From Prophet Mohammad (GR)(GR), Je suis Charlie Hebdo, global security to the Scale of Global Rights

A groundbreaking new study is confirming what green campaigners have long argued: in order to stave off climate disaster, the majority of fossil fuel deposits around the world—including 92 percent of U.S. coal, all Arctic oil and gas, and a majority of Canadian tar sands—must stay "in the ground."

The research is a boost to world-wide green campaigns, from the bid to stop the Keystone XL pipeline to grassroots protest against Arctic drilling.

The new findings were published in the journal Nature and authored by Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, both of whom hail from the University College London.

They write, "Policy makers have generally agreed that the average global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions should not exceed 2 °C above the average global temperature of pre-industrial times."

The researchers explain that they employed a "single integrated assessment model that contains estimates of the quantities, locations and nature of the world's oil, gas and coal reserves and resources" to determine what it would take to stay below this limit.

"Our results suggest that, globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 per cent of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of 2 °C," the researchers explain.

While this is not the first study to note that fossil fuels are being dangerously over-exploited, the research is unique in that it pinpoints the national locations of specific reserves that must remain untapped.

The scientists find that 92 percent of U.S. coal reserves, and 100 percent of Arctic gas and oil, and 90 percent of Australian coal reserves, must be left alone. In addition, 100 percent of Arctic oil and gas must remain beneath the earth. Furthermore, most Canadian tar sands must remain unexploited, the study concludes.

This graphic created by the Guardian summarizes other location-specific findings by researchers:

The researchers note that their findings, ultimately, mean that, despite the industry drive for exploitation, staving off disaster requires a different course. "[P]olicy markers' instincts to exploit rapidly and completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate, inconsistent with their commitments to this temperature limit."

The attack on Charlie Hebdo, in which 10 people were killed, claimed massive media attention worldwide. Everyone agreed that freedom of speech and democracy had been brutally attacked, and many people proclaimed “Je suis Charlie!”, in solidarity with the murdered members of the magazine's staff.

In Denmark, it was proposed that the offending cartoons of the prophet Mohammad should be reprinted in major newspapers. However, in the United States, there was no such proposal, and in fact, US television viewers were not even allowed to see the drawings that had provoked the attack. How is this difference between Denmark and the US to be explained?

Denmark is a country with a predominantly homogeneous population, which only recently has become more diverse through the influx of refugees from troubled parts of the world. Thus, I believe, Denmark has not yet had time to learn that politeness is essential for preventing conflicts in a multi-ethnic society. On the other hand, the United States has lived with the problem for much longer.

During most of its history, the US has had substantial Spanish-speaking and Italian-speaking minorities, as well as great religious diversity. During the 1960's the civil rights movement fought against racial prejudice and gradually achieved most of its goals. Thus, over a very long period of time, the United States learned to avoid racial and religious insults in its media, and this hard-earned wisdom has allowed the very markedly multi-ethnic US society to function with a minimum of racial and religious conflicts.

Is this a lesson that the world as a whole needs to learn? I strongly believe that it is. Globally, we are in great need of a new ethic, which regards all humans as brothers and sisters, regardless of race, religion or nationality. Human solidarity will become increasingly important in the future, as stress from climate change and the vanishing of nonrenewable resources becomes more pronounced.

To get through the difficult time ahead of us, we will need to face the dangers and challenges of the future arm in arm, respecting each other's differing beliefs, and emphasizing our common humanity rather than our differences.

John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago. He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in 1965. He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen. Fellowships, memberships in societies: Since 1990 he has been the Contact Person in Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was the Member of the Danish Peace Commission of 1998. Technical Advisor, World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988- 1997). Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy, April 2004. http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm. He can be reached at avery.john.s@gmail.com

Freedom, Where Are You? Not In America or Europe

By Paul Craig Roberts

27 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

When the former Goldman Sachs executive who runs the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that he was going to print 720 billion euros annually with which to purchase bad debts from the politically connected big banks, the euro sank and the stock market and Swiss franc shot up. As in the US, quantitative easing (QE) serves to enrich the already rich. It has no other purpose.

The well-heeled financial institutions that bought up the troubled sovereign debt of Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain at low prices will now sell the bonds to the ECB for high prices. And despite depression level unemployment in most of Europe and austerity imposed on citizens, the stock market rose in anticipation that much of the 60 billion new euros that will be created each month will find its way into equity prices. Liquidity fuels the stock market.

Where else can the money to go? Some will go into Swiss francs and some into gold while gold is still available, but for the most part the ECB is running the printing press in order to boost the wealth of the stock-owning One Percent. The Federal Reserve and the ECB have taken the West back to the days when a handful of aristocrats owned everything.

The stock markets are bubbles blown by central bank money creation. On the basis of traditional reasoning there is no sound reason to be in equities, and sound investors have avoided them.

But there is no return anywhere else, and as the central banks are run by the rich for the rich, sound reasoning has proved to be a mistake for the past six years. This shows that corruption can prevail for an indeterminable period over fundamentals.

As I demonstrated in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, first Goldman Sachs deceived lenders into over-lending to the Greek government. Then Goldman Sachs former executives took over Greece’s financial affairs and forced austerity upon the population in order to prevent losses to the foreign lenders.

This established a new principle in Europe, one that the IMF has relentlessly applied to Latin American and Third World debtors. The principle is that when foreign lenders make mistakes and over-lend to foreign governments, loading them up with debt, the bankers’ mistakes are rectified by robbing the poor populations. Pensions, social services, and public employment are cut, valuable resources are sold off to foreigners for pennies on the dollar, and the government is forced to support US foreign policy. John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man describes the process perfectly. If you haven’t read Perkins book, you have little idea how corrupt and vicious the United States is. Indeed, Perkins shows that over-lending is intentional in order to set up the country for looting.

This is what Goldman Sachs did to Greece, intentionally or unintentionally.

It took the Greeks a long time to realize it. Apparently, 36.5 percent of the population was awoken by rising poverty, unemployment, and suicide rates. That figure, a little over one-third of the vote, was enough to put Syriza in power in the just concluded Greek election, throwing out the corrupt New Democracy party that has consistently sold out the Greek people to the foreign banks. Nevertheless, 27.7 percent of the Greeks, if the vote reporting is correct, voted for the party that has sacrificed the Greek people to the banksters. Even in Greece, a country accustomed to outpourings of people into the streets, a significant percentage of the population is sufficiently brainwashed to vote against their own interests.

Can Syriza do anything? It remains to be seen, but probably not. If the political party had received 55% or 65% or 75% of the vote, yes. But the largest vote at 36.5% does not show a unified country aware of its plight and its looting at the hands of rich banksters. The vote shows that a significant percentage of the Greek population supports foreign looting of Greece.

Moreover, Syriza is up against the heavies: the German and Netherlands banks who hold Greece’s loans and the governments that back the banks, the European Union which is using the sovereign debt crisis to destroy the sovereignty of the individual countries that comprise the European Union, Washington which backs EU sovereign power over the individual countries as it is easier to control one government than a couple of dozen.

Already the Western financial presstitutes are warning Syriza not to endanger its membership in the common currency by diverting from the austerity model imposed from abroad on Greek citizens with the complicity of New Democracy.

Apparently, there is a lack of formal means of exiting the EU and the euro, but nevertheless Greece can be threatened with being thrown out. Greece should welcome being thrown out.

Exiting the EU and the euro is the best thing that can happen to Greece. A country without its own currency is not a sovereign country. It is a vassal state of another power. A country without its own currency cannot finance its own needs. Although the UK is a member of the EU, the UK kept its own currency and is not subject to control by the ECB. A country without its own money is powerless. It is a non-entity.

If the US did not have its own dollar, the US would be of no consequence whatsoever on the world scene.

The EU and the euro were deception and trickery. Countries lost their sovereignty. So much for Western “self-rule,” “freedom,” “democracy,” all slogans without content. In the entire West there is nothing but the looting of people by the One Percent who control the governments.

In America, the looting does not rely on indebtedness, because the US dollar is the reserve currency and the US can print all the money needed in order to pay its bills and redeem its debt. In America the looting of labor has been through jobs offshoring.

American corporations discovered, and if they did not they were informed by Wall Street to move offshore or be taken over, that they could raise profits by moving their manufacturing operations abroad. The lower labor cost resulted in higher profits, higher share prices, huge managerial bonuses based on “performance,” and shareholder capital gains. Offshoring greatly increased the inequality in income and wealth in the US. Capital succeeded in looting labor.

The displaced well-paid manufacturing workers, if they were able to find replacement jobs, worked part-time minimum wage jobs at Walmart and Home Depot.

Economists, if they are entitled to the designation, such as Michael Porter and Matthew Slaughter, promised Americans that the fictional “New Economy” would produce better, higher-paying, and cleaner jobs for Americans than the “dirty fingernail” jobs that we were fortunate our corporations were moving offshore.

Years later, as I have proven conclusively, there is no sign of these “New Economy” jobs. What we have instead is a sharp decline in the labor force participation rate as the unemployed cannot find jobs. The replacement jobs for the manufacturing jobs are mainly part-time domestic service jobs.
People have to hold 2 or 3 of these jobs to make ends meet. These part time jobs offer no medical or pension benefits.

Now that this fact, once controversial believe it or not, has proven completely true, the same bought-and-paid-for spokespersons for robbing labor and destroying unions claim, without a shred of evidence, that the offshored jobs are coming home.

According to these propagandists, we now have what is called “reshoring.” A “reshoring” propagandist claims that the growth of “reshoring” over the past four years is 1,775 percent, an 18 times increase. http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/2015/A.T.Kearny-No-Data-Supporting-Reshoring-0112151.html

There is no sign whatsoever of these alleged “reshoring” jobs in the monthly BLS payroll jobs statistics.

What reshoring is all about is propaganda to counteract the belated realization that “free trade” agreements and job offshoring were not beneficial to the American economy or its work force, but were beneficial only to the super-rich.

Like people throughout history, the American people are being turned into serfs and slaves because the fools believe the lies that are fed to them. They sit in front of Fox News, CNN, and whatever. They read the New York Times. If you want to learn how badly Americans have been served by the so-called media, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States.

The media helps the government, and the private interests that profit from their control of government, control the brainwashed public. We have to invade Afghanistan because a faction there fighting for political control of the country is protecting Osama bin Laden, whom the US accuses without any proof of embarrassing the mighty US with the 9/11 attack. We have to invade Iraq because Saddam has “weapons of mass destruction” that he surely has despite the reports to the contrary by the weapons inspectors. We have to overthrow Gaddafi because of a slate of lies that have best been forgotten. We have to overthrow Assad because he used chemical weapons even though all evidence is to the contrary. Russia is responsible for Ukraine problems, not because the US overthrew the elected democratic government but because Russia accepted a 97.6% vote of Crimeans to rejoin Russia where the province had resided for hundreds of years before a Ukrainian Soviet leader, Khrushchev, stuck Crimea into Ukraine, at the time a part of the Soviet Union along with Russia.

War, War, War, that is all Washington wants. It enriches the military/security complex, the largest component of the US GNP and the largest contributor, along with Wall Street and the Israel Lobby, to US political campaigns.

Anyone or any organization that offers truth to the lies is demonized. Last week the new chief of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, Andrew Lack, listed the Russian TV Internet service Russia Today as the equivalent of Boko Haram and the Islamic State terrorist groups. This absurd accusation is a prelude to closing down RT in the US just as Washington’s puppet UK government closed down Iran’s Press TV. http://rt.com/usa/225819-rt-isis-point-view-competition/

In other words, Anglo-Americans are not permitted any different news than what is served to them by “their” governments.

That is the state of “freedom” in the West today.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

The European Union May Be on the Verge of Regime Collapse

Europe won the Cold War.

Not long after the Berlin Wall fell a quarter of a century ago, the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States squandered its peace dividend in an attempt to maintain global dominance, and Europe quietly became more prosperous, more integrated, and more of a player in international affairs. Between 1989 and 2014, the European Union (EU) practically doubled its membership and catapulted into third place in population behind China and India. It currently boasts the world’s largest economy and also heads the list of global trading powers. In 2012, the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize for transforming Europe “from a continent of war to a continent of peace.”

In the competition for “world’s true superpower,” China loses points for still having so many impoverished peasants in its rural hinterlands and a corrupt, illiberal bureaucracy in its cities; the United States, for its crumbling infrastructure and a hypertrophied military-industrial complex that threatens to bankrupt the economy. As the only equitably prosperous, politically sound, and rule-of-law-respecting superpower, Europe comes out on top, even if -- or perhaps because -- it doesn’t have the military muscle to play global policeman.

And yet, for all this success, the European project is currently teetering on the edge of failure. Growth is anemic at best and socio-economic inequality is on the rise. The countries of Eastern and Central Europe, even relatively successful Poland, have failed to bridge the income gap with the richer half of the continent. And the highly indebted periphery is in revolt.

Politically, the center may not hold and things seem to be falling apart. From the left, parties like Syriza in Greece are challenging the EU’s prescriptions of austerity. From the right, Euroskeptic parties are taking aim at the entire quasi-federal model. Racism and xenophobia are gaining ever more adherents, even in previously placid regions like Scandinavia.

Perhaps the primary social challenge facing Europe at the moment, however, is the surging popularity of Islamophobia, the latest “socialism of fools.” From the killings at the Munich Olympics in 1972 to the recent attacks at Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, wars in the Middle East have long inspired proxy battles in Europe. Today, however, the continent finds itself ever more divided between a handful of would-be combatants who claim the mantle of true Islam and an ever-growing contingent who believe Islam -- all of Islam -- has no place in Europe.

The fracturing European Union of 2015 is not the Europe that political scientist Frances Fukuyama imagined when, in 1989, he so famously predicted “the end of history,” as well as the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy and the bureaucracy in Brussels, the EU’s headquarters, that now oversees continental affairs. Nor is it the Europe that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher imagined when, in the 1980s, she spoke of the global triumph of TINA (“there is no alternative”) and of her brand of market liberalism. Instead, today’s Europe increasingly harkens back to the period between the two world wars when politicians of the far right and left polarized public debate, economies went into a financial tailspin, anti-Semitism surged out of the sewer, and storm clouds gathered on the horizon.

Another continent-wide war may not be in the offing, but Europe does face the potential for regime collapse: that is, the end of the Eurozone and the unraveling of regional integration. Its possible dystopian future can be glimpsed in what has happened in its eastern borderlands. There, federal structures binding together culturally diverse people have had a lousy track record over the last quarter-century. After all, the Soviet Union imploded in 1991; Czechoslovakia divorced in 1993; and Yugoslavia was torn asunder in a series of wars later in the 1990s.

If its economic, political, and social structures succumb to fractiousness, the European Union could well follow the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia into the waste bin of failed federalisms. Europe as a continent will remain, its nation-states will continue to enjoy varying degrees of prosperity, but Europe as an idea will be over. Worse yet, if, in the end, the EU snatches defeat from the jaws of its Cold War victory, it will have no one to blame but itself.

The Rise and Fall of TINA

The Cold War was an era of alternatives. The United States offered its version of freewheeling capitalism, while the Soviet Union peddled its brand of centralized planning. In the middle, continental Europe offered the compromise of a social market: capitalism with a touch of planning and a deepening concern for the welfare of all members of society.

Cooperation, not competition, was the byword of the European alternative. Americans could have their dog-eat-dog, frontier capitalism. Europeans would instead stress greater coordination between labor and management, and the European Community (the precursor to the EU) would put genuine effort into bringing its new members up to the economic and political level of its core countries.

Then, at a point in the 1980s when the Soviet model had ceased to exert any influence at all globally, along came TINA.

At the time, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and American President Ronald Reagan were ramping up their campaigns to shrink government, while what later became known as globalization -- knocking down trade walls and opening up new opportunities for the financial sector -- began to be felt everywhere. Thatcher summed up this brave new world with her TINA acronym: the planet no longer had any alternative to globalized market democracy.

Not surprisingly, then, in the post-Cold War era, European integration shifted its focus toward removing barriers to the flow of capital. As a result, the expansion of Europe no longer came with an implied guarantee of eventual equality. The deals that Ireland (1973) and Portugal (1986) had received on accession were now, like the post-World War II Marshall Plan, artifacts of another era. The sheer number of potential new members knocking on Europe’s door put a strain on the EU’s coffers, particularly since the economic performance of countries like Romania and Bulgaria was so far below the European average. But even if the EU had been overflowing with funds, it might not have mattered, since the new “neoliberal” spirit of capitalism now animated its headquarters in Brussels where the order of the day had become: cut government, unleash the market.

At the heart of Europe, as well as of this new orthodoxy, lies Germany, the exemplar of continental fiscal rectitude. Yet in the 1990s, that newly reunified nation engaged in enormous deficit spending, even if packaged under a different name, to bring the former East Germany up to the level of the rest of the country. It did not, however, care to apply this “reunification exception” to other former members of the Soviet bloc. Acting as the effective central bank for the European Union, Germany instead demanded balanced budgets and austerity from all newcomers (and some old timers as well) as the only effective answer to debt and fears of a future depression.

The rest of the old Warsaw Pact has had access to some EU funds for infrastructure development, but nothing on the order of the East German deal. As such, they remain in a kind of economic halfway house. The standard of living in Hungary, 25 years after the fall of Communism, remains approximately half that of neighboring Austria. Similarly, it took Romania 14 years just to regain the gross national product (GDP) it had in 1989 and it remains stuck at the bottom of the European Union. People who visit only the capital cities of Eastern and Central Europe come away with a distorted view of the economic situation there, since Warsaw and Bratislava are wealthier than Vienna, and Budapest nearly on a par with it, even though Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary all remain economically far behind Austria.

What those countries experienced after 1989 -- one course of “shock therapy” after another -- became the medicine of choice for all EU members at risk of default following the financial crisis of 2007 and then the sovereign debt crisis of 2009. Forget deficit spending to enable countries to grow their way out of economic crisis. Forget debt renegotiation. The unemployment rate in Greece and Spain now hovers around 25%, with youth unemployment over 50%, and all the EU members subjected to heavy doses of austerity have witnessed a steep rise in the number of people living below the poverty line. The recent European Central Bank announcement of "quantitative easing" -- a monetary sleight-of-hand to pump money into the Eurozone -- is too little, too late.

The major principle of European integration has been reversed. Instead of Eastern and Central Europe catching up to the rest of the EU, pockets of the “west” have begun to fall behind the “east.” The GDP per capita of Greece, for example, has slipped below that of Slovenia and, when measured in terms of purchasing power, even Slovakia, both former Communist countries.

The Axis of Illiberalism

Europeans are beginning to realize that Margaret Thatcher was wrong and there are alternatives -- to liberalism and European integration. The most notorious example of this new illiberalism is Hungary.

On July 26, 2014, in a speech to his party faithful, Prime Minister Viktor Orban confided that he intended a thorough reorganization of the country. The reform model Orban had in mind, however, had nothing to do with the United States, Britain, or France. Rather, he aspired to create what he bluntly called an “illiberal state” in the very heart of Europe, one strong on Christian values and light on the libertine ways of the West. More precisely, what he wanted was to turn Hungary into a mini-Russia or mini-China.

“Societies founded upon the principle of the liberal way,” Orban intoned, “will not be able to sustain their world-competitiveness in the following years, and more likely they will suffer a setback, unless they will be able to substantially reform themselves.” He was also eager to reorient to the east, relying ever less on Brussels and ever more on potentially lucrative markets in and investments from Russia, China, and the Middle East.

That July speech represented a truly Oedipal moment, for Orban was eager to drive a stake right through the heart of the ideology that had fathered him. As a young man more than 25 years earlier, he had led the Alliance of Young Democrats -- Fidesz -- one of the region’s most promising liberal parties. In the intervening years, sensing political opportunity elsewhere on the political spectrum, he had guided Fidesz out of the Liberal International and into the European People’s Party, alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Now, however, he was on the move again and his new role model wasn’t Merkel, but Russian President Vladimir Putin and his iron-fisted style of politics. Given the disappointing performance of liberal economic reforms and the stinginess of the EU, it was hardly surprising that Orban had decided to hedge his bets by looking east.

The European Union has responded by harshly criticizing Orban’s government for pushing through a raft of constitutional changes that restrict the media and compromise the independence of the judiciary. Racism and xenophobia are on the uptick in Hungary, particularly anti-Roma sentiment and anti-Semitism. And the state has taken steps to reassert control over the economy and impose controls on foreign investment.

For some, the relationship between Hungary and the rest of Europe is reminiscent of the moment in the 1960s when Albania fled the Soviet bloc and, in an act of transcontinental audacity, aligned itself with Communist China. But Albania was then a marginal player and China still a poor peasant country. Hungary is an important EU member and China’s illiberal development model, which has vaulted it to the top of the global economy, now has increasing international influence. This, in other words, is no Albanian mouse that roared. A new illiberal axis connecting Budapest to Beijing and Moscow would have far-reaching implications.

The Hungarian prime minister, after all, has many European allies in his Euroskeptical project. Far right parties are climbing in the polls across the continent. With 25% of the votes, Marine Le Pen’s National Front, for instance, topped the French elections for the European parliament last May. In local elections in 2014, it also seized 12 mayoralties, and polls show that Le Pen would win the 2017 presidential race if it were held today. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, the National Front has been pushing a range of policies from reinstating the death penalty to closing borders that would deliberately challenge the whole European project.

In Denmark, the far-right People’s Party also won the most votes in the European parliamentary elections. In November, it topped opinion polls for the first time. The People’s Party has called for Denmark to slam shut its open-door policy toward refugees and re-introduce border controls. Much as the Green Party did in Germany in the 1970s, groupings like Great Britain’s Independence Party, the Finns Party, and even Sweden’s Democrats are shattering the comfortable conservative-social democratic duopoly that has rotated in power throughout Europe during the Cold War and in its aftermath.

The Islamophobia that has surged in the wake of the murders in France provides an even more potent arrow in the quiver of these parties as they take on the mainstream. The sentiment currently expressed against Islam -- at rallies, in the media, and in the occasional criminal act -- recalls a Europe of long ago, when armed pilgrims set out on a multiple crusades against Muslim powers, when early nation-states mobilized against the Ottoman Empire, and when European unity was forged not out of economic interest or political agreement but as a “civilizational” response to the infidel.

The Europe of today is, of course, a far more multicultural place and regional integration depends on “unity in diversity,” as the EU’s motto puts it. As a result, rising anti-Islamic sentiment challenges the inclusive nature of the European project. If the EU cannot accommodate Islam, the complex balancing act among all its different ethnic, religious, and cultural groups will be thrown into question.

Euroskepticism doesn’t only come from the right side of the political spectrum. In Greece, the Syriza party has challenged liberalism from the left, as it leads protests against EU and International Monetary Fund austerity programs that have plunged the population into recession and revolt. As elsewhere in Europe, the far right might have taken advantage of this economic crisis, too, had the government not arrested the Golden Dawn leadership on murder and other charges. In parliamentary elections on Sunday, Syriza won an overwhelming victory, coming only a couple seats short of an absolute majority. In a sign of the ongoing realignment of European politics, that party then formed a new government not with the center-left, but with the right-wing Independent Greeks, which is similarly anti-austerity but also skeptical of the EU and in favor of a crackdown on illegal immigration.

European integration continues to be a bipartisan project for the parties that straddle the middle of the political spectrum, but the Euroskeptics are now winning votes with their anti-federalist rhetoric. Though they tend to moderate their more apocalyptic rhetoric about “despotic Brussels” as they get closer to power, by pulling on a loose thread here and another there, they could very well unravel the European tapestry.

When the Virtuous Turn Vicious

For decades, European integration created a virtuous circle -- prosperity generating political support for further integration that, in turn, grew the European economy. It was a winning formula in a competitive world. However, as the European model has become associated with austerity, not prosperity, that virtuous circle has turned vicious. A challenge to the Eurozone in one country, a repeal of open borders in another, the reinstitution of the death penalty in a third -- it, too, is a process that could feed on itself, potentially sending the EU into a death spiral, even if, at first, no member states take the fateful step of withdrawing.

In Eastern and Central Europe, the growing crew who distrust the EU complain that Brussels has simply taken the place of Moscow in the post-Soviet era. (The Euroskeptics in the former Yugoslavia prefer to cite Belgrade.) Brussels, they insist, establishes the parameters of economic policy that its member states ignore at their peril, while Eurozone members find themselves with ever less control over their finances. Even if the edicts coming from Brussels are construed as economically sensible and possessed of a modicum of democratic legitimacy, to the Euroskeptics they still represent a devastating loss of sovereignty.

In this way, the same resentments that ate away at the Soviet and Yugoslav federations have begun to erode popular support for the European Union. Aside from Poland and Germany, where enthusiasm remains strong, sentiment toward the EU remains lukewarm at best across much of the rest of the continent, despite a post-euro crisis rebound. Its popularity now hovers at around 50% in many member states and below that in places like Italy and Greece.

The European Union has without question been a remarkable achievement of modern statecraft. It turned a continent that seemed destined to wallow in “ancestral hatreds” into one of the most harmonious regions on the planet. But as with the portmanteau states of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, the complex federal project of the EU has proven fragile in the absence of a strong external threat like the one that the Cold War provided. Another economic shock or a coordinated political challenge could tip it over the edge.

Unity in diversity may be an appealing concept, but the EU needs more than pretty rhetoric and good intentions to stay glued together. If it doesn’t come up with a better recipe for dealing with economic inequality, political extremism, and social intolerance, its opponents will soon have the power to hit the rewind button on European integration. The ensuing regime collapse would not only be a tragedy for Europe, but for all those who hope to overcome the dangerous rivalries of the past and provide shelter from the murderous conflicts of the present.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, the editor of LobeLog, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of several books, including Crusade 2.0.

Copyright 2015 John Feffer

At a time when the corporate-controlled media of Europe and the United States are doing everything that they can to fill us with poisonous Islamophobia, it is perhaps a useful antidote to remember the great role that Islamic civilization played in preserving, enlarging and transmitting to us the knowledge and culture of the ancient world.

After the burning of the great library at Alexandria and the destruction of Hellenistic civilization, most of the books of the classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophers were lost. However, a few of these books survived and were translated from Greek, first into Syriac, then into Arabic and finally from Arabic into Latin. By this roundabout route, fragments from the wreck of the classical Greek and Hellenistic civilizations drifted back into the consciousness of the West.

The Roman empire was ended in the 5th century A.D. by attacks of barbaric Germanic tribes from northern Europe. However, by that time, the Roman empire had split into two halves. The eastern half, with its capital at Byzantium (Constantinople), survived until 1453, when the last emperor was killed vainly defending the walls of his city against the Turks.

The Byzantine empire included many Syriac-speaking subjects; and in fact, beginning in the 3rd century A.D., Syriac replaced Greek as the major language of western Asia. In the 5th century A.D., there was a split in the Christian church of Byzantium; and the Nestorian church, separated from
the official Byzantine church. The Nestorians were bitterly persecuted by the Byzantines, and therefore they migrated, first to Mesopotamia, and later to south-west Persia. (Some Nestorians migrated as far as China.)

During the early part of the middle ages, the Nestorian capital at Gondisapur was a great center of intellectual activity. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Hero and Galen were translated into Syriac by Nestorian scholars, who had brought these books with them from Byzantium.

Among the most distinguished of the Nestorian translators were the members of a family called Bukht-Yishu (meaning “Jesus hath delivered”), which produced seven generations of outstanding scholars. Members of this family were fluent not only in Greek and Syriac, but also in Arabic and Persian.

In the 7th century A.D., the Islamic religion suddenly emerged as a conquering and proselytizing force. Inspired by the teachings of Mohammad (570 A.D. - 632 A.D.), the Arabs and their converts rapidly conquered western Asia, northern Africa, and Spain. During the initial stages of the conquest, the Islamic religion inspired a fanaticism in its followers which was often hostile to learning. However, this initial fanaticism quickly changed to an appreciation of the ancient cultures of the conquered territories; and during the middle ages, the Islamic world reached a very high level of culture and civilization.

Thus, while the century from 750 to 850 was primarily a period of translation from Greek to Syriac, the century from 850 to 950 was a period of translation from Syriac to Arabic. It was during this latter century that Yuhanna Ibn Masawiah (a member of the Bukht-Yishu family, and medical advisor to Caliph Harun al-Rashid) produced many important translations into Arabic.

The skill of the physicians of the Bukht-Yishu family convinced the Caliphs of the value of Greek learning; and in this way the family played an extremely important role in the preservation of the western cultural heritage. Caliph al-Mamun, the son of Harun al-Rashid, established at Baghdad a library and a school for translation, and soon Baghdad replaced Gondisapur as a center of learning.

The English word “chemistry” is derived from the Arabic words “al-chimia”, which mean “the changing”. The earliest alchemical writer in Arabic was Jabir (760-815), a friend of Harun al-Rashid. Much of his writing deals with the occult, but mixed with this is a certain amount of real chemical knowledge. For example, in his Book of Properties, Jabir gives a recipe for making what we now call lead hydroxycarbonate (white lead), which is used in painting and pottery glazes:

Another important alchemical writer was Rahzes (c. 860 - c. 950). He was born in the ancient city of Ray, near Teheran, and his name means “the man from Ray”. Rhazes studied medicine in Baghdad, and he became chief physician at the hospital there. He wrote the first accurate descriptions of smallpox and measles, and his medical writings include methods for setting broken bones with casts made from plaster of Paris. Rahzes was the first person to classify substances into vegetable, animal and mineral. The word “al-kali”, which appears in his writings, means “the calcined” in Arabic. It is the source of our word “alkali”, as well as of the symbol K for potassium.

The greatest physician of the middle ages, Avicinna, (Abu-Ali al Hussain Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina, 980-1037), was also a Persian, like Rahzes. More than a hundred books are attributed to him. They were translated into Latin in the 12th century, and they were among the most important medical books used in Europe until the time of Harvey. Avicinina also wrote on alchemy, and he is important for having denied the possibility of transmutation of elements.

In mathematics, one of the most outstanding Arabic writers was al-Khwarizmi (c. 780 - c. 850). The title of his book, Ilm al-jabr wa’d muqabalah, is the source of the English word “algebra”. In Arabic al-jabr means “the equating”. Al-Khwarizmi’s name has also become an English word, “algorism”, the old word for arithmetic. Al-Khwarizmi drew from both Greek and Hindu sources, and through his writings the decimal system and the use of zero were transmitted to the west.

One of the outstanding Arabic physicists was al-Hazen (965-1038). He did excellent work in optics, and in this field he went far beyond anything done by the Greeks. Al-Hazen studied the reflection of light by the atmosphere, an effect which makes the stars appear displaced from their true positions when they are near the horizon; and he calculated the height of the atmospheric layer above the earth to be about ten miles. He also studied the rainbow, the halo, and the reflection of light from spherical and parabolic mirrors. In his book, On the Burning Sphere, he shows a deep understanding of the properties of convex lenses. Al-Hazen also used a dark room with a pin-hole opening to study the image of the sun during an eclipes. This is the first mention of the camera obscura, and it is perhaps correct to attribute the invention of the camera obscura to al-Hazen.

Another Islamic philosopher who had great influence on western thought was Averroes, who lived in Spain from 1126 to 1198. His writings took the form of thoughtful commentaries on the works of Aristotle. He shocked both his Moslem and his Christian readers by maintaining that the world was not created at a definite instant, but that it instead evolved over a long period of time, and is still evolving.

In the 12th century, parts of Spain, including the city of Toledo, were reconquered by the Christians. Toledo had been an Islamic cultural center, and many Moslem scholars, together with their manuscripts, remained in the city when it passed into the hands of the Christians. Thus Toledo became a center for the exchange of ideas between east and west; and it was in this city that
many of the books of the classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophers were translated from Arabic into Latin.

It is interesting ans inspiring to visit Toledo. A tourist there can see ample evidence of a period of tolerance and enlightenment, when members of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam , lived side by side in harmony and mutual respect, exchanging important ideas which were to destined to become the foundations of our modern civilization. One can also see cathedrals, mosques and synagogues, in each of which craftsmen from all three faiths worked cooperatively to produce beautiful monuments to human solidarity.

John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago. He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in 1965. He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen. Fellowships, memberships in societies: Since 1990 he has been the Contact Person in Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was the Member of the Danish Peace Commission of 1998. Technical Advisor, World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988- 1997). Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy, April 2004. http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm. He can be reached at avery.john.s@gmail.com

Forget the future. The world already is nearly five times as dangerous and disaster prone as it was in the 1970s, because of the increasing risks brought by climate change, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization.

California officials have ordered an emergency shut-down of 11 oil and gas waste injection sites and a review more than 100 others in the state's drought-wracked Central Valley out of fear that companies may have been pumping fracking fluids and other toxic waste into drinking water aquifers there.

The state's Division of Oil and Gas and Geothermal Resources on July 7 issued cease and desist orders to seven energy companies warning that they may be injecting their waste into aquifers that could be a source of drinking water, and stating that their waste disposal "poses danger to life, health, property, and natural resources." The orders were first reported by the Bakersfield Californian, and the state has confirmed with ProPublica that its investigation is expanding to look at additional wells.

The action comes as California's agriculture industry copes with a drought crisis that has emptied reservoirs and cost the state $2.2 billion this year alone. The lack of water has forced farmers across the state to supplement their water supply from underground aquifers, according to a study released this week by the University of California Davis.

The problem is that at least 100 of the state's aquifers were presumed to be useless for drinking and farming because the water was either of poor quality, or too deep underground to easily access. Years ago, the state exempted them from environmental protection and allowed the oil and gas industry to intentionally pollute them. But not all aquifers are exempted, and the system amounts to a patchwork of protected and unprotected water resources deep underground. Now, according to the cease and desist orders issued by the state, it appears that at least seven injection wells are likely pumping waste into fresh water aquifers protected by the law, and not other aquifers sacrificed by the state long ago.

"The aquifers in question with respect to the orders that have been issued are not exempt," said Ed Wilson, a spokesperson for the California Department of Conservation in an email.

A 2012 ProPublica investigation of more than 700,000 injection wells across the country found that wells were often poorly regulated and experienced high rates of failure, outcomes that were likely polluting underground water supplies that are supposed to be protected by federal law. That investigation also disclosed a little-known program overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that exempted more than 1,000 other drinking water aquifers from any sort of pollution protection at all, many of them in California.

Those are the aquifers at issue today. The exempted aquifers, according to documents the state filed with the U.S. EPA in 1981 and obtained by ProPublica, were poorly defined and ambiguously outlined. They were often identified by hand-drawn lines on a map, making it difficult to know today exactly which bodies of water were supposed to be protected, and by which aspects of the governing laws. Those exemptions and documents were signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown, who also was governor in 1981.

State officials emphasized to ProPublica that they will now order water testing and monitoring at the injection well sites in question. To date, they said, they have not yet found any of the more regulated aquifers to have been contaminated.

"We do not have any direct evidence any drinking water has been affected," wrote Steve Bohlen, the state oil and gas supervisor, in a statement to ProPublica.

Bohlen said his office was acting "out of an abundance of caution," and a spokesperson said that the state became aware of the problems through a review of facilities it was conducting according to California's fracking law passed late last year, which required the state to study fracking impacts and adopt regulations to address its risks, presumably including underground disposal.

California officials have long been under fire for their injection well practices, a waste disposal program that the state runs according to federal law and under a sort of license 2014 called "primacy" 2014 given to it by the EPA.

For one, experts say that aquifers the states and the EPA once thought would never be needed may soon become important sources of water as the climate changes and technology reduces the cost of pumping it from deep underground and treating it for consumption. Indeed, towns in Wyoming and Texas 2014 two states also suffering long-term droughts 2014 are pumping, treating, then delivering drinking water to taps from aquifers which would be considered unusable under California state regulations governing the oil and gas industry.

In June 2011, the EPA conducted a review of other aspects of California's injection well program and found enforcement, testing and oversight problems so significant that the agency demanded California improve its regulations and warned that the state's authority could be revoked.

Among the issues, California and the federal government disagree about what type of water is worth protecting in the first place, with California law only protecting a fraction of the waters that the federal Safe Drinking Water Act requires.

The EPA's report, commissioned from outside consultants, also said that California regulators routinely failed to adequately examine the geology around an injection well to ensure that fluids pumped into it would not leak underground and contaminate drinking water aquifers. The report found that state inspectors often allowed injection at pressures that exceeded the capabilities of the wells and thus risked cracking the surrounding rock and spreading contaminants. Several accidents in recent years in California involved injected waste or injected steam leaking back out of abandoned wells, or blowing out of the ground and creating sinkholes, including one 2011 incident that killed an oil worker.

The exemptions and other failings, said Damon Nagami, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in an email, are "especially disturbing" in a state that has been keenly aware of severe water constraints for more than a century and is now suffering from a crippling drought. "Our drinking water sources must be protected and preserved for the precious resources they are, not sacrificed as a garbage dump for the oil and gas industry."

Still, three years after the EPA's report, California has not yet completed its review of its underground injection program, according to state officials. The scrutiny of the wells surrounding Bakersfield may be the start.

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Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that one cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that led to it. Yet this is precisely what we are now trying to do with climate change policy.  The Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, many environmental groups, and the oil and gas industry all tell us that the way to solve the problem created by fossil fuels is with more fossils fuels.  We can do this, they claim, by using more natural gas, which is touted as a “clean” fuel -- even a “green” fuel.

Like most misleading arguments, this one starts from a kernel of truth.

That truth is basic chemistry: when you burn natural gas, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced is, other things being equal, much less than when you burn an equivalent amount of coal or oil. It can be as much as 50% less compared with coal, and 20% to 30% less compared with diesel fuel, gasoline, or home heating oil. When it comes to a greenhouse gas (GHG) heading for the atmosphere, that’s a substantial difference.  It means that if you replace oil or coal with gas without otherwise increasing your energy usage, you can significantly reduce your short-term carbon footprint.

Replacing coal gives you other benefits as well, such as reducing the sulfate pollution that causes acid rain, particulate emissions that cause lung disease, and mercury that causes brain damage.  And if less coal is mined, then occupational death and disease can be reduced in coal miners and the destruction caused by damaging forms of mining, including the removal, in some parts of the country, of entire mountains can be reduced or halted.

Those are significant benefits. In part for these reasons, the Obama administration has made natural gas development a centerpiece of its energy policy, and environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, have supported the increased use of gas. President Obama has gone as far as to endorse fracking -- the controversial method of extracting natural gas from low permeability shales -- on the grounds that the gas extracted can provide “a bridge” to a low carbon future and help fight climate change.

So if someone asks: "Is gas better than oil or coal?" the short answer seems to be yes.  And when it comes to complicated issues that have science at their core, often the short answer is the (basically) correct one.

As a historian of science who studies global warming, I’ve often stressed that anthropogenic climate change is a matter of basic physics: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which means it traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. So if you put additional CO2 into that atmosphere, above and beyond what’s naturally there, you have to expect the planet to warm.  Basic physics.  

And guess what? We’ve added a substantial amount of CO2 to the atmosphere, and the planet has become hotter.  We can fuss about the details of natural variability, cloud feedbacks, ocean heat and CO2 uptake, El Niño cycles and the like, but the answer that you get from college-level physics -- more CO2 means a hotter planet -- has turned out to be correct.  The details may affect the timing and mode of climate warming, but they won’t stop it. 

In the case of gas, however, the short answer may not be the correct one.

 The often-touted decrease in greenhouse gas production applies when natural gas replaces other fuels -- particularly coal -- in electricity generation.  That’s important.  Electricity is about 40% of total U.S. energy use.  Traditionally, coal has been the dominant fuel used to generate electricity in this country and most of the world.  (And no one has any serious plan to live without electricity.)  Any measurable GHG reduction in the electricity sector is significant and gains achieved in that sector quickly add up.

But a good deal of the benefit of gas in electricity generation comes from the fact that it is used in modern combined-cycle gas turbine plants.  A combined-cycle plant is one in which waste heat is captured and redirected to drive a mechanical system that powers a generator that creates additional electricity. These plants can be nearly twice as efficient as conventional single-cycle plants.  In addition, if combined with cogeneration (the trapping of the last bits of heat for local home heating or other purposes), they can reach efficiencies of nearly 90%.  That means that nearly all the heat released by burning the fuel is captured and used -- an impressive accomplishment.

In theory, you could build a combined-cycle plant with coal (or other fuels), but it’s not often done. You can also increase coal efficiency by pulverizing it, and using a technique called “ultra super-critical black coal.” An expert report compiled by the Australian Council of Learned Societies in 2013 compared the efficiencies of a range of fuels, including conventional gas and shale gas, under a variety of conditions, and concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation using efficient forms of coal burning were not that much more than from gas.

What this means is that most of the benefit natural gas offers comes not from the gas itself, but from how it is burned, and this is mostly because gas plants tend to be new and use more efficient burning technologies.  The lesson, not surprisingly: if you burn a fuel using twenty-first century technology, you get a better result than with late nineteenth or twentieth century technology.  This is not to defend coal, but to provide an important reality check on the discussion now taking place in this country.  There is a real benefit to burning gas in America, but it’s less than often claimed, and much of that benefit comes from using modern techniques and new equipment. (If the coal industry weren’t so busy denying the reality of climate change, they might publicize this fact.)

It’s Not Just Electricity

Replacing coal with gas in electricity generation is still probably a good idea -- at least in the near term -- but gas isn’t just used to generate electricity.  It’s also used in transportation, to heat homes and make hot water, and in gas appliances like stoves, driers, and fireplaces.  Here the situation is seriously worrisome.

It’s extremely difficult to estimate GHG emissions in these sectors because many of the variables are poorly measured. One important emission source is gas leakage from distribution and storage systems, which is hard to measure because it happens in so many different ways in so many different places.  Such leaks are sometimes called “downstream emissions,” because they occur after the gas has been drilled.

Certainly, gas does leak, and the more we transport, distribute, and use it, the more opportunities there are for such leakage.  Studies have tried to estimate the total emissions associated with gas using well-to-burner or “life-cycle” analysis. Different studies of this sort tend to yield quite different results with a high margin for error, but many conclude that when natural gas replaces petroleum in transportation or heating oil in homes, the greenhouse gas benefits are slim to none. (And since almost no one in America heats their home with coal any more, there are no ancillary benefits of decreased coal.) One study by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University concluded that while the probability of reducing GHG emissions at least somewhat by replacing coal with gas in electricity generation was 100%, the substitution of natural gas as a transportation fuel actually carries a 10%-35% risk of increasing emissions.

In the Northeast, the northern Midwest, and the Great Plains, many builders are touting the “energy efficiency” of new homes supplied with gas heat and hot water systems, but it’s not clear that these homes are achieving substantial GHG reductions. In New England, where wood is plentiful, many people would do better to use high efficiency wood stoves (or burn other forms of biomass).

How Gas (CH4) Heats the Atmosphere Much More than CO2 

Isn’t gas still better than oil for heating homes? Perhaps, but oil doesn’t leak into the atmosphere, which brings us to a crucial point: natural gas is methane (CH4), which is a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2.

As a result, gas leaks are a cause for enormous concern, because any methane that reaches the atmosphere unburned contributes to global warming more than the same amount of CO2.  How much more?  This is a question that has caused considerable angst in the climate science community, because it depends on how you calculate it.  Scientists have developed the concept of “Global Warming Potential” (GWP) to try to answer this question.

The argument is complicated because while CH4 warms the planet far more than CO2, it stays in the atmosphere for much less time.   A typical molecule of CO2remains in the atmosphere about 10 times longer than a molecule of CH4.  In theirFifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the GWP for methane is 34 times that of CO2 over the span of 100 years.  However, when the time frame is changed to 20 years, the GWP increases to 86!

Most calculations of the impact of methane leakage use the 100-year time frame, which makes sense if you are worried about the cumulative impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the world as a whole, but not -- many scientists have started to argue -- if you are worried about currently unfolding impacts on the biosphere.  After all, many species may go extinct well before we reach that 100-year mark.  It also does not make sense if you are worried that we are quickly approaching irreversible tipping points in the climate system, including rapid ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

It gets worse.  CH4 and CO2 are not the only components of air pollution that can alter the climate.  Dust particles from pollution or volcanoes have the capacity to cool the climate.  As it happens, burning coal produces a lot of dust, leading some scientists to conclude that replacing coal with natural gas may actually increaseglobal warming.  If they are right, then not only is natural gas not a bridge to a clean energy future, it’s a bridge to potential disaster.

Fracking

A great deal of recent public and media attention has been focused not on gas itself, but on the mechanism increasingly used to extract it.  Hydraulic fracturing -- better known as fracking -- is a technique that uses high-pressure fluids to “fracture” and extract gas from low permeability rocks where it would otherwise be trapped.  The technique itself has been around for a long time, but in the last decade, combined with innovations in drilling technology and the high cost of petroleum, it has become a profitable way to produce energy.

The somewhat surprising result of several recent studies (including one by an expert panel from the Council of Canadian Academies on which I served) is that, from a climate-change perspective, fracking probably isn’t much worse than conventional gas extraction.  Life-cycle analyses of GHG emissions from the Marcellus and Bakken shales, for example, suggest that emissions are probably slightly but not significantly higher than from conventional gas drilling.  A good proportion of these emissions come from well leakage.

It turns out to be surprisingly hard to seal a well tightly. This is widely acknowledged even by industry representatives and shale gas advocates. They call it the problem of “well integrity.”  Wells may leak when they are being drilled, during production, and even when abandoned after production has ended.  The reason is primarily because the cement used to seal the well may shrink, crack, or simply fail to fill in all the gaps.

Interestingly, there’s little evidence that fracked wells leak more than conventional wells.  From a greenhouse gas perspective, the problem with fracking lies in the huge number of wells being drilled.  According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there were 342,000 gas wells in the United States in 2000; by 2010, there were over 510,000, and nearly all of this increase was driven by shale-gas development -- that is, by fracking.  This represents a huge increase in the potential pathways for methane leakage directly into the atmosphere.  (It also represents a huge increase in potential sources of groundwater contamination, but that’s a subject for another post.)

There have been enormous disagreements among scientists and industry representatives over methane leakage rates, but experts calculate that leakage must be kept below 3% for gas to represent an improvement over coal in electricity generation, and below 1% for gas to improve over diesel and gasoline in transportation.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently estimates average leakage rates at 1.4%, but quite a few experts dispute that figure.  One study published in 2013, based on atmospheric measurements over gas fields in Utah, found leakage rates as high as 6%-11%.  The Environmental Defense Fund is currently sponsoring a large, collaborative project involving diverse industry, government, and academic scientists. One part of the study, measuring emissions over Colorado’s most active oil and gas drilling region, found methane emissions almost three times higher than the EPA’s 2012 numbers, corresponding to a well-leakage rate of 2.6%-5.6%.

Some of the differences in leakage estimates reflect differing measurement techniques, some may involve measurement error, and some probably reflect real differences in gas fields and industrial practices.  But the range of estimates indicates that the scientific jury is still out.  If, in the end, leakage rates prove to be higher than the EPA currently calculates, the promised benefits of gas begin to vaporize.  If leakage in storage and distribution is higher than currently estimated -- as one ongoing study by my own colleagues at Harvard suggests -- then the alleged benefits may evaporate entirely.

And we're not done yet.  There’s one more important pathway to consider when it comes to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere: flaring.  In this practice, gas is burned off at the wellhead, sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s most commonly done in oil fields.  There, natural gas is not a desirable product but a hazardous byproduct that companies flare to avoid gas explosions. (If you fly over the Persian Gulf at night and notice numerous points of light below, those are wellhead fires).

In our report for the Council of Canadian Academies, our panel relied on industry data that suggested flaring rates in gas fields were extremely low, typically less than 2% and "in all probability" less than 0.1%. This would make sense if gas producers were efficient, since they want to sell gas, not flare it.  But recently the Wall Street Journal reported that state officials in North Dakota would be pressing for new regulations because flaring rates there are running around 30%.  In the month of April alone, $50 million dollars of natural gas was burned off, completely wasted.  The article was discussing shale oil wells, not shale gas ones, but it suggests that, when it comes to controlling flaring, there’s evidence the store is not being adequately minded. (At present, there are no federal regulations at all on flaring.)  As long as gas is cheap, the economic incentives to avoid waste are obviously insufficient.

Why Gas is Unlikely To Be a Bridge to Renewables

In a perfect world, people would use gas to replace more polluting coal or oil.  Unfortunately, the argument for gas rests on just that assumption: that the world works perfectly.  You don’t need to be a scientist, however, to know just how flawed that assumption is.  In fact, economists have long argued that a paradox of energy efficiency is this: if people save energy through efficiency and their energy bills start to fall, they may begin to use more energy in other ways.  So while their bills stay the same, usage may actually rise. (It’s like going to a sale and instead of saving money, buying more things because of the lower price tags.) In this way, consumers can actually end up using more energy overall and so emissions continue to rise.

To ensure that natural gas use doesn’t follow such a path, you’ve got to do something. You could introduce a law, like AB32, the California emissions control law, or put in place the pending EPA carbon rule just introduced by the Obama administration that mandates emissions reductions. Or you could introduce a hefty carbon tax to create a strong financial incentive for people to choose non-carbon based fuels.  But laws like AB32 are at present few and far between, the fossil fuel industry and its political and ideological allies are fighting the EPA carbon rule tooth and nail, and only a handful of political leaders are prepared to stand up in public and argue for a new tax.

Meanwhile, global fossil fuel production and consumption are rising.  A recent article by the business editor of the British Telegraph describes a frenzy of fossil fuel production that may be leading to a new financial bubble.  The huge increase in natural gas production is, in reality, helping to keep the price of such energy lower, discouraging efficiency and making it more difficult for renewables to compete.  And this raises the most worrisome issue of all.

Embedded in all positive claims for gas is an essential assumption: that it replaces other more polluting fuels.  But what if it also turns out to replace the panoply of alternative energies, including solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear?  In Canada, where shale-gas development is well advanced, only a small fraction of electricity is generated from coal; most comes from hydropower or nuclear power. In the U.S., competition from cheap gas was recently cited by the owners of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear power plant as a factor in their decision to close down.  And while the evidence may be somewhat anecdotal, various reports suggest that cheap gas has delayed or halted some renewable power projects. It stands to reason that if people believe natural gas is a “green” alternative, they will chose it over more expensive renewables.

Exports and Infrastructure: The Road to More Climate Change

We’ve all heard about the Keystone XL Pipeline through which Canada proposes to ship oil from the Alberta tar sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and from there to the rest of the world.  Few people, however, are aware that the U.S. has also become a net exporter of coal and is poised to become a gas exporter as well. Gas importshave fallen steadily since 2007, while exports have risen, and several U.S. gas companies are actively seeking federal and state approvals for the building of expanded gas export facilities.

Once coal leaves our borders, the argument for replacing it becomes moot because there’s no way for us to monitor how it’s used. If gas replaces coal in the U.S. and that coal is then exported and burned elsewhere, then there’s no greenhouse gas benefit at all.  Meanwhile, the negative effects of coal have been passed on to others.

All of the available scientific evidence suggests that greenhouse gas emissions must peak relatively soon and then fall dramatically over the next 50 years, if not sooner, if we are to avoid the most damaging and disruptive aspects of climate change. Yet we are building, or contemplating building, pipelines and export facilities that will contribute to increased fossil fuel use around the globe, ensuring further increases in emissions during the crucial period when they need to be dramatically decreasing.

We are also building new power plants that will be with us for a long time. (A typical power plant is expected to operate for at least 50 years.)  Once technologies are adopted and infrastructure built to support them, it becomes difficult and expensive to change course.  Historians of technology call this “technological momentum.”

Certain forms of infrastructure also effectively preclude others.  Once you have built a city, you can’t use the same land for agriculture.  Historians call this the “infrastructure trap.”  The aggressive development of natural gas, not to mention tar sands, and oil in the melting Arctic, threaten to trap us into a commitment to fossil fuels that may be impossible to escape before it is too late.  Animals are lured into traps by the promise of food.  Is the idea of short-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions luring us into the trap of long-term failure?

The institution of rules or incentives in the U.S. and around the globe to ensure that gas actually replaces coal and that efficiency and renewables become our primary focus for energy development is at this point extremely unlikely.  Yet without them, increased natural gas development will simply increase the total amount of fossil fuel available in the world to burn, accelerating what is already beginning to look like a rush towards disaster.

Have U.S. Emissions Really Decreased?

Gas advocates say that while these worries might be legitimate, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions nonetheless fell between 2008 and 2012, partly because of the way gas is replacing coal in electricity generation.  This claim needs to be closely examined.  In fact, it seems as if the lion’s share of that decrease was simply the result of the near global economic meltdown of 2007-2008 and the Great Recession that followed.  When economic activity falls, energy use falls, so emissions fall, too.  Not surprisingly, preliminary data from 2013 suggest that emissions are on the rise again. Some of the rest of the 2008-2012 decline was due to tighter automobile fuel economy standards.

But how do we know what our emissions actually are? Most people would assume that we measure them, but they would be wrong.  Emissions are instead calculatedbased on energy data -- how much coal, oil, and gas was bought and sold in the U.S. that year -- multiplied by assumed rates of greenhouse gas production by those fuels. Here’s the rub: the gas calculation depends on the assumed leakage rate.  If we’ve been underestimating leakage, then we’ve underestimated the emissions. Though the converse is also true, few experts think that anyone is overestimating gas leakage rates. This is not to say that emissions didn’t fall in 2008-2012.  They almost certainly did, again because of the recession.  But the claim that there’s been a large decrease thanks to natural gas remains unproven.

So Why Are So Many People So Enthusiastic About Gas?

The reason for industry enthusiasm isn’t hard to discern: a lot of people are making a lot of money right now in shale gas.  Chalk up the enthusiasm of the Canadian government, politicians in gas-rich states like Texas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania, and individuals who have made money leasing their properties for gas drilling to the same factor.  In those gas-rich states, employment, too, has benefited (even as the familiar social problems characteristic of boom towns have also increased).

On natural gas, the Obama administration seems to be looking for a compromise that Democrats and Republicans can support, and that does not invoke the wrath of the powerful and aggressive oil and gas industry or voters in states like Pennsylvania.  In the process, it’s surely tempting to demonize the coal industry, with its long history of abusive labor practices, its callous disregard for occupational health, and its catastrophic environmental record.  Since few of us ever see coal in our daily lives, a future without coal seems not only imaginable but overdue.

But when it comes to natural gas, what about the enthusiasm of some environmentalists? What about groups like the Environmental Defense Fund that have a long track record on climate change and no history of love for the oil and gas industry? What about scientists?

In such cases, I think the positive response to the exploitation of natural gas lies in a combination of wishful thinking and intimidation.

The fossil fuel industry and their allies have spent the past 20 years attacking environmentalists and climate scientists as extremists, alarmists, and hysterics.  Their publicists have portrayed them as hair-shirt wearing, socialist watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) who relish suffering, kill jobs, and want everyone to freeze in the dark.  Extremists do exist in the environmental movement as everywhere else, but they represent a tiny faction of the community of people concerned about climate change, and they are virtually nonexistent in the scientific community.  (Put it this way: if there is a hair-shirt wearing climate scientist, I have not met her.)

While the accusations may be false, that doesn’t mean they don’t affect our thinking.  Too often, environmentalists find ourselves trying to prove that we are not what they say we are: not irredeemable anti-business job-killers.  We bend over backwards to seek out acceptable compromises and work with business leaders, even to the point of finding a fossil fuel that we can love (or at least like).

And that leads to the wishful thinking.  We want to find solutions, or at least meaningful steps in the right direction, that command widespread support.  We want gas to be good.  (I know I did.)  Climate change is a gargantuan challenge, and it’s bloody hard to see how we are going to solve it and maintain our standard of living, much less extend that standard to billions more around the globe who want it and deserve it. If gas is good, or at least better than what we have now -- then that feels like a good thing.  If gas moved us substantially in the right direction, then that would be a good thing.

After all, can’t the leakage problem be fixed?  Our panel spent considerable time discussing this question. Industry representatives said, “Trust us, we’ve been drilling wells for 100 years.” But some of us wondered, “If they haven’t solved this problem in 100 years, why would they suddenly solve it now?”  A strong system of monitoring and compliance enforcement could help create incentives for industry to find a solution, but the odds of that developing any time soon seem as remote as the odds of a binding international treaty.

Sometimes you can fight fire with fire, but the evidence suggests that this isn’t one of those times.  Under current conditions, the increased availability and decreased price of natural gas are likely to lead to an increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.  Preliminary data from 2013 suggest that that is already occurring. Andglobal emissions are, of course, continuing to increase as well.

Insanity is sometimes defined as doing the same thing but expecting a different result. Psychologists define perseveration as repetitive behavior that interferes with learning. Whatever we call it, that seems to be what is happening. And whatever it is, it doesn’t make sense. Natural gas is not the bridge to clean energy; it’s the road to more climate change.

A team of University of Colorado Boulder researchers began a seismic investigation after a May 31 earthquake. The researchers’ information led the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to request a 20-day halt to NGL Water Solutions’ fracking wastewater injection operations.

NGL, formerly known as High Sierra Water Services, was given permission to resume its activities at a 10,800-foot-deep well a few weeks later. Anne Sheehan and her team found that the well is linked to more than 200 earthquakes, the geophysics professor in the CU Department of Geological Sciences told Boulder County Business Report. NGL made modifications to the well, cementing the bottom 400 feet of the well, and it is has come back into production at a lower rate of pressure and injection. CU continues to monitor the earthquake activity and has found it has decreased. The information from the study will help the researchers find out why some wells have earthquakes and some do not, and how to fix the wells that do have earthquakes, if possible.

Sheehan said the group found “quite a few” earthquakes with epicenters within two miles of the well.

Two earthquakes—with magnitudes of 3.4 and 2.6—took place within mere miles of the well. Shemin Ge and Matthew Weingarten, also of CU, also found that activity within fracking wastewater injection wells likely caused earthquakes in central Oklahoma.

NGL operates 11 of the 29 fracking wastewater injection wells in Weld County, CO. When the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission allowed NGL to resume activities, it began injecting 7,500 barrels per day at maximum pressure.

“We’ll continue to closely monitor and accumulate all available information at this location,” Colorado Department of Natural Resources spokesman Todd Hartman told the Report, “and work with partners to continue understanding how best to limit and prevent potential seismic impacts related to deep injection generally.”

WASHINGTON, DC – A renewed battle over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is shaping up for the new year in North America.

The Republicans, who favor the Alberta-Gulf Coast pipeline because of the jobs and energy security they say it will create, will have a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since TransCanada Corp. filed an application for the pipeline six years ago.

They plan to bring up legislation early in January to force President Barack Obama to sign the required Presidential Permit for the pipeline that declares it to be in the national interest. The Permit is needed because Keystone XL would cross an international border.

Obama says he is waiting for a lawsuit over the pipeline route in Nebraska to be settled, but has signaled that he views Keystone XL as a threat to international efforts to limit climate change.The proposed 1,179-mile (1,897 km), 36-inch-diameter pipeline would carry diluted bitumen from Hardisty, Alberta, and extend south to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would join existing pipelines to carry the dilbit to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. The refined product is planned largely for export.

Environmentalists on both sides of the border have made stopping the Keystone XL pipeline central to their efforts to fight climate change, and for years demonstrations have attracted thousands of people willing to be arrested in front of the White House and elsewhere across North America.

Most recently, some of the largest, most powerful environmental groups in the United States sent a memo to President Obama citing new data that shows “it would expand development of dirty tar sands oil, turbo-charging climate change by adding millions of tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere every year.”

The memo, delivered to Obama December 18 by Oil Change International and the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, 350.org, CREDO, and Bold Nebraska, analyzes current oil and transport economics and the climate impacts of the proposed pipeline on tar sands expansion.

It cites a November report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stating that 75 to 86 percent of the world’s fossil fuels must stay undeveloped to escape serious impacts of climate change.

“The case is stronger than ever to reject the dangerous Keystone XL tar sands project,” said Anthony Swift, staff attorney in Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program.Canada continues trying to build the pipeline and expand tar sands development. At recent international climate talks in Lima, Peru, Canadian government officials said they would not seek to control emissions from tar sands, even though analysts say these emissions would make it virtually impossible for Canada to reach its 2020 target for greenhouse gas reductions.

“Market forces and the latest climate science make it clear Keystone XL shouldn’t be approved because it would drive up carbon pollution, making climate change worse and jeopardizing our future. It’s not a plan to help our country. It’s about big profits for big oil – and big pollution for the rest of us,” said Swift. “It’s a terrible idea, and it needs to be denied.”

But TransCanada’s president and CEO Russ Girling points out that the U.S. Department of State’s Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (FSEIS) concluded that Keystone XL would create 42,000 direct and indirect jobs and $3.4 billion in U.S. GDP. Also, 17 of the 29 counties that Keystone XL moves through will see their property taxes increase by more than 10 percent.

“The regulatory process itself has been hijacked by those who believe if they can delay or prevent the Keystone XL pipeline, oil production and refining will be controlled and global GHG emissions will be reduced,” wrote Girling in November.

“This is a naïve, inaccurate and unrealistic conclusion. The Department of State’s FSEIS concluded denial of Keystone XL would not impact the amount of oil produced or refined in North America and they are right,” Girling wrote.

Still, the environmentalists’ memo warns that Canada’s tar sands industry plans a major expansion of production over the next decade.

Oil prices have fallen sharply, the global oil market has changed, and assumptions about OPEC’s response to falling prices are proving wrong, the enviros point out. “Prices now are below the break point needed for tar sands expansion.”In order to succeed profitably, the industry will need cheap transport options, high oil prices, and manageable production costs. But the environmental groups argue that things have changed since TransCanada proposed the pipeline in 2008, making profitability and environmental safety unlikely.

The memo also argues that other proposed transport options will not work for tar sands, as predicted by conservationists. The costs and limitations of rail transportation for tar sands crude have become clearer, demonstrating that only pipelines can support the scale of the planned expansion of tar sands production.

The memo urges that “High cost, high pollution tar sands crude” must be left in the ground in order to achieve our national and international climate goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

Together, the environmentalists say, these factors provide fresh evidence that the proposed Keystone XL tar sands project fails the “climate test” President Obama laid out last year and should be rejected.

“Because of the drop in oil price among other factors, it is now undeniable that the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will cause significant additional carbon pollution and it therefore now clearly fails the climate test that the president established at Georgetown University last year,” said Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International.

“The proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline should be the first fossil fuel project rejected explicitly on climate grounds,” said Kretzmann. “It will not be the last.”

At 3 p.m. on a Friday last January, two days before the 2014 Super Bowl, the State Department released a favorable assessment of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline’s environmental impacts. Though citizens had submitted nearly two million comments during consideration of the report, the timing suggested officials hoped most people would be focused on football.

Events since then have made the State Department’s reluctance to draw attention to its assessment look like the right strategy. The report’s assumptions about oil prices and alternatives to Keystone XL have been thoroughly undermined, and prospects for continued expansion of the tar sands, the vast Canadian oil deposit that the pipeline would link to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, have significantly declined.

Despite this, leaders of the new Republican-controlled Congress this week pushed forward legislation that would force approval of Keystone XL, and they expected both houses to pass it this month. Congressional action was moving ahead even though the White House announced on Tuesday that President Obama would veto the legislation.

Yet during the past year, the case for the pipeline has developed huge cracks. In giving Keystone XL a pass on its environmental impacts — a step toward final approval — the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs had argued that the pipeline would not generate increased greenhouse gas emissions because tar sands expansion is inevitable. If Keystone isn’t built, the report assumed, other pipelines from the tar sands would be, and railroads would provide additional capacity. These conclusions reaffirm one of the oil industry’s hoariest — and, historically speaking, largely accurate — maxims: Oil always finds a way to market.

But the maxim may not apply to tar sands crude.

Since declaring in 2006 that his country was an “emerging energy superpower,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has staked his administration on developing Alberta’s tar sands — a bucket of bitumen nearly the size of Florida that constitutes the world’s third-largest crude oil deposit. With encouragement from the Canadian government, as long as a decade ago pipeline companies began planning four major pipelines that would connect the landlocked tar sands to ports and refineries on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Back then, pipelines were rarely controversial, and the planners expected easy paths to construction. Instead, they have faced a blizzard of political opposition, lawsuits, adverse court decisions, and civil disobedience, to the point that all four pipelines now face substantial odds against completion.

In June, a vital ruling by Canada’s Supreme Court strengthened land rights of Canada’s indigenous groups, known as First Nations. Even more than environmentalists, First Nations provide the backbone of opposition to the pipelines in Canada, and the three proposed Canadian pipelines would wend through hundreds of First Nations territories. The decision instantly set back Northern Gateway, a $6.5 billion, 731-mile pipeline that would carry up to 525,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to the heart of First Nations opposition on the British Columbia coast. Even though Northern Gateway has already secured the federal government’s approval, its prospects of winning a go-ahead in British Columbia are considered bleak. A $5.4 billion proposal to triple the capacity to 890,000 barrels a day of Trans Mountain, a pipeline that runs from Alberta to the British Columbia coast, also faces growing opposition.

Resistance to both pipelines is so strong that even the Canadian government, previously the most ardent supporter of the projects, has seemed to back away — a stunning development for an administration that has pinned its fate to the tar sands. “We’ve done everything we can in a responsible way,” federal Industry Minister James Moore, who is a native of British Columbia, said last month. “It’s up to the [pipeline] firms to deliver on these projects.”

Energy East, the biggest proposed pipeline of all, would carry 1.1 million barrels a day of tar sands crude all the way to refineries on the East Coast, a distance of 2,850 miles. In addition to facing intense opposition from some of the 180 First Nations it would pass through, the project must satisfy seven stringent conditions laid down in November by the premiers of Ontario and Quebec. One requires TransCanada, the pipeline’s owner, to address climate change induced by tar sands emissions — a subject the Harper government has done everything in its power to avoid, including by suppressing scientific inquiry into climate change.

As for Keystone XL, the approval of which Harper called a “no-brainer” three years ago, even if quickly authorized by the new GOP-controlled Congress, it now faces a veto from Obama that Republicans would need to muster the votes to override. In his most recent comments on Keystone, at a press conference on December 19, Obama said the pipeline “is not even going to be a nominal benefit to U.S. consumers.” And on “The Colbert Report” earlier in the month, he said the pipeline’s modest pluses needed to be weighed against its impact on climate change, “which could be disastrous.”

Even railroads, touted a year ago as a solution to the tar sands’ transportation woes, are presenting oil companies with a new set of problems, from a tank car shortage and limited unloading facilities to spectacular derailments. In addition, rail transport adds another ten dollars per barrel or so to the already steep cost of tar sands oil.

Without opposition, Keystone’s 830,000-barrel capacity would have become operational in 2012, and Northern Gateway would already be under construction. Instead, tar sands oil has run into a bottleneck, with developers increasingly anxious to find outlets. Shipping constraints and higher costs led oil companies to suspend three major tar sands projects this year, and many other companies reduced capital expenditures. Oil Change International, a clean-energy advocacy group, estimates that between 2010 and 2013, tar sands developers lost $30.9 billion because of the loss of markets for their oil and competition from lower-priced light crude. Of that figure, Oil Change International claims, more than half can be directly attributed to the success of anti-pipeline campaigns.

All this happened before tar sands developers received an even bigger blow: the collapse in the last six months of world oil prices. Tar sands crude requires an assortment of energy-intensive processes that make it among the most expensive of the world’s crudes to produce. Operations were already slowing when oil cost more than $90 a barrel, but this week its price fell below $50, far below the tar sands projects’ break-even point. If oil prices stay low, Keystone XL loses all financial rationale.

The news for tar sands developers could get worse still. While the arrival of “peak oil” — the date at which global oil supplies begin to decline — has been indefinitely postponed by the advent of hydraulic fracturing, the United States reached peak oildemand in 2005. The decline in demand in the U.S. is likely to continue for a range of reasons. Electric cars and hybrids are becoming more popular, and gasoline cars are using fuel more efficiently. Americans are tapping more and more renewable sources of power such as wind and solar. Baby boomers, formerly enthusiastic car drivers, are retiring, and young people are driving far less.

Most ominous for tar sands producers, the announcement in November of an agreement on cutting carbon emissions between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping has raised hopes that a forceful international climate treaty can at last be negotiated, perhaps at the Paris climate change conference in December 2015. If that happens, tar sands developers presumably would try to gallop toward the finish line, seeking to extract a maximum amount of crude before the pact goes into effect.

Instead of becoming the beating heart of a North American energy superpower, the tar sands now stand poised to become a different kind of symbol. Whereas once they stood for oil production at its most excessive (with high rates of greenhouse gas emissions, massive water and soil pollution, and energy inefficiency), that notion is being turned inside out: The tar sands soon may represent a pioneering victory in combating climate change, on the first major battlefield where concern over the globe’s future overrode oil revenues.

The struggle has already taught climate change campaigners a lesson. They have tried for a couple of decades to persuade governments to agree to substantial percentage reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by a certain remote date, without much success. The goals were vital but intangible and abstract, not exactly fodder for rallying cries. But people can envision a piece of infrastructure like a pipeline and the dangers it poses along its route. In fact, the core of opposition to the tar sands pipelines hasn’t revolved around climate change, but rather fear of leaks and their impacts on soil, waterways, and aquifers.

“Instead of big groups of scientists going to local communities and saying, ‘You should be worried about climate change,’ farmers in Nebraska and First Nations fishermen in northern British Columbia started their own campaigns,” Tzeporah Berman, a prominent Canadian environmental strategist, told me. “What we’re seeing is a new climate movement with frontline communities at the forefront. That’s much stronger, with broader.

No one, including Paul Krugman, was surprised that the first move the Republican Senate has made is to try, once again, to force President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. As the the columnist points out in Monday's New York Times, "the oil and gas industry — which gave 87 percent of its 2014 campaign contributions to the G.O.P. — expects to be rewarded for its support."

If that is not appalling enough for you, then you are a very jaded observer of American politics. But, alas, this corruption-in-plain-sight has become commonplace in American politics.

More cynical still is the absurd Republican argument in favor of an environmentally damaging project at precisely the moment when the glut of oil has caused oil prices to plunge—so it really isn't that we need more oil. No, Mitch McConnell and pals say it's all about jobs.

And that alone is more than twice the best estimate for how many jobs the pipeline would create temporarily. Once it's built, there would be very few permanent jobs.

Of course, there is one kind of government spending that Republicans like, and that they agree creates jobs: Military spending. "When it comes to possible cuts in defense contracts, politicians who loudly proclaim that every dollar the government spends comes at the expense of the private sector suddenly begin talking about all the jobs that will be destroyed," Krugman writes, ruefully. "They even begin talking about the multiplier effect, as reduced spending by defense workers leads to job losses in other industries. This is the phenomenon former Representative Barney Frank dubbed 'weaponized Keynesianism.'"

The argument for Keystone XL could be called "carbonized Keynesianism," Krugman says.

But if you really want to create jobs—and not simultaneously endanger the environment—why not opt for investment in American's crumbling infrastructure? Wouldn't that be a win-win?

Krugman's Conclusion: Ignore jobs claims about Keystone XL. The numbers are tiny, and, "the jobs argument for the pipeline is basically a sick joke coming from people who have done all they can to destroy American jobs — and are now employing the very arguments they used to ridicule government job programs to justify a big giveaway to their friends in the fossil fuel industry."

Three hundred professors at Stanford, including Nobel laureates and this year’s Fields medal winner, are calling on the university to rid itself of all fossil fuel investments, in a sign that the campus divestment movement is gathering force.

In a letter to Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, and the board of trustees, made available exclusively to the Guardian, the faculty members call on the university to recognise the urgency of climate change and divest from all oil, coal and gas companies.

Stanford, which controls a $21.4bn (£14.2bn) endowment, eliminated direct investments in coalmining companies last May, making it the most prominent university to cut its ties to the industries that cause climate change. Months later, however, the university invested in three oil and gas companies.

Campus divestment campaigns have spread to about 300 universities and colleges over the last few years, but are largely dominated by students. The Stanford letter was initiated by faculty, and signed by the first female winner of the prestigious Fields prize in mathematics, Maryam Mizarkhani, as well as the Nobel laureates Douglas Osheroff and Roger Kornberg, Paul Ehrlich, a population analyst, Terry Root, a biologist and UN climate report author, and others – 300 faculty members in total.

The letter calls on Stanford to pull out of all fossil fuel investments, not just coal. “The urgency and magnitude of climate change call not for partial solutions, however admirable; they demand the more profound and thorough commitment embodied in divestment from all fossil-fuel companies,” the letter says.

“The alternative – for Stanford to remain invested in oil and gas companies – presents us with a paradox: if a university seeks to educate extraordinary youth so they may achieve the brightest possible future, what does it mean for that university simultaneously to invest in the destruction of that future? Given that the university has signalled its awareness of the dangers posed by fossil fuels, what are the implications of Stanford’s making only a partial confrontation with this danger?”

Elizabeth Tallent, an English professor and one of the organisers of the letter, said she saw the campaign as a natural extension of her work as a professor. “I think if you want what you do to matter, and not only for a moment in the classroom, you think: how can students make use of this in 10 years or 20 years? If you are imagining the future of youth in 20 years, then you run into the problem of what the world will look like.”

Ehrlich, known for his warnings about overpopulation, said Stanford had an obligation to protect its endowment. “It’s crystal-clear that fossil fuels, most of them, are going to have to remain in the ground if we are going to avoid a real catastrophe and of course the value of stock is tied to that,” he said. “If we are not going to be able to use those fossil fuels, the stock is going to tank and places like Stanford have a fiscal responsibility to maintain the endowment. Having an investment in fossil fuels is a very bad investment.”

Stanford would not comment directly on the petition. But a spokeswoman, Lisa Lapin, said in an email that Stanford had completely withdrawn its investments from coalmining companies.

She said an advisory panel was studying the feasibility of further fossil fuel divestment. “Stanford takes all concerns raised with the university about the nature and impact of its investments very seriously,” Lapin said.

The fossil-fuel divestment campaign has grown rapidly over the past few years, driven by the deepening awareness that most of the world’s coal, oil and gas reserves must stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. According to the world’s leading climate scientists, those safety limits could be breached within 30 years if the world goes on burning fossil fuels at the current rate,

Last September, the heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune withdrew their $860m philanthrophic fund from investments in tar sands, coal, and oil. Campaigners claimed at the time to have persuaded 800 investors – foundations such as the Rockefeller brothers, religious groups, healthcare organisations, cities and universities – to withdraw a total of $50bn from fossil fuel investments over the next five years.

But Harvard rejected a campaign by students and 100 faculty to remove fossil fuel holdings from its $32bn endowment, claiming such a move would have only a negligible financial impact.

George Shultz, secretary of state under Ronald Reagan and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who has tried to push fellow Republicans to act on climate, said the university should think instead about imposing a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

“I am very much on the side of worrying about climate issues,” he said. But he did not support the divestment campaign, adding: “It’s mainly to make people here feel good.”

Ehrlich said it was important for leading universities such as Stanford to take a stand. “It is very important that educational institutions in particular and organisations that think of themselves as part of civil society make this important step,” he said. “It is symbolic. It is not going to instantly change the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, but it is damn important.”

The findings, which confirm a conclusion that meteorologists confidently predicted last November, mean that 14 of the warmest years on record have happened this century, and nine of the 10 warmest years have been since 2000.

Scientists from the space agency NASA and from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both examined surface temperature measurements around the planet and decided that 2014 was on average the hottest since 1880 − the earliest year for global records.

Climate cycle

The post-millennial pattern was broken only in 1998 − the year of a super El Niño, when global warming coincided with the peak of a natural climate cycle in the Pacific.

Not surprisingly, 2014 was also recently confirmed as the hottest year ever for the UK, where there have been sustained temperature measurements since 1659.

And World Meteorological Organization scientists warned last month that 2014 could be a record-breaking year for the continent of Europe as well.

Since 1880, the Earth’s average surface temperature has crept up by 0.8 degrees Celsius, and most of that warming has occurred in the last three decades.

“This is the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases.”

The results are an average: some parts of the US − including the Midwest and the East Coast − were unusually cool, while Alaska, California and Nevada all experienced their highest ever temperatures.

The Goddard Institute analyzes were based on measurements from 6,300 weather stations, ship and buoy-based sea surface temperature measurements, and data from Antarctic research stations.

Rowan Sutton, who directs climate research at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, UK, said: “By itself, a single year doesn’t tell us too much, but the fact that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century shows just how clear global warming has become. This is yet another flag to the politicians, and to all of us.”

Likely to accelerate

And Bob Ward, policy director at the UK’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said the figures exposed the myth that global warming had stopped. The rate of increase in global average surface temperatures had slowed over the last 15 years to about 0.05°C a decade, but was likely to accelerate again.

“Measured over a period since 1951, global mean surface temperature has been rising about 0.12°C per decade,” Ward said. “There is mounting evidence all round the world that the Earth is warming and the climate is changing in response to rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“Carbon dioxide levels are close to 400 parts per million − 40% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution, and probably higher than they have been for millions of years.”

No politician, he said, could afford to ignore this overwhelming scientific evidence, or claim that global warming was a hoax.

President Barack Obama could not have signaled more clearly in his 2015 State of the Union address that he intends to fight for his legacy on climate change in the face of a hostile, anti-science GOP-led House and Senate.

But it was what the President didn’t mention that could negate his climate legacy: free trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership that undermine local efforts to lower emissions, projects like Keystone XL that lock us into decades of continued dirty energy use, and the exporting of American-made coal, crude oil and natural gas to overseas markets.

Which is not to say that every policy position Obama laid out regarding energy and the environment entirely matched his lofty rhetoric about climate change.

At this moment — with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production — we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth. It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come.

While Obama went on to list a number of achievements made in growing domestic renewable energy capacity under his watch, he also continued to pay lip service to an “all of the above” energy strategy—a strategy scientists tell us we most definitely do not have 15 more years to continue subscribing to.

We believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil and protect our planet. And today, America is number one in oil and gas. America is number one in wind power. Every three weeks, we bring online as much solar power as we did in all of 2008. And thanks to lower gas prices and higher fuel standards, the typical family this year should save $750 at the pump.

Given that the U.S. currently has the lowest gas prices it’s had in years, every SOTU Bingo game board across the country probably had an “American families saving at the pump” square this year. So, perhaps it was inevitable and even understandable for Obama to take a victory lap on low gas prices. Do the rest of his claims hold up?

It remains to be seen how long that freedom from foreign oil Obama claims will actually last, given that there are signs the shale boom is already going bust.

As Joe Romm points out over at Climate Progress, the wind energy claim is true—if you’re counting actual electricity from wind produced and delivered, not total installed capacity. And solar is indeed doing well in America—so well the industry is adding jobs at 20 times the rate of the rest of the economy.

But the Obama Administration quietly handed the oil industry a year-end gift that allows it to skirt the crude oil export ban, which DeSmog’s Justin Mikulka reports could make fracking for oil in the US more profitable. The controversial move also makes it easier to export Canadian tar sands oil from US ports, lest you forget this president is all about “all of the above.”