THE RISE OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 ABOVE 350 PPM AT THE CURRENT RATE OF ABOUT 2 PPM/YEAR IS TRANSCENDING THE CONDITIONS THAT ALLOWED THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN AGRICULTURE AND CIVILIZATION FROM ABOUT 8000 YEARS AGO.

Life on Earth depends on a delicate balance between the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere. The atmosphere acts like the lungs of the biosphere, while the ocean currents act as its vein system, modulating temperatures around the globe. Changes to the chemistry of the atmosphere, including greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitric oxides, ozone) and aerosols (mainly sulphur dioxide) through Earths history resulted in climate shifts between greenhouse states and glacial/interglacial states. Such changes were triggered by orbital shifts, solar cycles, volcanic events, asteroid impacts, release of methane from sediments and, on longer time scales, the distribution of oceans, continents and mountain ranges.

Sharp decline in CO2 34 million years ago and 15 million years ago to below 500 ppm has resulted in the development of the Antarctic ice sheet. About 2.8 million years ago a further decline in CO2 resulted in formation of the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic Sea ice. The current runaway climate change is a direct result of human emissions and land clearing. The emission of more than 320 billion tons of carbon (over 50% the original atmospheric inventory) since 1750 raised CO2 levels from 280 to 388 ppm, or 460 ppm CO2-equivalent (a value including the effect of methane).

Acceleration of climate change since the mid-1970s is leading toward a global temperature rise of +1.5oC above pre-industrial time, once the masking effects of sulphur aerosols are removed. The polar regions have already warmed by up to 4oC. This results in carbon cycle and ice/water melt feedback processes, with consequent (A) extreme rates of polar ice melting, including the Arctic Sea, Greenland, West and East Antarctica, which threatens accelerated sea level rise above the current rate of 0.35 cm/year; (B) a progressive shift of climate zones toward the poles, which extend the tropics, as indicated by intensified cyclones and floods, and enlarging desert regions as manifested by extreme droughts and fires. Given lag effects, looming threats include (1) ocean acidification, collapse of coral reefs and the marine food chain; (2) mountain snow and glacier melt and availability of freshwater; (3) destruction of native habitats, i.e. the Amazon; (4) ozone depletion; (5) atmospheric aerosol loading and (6) chemical pollution by metals, plastics, radioactive nuclei.

The consequences for human habitats include loss of arable land, fresh water supplies and extreme weather events. The loss of Himalayan snow and thereby decreased river flow, coupled with a failure of the monsoon and sea level rise, threatens more than one billion people in south and south-eastern Asia. As the polar regions warm, a release of methane from the many hundreds of billions of tons of carbon stored in permafrost and shallow lakes and seas, is imminent.

In the view of leading climate scientists there is no alternative to attempts at reducing atmospheric CO2 levels to below 350 ppm as soon as possible. What is urgently required is a combination of (A) urgent deep cuts in carbon emissions; (B) fast-track development of clean renewable energy systems; (C) an intensive global reforestation campaign; (D) application of a range of CO2 draw-down sequestration measures, including world-wide replantation and reforestation campaigns and chemical capture methods, solar-powered desalination plants, and long-range channel and pipe water transport systems.

Recent references

Schellnhuber, Oxford meeting, 28-30.10.09 http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
British Antarctic Survey http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press
/press_releases/press_release.php?id=989 NASA/GISS). http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
Copenhagen Synthesis Report http://www.anu.edu.au/climatechange/
content/news/copenhagen-synthesis-report-released-today/
Hansen et al. 2008. Target CO2: Where Should humanity aim? http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/
TargetCO2_20080407.pdf
Lenton et al., 2008. Tipping points in the Earth climate system. http://www.sciencedaily.com/release
s/2008/02/080204172224.htm
Reports by NASA/GISS, Hadley_Met, Potsdam Ocean Institute, NSIDC, CSIRO, BOM.

Andrew Glikson
Earth and paleoclimate scientist
22 October, 2009

Why are we asking this now?

Yesterday Gordon Brown, at a meeting of ministers from 17 major economies held in London to discuss the talks, warned that countries were not moving fast enough to reach an agreement.

What is at stake?

A global deal to cut the carbon dioxide emissions from power generation, industry, transport and deforestation which, all governments now accept, are causing the atmosphere to heat up, with potentially disastrous consequences for all of us.

That seems like a no-brainer. Why shouldn't all countries agree to that?

While all countries now recognise the problem a no-brainer is right they have very differing views about what their role in the solution should be. Cutting CO2 and other greenhouse gases can be done, but not with the wave of a wand. It means redesigning whole economies on a low-carbon model, which involves a lot of effort and a lot of expense; among much else, you have to close down your coal-fired power stations or fit them with costly equipment to capture their CO2 and bury it underground. And the argument at Copenhagen will essentially be about how the effort and the expense should be shared out between nations. If that can be agreed, a deal will be done. If it can't, the world is in for trouble.

So who's arguing?

In the simplest terms, two sides have to come together to do a deal: the rich, mainly western countries of the developed world, such as the US and Britain, and the poorer (but rapidly growing) nations of the developing world, led by China and India. The argument is about responsibility and fairness, and it turns on the fact that most of the CO2 that is in the atmosphere now (and it remains for a century or more) has been put there by the rich countries, who have been pumping the stuff out since the industrial revolution 200 years ago; but most of the extra CO2 that will go into the atmosphere in the future will be put there by the developing nations, who are now embarked on a period of unprecedented, explosive economic growth, much of it powered by burning coal, with the principal purpose of drawing their peoples out of poverty.

Throughout the 20th- century the US was the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world; but in the last two years China has overtaken it, having doubled its carbon emissions from 3bn to 6bn tonnes in a mere decade, and they will continue to grow. So you might say that China, with India, Brazil, Indonesia and their fellow developing economies, are now making the problem worse and they are; but that the US, with Britain, and Germany and France and the other rich countries, started the problem in the first place and we did. (And we too are worsening the problem every day, of course, with our own carbon emissions.)

What are the implications for responsibility and fairness?

The principal one is that the rich West has to lead the way in cutting carbon, and this has been recognised by all sides since the first global warming treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The treaty said that the international community had common but differentiated responsibilities with regard to the climate, and this principle was put into effect in the Kyoto Protocol to the treaty, signed in 1997.

Under Kyoto, the rich industrialised countries agreed to cut their carbon emissions by fixed amounts by 2012, but the developing nations were not required to make any cuts at all. They were allowed to carry on with business as usual.

Has anything changed since then?

Yes. First, although most of the rich countries, including Britain, accepted Kyoto, the US Congress would not ratify the treaty, as many US politicians felt it was giving a free ride to countries such as China who were economic competitors; George Bush withdrew the US from Kyoto in 2001. Second, the carbon emissions of China and India and their fellows have mushroomed in a way that no one imagined possible in 1997, and they will represent 90 per cent of all future emissions growth; if unchecked, they will derail all other efforts to control climate change. So the point is, the Chinas and Indias now have to make emissions cuts themselves, or first, the US will not join in a new treaty, and second, the fight to limit atmospheric CO2, and thus future temperature rises, will be lost. But China and India have always argued that they are only growing in the way the West did, and that is true; and now they find the western nations saying: 'don't do what we did, do what we say', which is clearly unfair. The deal at Copenhagen is essentially about what the West can offer to make that unfairness acceptable, and what carbon-cutting actions the Chinese and Indians and other developing countries can take, which will in turn be acceptable to the West.

What might be the offers?

The rich countries have to make clear commitments to cut their own CO2 significantly by 2020, and will have to agree massive financial help billions and billions of dollars for the poorer nations to continue their growth in a low-carbon way. For their part, the developing nations will have to agree some sort of numerical targets to cut their own CO2 something which was once anathema to them, as they saw the imposition of targets on them as a ruse by western competitors to hold back their growth. All sides now have to do things which are demanding.

Then why might the talks fail?

The European Union is signed up to tough emissions cuts and backs a big financial help package; even nations such as Japan and Australia, formerly laggards, have started setting serious CO2 targets. It is the position of the US which is crucial. President Barack Obama has to take something substantial to the table in Copenhagen in December in terms of US domestic action, but the Bill which will define US climate policy is stuck in the Senate, and will not go through until Mr Obama's healthcare package is dealt with, which may not be in time. Can Mr Obama offer something to China and its fellows which Congress will ratify? Maybe. The British Government is optimistic that he will. But if he can't, there will be no deal.

Is that the only threat?

That's the major threat, but it's by no means the only one. This is a treaty whose initial text was 200 pages long and contained 2,000 square brackets points of disagreement. It has to be agreed line by line by 192 countries whose representatives are all playing to different domestic agendas and who might have difficulty agreeing on the colour of an orange. If anybody tells you this is a simple matter, don't listen. It's true we have the technology to solve global warming, but this is not about technology. This is about politics, about the art of the possible. And it's the most difficult piece of politics the world has ever seen.

Could the Copenhagen climate meeting end in failure?

Yes

*The US may fail to come to the table with an adequately serious offer on climate.

*Citing the needs of their people, China and India may make offers of action that the US find inadequate.

*The huge financial agreement that is proposed may unravel because of the differing needs of each nation.

No

*When the time comes, President Obama's US will almost certainly try to offer what is needed.

*China and India are already recognising that they need to act themselves.

*All sides realise that the financial package is an essential part of any finally agreed deal.

©independent.co.uk

The system of capitalism is strongest in America. The Unions have had their best days and are no longer effective. The people have been trained to accept what the employers give them. Ronald Reagan was the one that broke the back of the labor unions, and they have never recovered. The disparity between the rich and the poor has never been as great as it is now. The middle class is practically non-existent. In todays America the younger citizens cannot blithely accept that they will be as well-off as their parents. In fact, just the opposite is true. Many parents are working multiple jobs just to maintain their standard of living.

Everything I have just written about is not news to anyone. In todays America almost everyone that works for a living or depends on someone that does can sense that there is something inherently wrong. People are working harder and longer while incomes are falling. The promise of universal health care that Obama campaigned on has been thrown overboard and in its place is a system which rewards insurance companies. The auto industry is saving money by downsizing, cutting pensions and reducing health care benefits and the unions seem to be powerless. In fact, the auto industry is being saved on the backs of its workers.

The facts are that almost every industry in trouble is cutting wages and benefits. One might believe that this is the only thing that will save these troubled corporations but that is the result of brainwashing by the ruling class of this nation. The long and short of this entire recession is that the people that run this country dont give a damn about the people who work for a living. If they did, it wouldnt be the workers that take the brunt of bad times; it would be the shareholders and the management.

A good case in point is the auto industry. The fact is that there are just too many cars and not enough customers. If the management cared enough, instead of shutting down perfectly fine plants. They would re-tool and manufacture something that the country needs. Where is it written that the only thing an automaker can produce is cars? Here you have a perfectly good workforce and the latest in manufacturing technology and they cant come up with an alternative to the automobile? Why must we wait for new companies to develop green technology? Wind turbines, solar panels and other technologies are just waiting for manufacturers.

The only way we are going to stop this decline of the American worker is to put power back in the hands of the worker. The fact is that for years companies have been moving to right to work states. While the name sounds noble enough, its nothing but an Orwellian ruse. Nobody in these states has a right to work, just the opposite. The manufacturers in these RTW states have the right to hire non-union people to work in a union shop. In other words, this breaks the backs of the unions.

The labor movement really needs new blood. This nation has prospered on the backs of the workers and the workers are the first to be thrown overboard when things go sour. The exceptions to this rule are the money handlers that are too big to fail. Since when is something too big to fail? The way it works in capitalism is that when one business goes under, another will be there to take its place. What happened to Wall Street was socialism for the rich. Everyone knows it but there is no mechanism in place to insure that workers keep their jobs. Government handouts to the wealthy appear to be the norm in this country while the middle and lower classes suffer. Its wrong, but thats the way it is.

The time for a balanced economic system was yesterday. Other nations take a much harder line with management than the workers of the USA. We are to believe that we should feel lucky to have what we are given. Our legislators have long ago thrown us over for corporate donations for campaigns and outright bribery. We need to realize this and support the rights of all workers to get a fair shake.

This kind of movement needs to start from the bottom up, not from the top down. If you wait for the ruling class to help you youll be waiting forever. We need to organize and take down those that stand in our way. This is a route that demands courage and fortitude. Its a simple strategy when the airlines or the automakers or any other segment of the economy threatens to reduce wages or to cut health care or pensions than the unions need to act. If these corporations are in such dire straits, a strike would be crippling. There should be no room for company loyalty when it is not deserved. If the workers can no longer stand up to management, we deserve what we get.

The government is not worker friendly. The Republicans and Democrats govern for the wealthy. They are paid by the corporations that keep the workers down. We have finally gotten to the point in this nations history when this charade can no longer be played out. We all know what is going on, and only we the people can end it. Call it socialism or call it common sense, it still amounts to one and the same. The only ones that can change the system are the people suffering under a flawed system. In every instance, in every nation, when things become intolerable for the people, the people change the system. It is no different in America. In fact it is amazing that capitalism has come this far.

http://liberalpro.blogspot.com Read Tim's new book From Complicity to Contempt

Have you recently taken a trip through the Western Ghats in Southern India and admired the natural forests that cover the Ghats? However if you have travelled the same route over decades it is obvious that with the mining and cutting down of the trees, the deforestation of the hills is being manifest at an alarming rate. And deforestation, is one of the major causes of global warming and climate change.

Tropical forests cover about 15 percent of the worlds land surface and contain about 25 percent of the carbon in the terrestrial biosphere. But they are being rapidly degraded and deforested like the Indian Ghats, which results in the emission of heat and trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Roughly 13 million hectares, an area the size of Nicaragua is deforested and converted into other land use every year in the world.

According to research done by the Global Canopy Programme which is an alliance of 37 scientific institutions in 19 countries, this loss accounts for around a fifth of global carbon emissions making land cover change the second largest contributor to global warming. Forests therefore play a crucial and vital role in any initiative to combat climate change.

Forests are also home to local communities and support the livelihood of 90 percent of the billions living below the poverty line. In the Ghats, tribes depend on the forests as a source of fuel, food, medicinal herbs and a source of income by selling natural produce like honey and wild fruit. The loss of these forests puts the very survival of these indigenous people at risk. Well managed nature plays an important role in both climate change adaptation and mitigation. Nature can offer solutions that are available to the rural poor in particular, that are cost effective and sustainable, says IUCNs(International Union for Conservation of Nature) Climate Change coordinator, Ninni Ikkala. The potential of forests in reducing emissions is well known, whilst for example well managed mangroves can reduce flood impacts in low lying areas.

Another new development is that despite scientific support, the protection of intact natural forests is under threat of conversion into plantations. These plantations will be periodically culled for their timber. Protection of natural forests and the rights of indigenous people are crucial for the well being of our planet. These indigenous people are stewards of the forest and provide vital ecosystem services, for the rest of the planet. As we can see it happening all around us already, Climate Change will hit the poorest the worst and so a concerted reduction in deforestation will help build natural resilience to climate impacts.

The reasons for deforestation are varied and multiple from country to country. In Asia, communities use forests to provide sources for food, fuel and farmland. Trees are cut down to make way for agriculture driven by consumer demand. In Africa, it is due to small scale subsistence farming. In South America, the reason is large scale farming to produce beef and soy for export markets. In South East Asia, the reasons for deforestation is clearing of land to grow palm oil, coffee and timber which is also a large scale export product.

If countries are able to comprehend that forests provide services which go beyond carbon storage alone, they would fiercely protect their forests. Forests afford watershed protection, water flow regulation, nutrient recycling, rainfall generation and disease regulation. Old growth forests also soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, offsetting anthropogenic emissions. There is also another important reason to protect old forests they have what is known as a double cooling effect, by reducing carbon emissions and maintaining high levels of evaporation from the canopy, says Charlie Parker, Global Canopy Programme's Policy Analyst and author of The Little REDD Book

Is REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation ) a solution to helping the world cut back drastically on carbon emissions without too much research and development efforts? Basically the idea behind REDD is to financially compensate those countries, willing to curb deforestation and thereby reduce the worlds emissions. Previous efforts to curb deforestation have been unsuccessful, however the REDD agreement under the UNFCCC provides objectives to protect primary forests in developing countries.

In the Bangkok talks there were protests against REDD being a mechanism to ‘co2lonialise forests. Annoyed remarks by a group called the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change said The CDM and carbon market are instruments that commodify the atmosphere. Cut emissions at the source. There were also protests that industrial logging should not be categorised as Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) considering the term- ill defined. However, REDD does provide an opportunity to break the cycle of harvesting timber for industrial use, by placing an economic value on the role of standing forests in climate change mitigation.

We know how to use REDD, we dont have to wait for the development of low carbon technologies, says IUCNs Director of Environment and Development, Stewart Maginnis. New science shows its more urgent than ever to act now; we cant wait to stop reducing green house gas emissions.

Hopefully with an effective REDD mechanism in place, carbon emissions will be curbed by protection of primary forests, restoration of degraded forests will be encouraged, besides looking at alternatives to industrial logging. All this can be successfully achieved working alongside indigenous people and forest dependant communities, who will naturally prevent encroachment and illegal activities.

REDD seems to be our best chance at saving the worlds few remaining primary forests, thereby safe guarding communities that depend on them and protecting the forests carbon carrying capacity.

(The writer is a fellow with the UNFCCC and teaches a module on Climate Change in Bangalore, India)

A frozen lake on a remote island off Canada's northern coast has yielded remarkable insights into how the Arctic climate has changed dramatically over 50 years.

Muddy sediment from the bottom of the lake, some of it 200,000 years old, shows that Baffin Island, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, has undergone an unprecedented warming over the past half-century. Scientists believe the temperature rise is probably due to human-induced warming. It has more than offset a natural cooling trend which began 8,000 years ago.

Instead of cooling at a rate of minus 0.2C every 1,000 years a trend that was expected to continue for another 4,000 years because of well-known changes to the Earth's solar orbit Baffin Island, like the rest of the Arctic, has begun to get warmer, especially since 1950. The Arctic is now about 1.2C warmer than it was in 1900, confirming that the region is warming faster than most other parts of the world.

Baffin Island, the largest island in the Arctic Canadian Archipelago, is subjected to prevailing northerly winds that keep average temperatures at about minus 8.5C, well below similar Arctic locations at a comparable latitude. Polar bears, arctic fox and arctic hares walk the island's territory while narwhal, walrus and beluga whale patrol its coastline.

The island is dotted with lakes, the bottoms of which have been periodically scoured by glaciers with each passing ice age. However, scientists have found that the sediments at the bottom of some of the lakes, which build up each year rather like tree rings, have survived this scouring process intact.

This has enabled the scientists to take core samples going back tens of thousands of years. One such lake on Baffin Island, known as CF8, has been found to have layers of sediment dating back 200,000 years, which makes it the oldest lake sediment bored from any glaciated parts of Canada or Greenland, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It is the CF8 lake that has provided scientists with the sediment core showing the unprecedented warming of Baffin Island over the past few decades, compared with a time span going back 200,000 years, a period which included two ice ages and three interglacial periods and roughly the time that Homo sapiens has been on earth.

The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores, said Yarrow Axford of the University of Colorado at Boulder. We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes. The scientists found that certain cold-adapted organisms in the layers of sediment have decreased in frequency since about 1950. Larvae from species of Arctic midge, which only live in cold conditions, have abruptly declined and two species in particular have disappeared altogether.

Meanwhile, a species of lake alga or diatom that is better suited to warmer conditions has increased significantly over the same period, indicating longer periods when the lake's surface was free of ice, the scientists said. Other sediment measurements support a dramatic reversal of the natural cooling trend, they said.

As part of a 21,000-year cycle, the Arctic has been receiving progressively less summertime energy from the Sun for the past 8,000 years because of a well-established wobble in the Earth's solar rotation the Earth is now 0.6 million miles further from the Sun during an Arctic summer solstice than it was in 1BC. This decline will not reverse for another 4,000 years, but changes to the climate of Baffin Island show that the cooling it should have caused has gone into reverse in the past few decades.

A separate team of scientists analysing Arctic lakes in Alaska found a similar warming trend in recent years compared to sediment records going back a few thousand years. They, too, concluded that the warming was unprecedented and could be explained by human activities, namely the build of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The amount of energy we're getting from the Sun in the 20th century continued to go down, but the temperature went up higher than anything we've seen in the last 2,000 years, said Nicholas McKay of the University of Arizona in Tucson .

The 20th century is the first century for which how much energy we're getting from the Sun is no longer the most important thing governing the temperature of the Arctic, said Dr McKay, when the study was published last month in the journal Science.

Baffin Island: An ancient trading post

*Baffin Island lies between Greenland and the northern coast of Canada and, for all its remoteness and inhospitable climate, it may have played an important role as a staging post on the first-ever transatlantic trade route.

Archaeologists have found wooden items and a length of yarn at Nunguvik in the south which they believe indicate that visiting Vikings were interacting with the local natives, known as the Dorset people, who lived on Baffin Island between 500BC and AD1500.

The scientists believe that the Dorset, who dressed in animal skins, did not know how to spin yarn, unlike the Vikings. The three-metre strand, found frozen in the tundra, was spun from arctic hare fur mixed with goat hair, similar to yarn found at Viking settlements on Greenland. There are no goats on Baffin Island.

Further evidence comes from one of the wooden carvings which shows two faces chin to chin. One has the features of indigenous North Americans, whose ancestors had an Asian origin, while the other shows a long, narrow face and nose with a heavy beard a portrait perhaps of a visiting Viking.

Two recent studies have shocked the world in regard to global warming. A phenomenon that was to happen possibly in our lifetime has evolved into a threat capable of transforming the world in ten years time.

A recent, extensive study of the northern polar ice caps released by climate expert Professor Peter Wadham, concluded that the Arctic Ocean would be mostly ice free in 10 years during the summer months.

This study is a stunning compliment to research done by NASA at the South Pole, which noted that ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003. The research concluded that the rate of melting is accelerating, creating a runaway effect.

As ice sheets melt, less sun is reflected back into outer space, and is instead absorbed into the ocean known as the Albedo Effect further accelerating the pace of oceanic warming.

The consequences will be devastating.

The International Institute for Environment and Development has studied the possible effects of rising ocean levels, and concluded that one eighth of the worlds urban population would become climate refugees, creating the largest displacement of people in world history. The most vulnerable countries are China (144 million displaced), India (63 million) and Bangladesh (62 million), while lower on the list are Japan (30 million) and the United States (23 million).

Not only will massive amounts of people become homeless, but the changing climate is expected to create other environmental and social crises internationally. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):

In Africa, between 75 million and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. And: access to food, in many African countries and regions is projected to be severely compromised by climate variability and change.

In Latin America: Changes in precipitation patterns and the disappearance of glaciers are projected to significantly affect water availability for human consumption, agriculture, and energy generation.

The EPA also outlines the negative effects of climate change in Europe, North America, Asia, and the rest of the world. Global warming is truly an international phenomenon requiring the cooperation of the worlds people and resources.

In response to the arctic ice melting, the U.S. and Europe have begun cooperatingmilitarily under the NATO umbrella. They see the melting ice not as social calamity, but as a corporate-profit opportunity. United Press International (UPI) reported that U.S. Navy Admiral James Savridis remarked that, ...climate change, which is melting ice around the polar cap, is opening trade routes and access to billions of barrels of oil. That, in turn, could lead to competition and friction (October 10, 2009).

The friction is between NATO and Russia, which also has corporations eager to exploit the raw materials and trade routes an iceless arctic will offer. UPI reports, Russia sent a submarine to the Arctic seafloor in February to symbolically plant a flag and announced in March that it would establish military bases along the northern coastline.

Melting polar ice caps should inspire the world to unite in cooperation, but the world today is dominated by giant corporations based in different nations, all obsessed with short-term profits.

Obama has not publicly discussed the arms race in the arctic, and has instead focused on climate change speeches full of idealism, but lacking content. Like Bush before him, Obama is putting U.S. [corporate] interests ahead of the interests of everybody else.

The influence of U.S. corporations has hampered environmental progress for years: under Bill Clinton, the Senate voted unanimously (95-0) against signing the Kyoto Protocol the inadequate international treaty aimed at lowering greenhouse gasses. The Senate stated that the treaty would result in serious harm to the economy [corporations] of the United States.

Without the participation of the United States and China the worlds two biggest polluters the Kyoto Protocol became a pointless exercise.

Now, Obama is posing as an environmental advocate looking to right the wrongs of the past. In reality, his vision for addressing climate change would be laughable, if the situation were not so dire.

The Cap and Trade environmental bill that Obama is encouraging Congress to pass mirrors the insufficient methods of the Kyoto protocol, with added loopholes. U.S. taxpayers will be expected to pay billions to give corporations allowances to pollute; corporations can trade their allowances to more-polluting corporations or Wall Street banks eager to profit from these new forms of corporate stock.

Greenpeace, like other environmental organizations, condemned the Cap and Trade bill, saying that the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions.

More evidence of Obamas fraudulent environmentalism is his attitude towards the upcoming international climate change conference in Copenhagen. Here, it was hoped that the standards of Kyoto Protocol would be improved while also including all the worst polluting countries in the world.

The Guardian newspaper recently reported that the Obama Administration was working to undermine the Copenhagen conference. This is being accomplished by the demand for a whole new structure for the treaty, which would destroy the years of planning that created the Kyoto Foundation. The Guardian reported, it could take several years to negotiate a replacement framework (September 15, 2009), effectively pushing any environmental solutions into the unknown future.

Another way the U.S. is disrupting the Copenhagen process is by demanding that there be no international mechanism to hold nations responsible for fulfilling their treaty obligations. The Guardian reported, the US is pushing instead for each country to set its own rules and to decide unilaterally how to meet its target. This way, any polluting U.S. corporation that disagrees with Copenhagens standards may rely on easily purchased U.S. congressmen to bail them out.

To hold such an obstinate attitude in the face of climate collapse is almost beyond comprehension. As a famous socialist once pointed out, the corporate elite are Tobogganing to disaster with its eyes closed. Their blindness, however, has a practical foundation. This class of people can see only the profits in front of their faces; they care nothing about the world around them, as theyve successfully gated themselves off from it. As the world enters a period of immense turmoil, theyve sequestered themselves in private paradises.

Thus, it is doubtful that even the loophole-ridden Cap and Trade bill will be passed or that anything of substance comes out of Copenhagen. Even if this meager progress were made, it would be mostly symbolic. Both tactics are completely inadequate to deal with the speed and severity of climate change; reducing greenhouse gasses will not do the trick at this point the structure of our economy itself needs to be drastically changed.

First, big oil and big coal along with other anti-change/polluting corporations need their wings clipped. Having such socially-valuable industries run by private corporations has greatly advanced climate destruction. Their immense power allows them the freedom to destroy the earth while throwing cash in all directions to have their agendas fulfilled at the expense of everybody else. They should instead be run as public utilities.

Ultimately, the industrial basis for an alternative energy superstructure needs to be created. Only by doing this can we seriously address the needs of the planet. Transforming our giant auto plants many laying idle into producers of solar panels, windmills, electricityproducing buoys, high-speed trains, electric busses and cars, etc., while massively investing in new research and technology to deal with climate change, is the only realistic way to drastically change direction in the time allotted.

Such a solution, however, is outside the reach of a capitalist economy, whose only motivation is profit. Drastically changing societys direction is not in the interest of those who benefit from the current version. All honest environmentalists will likely agree that such a system needs replacing. We can no longer allow giant corporations accountable only to big shareholders have the final say over all crucial economic and social issues. The resources of society need to be controlled by society, so we can cooperate effectively to deal with the largest crisis our species has ever faced.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscook@yahoo.com

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the talks in Copenhagen in December must focus on 2020, a far more important target than mid-century.

Strong, urgent and effective action is needed, Pachauri told a meeting of ministers of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris.

It is not enough to set any aspirational goal for 2050, it is critically important that we bring about a commitment to reduce emissions effectively by 2020, he said.

Pachauri added that over the last two years he had witnessed a massive explosion of awareness and therefore willingness to take action in climate change.

But, he said, the deal in Copenhagen had to be consistent with the findings of scientists, who say greenhouse gases that trap heat from the Sun are already affecting the climate system, and grave potential problems lie ahead.

The Group of Eight (G8) and other countries have endorsed the target of pegging warming to no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

Pachauri said this target is not without some fairly serious impact.

If this path of mitigation is to be embarked on, to ensure stabilisation of temperatures at the level that I mentioned (2 C, 3.6 F), then global emissions must peak by 2015, he said.

The December 7-18 Copenhagen talks are taking place under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The objective is a treaty that will tackle carbon emissions and their impacts, and encourage a switch to cleaner energy after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol pledges expire.

But UN talks have been bogged down by what is largely a divide between rich and poor countries, complicated by the US position.

President Barack Obama is sweeping away many of George W. Bush's legacy climate policies but has been unable to satisfy demands for deep, swift cuts in US carbon emissions.

He also faces a race against the clock to steer cap-and-trade legislation through Congress before the Copenhagen conference opens.

Pachauri told a press conference that it might take until next year for Washington to formulate its commitments on 2020.

A reasonably good agreement could emerge in Copenhagen, Pachauri said, adding though that he would not be dismayed by a delay if this provided a better outcome.

If we are not getting a good agreement, then the global community really has the option of meeting again six months later or three months later or whatever, he said.

I think we really have to keep at it until we can hammer out an agreement that meets the requirements of what science has clearly placed before us. It means a delay, it means some degree of disappointment all around, but who knows in the end you might get a much better agreement six months later.

It seems to be a highly risky concept if you turn your head around the technicalities of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). Think about it - Carbon is emitted into the atmosphere (as carbon dioxide, also called CO2) whenever we burn any fossil fuel, anywhere. The largest sources are cars, trucks and power stations that burn fossil fuels: coal, oil or gas. To prevent the carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere which is probably causing global warming and proven ocean acidification, CCS means catching the CO2 and sinking it away from the atmosphere. As we would need to store thousands of millions of tons of CO2, we cannot just build containers, but must use natural storage facilities. Old oil and gas fields, such as those in the North Sea apparently are ideal for this kind of use.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), or carbon sequestration, is a means of separating out carbon dioxide when burning fossil fuels. This carbon is collected and subsequently dumped underground or in the sea. CCS is an integrated concept consisting of three distinct components: CO2 capture, transport and storage. All three components are currently found in industrial operation today, although mostly not for the purpose of CO2 storage.

By far the most energy intensive portion of the CCS process - carbon capture, produces a concentrated stream of CO2 that can be compressed, transported and eventually stored. To date, there has not been a single application of CCS to large scale (> 500 MW) power stations. Since every ton of coal burned produces 3.7 tons of CO2, the sheer volume of CO2 that must be disposed of makes CCS inherently impractical and extremely expensive.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) aims to reduce the climate impact of burning fossil fuels by capturing CO2 from power station smokestacks and disposing of it underground. The development of this technology has been widely promoted by the coal industry as a justification for the construction of new coal-fired power plants. However, the technology is largely unproven and will not be ready in time to save the climate says a study conducted by Greenpeace.

CCS cannot deliver in time to stop climate change, it's unproven and it's risky, both environmentally, and for investors. It's being used as an excuse for building new coal-fired power stations when we need to be shutting them down. So on all levels, CCS is not the answer to solving climate change. Says Emily Rochon, Greenpeace International climate campaigner

The report, circulated by Greenpeace after independent scientific research shows that:

* CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change. The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030.1 To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions have to start falling after 2015, just seven years away.

*Storing carbon underground is risky as safe and permanent storage of CO2 cannot be guaranteed. The possibility of leakage would negate all mitigation efforts.

*CCS is expensive and therefore it could lead to a doubling of plant costs, and an electricity price increase of 21-91%.

* Money spent on CCS will divert investments away from sustainable solutions to climate change.

*CCS carries significant liability risks. It poses a threat to health, ecosystems and the climate and the severity is an unknown.

The world is reeling under a climate crisis that requires urgent action. Climate scientists warn that to avoid the worst effects, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015 and then start falling by at least 50% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels. Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels, and the single greatest threat to the climate. If current plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in coal plants are realised, CO2 emissions from coal will have risen by 60%, by 2030. Concerns about the feasibility, costs, safety, and liability of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) make it a dangerous gamble. A survey of 1000 climate decision makers done by Greenpeace around the world reveal substantial doubt in the ability of CCS to deliver.

It is a proven fact that the real solutions to stopping dangerous climate change lie in renewable energy and energy efficiency that can start protecting the climate today. Huge reductions in energy demand are possible with efficiency measures. Technically accessible renewable energy sources- such as wind, wave and solar- are capable of providing six times more energy than then world currently consumes forever. And save our fragile planet.

The Nobel Committee's tradition is long and inglorious, but for the well-informed no surprise. Consider its past honorees:

-- Henry Kissinger;

-- Shimon Peres;

-- Yitzhak Rabin;

-- Menachem Begin;

-- FW de Klerk;

-- Al Gore;

-- The Dalai Lama, a covert CIA asset;

-- Kofi Annan, a reliable imperial war supporter;

-- UN Peacekeeping (Paramilitary) Forces that foster more conflicts than they resolve;

-- Elie Wiesel, a hawkish Islamophobe;

-- Norman Borlaug, whose green revolution wheat strains killed millions;

-- Medecins Sans Frontieres, co-founded by rabid war hawk Bernard Kouchner, now France's Minister of Foreign and European Affairs;

-- Woodrow Wilson who broke his pledge to keep us out of war,

-- Jimmy Carter who backed an array of tyrants and drew the Soviets into its Afghan quagmire that took a million or more lives;

-- George C. Marshall, instrumental in creating NATO and waging war against North Korea;

-- Theodore Roosevelt who once said I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one; and

-- other undeserving winners....War is peace, what Orwell understood and why the award legitimizes wars and the leaders who wage them.

After the October 9 announcement, The New York Times quoted 2007 winner Al Gore saying it was thrilling without explaining it was as undeserved as his own. Writers Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg called it a surprise. For others it shocked and betrayed.

Palestinian Muhammad al-Sharif asked: Has Israel stopped building settlements? Has Obama achieved a Palestinian state yet?

Iyad Burnat, one of the West Bank's non-violent protest leaders, started to go crazy after hearing about the award. I asked myself why. The Americans are still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Palestine is still occupied....Why didn't (they) give the prize to (George Bush. He) worked very hard (for) eight years killing children, starting wars and supporting the occupation, and they gave the prize to (other choices). I think (the) prize makes the people more violent. Do you think that Obama can make peace....why didn't (they) wait until he actually made it.

Straddling both sides, The Times said that the unexpected honor....elicited praise and puzzlement around the globe.

It called it a rebuke of Bush's foreign policies instead of explaining it legitimizes wars and conflicts, the same ones Obama's pursuing more aggressively in Afghanistan and Pakistan under a general (Stanley McChrystal) James Petras calls a notorious psychopath - responsible for committing war crime atrocities when he headed the Pentagon's infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). No matter, according to Erlanger and Stolberg's Times-speak:

Mr. Obama has generated considerable goodwill overseas (and) has made a series of speeches with arching ambition. He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons; reached out to the Muslim world (and) sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, at the expense of offending some of his Jewish supporters.

In fact, his speeches are disingenuous and lie-filled. He disdains peace. The renamed Global War on Terror is now the Overseas Contingency Operation. Torture remains official US policy. His administration reeks of Islamophobes. The Israeli Lobby remains comfortably dominant. Muslims are still target one. His ambition is global dominance. His method - imperial wars with a first-strike nuclear option.

The Nobel Committee's Twisted Logic in Announcing the Award

It reflects Obama's extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.

Fact Check:

In less than nine months in office, Obama has been confrontational through destabilizing belligerence towards numerous countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, China, Occupied Palestine, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Somalia, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Honduras by deposing a democratically elected president and obstructing efforts to reinstate him.

Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Fact Check:

America has the world's largest, most threatening arsenal and global delivery systems. Besides Israel, it's the only major power with a first-strike nuclear policy against any country called a threat. Its drawdown plans will replace old weapons with better new ones, and so-called missile defense is solely for offense.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multinational diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions play.

Fact Check:

Obama is pursuing the same policies as George Bush:

-- permanent wars and occupations;

-- record amounts of military spending at a time America has no enemies;

-- supplying arms and munitions to rogue state allies;

-- confronting independent ones with sanctions, belligerent threats, and more war;

-- subverting the rule of law;

-- pursuing a global jihad against human rights and civil liberties;

-- using Security Council pressure and intimidation to enforce policy and block constructive measures through vetoes; and

-- overall continuing America's hegemonic pursuit of full spectrum dominance over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

Under Obama, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climate challenges the world is confronting.

Fact Check:

Obama's House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is environmentally destructive, lets corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel, and creates new Wall Street bubble potential through carbon trading derivatives speculation.

According to Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the US stance retards progress at Bangkok climate talks the way it's obstructed earlier efforts.

Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Fact Check:

Obama's polices have weakened them at home and abroad. Torture remains official US policy. Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists are repeated victims. So are peaceful protestors. Police state measures are still law and tough new ones are planned. Civil and human rights issues are nonstarters. Warrantless illegal spying continues. Health care reform schemes will ration a human right, and the new Swine Flu vaccines are covert bioweapons.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future.

Fact Check:

Under Obama, growing millions in America face poverty, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, despair, ill health, and early deaths at a time of permanent wars.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely the international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

Fact Check:

Skirting the truth, the Committee's twisted logic picks honorees who should face prosecutions for their crimes.

A 110-Year Tradition

Alfred Nobel (1833 - 1896) began it in 1901. Swedish- born, he was a wealthy 19th century chemist, engineer, dynamite inventor, armaments manufacturer, and war profiteer, later reinventing himself as a peacemaker.

Past nominees included Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Tony Blair, Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush. Mahatma Gandhi got four nominations but never won. Nor did three-time nominee Kathy Kelly and other deserving choices, passed over for war hawks like Henry Kissenger whose credentials include:

-- three - four million Southeast Asian deaths;

-- many tens of thousands more worldwide;

-- backing coups and despots;

-- stoking global conflict and violence; and

-- compiling an overall breathtaking criminal record.

Others like:

-- Israeli leaders Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin matched him against Palestinian civilians;

-- Kofi Annan backed Western imperialism, years of genocidal Iraqi sanctions, the 2003 invasion and occupation, and the same lawlessness against Afghanistan; and

-- Al Gore, the 2007 choice, was infamous for putting politics above principles and made a career out of being pro-war, pro-business, anti-union, and no friend of the earth - credentials descriptive of Obama and his national security team, ideologically stacked with hawks.

As a result, American war making continues, sanctified and legitimized under Obama's peacemaker mantle. Or as CounterPunch's Alexander Cockburn put it in his October 10 War and Peace article:

The award is a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth (and future Nobel hopefuls): you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That's the audacity of hope at full stretch. Nobel hypocrisy also by scorning peace in favor of war. The tradition continues.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on Republic Broadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

The intended destruction or genocide of Iraq as a state and nation has been ongoing for 19 years, combining the imposition of the most draconian sanctions regime ever designed and that led to 1.5 million Iraqi deaths, including 500,000 children, with a war of aggression that led to the violent deaths of over one million more.

Destroying Iraq included the purposeful targeting of its water and sanitation system, attacking the health of the civilian population. Since 1990, thousands of tons of depleted uranium have been dropped on Iraq, leading in some places to a 600 per cent rise in cancer and leukaemia cases, especially among children. In both the first Gulf War and Shock and Awe in 2003, an air campaign that openly threatened total destruction, waves of disproportionate bombing made no distinction between military and civilian targets, with schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, shelters, residential areas, and historical sites all destroyed.

Destroying Iraq included promoting, funding and organizing sectarian and ethnic groups bent on dividing Iraq into three or more sectarian or ethnic entities, backed by armed militias that would terrorize the Iraqi people. Since 2003, some 4.7 million Iraqis one fifth of the population have been forcibly displaced. Under occupation, kidnappings, killings, extortion and mutilation became endemic, targeting men, women and even children and the elderly.

Destroying Iraq included purposefully dismantling the state by refusing to stop or stem or by instigating mass looting, and by engaging in ideological persecution, entailing manhunting, extrajudicial assassinations, mass imprisonment and torture, of Baathists, the entire educated class of the state apparatus, religious and linguistic minorities and Arab Sunnis, resulting in the total collapse of all public services and other economic functions and promoting civil strife and systematic corruption.

In parallel, Iraqs rich heritage and unique cultural and archaeological patrimony has been wantonly destroyed.

In order to render Iraq dependent on US and UK strategic designs, successive US and UK governments have attempted to partition Iraq and to establish by military force a pro-occupation Iraqi government and political system. They have promoted and engaged in the massive plunder of Iraqi natural resources, attempting to privatize this property and wealth of the Iraqi nation.

Humanity at stake

This is but the barest summary of the horrors Iraq has endured, based on lies that nobody but cowed governments and complicit media believed. In 2003, millions worldwide were mobilized in opposition to US/UK plans. In going ahead, the US and UK launched an illegal war of aggression. Accountability has not been established.

The persons named in this case have each played a key role in Iraqs intended destruction. They instigated, supported, condoned, rationalized, executed and/or perpetuated or excused this destruction based on lies and narrow strategic and economic interests, and against the will of their own people. Allowing those responsible to escape accountability means such actions could be repeated elsewhere.

It is imperative now to establish accountability for US and UK war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Iraq because:

Every Iraqi victim deserves justice.

Everyone responsible should be accountable.

We are before immoral and unlawful acts, contrary to the basis on which the international order of state sovereignty and peace and security rests. Whereas the official international justice system is closed before the suffering of those that imperialism makes a target, through this case we try to open a channel whereby the conscience of humanity can express its solidarity with justice for victims of imperial crimes.

Ad Hoc Committee For Justice For Iraq

Press contacts:
Hana Al Bayaty, Executive Committee, BRussells Tribunal

34 657 52 70 77 or +20 10 027 7964 (English and French) hanaalbayaty@gmail.com

Dr Ian Douglas, Executive Committee, BRussells Tribunal, coordinator, International Initiative to Prosecute US Genocide in Iraq

+20 12 167 1660 (English) iandouglas@USgenocide.org

Amanda Nuredin, +34 657 52 70 77 (Spanish) justiciaparairak@gmail.com
Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Executive Committee, BRussells Tribunal

+33 471 461 197 (Arabic) albayaty_abdul@hotmail.com

Web:
www.brusselstribunal.org
www.USgenocide.org
www.twitter.com/USgenocide
www.facebook.com/USgenocide

In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one-eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis would then import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people.

The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation. But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

Emerging Trends Threaten Food Security

Fifteen percent of India's grain harvest is produced by overpumping its groundwater. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages. It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices.

Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-driven - a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, or a crop-withering heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining world food production.

These trends include - in addition to falling water tables - eroding soils and rising temperatures from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Rising temperatures bring crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and shrinking mountain glaciers.

With both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting at an accelerating pace, sea level could rise by up to six feet during this century. Such a rise would inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world's second-ranking rice exporter. Even a three-foot rise in sea level would cover half the riceland in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people. And these are only two of Asia's many rice-growing river deltas.

The world's mountain glaciers have shrunk for 18 consecutive years. Many smaller glaciers have disappeared. Nowhere is the melting more alarming than in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau where the ice melt from glaciers sustains not only the dry-season flow of the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers but also the irrigation systems that depend on them. Without these glaciers, many Asian rivers would cease to flow during the dry season.

The wheat and rice harvests of China and India would be directly affected. China is the world's leading wheat producer. India is second. (The United States is third.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these glaciers poses the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced.

The Harbinger of Civilisation's Demise?

The number of hungry people, which was declining for several decades, bottomed out in the mid-1990s at 825 million. In 2009 it jumped to over one billion. With world food prices projected to continue rising, so too will the number of hungry people.

We know from studying earlier civilisations such as the Sumerians, Mayans, and many others, that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their demise. It now appears that food may be the weak link in our early twenty-first century civilisation as well.

Will we follow in the footsteps of the Sumerians and the Mayans or can we change course - and do it before time runs out? Can we move onto an economic path that is environmentally sustainable? We think we can. That is what Plan B 4.0 is about.

Mobilising to Save Civilisation

Plan B aims to stabilise climate, stabilise population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy's natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million.

Cutting carbon emissions will require both a worldwide revolution in energy efficiency and a shift from oil, coal, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not imagine even two years ago.

Consider the state of Texas. The enormous number of wind projects under development, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to over 50,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state's 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The energy transition is under way.

The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind generating capacity, having overtaken Germany in 2005. But this lead will be short-lived. China is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned.

Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB plus an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

Solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe's electricity. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. (No, this is not an error.)

The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realisation that these renewables can last as long as the earth itself. In contrast to investing in new oil fields where well yields begin to decline in a matter of decades, or in coal mines where the seams run out, these new energy sources can last forever.

At a Tipping Point

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? Can we stabilise population by lowering fertility before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising mortality?

Yes. But it will take something close to a wartime mobilisation, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilisation itself that is now at risk.

Saving civilisation is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Plan B 4.0: Mobilising to Save Civilisation can be downloaded for free at http://www.earth-policy.org/.

Systemic collapse, societal collapse, the coming dark age, the great transformation, the coming crash, the post-industrial age, the long emergency, socioeconomic collapse, the die-off, the tribulation, the coming anarchy, perhaps even resource wars (to the extent that this is not an oxymoron, since wars themselves require resources) ― there are many names, and they do not all correspond to exactly the same thing, but there is a widespread belief that something immense and ominous is happening. Unlike those of the Aquarian Age, the heralds of this new era often have impressive academic credentials: they include scientists, engineers, and historians. The serious beginnings of the concept can be found in Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Population, Resources, Environment (1970); Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (1972); and William R. Catton, Jr., Overshoot (1980). What all the overlapping theories have in common can be seen in the titles of those three books.

Oil depletion is the most critical aspect in the systemic collapse of modern civilization, but altogether this collapse has about 10 principal parts, each with a vaguely causal relationship to the next. Oil, metals, and electricity are a tightly-knit group, as we shall see, and no industrial civilization can have one without the others. As those 3 disappear, food and fresh water become scarce (fish and grain supplies per capita have been declining for years, water tables are falling everywhere, rivers are not reaching the sea). These 5 can largely be considered as resource depletion, and the converse of resource depletion is environmental destruction. Disruption of ecosystems in turn leads to epidemics. Matters of infrastructure then follow: transportation and communication. Social structure is next to fail: without roads and telephones, there can be no government, no education, no large-scale division of labor. After the above 10 aspects of systemic collapse, there is another layer, in some respects more psychological or sociological, that we might call the 4 Cs. The first 3 are crime (war and crime will be indistinguishable, as Robert D. Kaplan explains), cults, and craziness the breakdown of traditional law, the tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the inability to distinguish mental health from mental illness. After that there is a more general one that is simple chaos, which results in the pervasive sense that nothing works any more.

Systemic collapse, in turn, has one overwhelming cause: world overpopulation. All of the flash-in-the-pan ideas that are presented as solutions to the modern dilemma solar power, ethanol, hybrid cars, desalination, permaculture have value only as desperate attempts to solve an underlying problem that has never been addressed in a more direct manner. American foreign aid, however, has always included only trivial amounts for family planning; the most powerful country in the world has done very little to solve the biggest problem in the world.

Oil Depletion

Oil is everything. That is to say, everything in the modern world is dependent on oil. From oil and other hydrocarbons we get fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, lubricants, plastic, paint, synthetic fabrics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, and many other things. On a more abstract level, we are dependent on oil and other hydrocarbons for manufacturing, for transportation, for agriculture, for mining, and for electricity. As the oil disappears, our entire industrial society will go with it. There will be no means of supporting the billions of people who now live on this planet. Above all, there will be insufficient food, and the result will be terrible famine.

A vast amount of debate has gone on about peak oil, the date at which the worlds annual oil production will reach (or did reach) its maximum and will begin (or did begin) to decline. The exact numbers are unobtainable, but the situation can perhaps be summarized by saying that about 20 or 30 major studies have been done, and the consensus is that the most likely date for peak oil is 2008, when about 30 billion barrels were produced. (Perhaps of greater importance is the fact that oil production per capita peaked much earlier, in 1979.) On the other side of the peak, however, we are facing a steep drop: 20 billion barrels in 2020, 15 in 2030, 9 in 2040, 5 in 2050.

In the entire world, there are perhaps a trillion barrels of oil left to extract which may sound like a lot, but isnt. When newspapers announce the discovery of a deposit of a billion barrels, readers are no doubt amazed, but they are not told that such a find is only 2 weeks supply.

As the years go by, new oil wells have to be drilled deeper than the old, because newly discovered deposits are deeper. Those new deposits are therefore less accessible. But oil is used as a fuel for the oil drills themselves, and for the exploration. When it takes an entire barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out of the ground, as is increasingly the case, it is a waste of time to continue drilling such a well.

Coal and natural gas are also disappearing. Coal will be available for a while after oil is gone, although previous reports of its abundance were highly exaggerated. Coal, however, is highly polluting and cannot be used as a fuel for most forms of transportation; the last industrial society may be a bizarre, crowded, dirty, impoverished world. Natural gas is not easily transported, and it is not suitable for most equipment.

Alternative sources of energy will never be very useful, for several reasons, but mainly because of a problem of net energy: the amount of energy output is not sufficiently greater than the amount of energy input. All alternative forms of energy are so dependent on the very petroleum that they are intended to replace that the use of them is largely self-defeating and irrational. Alternative sources ultimately dont have enough bang to replace 30 billion annual barrels of oil ― or even to replace more than the tiniest fraction of that amount.

Petroleum is required to extract, process, and transport almost any other form of energy; a coal mine is not operated by coal-powered equipment. It takes oil energy to make alternative energy.

The use of unconventional oil (shale deposits, tar sands, heavy oil) poses several problems besides that of net energy. Large quantities of conventional oil are needed to process the oil from these unconventional sources, so net energy recovery is low. The pollution problems are considerable, and it is not certain how much environmental damage the human race is willing to endure. With unconventional oil we are, quite literally, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

More-exotic forms of alternative energy are plagued with even greater problems. Fuel cells cannot be made practical, because such devices require hydrogen derived from fossil fuels (coal or natural gas), if we exclude designs that will never escape the realm of science fiction; if fuel cells ever became popular, the fossil fuels they require would then be consumed even faster than they are now. Biomass energy (perhaps from wood, animal dung, peat, corn, or switchgrass) would require impossibly large amounts of land and would still result in insufficient quantities of net energy, perhaps even negative quantities. Hydroelectric dams are reaching their practical limits. Wind and geothermal power are only effective in certain areas and for certain purposes. Nuclear power will soon be suffering from a lack of fuel and is already creating serious environmental dangers.

The current favorite for alternative energy is solar power, but proponents must close their eyes to all questions of scale. To meet the worlds present energy needs by using solar power, we would need an array (or an equivalent number of smaller ones) of collectors covering about 550,000 km2 a machine the size of France. The production and maintenance of this array would require vast quantities of hydrocarbons, metals, and other materials a self-defeating process.

Modern agriculture is highly dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, and the operation of machines for harvesting, processing, and transporting. The Green Revolution was the invention of a way to turn petroleum and natural gas into food. Without fossil fuels, modern methods of food production will disappear, and crop yields will be far less than at present. Because of the shortage of food, world population must shrink to one billion by 2050, but we conveniently forget that war, plague, and famine are the only means available. A close analogy to petroleum famine may be Irelands potato famine of the 1840s, since like petroleum it was a single commodity that caused such devastation. Cecil Woodham‑Smith describes the Irish tragedy in The Great Hunger. The first official response was disbelief: There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable, wrote Sir Robert Peel in 1845. By 1847 the image had changed: Bodies half‑eaten by rats were an ordinary sight; ‘two dogs were shot while tearing a body to pieces.

Petroleum is the lifeblood of our civilization. Even a bicycle, that ultimate symbol of an alternate lifestyle, requires petroleum for lubrication, for paint, and for plastic components. The vehicle that delivers the bicycle runs on petroleum, over asphalt that is made of petroleum. Rubber tires are often made of petroleum.

The problem of the worlds diminishing supply of oil is a problem of energy, not a problem of money. The old bromide that higher prices will eventually make [e.g.] shale oil economically feasible is meaningless. This planet has only a finite amount of fossil fuel. That fuel is starting to vanish, and higher prices are quite unable to stop the event from taking place.

Much of modern warfare is about oil, in spite of all the pious and hypocritical rhetoric about the forces of good and the forces of evil. The real forces are those trying to control the oil wells and the fragile pipelines that carry that oil. A map of recent American military ventures is a map of petroleum deposits. When the oil wars began is largely a matter of definition, though perhaps 1973 would be a usable date, when the Yom Kippur War or, to speak more truthfully, the decline of American domestic oil led to the OPEC oil embargo.

The problem of the loss of petroleum will, of course, be received in the same manner as most other large-scale disasters: widespread denial, followed by a rather catatonic apathy. The centuries will pass, and a day will come when, like the early Anglo-Saxons, people will look around at the scattered stones and regard them as the work of giants.

When thinking about survival in a world without oil, we must remember that the near future will differ from the distant future. To get an overview of the all the coming phases, we must consider that history in general (not only the history of oil) will form a sort of bell curve: the events after about the year 2000 will form a downward curve that somewhat reflects the curve of events leading up to that same year. That bell curve will not be perfectly symmetrical, of course: the decline in modern civilization is likely to be fairly swift.

Although my own terms are largely arbitrary, I tend to think of a future transition from what I call a Neo-Victorian Era to a Neo-Alfredian one. In other words, the future will descend from an industrial age resembling that of Queen Victoria (the world of Charles Dickens) to a pre-industrial age resembling that of King Alfred the Great (the world of Viking raids), whose reign was a thousand years earlier. And finally we shall return to the Stone Age, where we started from back to the Olduvai Gorge, as Richard C. Duncan says.

The Problem of Infrastructure

Most schemes for a post-oil technology are based on the misconception that there will be an infrastructure, similar to that of the present day, which could support such future gadgetry. Modern equipment, however, is dependent on specific methods of manufacture, transportation, maintenance, and repair. In less abstract terms, this means machinery, motorized vehicles, and service depots or shops, all of which are generally run by fossil fuels. In addition, one unconsciously assumes the presence of electricity, which energizes the various communications devices, such as telephones and computers; electricity on such a large scale is only possible with fossil fuels.

To believe that a non-petroleum infrastructure is possible, one would have to imagine, for example, solar-powered machines creating equipment for the production and storage of electricity by means of solar energy. This equipment would then be loaded on to solar-powered trucks, driven to various locations, and installed with other solar-powered devices, and so on, ad absurdum and ad infinitum. Such a scenario might provide material for a work of science fiction, but not for genuine science. The sun simply does not work that way.

It is not only oil that will soon be gone. Iron ore of the sort that can be processed with primitive equipment is becoming scarce, and only the less-tractable forms will be available when the oil-powered machinery is no longer available a chicken-and-egg problem. Copper, aluminum, and other metals are also rapidly vanishing. Metals were useful to mankind only because they could once be found in concentrated pockets in the earths crust; now they are irretrievably scattered among the worlds garbage dumps.

The infrastructure will no longer be in place: oil, electricity, and asphalt roads, for example. Partly for that reason, the social structure will also no longer be in place. Without the infrastructure and the social structure, it will be impossible to produce the familiar goods of industrial society.

Without fossil fuels, the most that is possible is a pre-industrial infrastructure, although one must still ignore the fact that the pre-industrial world did not fall from the sky as a prefabricated structure but took uncountable generations of human ingenuity to develop. The next problem is that a pre-industrial blacksmith was adept at making horseshoes, but not at making or repairing solar-energy systems.

Fossil fuels, metals, and electricity are all intricately connected. Each is inaccessible on the modern scale without the other 2. Any 2 will vanish without the third. If we imagine a world without fossil fuels, we must imagine a world without metals or electricity. What we imagine, at that point, is a society far more primitive than the one to which we are accustomed.

The End of Electricity

As Duncan points out, the first clearly marked sign of systemic collapse may be the failure of electricity. Throughout the world, electricity comes mainly from coal, natural gas, nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric dams, and all of them are bad choices. Most North American electricity is produced by fossil fuels, and in the United States that generally means coal, although natural gas is often the first choice for future supplies of fuel. Coal is terribly inefficient; only a third of its energy is transferred as it is converted to electricity.

The North American grid is a hopelessly elaborate machine the largest machine in history and it is perpetually operating at maximum load, chronically in need of better maintenance and expensive upgrading. But most North Americans still cannot think of a failure of electricity as anything more than a momentary aspect of a summer storm. In other parts of the world, the future is already here: the lights fade out daily after 4 or 5 hours, if they come on at all. Actually North Americans are in far better shape than the citizens of other countries. Thanks to political bungling, even civilized Britain will apparently be losing 40 percent of its electrical power between 2008 and 2014.

The Long-Term Reliability Assessment, a lengthy document by the North American Electric Reliability Council, is disquieting. Each area of North America, according to this text, will be in some danger of outage over the next few years, due to inadequate supplies of electricity. Texas may be in the greatest danger, whereas Quebec (with the advantage of hydroelectric dams) may be the safest area.

North Americans should have been warned about the threat to electricity by the great blackout of August 14, 2003. Jason Leopold describes the aftermath of that event:

Congress called for spending of up to $100 billion to reduce severe transmission bottlenecks and increase capacity so the transmission lines could carry additional electricity from power plants to homes and businesses. But the money that would have funded a reliable power grid was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I remember that day in 2003 very well. No gasoline, because the pumps required electricity. Still, many Torontonians came up to Ontarios cottage country, where I was living, to wait out the troubles. Also no bank machines working, so it was cash only. There were big sales of batteries and candles. Also bottled water.

Its amazing how much pure water is needed, even by frugal people about 8 liters per person per day is about the minimum comfortable amount, and thats only for drinking, cooking, and perhaps a little dishwashing. All other water, such as for flushing the toilet (if you dont use an outhouse), must come from a pond or a river, although you might want to install a hand pump for a well long before such an emergency occurs. You might also want to keep candles, matches, batteries, wind-up electric devices, and so on. And in winter you would of course need several cords of firewood, and plenty of warm clothing and bedding.

Money and Labor

Almost everything in our modern economy is either made from oil or requires oil for its functioning or its transportation. As the price of oil begins to skyrocket, therefore, so will the price of everything else. The same happened on a smaller scale during the temporary oil crises of the 1970s and 80s; it was referred to in those days as stagflation stagnation of income combined with inflation of prices, something that economists used to say was impossible. The hardest hit will be those with debts: car payments, house mortgages, credit cards, student loans. But everyone will find that a dollar just doesnt stretch. High prices will be combined with low wages.

At first, money will be an immensely important issue. It will take a handful of bills to buy anything. And largely because of the high prices, unemployment will rise dramatically. For the first few years of the collapse, there will be a financial Reign of Terror, and in fact this era has already begun to some extent, if we can judge from a number of related events. In 1970 U.S. domestic oil production went into a permanent decline. Although global oil production must be dated to the first years of the twenty-first century, production per capita reached its peak much earlier, in 1979. In the U.S., gasoline prices, which had been steady for decades, started to increase annually by 18 percent in 2003. And around 2005 the energy required to drill for a barrel of oil began to exceed the energy gained from it.

The economic problem of peak oil is occurring when North Americans have already been battered by other economic problems. One serious issue is globalization: for many years, big companies have been getting their work done by sending it out to whatever countries have the poorest people and the most repressive governments. The result is that people in developed countries lose their jobs. Although the official unemployment levels are low, the figures are misleading; large numbers of the employed are not working at well-paying, permanent, full-time jobs. Closely related to the problem of globalization is that of automation, which increases production but decreases payrolls. (The Historical Income Tables of the United States Census Bureau have shown, over many years, the widening gap between the rich and the poor: in particular, while most incomes have either fallen or not changed, the upper 5 percent of families have seen their incomes climbing dramatically.) As a result of all these vagaries within the capitalist system, government services are perpetually being cut. The common expression is that money is tight these days, although very few people ask why that is the case. Taxes continue to rise, but the individual receives little in return.

(But, no, contrary to rumor the international credit collapse that began in 2007 was not due to oil depletion; all that the two had in common is that the former can be ascribed to government corruption, which like oil depletion is an aspect of systemic collapse.)

At one point, the money problem will be everything. A few decades later, the money problem will be nothing, because money will disappear. Money is only a symbol, and it is only valuable as long as people are willing to accept that fiction: without government, without a stock market, and without a currency market, such a symbol cannot endure, as George Soros has pointed out. Money itself will be useless and will finally be ignored. Tangible possessions and practical skills will become the real wealth. Having the right friends will also help.

The answer, in part, is to try to give up the use of money well ahead of time, instead of letting the money economy claim more victims. Barter would allow people to provide for their daily needs on a local basis, without the dubious assistance of governments or corporations. Such a way of doing business, unfortunately, is illegal if the participants are not paying sales tax on their transactions. Politicians disparage the age-old practice of barter as the underground economy or the gray economy, but of course their own income is dependent on taxes. In any case, the transition would not be simple: there are so many rules, from building codes to insurance regulations to sales- and income-tax laws, that make it difficult to provide oneself with food, clothing and shelter without spending money. Nevertheless, as the economy breaks down, so will the legal structure; where there is no law, there are no criminals.

Leadership and Social Structure

The decline in the worlds oil supply, the biggest news story of modern times, rarely appears in the conventional news media, or it appears only in distorted forms. Ironically, the modern world is plagued by a lack of serious information. Todays news item is usually forgotten by tomorrow. The television viewer has the vague impression that something happened somewhere, but one could change channels all day without finding anything below the surface. The communications media are owned by an ever-shrinking number of interrelated giant corporations, and the product sold to the public is a uniform blandness, designed to keep the masses in their place. But the unreality of television is only the start of the enigma. What is most apparent is the larger problem that there is no leadership, no sense of organization, for dealing with peak-oil issues.

One might consider as an analogy the Great Depression. During those 10 years, everyone lived on his own little island, lost, alone, and afraid. It was a shame to be poor, so one could not even discuss it with ones neighbors. The press and the politicians largely denied that the Depression existed, so there was little help from them. In general, it was just each nuclear family on its own for those who were lucky enough to have a family. Barry Broadfoot, in Ten Lost Years, records the memories of one Depression survivor:

Every newspaper across Canada and in the United States always played up the silver lining. . . . There were no such things as starvation, hunger marches, store front windows being kicked in. Yes, they were reported, but always these were called incidents and incited by highly-paid professional agitators.

A related problem is the lack of ideological unity. While one person has a sort of Armageddon-like vision, stocking up ammunition for the Last Battle, someone else is busy on the Internet asking for ideas on how to make a still for the dozen corn plants he intends to grow. There is a complete lack of agreement on first principles.

Part of the reason for these problems is that many modern societies, including that of the United States, are individualist rather than collectivist. There is a sort of frontier mentality that pervades much of modern life. In many ways, this has been beneficial: freedom from tradition, freedom from onerous family duties, and freedom from manorial obligations have perhaps provided much of the motivation for those who came to what was seen as the New World. That spirit of self-sufficiency made it possible for pioneers to thrive in the isolation of the wilderness.

Yet we must not forget the truism that there is strength and safety in numbers. Individualism might be more beneficial in good times than in bad; North Americans seem to adjust poorly to crises. The defects of individualism can seen right within what is mistakenly called the democratic process: political leaders can tell the most blatant lies about economic trends, about warfare, or about transgressions of civil liberties, and the response is a numbed, silent obedience which is puzzling only until one realizes that most people have little means of behaving otherwise. They are generally lacking in family or friends with whom they can share information or compare ideas, and they are therefore entirely dependent on the news media for mental sustenance. The television set in the living room is the altar on which common sense is sacrificed.

Faced with such challenges, one would at first be lucky to produce a post-oil community much larger than ones own nuclear family, before sheer destitution forces people to take a more serious attitude to survival. Fair-sized groups, however, would eventually develop. The society of the future has never been described, but at least some numbers are available. Chester G. Starrs statement, in A History of the Ancient World, is probably as good as any: Whereas Paleolithic packs numbered perhaps 20 or 30, Neolithic farmers either lived in family homesteads, in villages of 150 persons (as at Jarmo), or in even larger towns (as at Jericho).

In any case, the question of the ideal political system is essentially not a political matter but a psychological one. Humans spent thousands of years living in small groups, hunting and gathering. The group was small enough so that each person knew every other person. Democracy could work because both the voters and the politicians were visible. It has only been in a tiny fraction of the life span of humanity that political units have been created that are far too large for people to know one another except as abstractions. Small groups have their problems, but in terms of providing happiness for the average person, the band or village is more efficient than the empire.

References:

Broadfoot, Barry. Ten Lost Years 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.

Duncan, Richard C. The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge. Geological Society of America, Summit 2000. Reno, Nevada, November 13, 2000. http://www.dieoff.org/page224.htm

Kaplan, Robert D. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith Publisher, 2001.

Leopold, Jason. Dark Days Ahead. Truth Out. 17 October 2006.
http://www.truthout.org/docs2006/101706J.shtml#

North American Electric Reliability Council. Long-Term Reliability Assessment. Annual.
http://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_wpdl/
docs/pubs/LTRA2008.pdf

Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.

Starr, Chester G. A History of the Ancient World. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

United States Census Bureau. Historical Income Tables Families. U.S. Government Printing Office. Annual. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www
/income/histinc/f03ar.html

Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus@live.com.

While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all developing societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly -- our nearsightedness?

Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.

A Clerk of Resistance

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.

Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, apply-through-proper-channels nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world's favorite new superpower. Repression through proper channels sometimes engenders resistance through proper channels. As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

Today, words like progress and development have become interchangeable with economic reforms, deregulation, and privatization. Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The market is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling futures. Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, a few will do).

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being anti-progress, anti-development, anti-reform, and of course anti-national -- negativists of the worst sort.

Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, Don't you believe in progress? To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, Do you have an alternative development model? To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, You're against the market. And who except a cretin could be against markets?

To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.

Two decades of Progress in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it -- and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

The hoary institutions of Indian democracy -- the judiciary, the police, the free press, and, of course, elections -- far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.

A New Cold War in Kashmir

Speaking of consensus, there's the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment -- including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have disappeared, women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian Army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India's deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen -- who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people -- and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of Azadi! Azadi! (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting Azadi! Azadi! Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers -- everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted Azadi! Azadi! The protests went on for several days.

The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.

Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary -- it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were rearrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir valley.

None of India's analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy -- who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count -- talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (an armed soldier for every 20 civilians).

No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.

Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues -- roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades -- where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night -- might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.

The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers' view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. Never trust a Kashmiri, several Kashmiris said to me. We're fickle and unreliable. Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades -- its attempt to destroy people's self-esteem -- are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It's enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies -- Indian nationalism (corporate as well as Hindu, shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), U.S. imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated, and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the party line.

Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, demon-crazy can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

Is Democracy Melting?

Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.

The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war -- thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.

While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the U.N. Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan… it's a long list.)

The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life -- and the glaciers will melt even faster.

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new book, just published by Haymarket Books, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This post is adapted from the introduction to that book.