Global Protection Agency (GPA)

The interview also touches on Israel’s most recent massacre in the Gaza Strip, putting it in the context of the vital role Israel has always played for the United States. Chomsky then turns to today’s racist scapegoating of Guatemalan immigrants, tracing the conditions that lead them to leave their homes to the Reagan administration’s brutal destruction of the country.

Finally, Chomsky shares his thoughts on the growing movement for climate justice and why he thinks it is the most urgent of our time. The full exchange will be broadcast by Alternative Radio.

There are few voices more vital to the Left than Professor Chomsky’s. We hope you read and share the interview widely.

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February 14, 2015 "ICH" - "Jacobin Magazine "

- The Middle East is engulfed in flames, from Libya to Iraq. There are new jihadi groups. The current focus is on ISIS. What about ISIS and its origins?

There’s an interesting interview that just appeared a couple of days ago with Graham Fuller, a former CIA officer, one of the leading intelligence and mainstream analysts of the Middle East. The title is “The United States Created ISIS.” This is one of the conspiracy theories, the thousands of them that go around the Middle East.

But this is another source: this is right at the heart of the US establishment. He hastens to point out that he doesn’t mean the US decided to put ISIS into existence and then funded it. His point is — and I think it’s accurate — that the US created the background out of which ISIS grew and developed. Part of it was just the standard sledgehammer approach: smash up what you don’t like.

In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq, a major crime. Just this afternoon the British parliament granted the government the authority to bomb Iraq again. The invasion was devastating to Iraq. Iraq had already been virtually destroyed, first of all by the decade-long war with Iran in which, incidentally, Iraq was backed by the US, and then the decade of sanctions.

They were described as “genocidal” by the respected international diplomats who administered them, and both resigned in protest for that reason. They devastated the civilian society, they strengthened the dictator, compelled the population to rely on him for survival. That’s probably the reason he wasn’t sent on the path of a whole stream of other dictators who were overthrown.

Finally, the US just decided to attack the country in 2003. The attack is compared by many Iraqis to the Mongol invasion of a thousand years earlier. Very destructive. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, millions of refugees, millions of other displaced persons, destruction of the archeological richness and wealth of the country back to Sumeria.

One of the effects of the invasion was immediately to institute sectarian divisions. Part of the brilliance of the invasion force and its civilian director, Paul Bremer, was to separate the sects, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, from one another, set them at each other’s throats. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian conflict incited by the invasion.

You can see it if you look at Baghdad. If you take a map of Baghdad in, say, 2002, it’s a mixed city: Sunni and Shi’a are living in the same neighborhoods, they’re intermarried. In fact, sometimes they didn’t even know who was Sunni and who was Shi’a. It’s like knowing whether your friends are in one Protestant group or another Protestant group. There were differences but it was not hostile.

In fact, for a couple of years both sides were saying: there will never be Sunni-Shi’a conflicts. We’re too intermingled in the nature of our lives, where we live, and so on. By 2006 there was a raging war. That conflict spread to the whole region. By now, the whole region is being torn apart by Sunni-Shi’a conflicts.

The natural dynamics of a conflict like that is that the most extreme elements begin to take over. They had roots. Their roots are in the major US ally, Saudi Arabia. That’s been the major US ally in the region as long as the US has been seriously involved there, in fact, since the foundation of the Saudi state. It’s kind of a family dictatorship. The reason is it has a huge amount oil.

Britain, before the US, had typically preferred radical Islamism to secular nationalism. And when the US took over, it essentially took the same stand. Radical Islam is centered in Saudi Arabia. It’s the most extremist, radical Islamic state in the world. It makes Iran look like a tolerant, modern country by comparison, and, of course, the secular parts of the Arab Middle East even more so.

It’s not only directed by an extremist version of Islam, the Wahhabi Salafi version, but it’s also a missionary state. So it uses its huge oil resources to promulgate these doctrines throughout the region. It establishes schools, mosques, clerics, all over the place, from Pakistan to North Africa.

An extremist version of Saudi extremism is the doctrine that was picked up by ISIS. So it grew ideologically out of the most extremist form of Islam, the Saudi version, and the conflicts that were engendered by the US sledgehammer that smashed up Iraq and has now spread everywhere. That’s what Fuller means.

Saudi Arabia not only provides the ideological core that led to the ISIS radical extremism, but it also funds them. Not the Saudi government, but wealthy Saudis, wealthy Kuwaitis, and others provide the funding and the ideological support for these jihadi groups that are springing up all over the place. This attack on the region by the US and Britain is the source, where this thing originates. That’s what Fuller meant by saying the United States created ISIS.

You can be pretty confident that as conflicts develop, they will become more extremist. The most brutal, harshest groups will take over. That’s what happens when violence becomes the means of interaction. It’s almost automatic. That’s true in neighborhoods, it’s true in international affairs. The dynamics are perfectly evident. That’s what’s happening. That’s where ISIS comes from. If they manage to destroy ISIS, they will have something more extreme on their hands.

And the media are obedient. In Obama’s September 10 speech, he cited two countries as success stories of the US counterinsurgency strategy. What were the two countries? Somalia and Yemen. Jaws should have been dropping all over the place, but there was virtual silence in the commentary the next day.

The Somalia case is particularly horrendous. Yemen is bad enough. Somalia is an extremely poor country. I won’t run through the whole history. But one of the great achievements, one of the great boasts of the Bush administration counterterror policy was that they had succeeded in shutting down a charity, the Barakat charity, which was fueling terrorism in Somalia. Big excitement in the press. That’s a real achievement.

A couple of months later the facts started leaking out. The charity had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism in Somalia. What it had to do with was banking, commerce, relief, hospitals. It was sort of keeping the deeply impoverished and battered Somali economy alive. By shutting it down, the Bush administration had ended this. That was the contribution to counterinsurgency. That got a few lines. You can read it in books on international finance. That’s what’s being done to Somalia.

There was a moment when the so-called Islamic courts, they were called, an Islamic organization, had achieved a kind of a measure of peace in Somalia. Not a pretty regime, but at least it was peaceful and people were more or less accepting it. The US wouldn’t tolerate it, and it supported an Ethiopian invasion to destroy it and turn the place back into horrible turmoil. That’s the great achievement.

Yemen is a horror story of its own.

Going back to National Public Radio and Morning Edition, the host, David Greene, was doing an interview with a reporter based in Gaza, and he prefaced his interview with this comment: “Both sides have suffered tremendous damage.” So I thought to myself, does this mean Haifa and Tel Aviv were reduced to rubble, as Gaza was? Do you remember the Jimmy Carter comment about Vietnam?

Not only do I remember it, I think I was the first person to comment on it, and am probably to date practically the only person to comment on it. Carter, the human rights advocate, he was asked in a press conference in 1977 a kind of mild question: do you think we have some responsibility for helping the Vietnamese after the war? And he said we owe them no debt — “the destruction was mutual.”

That passed without comment. And it was better than his successor. When a couple years later George Bush I, the statesman, was commenting on the responsibilities after the Vietnam War, he said: there is one moral problem that remains after the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese have not devoted sufficient resources to turning over to us the bones of American pilots. These innocent pilots who were shot down over central Iowa by the murderous Vietnamese when they were spraying crops or something, they have not turned over the bones. But, he said: we are a merciful people, so we will forgive them this and we will allow them to enter the civilized world.

Meaning we’ll allow them to enter trade relations and so on, which, of course, we bar, if they will stop what they’re doing and devote sufficient resources to overcoming this one lingering crime after the Vietnam War. No comment.

One of the things that Israeli officials keep bringing up, and it’s repeated here in the corporate media, ad nauseam, is the Hamas charter. They don’t accept the existence of the state of the Israel, they want to wipe it off the map. You have some information about the charter and its background.

The charter was produced by, apparently, a handful of people, maybe two or three, back in 1988, at a time when Gaza was under severe Israeli attack. You remember Rabin’s orders. This was a primarily nonviolent uprising which Israel reacted to very violently, killing leaders, torture, breaking bones in accordance with Rabin’s orders, and so on. And right in the middle of that, a very small number of people came out with what they called a Hamas charter.

Nobody has paid attention to it since. It was an awful document, if you look at it. Since then the only people who have paid attention to it are Israeli intelligence and the US media. They love it. Nobody else cares about it. Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Gaza years ago, said: look, it’s past, it’s gone. It has no significance. But that doesn’t matter. It’s valuable propaganda.

There is also — they don’t call it a charter, but there are founding principles of the governing coalition in Israel, not some small group of people who are under attack but the governing coalition, Likud. The ideological core of Likud is Menachem Begin’s Herut. They have founding documents. Their founding documents say that today’s Jordan is part of the land of Israel; Israel will never renounce its claim to the land of Jordan. What’s now called Jordan they call the historical lands of Israel. They’ve never renounced that.

Likud, the same governing party, has an electoral program — it was for 1999 but it’s never been rescinded, it’s the same today — that says explicitly there will never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan. In other words, we are dedicated in principle to the destruction of Palestine, period.

This is not just words. We proceed day by day to implement it. Nobody ever mentions the founding doctrines of Likud, Herut. I don’t either, because nobody takes them seriously. Actually, that was also the doctrine of the majority of the kibbutz movement. Achdut Ha-Avodah, which was the largest part of the kibbutz movement, held the same principles, that both sides of the Jordan River are ours.

There was a slogan, “This side of the Jordan, that side also.” In other words, both western Palestine and eastern Palestine are ours. Does anybody say: okay, we can’t negotiate with Israel? More significant are the actual electoral programs. And even more significant than that are the actual actions, which are implementing the destruction of Palestine, not just talking about it. But we have to talk about the Hamas charter.

There is an interesting history about the so-called PLO charter. Around 1970 the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi, published an article in a major Israeli journal in which he brought to light something called the PLO charter or something similar to that. Nobody had ever heard of it, nobody was paying any attention to it.

And the charter said: here’s our aim. Our aim is it’s our land, we’re going to take it over. In fact, it was not unlike the Herut claims except backwards. This instantly became a huge media issue all over. The PLO covenant it was called. The PLO covenant plans to destroy Israel. They didn’t know anything about it, nobody knew anything about it, but this became a major issue.

I met Harkabi a couple years later. He was kind of a dove, incidentally. He became pretty critical of Israeli policy. He was an interesting guy. We had an interview here at MIT, in fact. Incidentally, at that time there was material in the Arab press that I was reading saying that the Palestinians were thinking about officially throwing out the charter because it was kind of an embarrassment.

So I asked him, “Why did you bring this out for the first time just at the time when they were thinking of rescinding it?” He looked at me with the blank stare that you learn to recognize when you are talking to spooks. They are trained to pretend not to understand what you’re talking about when they understand it perfectly.

He said, “Oh, I never heard that.” That is beyond inconceivable. It’s impossible that the head of Israeli military intelligence doesn’t know what I know from reading bits and pieces of the Arab press in Beirut. Of course he knew.

There’s every reason to believe that he decided to bring this out precisely because he recognized, meaning Israeli intelligence recognized, that it would be a useful piece of propaganda and it’s best to try to ensure that the Palestinians keep it. Of course, if we attack it, then they’re going to back off and say: we’re not going to rescind it under pressure, which is what’s happening with the Hamas charter.

If they stopped talking about it, everyone would forget about it, because it’s meaningless. Incidentally, let me just add one more thing. It is now impossible to document this, for a simple reason. The documents were all in the PLO offices in Beirut. And when Israel invaded Beirut, they stole all the archives. I assume they must have them somewhere, but nobody is going to get access to them.

What accounts for the almost near unanimity of the Congress in backing Israel? Even Elizabeth Warren, the highly touted Democratic senator from Massachusetts, voted for this resolution about self-defense.

She probably knows nothing about the Middle East. I think it’s pretty obvious. Take the US prepositioning arms in Israel for US use for military action in the region. That’s one small piece of a very close military and intelligence alliance that goes back very far. It really took off after 1967, although bits and pieces of it existed before.

The US military and intelligence regard Israel as a major base. In fact, one of the more interesting WikiLeaks exposures listed the Pentagon ranking of strategic centers around the world which were of such significance that we have to protect them no matter what, a small number. One of them was a couple of miles outside Haifa, Rafael military industries, a major military installation.

That’s where a lot of the drone technology was developed and much else. That’s a strategic US interest of such significance that it ranks among the highest in the world. Rafael understands that, to the extent that they actually moved their management headquarters to Washington, where the money is. That’s indicative of the kind of relationship there is.

And it goes way beyond that. US investors are in love with Israel. Warren Buffet just bought some Israeli enterprise for, I think, a couple billion dollars and announced that outside the US, Israel is the best place for US investment. And major firms, like Intel and others, are investing heavily in Israel, and continue to. It’s a valuable client: it’s strategically located, compliant, does what the US wants, it’s available for repression and violence. The US has used it over and over as a way of circumventing congressional and popular restrictions on violence.

There’s a huge fuss now about children fleeing Central America, say, from Guatemala. Why are they fleeing from Guatemala? You can see a photo of one of them here in my office. They’re fleeing from Guatemala because of the wreckage of Guatemala, of which a large part was the attack on the Mayan Indians, which was really genocidal, in the early 1980s. That’s a Mayan woman in the photo, in fact. They’ve never escaped this, and many of them are fleeing.

Reagan, who was extremely brutal and violent and a terrible racist as well, wanted to provide direct support for the Guatemalan army’s attack, which was literally genocidal on the Mayan Indians. There was a congressional resolution that blocked him, so he turned to his terrorist clients.

The major one was Israel. Also Taiwan, a couple of others. Israel provided the arms for the Guatemalan army — to this day they use Israeli arms — provided the trainers for the terrorist forces, essentially ran the genocidal attack. That’s one of their services. They did the same in South Africa. Actually, this led to an interesting incident with the great hero Elie Wiesel.

In the mid-1980s, Salvador Luria, a friend of mine who is a Nobel laureate in biology and politically active, knew about this. It wasn’t a big secret. He asked me to collect articles from the Hebrew press which described Israel’s participation in genocidal attacks in Guatemala — not just participation, it’s a leadership role — because he wanted to send it to Elie Wiesel with a polite letter saying: as a fellow Nobel laureate, I would like to bring this to your attention. Could you use your influence — he didn’t ask him to say anything, that’s too much, but privately could you communicate to the people you know well at a high level in Israel and say it’s not nice to take part in genocide. He never got a response.

A couple of months later, I read an interview in the Hebrew press, where they really dislike Wiesel. They regard him as a charlatan and a fraud. One of the questions in the interview was, “What do you think about Israel’s participation in the genocidal assault in Guatemala?”

The report says Wiesel sighed and then said: I received a letter from a fellow Nobel laureate bringing to my attention these actions and asking me if I could say something privately to try to restrict them somehow, but, he said: I can’t criticize Israel even privately. I can’t say anything even privately that might impede Israel’s participation in genocide. That’s Elie Wiesel, the great moral hero.

Even this story is astonishing. Now children and many other refugees are fleeing from three countries: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Not from Nicaragua, about as poor as Honduras. Is there a difference? Yes. Nicaragua is the one country in the 1980s that had a way of defending itself against US terrorist forces — an army. In the other countries the army were the terrorist forces, supported and armed by the US, and its Israeli client in the worst cases. So that’s what you had.

There is a lot of upbeat reporting now saying the flow of children has reduced. Why? Because we’ve turned the screws on Mexico and told them to use force to prevent the victims of our violence from fleeing to the US for survival. So now they’re doing it for us, so there are fewer coming to the border. It’s a great humanitarian achievement of Obama’s.

Incidentally, Honduras is in the lead. Why Honduras? Because in 2009 there was a military coup in Honduras which overthrew the president, Zelaya, who was beginning to make some moves towards badly needed reform measures, and kicked him out of the country.

I won’t go through the details, but it ended up with the US, under Obama, being one of the very few countries that recognized the coup regime and the election that took place under its aegis, which has turned Honduras into an even worse horror story than it was before, way in the lead in homicides, violence. So, yes, people are fleeing. And therefore we have to drive them back and ensure that they go back into the horror chamber.

In the current situation, it seems that this is an opportunity for the Kurdish population of Iraq to realize some kind of statehood, some kind of independence, something that they’ve wanted for a long time, and which intersects, actually, with Israeli interests in Iraq. They have been supporting the Kurds, rather clandestinely, but it’s well known that Israel has been pushing for fragmentation of Iraq.

They are. And that’s one of the points on which Israeli and US policy conflict. The Kurdish areas are landlocked. The government of Iraq has blocked their export of oil, their only resource, and of course opposes their statehood bid. The US so far has been backing that.

Clandestinely, there evidently is a flow of oil at some level from the Kurdish area into Turkey. That’s also a very complex relationship. Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader, visited Turkey about a year ago, I guess, and made some pretty striking comments. He was quite critical of the leadership of the Turkish Kurds and was plainly trying to establish better relations with Turkey, which has been violently repressing the Turkish Kurds.

Most of the Kurds in the world are in Turkey. You can understand why, from his point of view. That’s the one outlet to the outside world. But Turkey has a mixed attitude about this. An independent Kurdistan in, say, northern Iraq, which is right next to the Kurdish areas of Turkey, or in the Syrian Kurdish areas, which are right by them, potentially, from the Turkish point of view, might encourage separatists or even efforts for autonomy in the southeastern part of Turkey, which is heavily Kurdish. They’ve been fighting against that ever since modern Turkey arose in the 1920, very brutally, in fact. So they have a mixed kind of attitude on this.

Kurdistan has succeeded somehow in getting tankers to take Kurdish oil. Those tankers are wandering around the Mediterranean. No country will accept it, except probably Israel. We can’t be certain, but it looks as though they’re taking some of it. The Kurdish tankers are seeking some way to unload their oil in mostly the eastern Mediterranean. It’s not happening at a level which permits Kurdistan to function, even to pay its officials.

On the other hand, if you go to the Kurdish so-called capital, Erbil, apparently there are high rises going up, plenty of wealth. But it’s a very fragile kind of system. It cannot survive. It’s completely surrounded by mostly hostile regions. Turkey is sort of unclear because of the reasons that I mentioned. So, yes, they do have that in mind. That’s why they took Kirkuk as soon as they could.

There are a couple of questions I want to close with, actually from our latest book, Power Systems. I ask you, “You’ve got grandchildren. What kind of world do you see them inheriting?”

The world that we’re creating for our grandchildren is grim. The major concern ought to be the one that was brought up in New York at the September 21 march. A couple hundred thousand people marched in New York calling for some serious action on global warming.

This is no joke. This is the first time in the history of the human species that we have to make decisions which will determine whether there will be decent survival for our grandchildren. That’s never happened before. Already we have made decisions which are wiping out species around the world at a phenomenal level.

The level of species destruction in the world today is about at the level of sixty-five million years ago, when a huge asteroid hit the earth and had horrifying ecological effects. It ended the age of the dinosaurs; they were wiped out. It kind of left a little opening for small mammals, who began to develop, and ultimately us. The same thing is happening now, except that we’re the asteroid. What we’re doing to the environment is already creating conditions like those of sixty-five million years ago. Human civilization is tottering at the edge of this. The picture doesn’t look pretty.

So September 21, the day of the march, which was a very positive development, an indication that you can do things, it’s not a foregone conclusion that we’re going to wipe everything out, that same day one of the major international monitoring scientific agencies presented the data on greenhouse emissions for the latest year on record, 2013. They reached record levels: they went up over 2 percent beyond the preceding year. For the US they went up even higher, almost 3 percent.

The Journal of the American Medical Association came out with a study the same day looking at the number of super hot days that are predicted for New York over the next couple of decades, super hot meaning over ninety. They predicted it will triple for New York, and much worse effects farther south. This is all going along with predicted sea-level rise, which is going to put a lot of Boston under water. Let alone the Bangladesh coastal plan, where hundreds of millions of people live, will be wiped out.

All of this is imminent. And at this very moment the logic of our institutions is driving it forward. So Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest energy producer, has announced — and you can’t really criticize them for it; this is the nature of the state capitalist system, its logic — that they are going to direct all of their efforts to lifting fossil fuels, because that’s profitable. In effect, that’s exactly what they should be doing, given the institutional framework. They’re supposed to make profits. And if that wipes out the possibility of a decent life for the grandchildren, it’s not their problem.

Chevron, another big energy corporation, had a small sustainable program, mostly for PR reasons, but it was doing reasonably well, it was actually profitable. They just closed it down because fossil fuels are so much more profitable.

In the US by now there’s drilling all over the place. But there’s one place where it has been somewhat limited, federal lands. Energy lobbies are complaining bitterly that Obama has cut back access to federal lands. The Department of Interior just came out with the statistics. It’s the opposite. The oil drilling on federal lands has steadily increased under Obama. What has decreased is offshore drilling.

But that’s a reaction to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Right after that disaster, the immediate reaction was to back off. Even the energy companies backed off from deep-sea drilling. The lobbies are just pulling these things together. If you look at the onshore drilling, it’s just going up. There are very few brakes on this. These tendencies are pretty dangerous, and you can predict what kind of world there will be for your grandchildren.

Both before and after Crimea left Ukraine and joined Russia in a public referendum on 16 March 2014, the Gallup Organization polled Crimeans on behalf of the U.S. Government, and found them to be extremely pro-Russian and anti-American, and also anti-Ukrainian. (Neither poll was subsequently publicized, because the results of each were the opposite of what the sponsor had wished.) Both polls were done on behalf of the U.S. Government, in order to find Crimeans' attitudes toward the United States and toward Russia, and also toward Ukraine, not only before but also after the planned U.S. coup in Ukraine, which occurred in February 2014 but was actually kicked off on 20 November 2013, the day before Ukraine's democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych publicly announced that Ukraine had received a better economic offer from Russia's Eurasian Economic Community than from America's European Union. (The EEC subsequently became the Eurasian Economic Union, now that it was clear that Ukraine was going with the EU.) That decision by Yanukovych in favor of the EEC was mistakenly thought by him to be merely an economic one, and he didn't know the extent to which the U.S. Government had set up an operation to overthrow him if he didn't go along with the EU's offer. (If some of these basic historical facts don't come through from merely the wikipedia articles alone, that's because the CIA is among the organizations that edit wikipedia articles, and so wikipedia is unwittingly a political propaganda vehicle. It is especially used for propaganda by the CIA and FBI.)

The President says he’ll veto the Keystone XL pipeline. He should do more, and put an end to the project altogether. He has the authority. Oil from Alberta’s tar sands is the dirtiest in the world – causing not just serious environmental damage when it’s extracted but also when and if it leaks out along its route from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Please tell the White House to veto it permanently.

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." His homepage is www.robertreich.org.

Our economy has gone into the toilet over the past 30 years, and President Obama and his advisors think "free trade" is the solution. Like Bill Clinton and both George Bush, he's so enamored with it he's backing the biggest trade agreement in world history, the Trans Pacific Partnership.  

At the House Democrats’ retreat in Philadelphia last weekend, President Obama once again urged lawmakers to support the infamous trade deal. He argued that the TPP will improve the “status quo” for workers and businesses, and he promised to work with leadership to ensure that members have better access to the information being negotiated.  

In his remarks at the retreat, the President said he recognizes previous trade deals were not perfect. However, what he doesn’t seem to recognize is that free trade is a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse for any nation. The evidence is overwhelming that tariffs on foreign imports and subsidizing domestic manufacturing are the proven ways to build a strong economy for the middle class. 

The concept of free trade was introduced by Henry VII, as something England should encourage other countries to do while it maintained protectionism; a process known as the 1485 Tudor Plan led to the rapid industrialization of England and the deeper impoverishment of its trading "partners."

With no evident irony or understanding of how South Korea went about becoming a modern economic powerhouse, back in 2009, President Obama lectured the countries of Africa. According to The New York Times:

"Mr. Obama said that when his father came to the United States, his home country of Kenya had an economy as large as that of South Korea per capita. Today, he noted, Kenya remains impoverished and politically unstable, while South Korea has become an economic powerhouse."

In the same day's newspaper, the New York Times' lead editorial echoed the mantra that so-called free trade is the solution to a nation's economic ills.

"There are few things that could do more damage to the already battered global economy than an old-fashioned trade war," the Times wrote. "So we have been increasingly worried by the protectionist rhetoric and policies being espoused by politicians across the globe and in this country."

But South Korea did not become an "economic powerhouse" as a result of "free trade." Indeed, the exact opposite is the case.

South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang's book Bad Samaritans describes South Korea's economic ascent in detail. In 1961, South Korea was as poor as Kenya, with an $82 per capita annual income and many obstacles to economic strength. The country's main exports were primary commodities such as tungsten, fish and human hair for wigs.  

Interestingly, some of its largest modern-day producers of technology began by producing these basic commodities. Samsung started out exporting fish, fruits and vegetables. But by throwing out free trade and embracing "protectionism" during the 1960s, in roughly 50 years South Korea managed to do what it took the United States 100 years and Britain 150 years to do.

This economic development of South Korea started following a military coup in 1961, where General Park Chung-Hee began South Korea's economic assent by implementing short-term plans for economic development. He instituted the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization program, and South Korea's first steel mill and modern shipyard went into production. In addition, South Korea began producing its own cars. Electronics, machinery, chemicals plants soon followed, all sponsored or subsidized by the government. 

Between 1972 and 1979 the per capita income grew over five times. In addition, new protectionist slogans were adopted by South Korean citizens. For example, it was viewed as civic duty to report anyone caught smoking foreign cigarettes. 

All money made from exports went into developing industry. South Korea enacted import bans, high tariffs and excise taxes. 

In the '80s South Korea was still far from the industrialized west, but it had built a solid middle-class. South Korea's transformation was as if, in 40 years, to quote Chang, "Haiti had turned into Switzerland." 

This transformation was accomplished through protecting fledgling industries with high tariffs and subsides, and only opening itself to global completion slowly and when ready. In addition, the government ran many of the larger industries, although private industry was allowed. Private industry, when allowed, was monitored carefully and taken over by the state if found to be inefficient. 

The government ran or tightly regulated the banks and therefore the credit. It controlled foreign exchange and used its currency reserves to import machinery and industrial imports. 

On the other hand, the government tightly controlled foreign investment in South Korea, and largely ignored enforcement of foreign patent laws. Korea focused on exporting basic goods to fuel and protect its ‘high-tech' industries with tariffs and subsides.

Had South Korea adopted the "free trade" policies being espoused by President Obama, it would still be exporting fish and still have a per-capita income like Kenya's.

Another great example of this is Toyota's success with its luxury car the Lexus. Toyota has been touted by free traders as a clear example of why free trade works. But at a closer look, the reality is the opposite.  

In fact, Japan subsidized Toyota not only in its development but even after if failed terribly in the American markets in the late 1950s. In addition, early in Toyota's development, Japan kicked out foreign competitors like GM. 

Thus, because the Japanese government financed Toyota at a loss (for roughly 20 years), built high tariff and other barriers to competitive imports, and initially subsidized exports, auto manufacturing was able to get a strong foothold and we now think of Japanese exports being synonymous with automobiles.

For about 200 years, we understood this in the United States. Had the fathers of the United States like Lincoln, Washington, Jackson or Grant applied for IMF loans, they would have been denied: All of them believed in high tariffs and a heavy control of foreign investment, and considered "free trade" to be absurd.

In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton submitted his Report on the Subject of Manufactures to the US Congress. In it he outlined the need for our government to subsidize new industries and subsequently protect them from the international markets until they become globally competitive. 

Additionally, he proposed a roadmap for American industrial development. These steps included protective tariffs on imports, import bans, subsides, export bans on selected materials, and the development of product standards. 

It was this policy, followed largely for most of the history of our country with average tariffs through most of the 19th and 20th centuries of around 40 percent, which built our American industry. All three times we radically dropped tariffs – for three years in 1857, for nine years in 1913 (just down to 25%), and in 1987—what followed were economic disasters, particularly for small American manufacturers.

Since Reagan blew out our tariffs in the 1980s (and Clinton kicked the door open with GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO), our average tariffsare now around 2 percent. The predictable result has been the hemorrhaging of American manufacturing capacity to those countries that do protect their industries through high import tariffs but allow exports on the cheap, particularly China and South Korea.

If President Obama and our Congress don't soon learn the lessons Alexander Hamilton taught us in 1791, which he learned from Henry VII and were borrowed by Japan, South Korea, and China, the TPP may soon become reality. This massive trade deal will likely be the death of American industry. And with it will go the American middle class.

A recent research article published in the online journal Science Advances by 2050 major portions of the Southwestern and Great Plains states will suffer from droughts much, much worse than the ones we have seen over the last 15 years.  If you think things are at a crisis point, now, just wait.  According to the researchers:

[A]n empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals. This desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium.

Let's put that in non-specialist terms, shall we.

The coming drought age – caused by higher temperatures under climate change – will make it nearly impossible to carry on with current life-as-normal conditions across a vast swathe of the country.

The droughts will be far worse than the one in California – or those seen in ancient times, such as the calamity that led to the decline of the Anasazi civilizations in the 13th century, the researchers said.

“The 21st-century projections make the [previous] mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the garden of Eden,” said Jason Smerdon, a co-author and climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

When someone starts talking about mega droughts that would dwarf any ever experienced in the region in nearly a thousand years, I sit up and take notice.  And just to be clear, the droughts in the region during the Medieval era were significant, and likely were a major contributor to the end of one of the longest lasting Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, the "Ancient Pueblo peoples."

For those of you unfamiliar with the "Ancient Pueblo peoples,"  its civilization in what is now the Southwestern United States lasted for over a thousand years, from at least 100 B.C.E. (some scholars place them in the area as early as 1500 B.C.E.) until roughly 1300 C.E. Their pueblo communities extended throughout the mountains, mesas and grasslands of Southwestern Colorado, Southeastern Utah, Northern New Mexico and Arizona. The most famous of their cliff dwelling sites are ruins found in Mesa Verde National Park.  

Their civilization, based on a mix of dry land farming, hunting and trade in pottery goods collapsed sometime around 1300 C.E. in part due to a series of severe droughts that hit the region following a large increase in their population between 700 B.C.E. and 1100 B.C.E. when rainfall patterns were above average for an extended period of time. The loss of water resources was a major factor in their abandonment of their pueblo communities, along with other stresses believed to include including competition from peoples migrating into their traditional range, and increased warfare among various groups of Ancient Pueblo peoples Anasazi themselves.  

Nonetheless, there is little doubt of the severity of the droughts the region endured during that time.

New tree-ring records of ring-width from remnant preserved wood are analyzed to extend the record of reconstructed annual flows of the Colorado River at Lee Ferry into the Medieval Climate Anomaly, when epic droughts are hypothesized from other paleoclimatic evidence to have affected various parts of western North America. The most extreme low-frequency feature of the new reconstruction, covering A. D. 762-2005, is a hydrologic drought in the mid-1100s. The drought is characterized by a decrease of more than 15% in mean annual flow averaged over 25 years, and by the absence of high annual flows over a longer period of about six decades. The drought is consistent in timing with dry conditions inferred from tree-ring data in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau

So, how extreme will be these mega droughts that are being predicted for much of the Western United States, including the regions that provide most of the crops we produce?  Pretty damn severe, in the nature of apocalyptic severity.  That is not hyperbole from me.  It's what the scientists are saying about our future prospects:

Eugene Wahl, a paleoclimatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Co., called the results "stunning."

"It is clear that they are seeing drought, especially in the Southwest, as being greater than any time in the past," Wahl said. "It is also clear that it is the higher temperatures in the future that is driving it." [...]

According to the new research, droughts in the Southwest and Central Plains will only worsen during the second half of this century. The closest comparison is to the 1930s Dust Bowl or 1950s drought, but lasting 35 years instead of just a few.

"Our results point to a markedly drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation," the authors write.

We are talking about extreme drought conditions that will extend from the Mississippi River to California that will last for thirty, forty or more years, literally leave our highly populated, water dependent society in uncharted territory, threatening our civilization's ability to adapt to what will be  a radically altered future environment.

No one knows what megadroughts, which can last from 30-50 years, look like. So researchers from NASA and Columbia and Cornell Universities went back 1,000 years to peer confidently into our drier future.

“Our results show it’s very likely, if we continue on our current trajectory of greenhouse gas emission and warming, that regions in the west will be drier at the end of the 21st century than the driest centuries during the Medieval era,” Cook told Quartz.

But just how likely is very likely? The study puts the chances of a megadrought in the central plains and southwest sometime between 2050-2099 at above 80%. That’s compared with just a 5-10% risk from 1950-2000. Even the milder emissions scenario predicts drying comparable to a Medieval-style megadrought in many locations. “This really represents a fundamental shift in the climate in western North America forced by these greenhouse gases—it’s a shift towards a much drier baseline than anything that anyone alive today has experienced,” said Cook. [...]

When asked how a megadrought, if it started today, would affect in the West, Famiglietti said that public water, aquifers, agriculture, rangelands, wildlife and forests would all be at risk. He added: “In California, we’re already in deep trouble. Imagine what the water situation will look like in 2075?  Depleted groundwater, decimated agriculture, irreparable damage to ecological habitat. Think apocalypse.”

He’s recently written about the water crisis in California, where he imagined the state as a “disaster movie waiting to happen.” After reading the new study, he told Quartz that it “presents a real doomsday scenario and a situation that is far worse than anything that I had been thinking about.”

That is a very frightening thought, particularly since our political and business leaders seemed to be doing their best to ignore or deny the existence of this threat. If we want our children and grandchildren to have any kind of hope for a sustainable future, one that does not risk total societal collapse, we need to change the way in which our nation currently functions at all levels.  Political goals, economic policy and cultural valuers all must change, and that change cannot come soon enough.  The current devastation and economic disruption caused by the droughts out West are just a taste of what is to come.

“We need to be thinking about intensifying drought and bringing it into our planning, but I think there are also a lot of opportunities, but it’s going to take more cooperation and more coordination to face the uncertainty of the future,” he told Quartz. “We can’t continue the status quo.”

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke recently at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC, she said that if she had to pick one case to undo, her choice would be the 2010 Citizens United ruling. Two years after that decision, one poll found that 62% of Americans also opposed it. Among progressives, there is even broader consensus that it represented a sea change for democracy.

Bader remains optimistic that one day, there will be more sensible campaign finance restrictions. She quoted her late husband, Georgetown law professor Martin Ginsburg, who said, “The true symbol of the United States is not the eagle, it’s the pendulum. When it swings too far in one direction, it will swing back.”

But while that has been true throughout American history, it can only continue to happen if the pendulum doesn’t get into the wrong hands. That’s why maintaining democracy in the post-Citizens United era demands a higher order of vigilance.

That brings us to the new breed of global trade deals, the first of which is slated to come up in the Senate some time this month. Until recently, these deals have eluded public notice, shrouded in secrecy, dense with complex provisions and branded with obscure initials like TPP and TTIP. But if their critics are right, these deals are slated to function as the next logical step in a deconstruction of democracy on the same continuum as Citizen United.  

Most people assume that both Congressional and public oversight will occur prior to signing. Not true. Bypassing that evaluation via “Fast Track,” a straight up or down vote, without any debate, review, or changes, is core to the strategy for passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). That is why Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is asking the President to “make the full text of all pending trade agreements public.

The deals have been secretly negotiated by multinational corporations in treaty language that runs to thousands of pages. They have been leaked in bits and pieces. This makes it easy for mainstream media pundits like Paul Krugman to miss crucial issues. They typically zero in on a specific aspect (such as trademark law or generic medicines) while missing the key provisions that alarm environmentalists— ones that contravene grassroots initiatives on climate change, food quality, fracking, and toxic chemical regulation.

“To a certain extent these international agreements are about trade but they are even more about deregulation, about rolling back the health and environmental safeguards that we depend upon to take care of ourselves and the planet,” says William Waren, the former policy director at the Forum on Democracy and Trade, currently a senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth.

The treaties provide corporations with a golden opportunity to make unilateral global agreements to permanently remove “barriers to trade.” All major corporations have their wish lists. Here are just a few samples of what is on the table:

• The chemical industry wants to gut international toxic chemicals safety regulations.
• The food industry wants to gut international food safety regulations.
• The gas and oil industry wants to remove obstacles to coal, LNG and tar sands oil exports.

“This is a climate change nightmare,” says Jason Kowalski, policy director for 350.org. “These are trade deals written in the backroom by oil companies. We need a transparent process that brings the provisions into the light of day. Once this becomes more public, the public will oppose it.”

Given that Fast Track may be launched this month, to get the treaties ratified before the public knows what’s in them, people need to get familiar quickly.

First, a primer on the problems with tinkering with the American democratic pendulum.

Nearly all advocacy initiatives function by pressuring elected officials to act on the public will via laws, regulations, local ordinances, bans, referenda, and subsidies. When vested parties flood elections with untraceable cash, it shifts power toward the donors and away from the people. As activists on many fronts have found, that’s how the Citizens United ruling has eroded the U.S.’ 250-year-old democratic process.

Since FDR’s time, the ultra-right has sought deregulation, rolling back Roosevelt-, Kennedy-, Johnson-, and Carter-era laws. According to an article in the New Republic, near the top of the Republican wishlist for the new Congress is axing the EPA, with its unwelcome potential to nix hazardous industrial activities and limit carbon pollution.

Still from let’s say, the Koch perspective, it’s less efficient to lobby for (or against) each and every one of the thousands of bills filed each year, than it is to buy the officials and craft legislation for them, which ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) does. According to the website ALECexposed, ALEC hosts “global corporations and state politicians [who] vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws…. These so-called 'model bills' reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations.”

To my untrained eye, the biggest difference between ALEC’s working M.O. and the treaty negotiations are that the former are more likely to occur in Nevada, and the latter in Brussels. The former seek to modify American law, the latter to overrule it.

If you have ever wondered why elected officials are less responsive to public opinion than in the past, it may be because their ears are swiveled toward those who put them in office. Thanks to political advertising, PR and media influence, public opinion can be bought. This was seen in the 2014 Oregon GMO labeling referendum. The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) spent $20 million on misleading television advertising to defeat the vote to label by a mere 857 votes.

The public opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, the recent fracking ban in New York State, and the campaign to preserve net neutrality reveal that, despite Citizens United, the pendulum of democracy may still be in motion. Currently, the public still has the power to interfere with multinational corporations’ well-laid plans. Deal critics say the uber-treaties represent a long-term strategy to permanently override that power, by allowing corporations to nullify the public will wherever it lessens their profits.

To see how this works, consider the passage of the 2014 bill to label GMO foods in Vermont. The GMA, the same food industry trade group that defeated labeling in Oregon, decided to sue the state of Vermont. The GMA, which includes General Mills, ConAgra, Nestle, Kellogg, SynGenta, Dupont, Pepsico, Merck, and Monsanto, claims the new law undermines these corporations’ right to free speech.

Now that a corporation is designated a person, its product information is supposed to be governed by the First Amendment. In the aftermath of Citizens United, each new incursion must be understood as more than just another bad idea. It must be seen as to whether or not it advances the ongoing movement toward corporate encroachment—the seizing of the pendulum.

In a recent phone call with advocacy groups, Naomi Klein, the author of This Changes Everything (and a board member of 350.org) says the new treaty playbook can be also be seen in recent events in Quebec.

Heeding a grassroots citizen movement to protect from fracking, the National Assembly of Quebec issued a moratorium on fracking in the St. Lawrence River. A Canadian fracking company called Long Pine Resources used a corporate address in the US to claim status as a U.S. investor in Canada under the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.) This allowed Long Pine to file suit before an investor-state tribunals, asking for tens of millions of dollars in compensation.

Suits like these could deter or outright prevent fracking bans, labeling bills, and a host of other protections and initiatives, in ways difficult to foresee. Many now common initiatives could simply be prohibited by the secret deals.

“The investor-state tribunals, these treaties will instate, replace our courts. Only corporations have access to them. The new agreements will give these companies the right to claim damages in the millions and billions of dollars in compensation for their current and future lost profits,” says Friends of the Earth’s William Waren. (Listen to my complete interview with him.)

Citizens United, ALEC, the GMA, and Long Pine examples make it clearer why the details of agreements negotiated in secret by multinational corporations must be subject to public scrutiny—before they pass into law. Why the fear of revealing them? Perhaps the deals are totally kosher. Or maybe not. 

Alison Rose Levy @alisonroselevy writes on health, food and the environment. Her website is healthjournalistblog.com and her weekly radio program on Progressive Radio is Connect the Dots.

After decades of obscurity, Paleo is now one of the fastest-growing diet trends. A 2013 survey found that one percent of Americans eat Paleo, which is based on the premise that our diets should be based on animals and plants, the way we ate when we were hunter-gatherers. Bestselling books like Grain Brain have redeemed meat’s nutritional profile and convinced many people that their high-carb diets promote unhealthy levels of brain and gut inflammation. I count myself among the throngs of Paleolistas who have benefited from adhering, more or less, to its principles.

Many paleo advocates recommend eating organic, pastured, holistically grazed animal protein. But there’s simply not enough grazing land on the planet to feed enough livestock to put sustainable meat and eggs in front of all seven billion of us three times a day.

But what happens when Paleo really starts catching on, and millions of ill and overweight people eliminate grains and start eating animal protein with every meal? This leads to questions the Paleo community has yet to address: How many inhabitants of our small planet can regularly eat meat without despoiling the environment? And how do we decide who gets to eat Paleo and who’s stuck with grains and tofu?

Many Paleo advocates and consumers are no doubt aware of the environmental issues associated with factory-farmed livestock and commercial fishing — the enormous quantities of water, fossil fuels and pesticides needed to grow cattle, pig and chicken feed, livestock’s fecal contamination of fresh water, aquatic dead zones caused by pesticide runoff, the depletion and collapse of fisheries, heat-trapping methane emissions from the front and back-ends of farm animals … I could go on.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that global meat production uses one-third of the world’s fresh water and that more than 1.3 billion tons of grain are consumed by farm animals each year. In the Gulf of Mexico, aquatic dead zones from pesticide, fertilizer and manure runoff now total an area the size of Connecticut. Much of the runoff originates on heartland farms that produce corn for cattle feed.

Conventionally grown grains and vegetables are an ecological disaster too, but conventional meat production is substantially more resource-intensive, polluting and wasteful. The United Nations Environmental Programme cites meat production as one of the top three causes of ecological problems and one of the main drivers of climate change.

Many paleo advocates recommend eating organic, pastured, holistically grazed animal protein. Holistic grazing mimics the herd activity of wild animals, grouping the animals together to graze on perennial grasses for strictly controlled periods before rotating them to a new area. Though it has its skeptics, many ranchers have found that holistic grazing restores soil fertility and reduces their use of water, pesticides, and feed grain. Meanwhile, emerging research indicates that holistically grazed grasslands sequester large amounts of carbon, more than negating the warming effect of the animals’ methane emissions.

Paleo guru Robb Wolf, producer of a weekly podcast and several books is, as far I can tell, the only prominent Paleo advocate who talks publicly about the sustainability of the diet. Wolf promotes pastured protein and denounces government grain subsidies that prop up factory-farmed meat. He understands that most Paleo wannabes cannot afford pastured meat and advises them to “do the best that they can.”

Wolf’s stance begs the question: How many people can afford pastured meat, assuming it’s even available at their local grocery store or farmers’ market? And what is the national and global production capacity for this kind of meat? An hour of googling suggests that no one really knows, but my hunch is there’s not enough grazing land on the planet to feed enough livestock to put meat and eggs in front of all seven billion of us three times a day.

And there’s certainly not enough fish. According to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization 53 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited, and 32 percent are overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion. More to the point, “The global fishing fleet is 2-3 times larger than what the oceans can sustainably support.” Most of the developed world now relies heavily on aquaculture, but farmed fish still requires feed made with wild fish.

For indigenous coastal communities, fish is their dietary and cultural heritage; we are taking it away from them by eating fish unsustainably harvested by commercial fisheries. What a sad irony is transpiring — Paleos are contributing to the destruction of the very way of life that inspired the Paleo diet.

The environmental impact of the Paleo diet has not escaped the notice of climate hawks such as Elizabeth Kolbert, chronicler of the tragic and terrifying mass extinction currently underway (The Sixth Extinction: An Unusual History). She argues in The New Yorker that “paleo’s ‘Let them eat steak’ approach is a [greenhouse gas] disaster.”

Another critic of meat-eating is Nicholas Stern, former World Bank vice-president and author of the widely-respected “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change” prepared for the British government. He advocates a vegetarian diet as part of a global strategy to prevent runaway climate change.

If there’s not enough animal protein to go around without cooking the planet, who should be first in line? Diabetics? Children? Celiacs? Cancer patients? Seniors? Pregnant women? Traditional hunters? A case could be made for any of these groups but, living in a free-wheeling market economy, there is one and only one basis for determining who gets the goods and that is — whoever can afford it.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I find it troubling to see the Paleo community grow — and evangelize — without discussing these issues. Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, shares this concern: "Any diet that encourages high levels of meat consumption without acknowledging the reality of American meat production is irresponsible. Nearly all of the meat we find in supermarkets and restaurants in the United States today comes from industrial operations and, especially when it comes to beef, is the most energy-intensive, water-intensive, greenhouse gas-intensive way to put protein on your plate."

Paleo dieters are in it for their health… fair enough. But it’s critical to understand that human health is inextricably bound to the health of Earth’s ecosystems. Humans are but one link in the web of life, and that web is being polluted and stretched to the breaking point.

If Paleos want to eat a lot of meat and fish, I’d like to see them get engaged in figuring out how to sustainably produce it. Wolf, to his credit, serves on the board of the Savory Institute, a research and training center for ranchers wishing to transition to holistic management. The next edition of his cookbook will encourage consumers to choose fish that are lower on the food chain and, when I suggested he plug Seafood Watch, he promised to consider it.

Wolf incorporates sustainability issues into his talks but says his audience generally doesn’t want to hear it. “The vast majority want to know about protein, carbs and fat, so they can have abs and fit into their skinny jeans,” Wolf laments. He says that Paleo thought leaders tend to steer clear of the sustainability issue because it negatively impacts book sales. “It’s a buzzkill,” says Wolf.

Which brings me to Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, an important albeit uber-doomy book that gives new meaning to the word “buzzkill.” Keith, a vegan-turned-omnivore, argues that choosing a plant-based diet out of concern for the environment is a tragically misinformed choice based on ignorance of the critical role predators and farm animals play in the food web.

Keith is the first to admit that there’s not enough land to graze enough animals to feed everyone and adamantly calls for population control, a radical agrarian overhaul and the dismantling of patriarchy as the only hope for human survival. Like Wolf, she believes that livestock, properly managed, are essential for restoring topsoil that has been ruined by millennia of plowing and planting vegetables, grains and legumes. And the only way we can arrange to have animals stamping their organic manure into the earth is if we pay ranchers to raise and slaughter those animals for meat. Which brings us back full circle: Our food can and must be produced in ways that restore degraded ecosystems, but there isn’t enough of this kind of food, nor is there any large-scale movement in this direction.

Paleo’s sustainability contradictions aren’t limited to meat. Palm oil is a Paleo pantry staple. A while back, I sent an email to the Weston A. Price Foundation (WPF) criticizing their promotion of palm oil. (WPF doesn’t consider itself Paleo, but its nutritional advice is heavy on animal protein and palm oil). WPF President Sally Fallon Morell fired back a curt reply, referring me to the “Coconut Information Center”.  This website claims that the soy industry has duped environmental groups into believing that palm oil plantations are destroying rainforests when, in reality, the palm industry plays a “protective” role. As EIJ readers are aware, palm plantations spur deforestation just as surely as ruminants belch, but these are inconvenient truths for people with a myopic view of human health.

Paleos obviously don’t want to bring about ecological collapse, but they ignore the unfolding catastrophe at their own peril. Wolf says Paleos are slowly embracing the notion of sustainability and that he gets less pushback now than he did five years ago, but the community is still a long ways from seriously grappling with the unintended consequences of their diet. They should pull their heads out of the sand and start discussing these issues pronto. With so many great minds no longer addled by carbohydrates, they may hit upon some solutions.

Research assistance for this article was provided by Christopher Cook, author of Diet for a Dead Planet.

Republished with permission from EcoWatch.

Burlington, Vermont is that state’s largest city, with a population of 42,000 people. It describes itself as “forward-thinking” which is what you’d expect from a city that once elected Senator Bernie Sanders as its mayor. So it’s no surprise that it recently became the first U.S. city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.

“Climate change is the biggest problem we face, maybe the biggest problem we’ve ever faced,” University of Vermont environmental science professor Taylor Ricketts told NPR. “But there’s no silver bullet to fix it. It’s gonna be a million individual solutions from all over the place. And this is one of Burlington’s, right?”

The city’s publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department (BED), says in its mission statement, “BED will continue to be a leader in sustainability by producing power that is as clean and as locally produced as possible. BED will continue to treat the environment with the utmost respect and will continue to influence decisions and public policy that enhance environmental quality, the use of renewable resources, and the sustainability of Burlington.”

The city lives up to that mission by acquiring its energy in diverse ways, including biomass, hydroelectric, solar and wind. Its biggest power generator is hydro, which the city acquires from dams both locally and elsewhere in the region. Its biomass facility, the McNeil generating station, provides another 30 percent of its power. It runs on burning wood chips, although it can run on natural gas or oil on an interruptible basis. The wood chips are the residue of the region’s logging industry and come primarily from within 60 miles of the city, reducing transportation costs. Wind turbines and solar panels provide another 20 percent of its electricity.

In addition, BED says, “McNeil is equipped with a series of air quality control devices that limit the particulate stack emissions to one-tenth the level allowed by Vermont state regulation. McNeil’s emissions are one one-hundredth of the allowable federal level. The only visible emission from the plant is water vapor during the cooler months of the year.”

Renewable electricity generation isn’t the only way this forward-thinking city is addressing climate change, the environment and sustainability. BED has aggressive energy efficiency programs and boasts that it uses less electricity now than it did in 1989. And despite its small size, Burlington already has nine charging stations for electric vehicles.

And contrary to those who insist that renewably generated electricity is an expensive luxury that only a bunch of Phish-loving Vermont hippies will pay for, Ken Nolan of BED told NPR that the switch to renewables was initially driven by economic concerns and will likely save the city $20 million over the next decade.

“Greenhouse gas reduction is a major thing that we’re concerned about and we are always trying to improve on,” he said. “But in looking at whether to buy renewable power, we really were focused on an economic decision at the time. Our financial analysis at that time indicated to our—actually, to our surprise–that the cheapest long term financial investment for us with the least amount of risk was to move in this direction.”

Editor's note: The original PBS report on which this article is based said that the biomass plant burned only scrap wood and that smokestake emissions contained only water vapor. AlterNet is following PBS's lead and making corrections to these claims. The biomass plant, which supplies 30% of Burlington's power also uses some trees that are specifically logged for fuel. PBS has also determined that the biomass plant does emit some pollutants into the atmosphere. Viewers of the PBS Newshour report argued that it gave the overstated impression of the environmental attributes of the plant, so PBS removed those two specific references.