, Chomsky cited mass transportation, localised agriculture, and energy efficiency improvements as useful forms of growth that could mitigate climate change and improve quality of living.

"If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that."

Chomsky said that a "major issue" behind climate change is the deficiencies of the market system.

"Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment," he said.

"When you turn to energy production, in market exchanges each participant is asking what can I gain from it? You don't ask what are the costs to others. In this case the cost to others is the destruction of the environment. So the externalities are not trivial."

Chomsky said during the 2008 financial crisis, the big banks could "forget the fact that they're supposed to believe in markets, run cap in hand to the government and say bail us out".

"In the case of the environment there's no one to bail it out."

Geneva — The amount of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere hit a new record high in 2012, continuing an ever-faster rise that is driving climate change, the UN weather agency said Wednesday.

"The concentrations are reaching once again record levels," Michel Jarraud, who heads the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told reporters in Geneva.

His organisation released its annual report on greenhouse gases Wednesday, showing that concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide all broke fresh records in 2012.

Global concentrations of CO2, the main culprit in global warming, for instance reached 393.1 parts per million last year, or 141 percent of pre-industrial levels -- defined as before 1750.

The report was released a day after the UN Environment Programme warned the chances of limiting the global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels were swiftly diminishing, and ahead of UN climate talks that open in Warsaw next week.

The UN's two-degree target is being chased through efforts to curb Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions, mainly caused by fossil-fuel burning to power industry, transport and farming.

"The observations from WMO's extensive Global Atmosphere Watch network highlight yet again how heat-trapping gases from human activities have upset the natural balance of our atmosphere and are a major contribution to climate change," Jarraud said.

Dave Reay, a carbon management expert at the University of Edinburgh, said that stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations was the key to successful climate negotiations, emissions regulations, and carbon markets rests.

"Despite the financial crash, and reduced emissions from some nations, the global picture is one of carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere reaching a record-breaking high year after year," Reay added.

'C02 has a ratchet effect'

Experts warn that unless more is done to rein in emissions, the world faces potentially devastating effects such as more frequent megastorms, species extinctions, water shortages, crop die-offs, loss of land to the rising seas as glaciers and polar ice melt, and spreading disease.

"CO2 has a ratchet effect," said Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

"Its influence on the climate system lasts for about 100 years, so we will be paying for our profligate use of fossil fuels for a long time to come -- so long, in fact, that we may well have now made it impossible for the planet to avoid catastrophic global warming effects, even if we make a start now on reducing CO2 emissions."

The atmospheric increase of CO2 from 2011 to 2012 was higher than the average growth rate over the past 10 years, WMO said, stressing that the global concentrations of CO2 last year were dangerously close to the symbolic 400 parts per million threshold.

That threshold was actually exceeded at several Arctic stations during the year, and the global annual average CO2 concentration looks set to cross it in 2015 or 2016, the UN agency said.

This level has not existed on Earth in three to five million years, experts say.

Concentrations of methane, meanwhile, were 260 percent of the pre-industrial level, while nitrous oxide reached 120 percent.

The WMO report said that between 1990 and 2012 there was a 32 percent increase in so-called "radiative forcing" ?- the warming effect on our climate -? because of heat-trapping gases.

CO2 accounted for 80 percent of this increase.

What is happening in the atmosphere is just part of the picture.

Only about half of the CO2 emitted by human activities remains in the atmosphere, with the rest absorbed in the biosphere and in the oceans, the WMO underlined.

Jarraud noted that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently sounded the alarm over gas concentrations.

"According to the IPCC, if we continue with 'business as usual,' global average temperatures may be 4.6 degrees higher by the end of the century than pre-industrial levels ?- and even higher in some parts of the world. This would have devastating consequences," he said.

Amid clouds of steam spewing from magma-heated pockets beneath Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, a start-up company is tapping volcanic forces to transform the climate change agent carbon dioxide from a problem into a solution. 

Using geothermal electricity and flue gas from the Svartsengi power plant nearby, Carbon Recycling International (CRI) fuses waste CO2, with hydrogen split from water to create "renewable methanol." The Reykjavik-based clean-tech venture recently began exporting the product to the Netherlands, where it is blended into gasoline. Its name, conjuring images of a comic book superhero, is Vulcanol. While others elsewhere are working on similar efforts to make green fuel from repurposed CO2, only CRI has been able to do it commercially, thanks to Iceland’s abundant supply of low-cost, earth-generated power. 

As Iceland struggles to get back on its feet after a fiscal crisis that began in 2008, CRI is one of numerous ventures seeking to turn the geologic hotspot’s renewable energy bounty into an exportable economic asset. Pioneers in harnessing geothermal heat for power, Icelanders are now bringing their expertise to a variety of novel endeavors, including a 1,000-kilometer undersea cable carrying renewably generated electricity to Europe.

This volcano- and glacier-covered island straddling the Mid-Atlantic Ridge already leads the world in renewable energy use — aside from oil for transportation, Iceland’s power comes entirely from sustainable sources. Geothermal steam heats most buildings and generates about a quarter of its electricity, with the rest coming from hydropower. Inexpensive electricity — up to 35 percent cheaper than in the U.S. — has lured aluminum smelters and other power-intensive industries.

But analysts say Iceland’s energy resources are vastly underutilized, and exploiting them is crucial to an economy whose current biggest driver is fishing. So a spate of projects are in the works, including new, carbon-free consumer products and a promising method for locking away greenhouse gases, which could benefit CO2 sequestration efforts worldwide.

"We’re trying to create a value and a premium from our ability here in Iceland to utilize these renewable energy resources," said Benedikt Stefansson, CRI’s director of business development. In July, a Canadian company invested $5 million in the company. 

"Iceland has a lot to offer," said Thorsteinn Sigfusson, director general of Innovation Center, Iceland, a start-up incubator with several energy-related ventures. Sigfusson believes inventions capitalizing on renewable power will provide important sources of foreign revenue for the country. 

One of the boldest ideas, with potentially the greatest economic benefit, is the proposed $2.1 billion electrical interconnector to Scotland, which would become the world’s longest undersea power cable. The project is the brainchild of state-owned utility Landsvirkjun, which operates the country’s hydroelectric system. Currently, about 80 percent of Iceland’s electricity goes to heavy industry. The cable scheme would increase Iceland’s geothermal operations and switch all of its domestic energy needs to these sources, then sell its hydroelectricity to the U.K. as a peak power supply.

"This is of a scale and scope that is foreign to Iceland," Bjorgvin Sigurdsson, executive vice president for marketing and business development, said in an interview at Landsvirkjun’s Reykjavik offices. "It’s actually a way to rethink the whole system… The idea is to use geothermal to displace hydro, so the hydro is available for use as the flexibility mechanism for export."

Iceland and the U.K. signed a memorandum of understanding on the project last year, and this fall Iceland’s parliament and cabinet are expected to decide whether to move forward. Big hurdles at present include public fears that local electricity prices will skyrocket, concerns that the project will create jobs abroad instead of in Iceland, and a steep cost that requires guaranteed revenues through an as-yet-unsigned, long-term power contract with the U.K.

Other green energy projects in Iceland are combining the country’s clean power resources and distinctive geology to create eco-friendly consumer goods. 

On a recent morning at the Innovation Center’s R&D facility north of Reykjavik, Sigfusson and colleague Árdís Ármannsdóttir played with a bundle of silky, gray strings, which he calls "fairy hair." Made from basalt — the volcanic rock covering much of the island — the filament offers a green alternative to carbon fiber, a ubiquitous manufacturing material synthesized from oil and natural gas.

"Carbon fiber’s footprint is very bad," said Sigfusson, a renewable energy expert who is also a physics professor at the University of Iceland. "But there is a way to go about it which is much greener. This will be possible to do with green heat from our power plants and with no carbon ingredients. It will be amazingly green." 

The idea isn’t new — basalt fiber has been around since World War II, but it was difficult to work with and never gained widespread use. Now, using technical advances developed at ICI, Sigfusson predicts the new filament will replace carbon fiber in products like car bumpers and boats, becoming an important Icelandic export. He expects manufacturing to begin within two years.

Other ICI energy projects include using new technologies to generate electricity from low-temperature geothermal fields, and creating synthetic, renewable diesel fuel. One cutting-edge concept is to develop materials that can store geothermal heat for release by a chemical reaction later on. "Then we could use our high-temperature [geothermal] fields to actually power up the less-blessed areas of Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands," said Ingolfur Thorbjornsson, ICI’s managing director of technological development. 

Many of these projects, however, come with a high price tag. CRI’s renewable methanol, for instance, is about twice the price of conventional methanol, according to Stefansson. This year the plant will make 1.7 million liters (about 450,000 gallons), which is expected to grow to 5 million liters after a planned expansion. 

Moreover, not all Icelanders favor expanding use of the nation’s energy resources. 

"You can't engage in any more energy projects without destroying priceless natural treasures and natural habitats," said Halli Bjornsson, an Iceland native now living in England, whose year-old Facebook page, Protect Icelandic Nature, has nearly 10,000 followers. Iceland’s green energy is neither entirely clean nor indefinitely renewable, Bjornsson said, pointing out that hydropower dams disrupt glacial rivers and harm fish populations. And while geothermal power is, on the whole, far cleaner than fossil fuels, it does release CO2 and noxious hydrogen sulfide from underground chambers. Reykjavikers complain about rotten egg fumes from the Hellisheidi geothermal station nearly 20 miles away.

What’s more, about three-quarters of Iceland’s electricity now goes to aluminum smelters that burn carbon electrodes, giving off significant amounts of CO2. Add in the fossil fuels still used for transportation and commercial fishing, and the nation’s carbon footprint is heavy despite its renewable energy. Iceland’s 320,000 residents have the highest per capita greenhouse emissions in the Nordic region, and among the highest in Europe, although it is still well below the U.S. and Australia, according to data from the European Energy Agency and Nordic Energy Research.

CarbFix, a new carbon capture and storage method being developed at the University of Iceland, could help keep some of that climate-warming gas out of the atmosphere. Siphoning CO2 from smokestacks and sequestering it is critical for holding down emissions, and may soon be required at all coal-burning power plants in the U.S. But the technology has been difficult to develop. CarbFix — a partnership involving state-owned power company Reykjavik Energy, the University of Iceland, Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and France’s Center for Scientific Research — is currently being tested at a pilot site near the Hellisheidi geothermal plant, where it uses the island’s reactive basalt to permanently trap CO2 emissions.

"What we do differently than everybody else is we basically make soda water," said Sigurdur Gislason, a professor at the University of Iceland’s Institute of Earth Sciences and chairman of the project’s scientific steering committee. The process pumps CO2 into water underground, where it dissolves and reacts with minerals in the basalt. Within a decade or two, it solidifies as carbonates. Compared to other carbon storage approaches, such as injecting compressed CO2 into sedimentary rock cavities, trapping carbon in basalt is far quicker, with virtually no chance of leakage, Gislason said.

The process requires 25 metric tons of water for every ton of CO2 — not a problem in Iceland, which receives ample amounts of rainfall. The Hellisheidi target zone contains enough basalt to store 12 million metric tons, or 200 years’ worth of the plant’s CO2 emissions at its current production level. Basalt-rich coastal areas and the entire ocean crest are also potential storage sites, Gislason said. 

Next year, plant operator Reykjavik Energy will expand the project to include hydrogen sulfide as well. Eliminating both gases would allow geothermal energy production to be stepped up in Iceland and elsewhere. "If we prove that this can be done without harming the harnessing of the heat, then of course this is very positive for geothermal energy utilization," Gislason said. "If the industrial scale-up is successful, then this is something that could be done within the next five years." 

While tiny Iceland is unlikely to become a global renewable energy powerhouse, the world could learn from the resourcefulness of this remote northern island. Banking on sustainable power could both shore up its sagging economy and help build a bridge to a fossil-fuel-free future. 

Haiti topped the chart as the country most at risk from extreme weather events in this year’s Global Climate Risk Index, because of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 that left 200,000 people homeless and destroyed many crops.

The Index, released on the second day of the UN climate conference here, noted that while the damage in New York made all the headlines it was in Haiti that losses were greatest.

All ten of the countries most at risk from extreme events in the 1993 to 2012 period were developing countries, emphasising the message in Warsaw that poor countries cannot cope with the increasing number of catastrophes by themselves.

The major issue at the conference in the wake of the current Philippine disaster is how to finance “loss and damage” caused by an increasingly unstable climate.

The index, compiled by a think tank called Germanwatch from figures supplied by the giant re-insurance company Munich Re, lists ten countries most affected in 2012 and the long-term climate risk from loss of life and damage from 1993 to 2012.

The Philippines came second in the 2012 list because of a devastating cyclone in that year and is almost certain to come number one in next year’s table because of the current crisis caused by super-typhoon Haiyan, which has killed more than 10,000 people.

Pakistan came third in both this year’s list and the 2011 table, showing its increasing vulnerability to floods and droughts.

In the 20-year long-term risk list Honduras was first, Myanmar (Burma) second and Haiti third, reflecting a constant battering of these countries by extreme weather events.

Christoph Bals, policy director of Germanwatch, said: “The report illustrates that the self-help capacity of countries is being overwhelmed by the scale of the climate disasters they are facing.

“These are the countries that have contributed least to climate change because they have tiny emissions, yet they are the countries that are suffering most from it. Developed countries that have caused the problem have a moral responsibility to help.”

Bals admitted that the list had flaws, in that it did not include the gradual effects of sea level rise and melting glaciers, but said there were no data for the losses caused in this way, only by more sudden disasters. Africa was also under-represented because losses from drought were hard to evaluate.

Muhammad Irfan Tariq, director general of the Climate Change Division of the Pakistan Government, who helped launch the report in Warsaw, said: “The report makes clear that my country is already adversely affected by climate change. Loss of glaciers, floods and droughts are causing suffering and loss of life, not to mention the economic losses in a mainly agricultural economy.

“In 1950 we had 5,000 litres of fresh water available for each person in the country. Now it is less than 1,000. As a result we are suffering loss of energy from hydro-electricity, shortages of food, and general water scarcity. We need more reservoirs to capture the snowmelt in the spring to last us for the year.

“Our people have contributed least to climate change, yet they are enduring great suffering. We have had disastrous floods followed by three years of droughts; we have not the resources to deal with this on our own.”

Unusually several European countries, including Serbia and Bosnia/Herzegovina, made the 2012 list. The report says that after experiencing the hottest summer in 40 years the Balkan countries suffered from extensive droughts that destroyed most of their crops.

The ten most-affected countries in 2012, in order of seriousness, are Haiti, the Philippines, Pakistan, Madagascar, Fiji, Serbia, Samoa, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Russia and Nigeria.

The top ten for 1993 to 2012 are Honduras, Myanmar, Haiti, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic and Mongolia (equal 8th), and Thailand and Guatemala (equal 10th). 

The environment is one bad news story after another. The Pacific Ocean is warming at a rate faster than anything seen in the last 10,000 years and we may have the warmest Arctic in the last 120,000 years. We’re told to brace for more and worse droughts, floods, heat waves, and storms. Coastal communities may disappear from rising seas, entire island nations are going under. If that all weren’t bad enough, there is a global wine shortage.

The bright side is that we aren’t being blindsided by an unknown enemy: Our relentless burning of fossil fuels is the big thing pushing us toward the brink. So it would figure that a solution to get us out of this mess would be pretty obvious.

That’s why it’s great that there are people like Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. While it is one thing to say we want to stop burning fossil fuels, Jacobson (and a team of researchers) are telling us how to do it.

Jacobson was recently on the “David Letterman Show,” where he proclaimed that we have enough wind and solar to power the world.

Is he right? Can renewables really replace fossil fuels? If so, are we willing to do what’s necessary to get there? Let’s take a look at his work and some other new developments.

A Renewable World

In 2009 Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California, Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, published a cover story in Scientific American outlining a plan to power 100 percent of the world’s energy (for all purposes) using wind, water and solar technologies (WWS for shorthand). Their list of acceptable technologies includes several different kinds of solar power, on- and offshore wind turbines, geothermal, tidal, and hydropower. No nukes, no natural gas, no ethanol—only the real deal renewables.

“Our plan calls for millions of wind turbines, water machines and solar installations,” they wrote. “The numbers are large, but the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle; society has achieved massive transformations before,” including our massive highway system and our industrial rampup during World War II.

Their plan, which would provide energy for everything—transportation, heating/cooling, electricity, and industry—would have 51 percent of the energy coming from wind, specifically 3.8 million 5-megawatt wind turbines. Sound like a lot? “It is interesting to note that the world manufactures 73 million cars and light trucks every year,” they write. Also, the footprint of these would be smaller than the size of Manhattan, and of course they wouldn’t all be clustered in the same area either.

The next big power source is solar—40 percent coming from a combination of 89,000 photovoltaics (like the kind you mount on the roof of a home or business) and concentrated solar plants, which usually use mirrors to concentrate light, turning it into heat, and creating electricity with steam turbines. Add in 900 hydroelectric facilities, 70 percent of which we already have, and around 4 percent from geothermal and tidal energy, and the globe is powered by renewable energy!

That’s the plan, anyway. If this seems too big to comprehend, let’s look at the state level. Jacobson has worked with research teams to develop plans for New York and California, and he hopes to do one for each state in the country.

The California plan aims for “all new energy powered with WWS by 2020, 80-85 percent of existing energy replaced by 2030, and 100 percent replaced by 2050.”

They found that, “electrification plus modest efficiency measures would reduce California’s end-use power demand 44 percent and stabilize energy prices since WWS fuel costs are zero.” This is a common finding with researchers delving into electrifying energy systems with renewables—we end up with far more efficient systems, so we need even less energy.

One possible scenario they lay out for California looks like this:

• 25 percent from onshore wind (22,900 5-MW turbines)
• 10 percent from offshore wind (7,233 5-MW wind turbines)
• 15 percent from concentrated solar plants (1,080 100-MW plants)
• 15 percent from solar-PV power plants (1,820 50-MW plants)
• 10 percent from residential rooftop solar PV (16.2 million 5 kW systems)
• 15 percent from commercial/government rooftop PV (1.15 million 100-kW systems)
• 5 percent from geothermal plants (81 100-MW plants)
• 4 percent from hydroelectric power plants (11 1,300-MW plants, 90 percent of which we already have)
• 0.5 percent from wave (4,360 0.75-MW devices)
• .5 percent from tidal (2,960 1-MW turbines)

Their research found this will create 856,000 20-year construction jobs and net 137,000 permanent jobs. Other benefits include protecting the water supply from hazardous spills, cleaning up air pollution (including preventing thousands of premature annual deaths), and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

When it comes to New York, the biggest difference from California is a little less concentrated solar and much more offshore wind. This is their New York plan:

• 10 percent onshore wind (4020 5-MW turbines)
• 40 percent offshore wind (12,700 5-MW turbines)
• 10 percent concentrated solar (387 100-MW plants)
• 10 percent solar-PV plants (828 50-MW plants)
• 6 percent residential rooftop PV (5 million 5-kW systems)
• 12 percent commercial/ government rooftop PV (500,000 100-kW systems)
• 5 percent geothermal (36 100-MW plants)
• 0.5 percent wave (1910 0.75-MW devices)
• 1 percent tidal (2600 1-MW turbines)
• 5.5 percent hydroelectric (6.6 1300-MW plants, of which 89 percent exist)

Now that we have the numbers, we have to ask: is this really feasible?

Surmountable Obstacles?

Mark Jacobson and company think their work is technically feasible, although not without significant challenges (more on that below). That doesn’t include the social and political hurdles that are set pretty high. Right now, it looks like an impossible leap. But that doesn’t dismiss the importance of Jacobson's vision. We may not reach his goal, but he’s pointed us in the right direction.

So has Vasilis Fthenakis, senior research scientist and adjunct professor at Columbia University, who developed a plan that employs solar to power 69 percent of the country’s electricity and 35 percent of all our energy needs by 2050, with 90 percent of all energy in the U.S. coming from solar by the end of the century.

“In contrast to the Jacobson plan, Fthenakis and his fellow researchers concentrate on building a large number of photovoltaic and thermoelectric solar power plants in the sunniest parts of the United States—chiefly the Southwest—and using high voltage direct current transmission to connect these power sources with the rest of the country,” explains Lakis Polycarpou for Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Jacobson leans more on wind, while Fthenakis puts more stock in solar. But both will take raw materials to build, and that could be problematic. All those wind turbines and solar panels start from materials that will need to be dug out of the ground in someone’s backyard. We could be trading our dependence on Middle East oil for raw earth metals from China, lithium from Bolivia, or copper from the Congo.

“Humankind faces a vicious circle: a shift to renewable energy will replace one non-renewable resource (fossil fuel) with another (metals and minerals),” wrote researchers Olivier Vida, Bruno Goffe, and Nicholas Arndt in Nature GeoScience. “Potential future scarcity is not limited to the scarce high-tech metals that have received much attention. The demand for base metals such as iron, copper and aluminum, as well as industrial minerals, is also set to soar.”

This doesn’t mean, they write, that pursuing renewables should be abandoned; simply that we need a comprehensive strategy in our path forward.

One good thing about an investment in renewable infrastructure is that while it may take many years to build (and much materials), it will also last for decades. We do not need to keep feeding steel into a wind turbine that’s already up and running, unlike the hungry beasts of fossil fuels, which endlessly devour coal, oil and gas.

Supposing we get past the first hurdle of materials, what about some of renewables’ other challenges? The one most levied is intermittency—the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing when you need the energy most. Then what?

“By combining wind and solar and using hydroelectric to fill in the gaps” it can be done, Jacobson told AlterNet. “We found for California that you can do this pretty straightforwardly, wind and solar are very complementary: if the wind is not blowing during the day, the sun is often shining, and vice versa. If you have enough hydro on the grid, which you do on the West Coast, then you can fill in the gaps. You can also use concentrated solar power.”

And then there’s location; what if the wind blows or the sun shines the most in places where you have the least need for the energy. "Transmission is technically not a barrier at all,” said Jacobson. “Maybe you need to do some rezoning, people don't generally like to add transmission lines. But you can take advantage of a lot of existing lines, increase the capacity on them, that would reduce the issue of having to put in new lines.”

Some of this is already underway. A project installing 3,600 miles of new transmission lines is nearing completion in Texas that would hook up the state’s windy western region with high population centers in the rest of the state. Sustainable Business reported that it would increase the state’s capacity for wind energy by 50 percent.

Another project that’s proposed to begin construction next year would be able to send energy from windy Wyoming, 725 miles to Las Vegas, Nevada.

To get the most efficiency out of the transmission process, you can use HDVC, high-voltage direct current, a big part of Fthenakis’ solar plans. Unlike the AC power we currently use, HDVC transmits electricity with less loss over long distances.

The other massive issue is cost. “If you look historically of all the fossil fuels, they just keep rising and rising,” said Jacobson. “Whereas the wind and solar costs are going down, for the most part. For example, in the last four years costs of installing wind have gone down 50 percent. Solar prices in the last year just went down another 6 to 14 percent, they've been gradually declining.”

Fossil fuels, however, may continue to get more expensive. We’re drilling tens of thousands of feet deep. We’re going miles vertically and then horizontally for gas and oil. If you could look at the technology that’s used today to do high-volume horizontal fracturing for shale gas and tight oil, it’s quite complicated stuff. We’re not just putting a straw in the ground anymore. The harder this stuff is to get, the more energy we’re using to do it. It’s not just more expensive; we’re also consuming more energy for extraction than in decades past.

Then there is the obvious point that we don’t seem willing to address. Burning fossil fuels is what’s driving climate change—yet we give the industry a free pass on the externalities. A story in Nature set the price of just the impacts of the release of methane from a melting Arctic at $60 trillion. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Natural disasters in the U.S. alone last year totaled $110 billion. If the frequency and severity of extreme weather continues to rise as predicted, that number may get a whole lot bigger.

Good News for Renewables

Regardless of specific plans outlined by researchers, there is reason to be optimistic about the future of renewables

In August the Department of Energy announced that in 2012, wind was the top source of new electricity in the country and it was double the amount of wind power the previous year. “The country’s cumulative installed wind energy capacity has increased more than 22-fold since 2000,” the department stated. And it’s not just power, it’s also jobs—nearly three-quarters of all turbine equipment in the country is made at home.

That’s not all. “The price of wind under long-term power purchase contracts signed in 2011 and 2012 averaged 4 cents per kilowatt hour—making wind competitive with a range of wholesale electricity prices seen in 2012,” the Energy Department reports.

The potential for offshore wind in the U.S. is huge, but it’s yet to become a reality. That may soon change as there are now 11 projects in advanced stages—one in the Great Lakes, two off Texas’ Gulf coast, and the rest in the Atlantic from Virginia north to Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, wind’s huge gains could be dampened next year if the production tax credit that aids wind energy development is allowed to expire at the end of December. Likewise, the solar industry faces a federal tax credit expiring at the end of 2016, which could curb huge growth in that area. Right now, solar is hot. The Solar Energies Industry Association reports that a new solar system is installed in the U.S. every four minutes and the price of a PV system has dropped 50 percent since 2010. Although the amount of energy coming from solar that is used by power plants is only 1 percent, that’s likely to change with larger plants coming on line in the next few years.

Most people in the renewables industry see these tax credits as helping to level the playing field with fossil fuels, which despite being one of the most profitable industries in the world, still sees enormous subsidies. A report released this year by the International Monetary Fund found that global pre-tax subsidies for the fossil fuel industry hit $480 billion in 2011 (post-tax subsidies are nearly $2 trillion).

An optimistic assessment of solar’s future by Deutsche Bank predicts that globally the solar market will be totally sustainable, and not in need of subsidies, in only two years. Country-by-country, things will obviously differ.

The Biggest Hurdle

Jacobson recently said on the “David Letterman Show,” “There is no technological or economic limitation to solving these problems; it’s a social and political issue, primarily.”

These are no small problems. We have a Congress that can’t even agree how to tie its own shoelaces, let alone how to solve the biggest threat facing humanity. Conservatives have waged a war on renewables, seeking to roll back state requirements for renewable energy, but they haven’t always been successful. As more red states like Texas benefit from wind energy, it may well be a losing strategy for them (as it was for arch climate denier Ken Cuccinelli who just lost the race to be Virginia’s next governor).

The Washington Post published the results of a new Pew poll that found only Tea Partiers still cling to anti-science views about climate change; 25 percent of Tea Party Republicans believe in climate change, compared to 61 percent of non-Tea Party Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats.

Despite an outlier (yet vocal) conservative fringe, we’re slowly headed in the right direction. Time is of the essence. Can the change happen quickly enough?

“I think in some sectors it will naturally evolve very quickly like electric cars because they're so efficient,” said Jacobson. “In other sectors, if we don't push faster, then they're just going to change really modestly or not fast enough. I'm pretty optimistic that once people understand what's going on with the problems, in terms of climate, pollution, energy security, and once they understand there are technical solutions available and the economic solution is available, they will galvanize around those solutions.”

All the finger pointing can’t just be aimed at our elected officials—there has to be broad public support. Renewable projects should still be subject to environmental review, but barring that, it’s no longer acceptable to say that wind turbines or solar panels are too ugly to look at, especially by people who get electricity from coal, oil and gas yet share none of the burden of its extraction or burning.

When we talk about powering our future with renewable energy we have to understand that we’re still talking about impacts—but we have to weigh those against the impacts of continuing to power our world with ever more extreme methods of fossil fuel extraction.

This isn’t simply a matter of changing how we get energy. It means shifting the power dynamic in this country (and across the world), and literally putting power back in the hands of individual people and communities.

At this point, Mark Jacobson’s optimistic goal of 100 percent renewables by 2030 or even 2050 looks out of reach. But what if we aimed for 50 percent for starters, and focused our economy on resilience instead of endless growth? The right wing might kick and scream, but I doubt the world would come to an end. If we keep burning fossil fuels, however, our fate isn’t likely to be very pleasant.

Tara Lohan, a senior editor at AlterNet, has just launched the new project Hitting Home, chronicling extreme energy extraction. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis, including most recently, Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. Follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.