Unclean Hands at the Gill Tract?
May 16th, 2012
The battle over the future of Albany’s Gill Tract has tapped into multiple, deep-seated conflicts that perennially dominate Bay Area politics, from land use and development to food ethics. But in one area, the roots of disagreement are potentially very deep: biotechnology and its uses.
Genetic engineering has been a topic of intense debate since its emergence in the early 1970s when scientists developed methods to cut and paste fragments of DNA, creating genetically modified organisms — GMOs. Some claim that GMOs represent a dangerous leap in the technological manipulation of life. Critics also point out that GMO research products benefit large corporations, producing proprietary crop varieties designed to promote industrialized models of agriculture, at the expense of small farmers and the public. Proponents, meanwhile, contend that genetic engineering is simply a new tool that could, if responsibly applied, enable humanity to better provide for the common good.
The East Bay encapsulates the entire debate like no place else. UC Berkeley and many of its spin-off companies are on the cutting edge of biotech. This university-led academic-industrial combine has arguably done more to promote the genetic engineering of food crops than any other cluster of institutions. Paradoxically, the Bay Area is also an epicenter for GMO opposition. It’s no wonder, then, that the issue has lurked in the background of the recent farm occupation in Albany.
While saying they respect the academic freedom of the current crop of UC researchers who utilize the Gill Tract, and even inviting these researchers to continue their work alongside them, organizers of the farm occupation have expressed concern with the University of California’s wider links to agribusiness corporations. Perhaps due to these criticisms, a few of the researchers who use the Gill Tract in their experiments have fired back. They said their work, and, by association, UC’s research program at the Gill Tract, isn’t connected to the biotech industry’s profit motives, nor the genetic engineering of food crops.
In an interview with Albany Patch shortly after the occupation began, Damon Lisch, a UC researcher who uses the Gill Tract in his studies, characterized his work as having nothing to do with the agenda of corporate agribusiness. “Basic research using corn as a model is different than making GMO corn to improve profits for Monsanto,” he said. In another Albany Patch article, UC researcher Sarah Hake said her research “is not to create new products (such as in genetic engineering),” but rather, “to understand basic processes in plant biology.” Most recently, Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson quoted UC researcher George Chuck, who is a member of Hake’s lab team, as saying that research at the Gill Tract is not funded by large oil and other corporate concerns.
But are the GMO-free claims of UC’s researchers true? Is research at the Gill Tract by UC’s scientists purely a public service, unconnected to corporate profits?
A survey of biotechnology patents that cite the research of these outspoken scientists shows that some of their research has, in fact, resulted in the production of GMO technologies. While UC’s researchers might not be conducting GMO trials at the Tract directly for Big Agribusiness, some of their findings have been heavily cited by private sector researchers who are developing transgenic crops for their corporate employers. In fact, Lisch, the most outspoken researcher opposed to the Gill Tract occupation, is a co-inventor of a patent that is directly applicable to GMO research.
Lisch is a named inventor of one biotechnology patent owned by UC, “Genetic functions required for gene silencing in maize.” The patent claims to solve a problem, known as “transgene silencing,” faced by developers of GMO corn. In addition, the UC Office of Technology Transfer markets the techniques described in Lisch’s patent to biotechnology companies so they can use these methods in their GMO development operations. According to the UC’s Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Research Alliances website, the patent’s “applications” are relevant to the “genetic engineering of corn.” UC’s Office of Technology Transfer says it’s university policy to keep the names of corporations that are licensing a specific technology confidential, so it’s not clear who is using Lisch’s patented research findings to develop GMO corn.
Researcher Chuck’s insistence that his work at the Gill Tract isn’t funded by industry might be technically true, but his research has also been patented and marketed, not by UC, but by a private biotechnology company called DNA Plant Technology Corporation, which was headquartered on San Pablo Avenue in North Oakland during the 1990s, giving researchers physical access to UC’s resources, including the Plant Gene Expression Center in Albany. DNA Plant Technology’s intellectual property holdings were bought by the Bionova Holding Corporation in the mid-1990s. Bionova markets numerous GMO plant varieties, and has “major technology relationships” with Monsanto and UC, according to the company’s website.
The academic research of UC’s Gill Tract scientists also serves as an important building block in private industry’s biotech efforts. A search of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s online database reveals more than a dozen patents or patent applications that cite Hake’s research. One patent that cites Hake’s corn research involves inserting genetic material from another life form from outside the plant kingdom. The owner of the patent is DeKalb Genetics Corporation, a subsidiary of Monsanto. Lisch’s research is also referenced in patents involving the genetic manipulation of food crops by Pioneer Hi-Bred, a subsidiary of DuPont.
A reference to academic research within a patent does not mean the cited researcher necessarily endorses the end product, or intended to facilitate its creation. Furthermore, a few patents citing Lisch and Hake’s research do not involve genetic engineering methods, but instead employ more “traditional” means of plant breeding or modification. Neither Lisch nor Hake responded to requests for comment.
The University of California is a major contributor to the development of genetically engineered food crops, and the Plant Gene Expression Center, which uses the Gill Tract, is a large part of UC’s link to the biotech industry. UC owns more than 150 GMO plant patents, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office. UC policy states that financial proceeds from licensed technologies are shared with the inventors, and that the remainder is plowed back into research at the university or put into the general fund.
According to UC’s most recent annual report, the university earned approximately $182 million on its patented technologies on 2011. A mere 25 UC-owned patents earned the bulk of this — about $155 million. Among these are licenses for four different varieties of strawberries and a mandarin orange. Through a licensing arrangement with UC, one of the strawberries, the Camarosa, was genetically engineered by DNA Plant Technology Corporation to withstand Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. The Camarosa Strawberry patent earned the university $2.36 million last year.
Many other UC patents are routinely licensed by biotech companies to develop GMO crops, like the Endless Summer Tomato, another product of DNA Plant Technology. Such deals are lucrative for UC. The university had 627 active plant licensing contracts with industry at the end of last year. More than a few of these were developed from research conducted at the Plant Gene Expression Center. Hake is the center’s director.
Monsanto and UC have at least twenty agreements “that include licensing, sharing materials for research, sponsoring research, and utilizing their specialized, technical services,” according to Kelly Clauss, a Monsanto spokeswoman. “We’ve had a long-standing relationship with the University of California, as well as many other land-grant universities across the country, for decades,” Clauss added. ”As a company rooted in science and research, we are proud to work with universities and support agricultural research through these types of collaborative programs.”
Organizers of Occupy the Farm contacted for this article said they support academic freedom, and were wary of jumping into any debates about the nature of research that has been conducted at the Gill Tract. After planting their crops in late April, Occupy the Farm organizers posted several open letters to all the researchers inviting them to continue their projects alongside the working farm.
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
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Report from the International Joint People’s Summit for Social and Environmental Justice in Rio
May 16th, 2012
For the unity and mobilization of the people in defense of life and the common good, social justice and environmental against the commodification of nature and “green economy”
Rio de Janeiro, May 12, 2012
A month before the UN Conference Rio +20, the world’s people do not see positive results of the negotiation process that is taking place in the lead up to the official conference. There is no discussion in the agreements reached in Rio+20 about how to change the causes of the crisis. The focus of the discussion is a package of proposals misleadingly called the “green economy” and the establishment of a new system of international environmental governance to facilitate it.
The real cause of the multiple structural crisis of capitalism, with its classical forms of domination, which concentrates wealth and produces social inequality, unemployment, violence against the people, and the criminalization of those who report it. The current system of consumption and production – maintained by large corporations, financial markets and governments – produces and deepens crises of global warming, hunger and malnutrition, loss of forests and biological and socio-cultural diversity, chemical pollution, water scarcity, increasing desertification of soils, acidification of the seas, land grabbing and the commodification of all aspects of life in cities and the countryside.
The “green economy”, contrary to what its name suggests, is another phase of capitalist accumulation. Nothing in the “green economy” questions the current economy based in the extractive and fossil fuels, nor the patterns of consumption and industrial production, but extends the economy into new areas, feeding the myth of that economic growth can be infinite.
The failed economic model, now dressed in green, aims to bring all life cycles of nature to the market rules and the domain of technology, privatization and commodification of nature and its functions, as well as traditional knowledge, increasing speculative financial markets through carbon markets for environmental services, biodiversity offsets and REDD + (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).
GMOs, agrochemicals, Terminator technology, biofuels, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, artificial life, geo-engineering and nuclear power, among others, are presented as “technological solutions” to the natural limits of the planet and the many crises, without addressing the real causes that provoke them.
The Green Economy also promotes the expansion of the agro-industrial food system, which is one of the biggest factors leading to climate change, environmental, economic and social crises; the speculation in food, and the promotion of the interests of agribusiness corporations at the expense of production local peasant family, indigenous peoples and traditional populations and affecting the health of entire populations.
As a trading strategy in the Rio +20 conference, some governments in rich countries are proposing a setback of 1992 Rio Principles, including the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, the precautionary principle, the right to information and participation, and threatening already established rights, such as the rights of indigenous and traditional peoples, peasants, the human right to water, the rights of workers, migrants, the right to food, housing, the rights of youth and women, the right to sexual and reproductive health, education and cultural rights.
They are also trying to install so-called Sustainable Development Objectives (ODS) to be used to promote “green economy”, further weakening the already inadequate Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The official process aims to establish global environmental governance forms that serve as managers and facilitators of this “green economy”, giving prominence to the World Bank and other public or private financial institutions, international and national, which will provide a new cycle of indebtedness and structural adjustments dressed in green.
There can be no democratic global governance without ending the current corporate capture of the United Nations.
We reject this process and call for strengthening and building alternatives demonstrations around the world.
We fight for a radical change from the current model of production and consumption, solidifying our right to develop alternative models based on the multiple realities and experiences of the people that are genuinely democratic, respect human rights and are in harmony with nature and social and environmental justice.
We raise the assertion and collective construction of new paradigms based on food sovereignty, agro-ecology and the solidarity economy, the defense of life and the commons, the affirmation of all the threatened rights, the right to land and territory, the rights of nature and future generations, the elimination of all forms of colonialism and imperialism.
We call on people everywhere to support the Brazilian people’s struggle against the destruction of a major legal frameworks for the protection of forests (Forestry Code), which opens avenues for further deforestation in favor of the interests of agribusiness and enlargement of the monocultures, and against the implementation of mega hydro-electric dam–the Belo Monte, which is affecting the survival and livelihoods of forest peoples and the Amazonian biodiversity.
We reiterate the call to participate in the People’s Summit to be held from 15 to 23 June in Rio de Janeiro, which will be an important point in the trajectory of the global struggles for social and environmental justice that we are building since The first Rio Earth Summit in 1992, particularly building from Seattle, FSM, Cochabamba, where the struggles against the WTO and the FTAA were catapulted, for climate justice and against the G-20. Are also included mass mobilizations as Occupy, and Arab Spring.
We call for a global mobilization on 5 June (World Environment day), on June 18 against the G20 (which this time will focus on “green growth”) and the progress of the People’s Summit on 20 June in Rio de Janeiro and in the world, social and environmental justice, against the “green economy”, the commodification of life and nature and the defense of the commons and rights of peoples.
Group’s international joint People’s Summit for Social and Environmental Justice
Sign on: International Organizations Condemn IKEA’s Logging of Russia’s Old-growth Forests
May 16th, 2012
The Swedish-owned international furniture retailer, IKEA, is logging old-growth forests and other high conservation value forests in Russian Karelia[1] through its subsidiary Swedwood.
A petition has been launched by Swedish NGO Protect the Forest to help change IKEA and Swedwood’s destructive ways. Now other environmental organizations from all over the world are also expressing their concern and outrage.
The Protect the Forest petition is addressed to the management of IKEA and Swedwood, with five demands for a more trustworthy IKEA. Anyone wanting to protest IKEA’s logging of old-growth forest is invited to sign the petition. Read more about the campaign and the petition at www.protecttheforest.se/ikea/en
The Global Forest Coalition (an alliance of NGOs with members in more than 40 countries) strongly condemns IKEA’s forest destruction activities in Russia. Swedish NGO Protect the Forest, a Global Forest Coalition member, and Russian environmental organization SPOK, conducted a field inspection in Russian Karelia, which revealed that IKEA’s wholly-owned subsidiary Swedwood had clear-cut forests with high biodiversity value and very old trees.
Swedwood is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which claims to ensure ‘responsibly managed forests’. “The company NEPCon, which certifies that Swedwood’s forestry complies with FSC standards, allows the logging of trees which are 200-600 years old,” said Linda Ellegaard Nordström, board member of Protect the Forest. “This is nothing but a scandal!”.
IKEA is also not paying enough attention to the social impacts of their logging activities in Russian Karelia. A lack of dialogue and low wages are some of the problems. According to Andrei Laletin of Friends of the Siberian Forests, Global Forest Coalition focal point in Russia, “It is very sad that forests that have taken centuries to mature can be lost in a few days. Thanks to IKEA’s promotion of the mass-consumption of cheap timber products, people’s appreciation of the true value of old forests is being undermined, and this threatens the rights of future generations to enjoy the benefits of our forest heritage.”
Wally Menne of the Timberwatch Coalition in South Africa, added: “The heavily green-washed ‘Swedish forestry model’, which promotes the destructive practice of logging old-growth forests, and replacement with monoculture tree plantations, is causing serious damage to forest ecosystems in many different countries. This leads to increased biodiversity loss, greater flooding and soil erosion, accelerated climate change, and also impacts severely on local communities whose wellbeing depends on healthy intact forests.”
Speaking for the Global Forest Coalition, the Executive Director, Simone Lovera, stated: “Whoever is responsible for this destruction, in this case the owners of IKEA and Swedwood, must be held responsible for the social and environmental costs of their companies’ actions. I suggest Protect the Forest and SPOK should consider all possible options, including legal action against IKEA, in order to correct the situation.”
The Protect the Forest petition is addressed to the management of IKEA and Swedwood, with five demands for a more trustworthy IKEA. Anyone wanting to protest IKEA’s logging of old-growth forest is invited to sign the petition. Read more about the campaign and the petition at www.protecttheforest.se/ikea/en
Free press photos of Swedwood’s controversial loggings in Russian Karelia can be found here: http://www.protecttheforest.se/ikea/en/photographic-evidence
IKEA’s reply to Protect the Forest’s criticism can be found here
Examples of forest loggings in other parts of the world:
Clear-felling threatens the already decimated forests of Tasmania in order to produce wood chips. See http://www.wilderness.org.au/regions/tasmania/tasmanias-irreplaceable-forests
Veracel, a joint venture between the Swedish-Finnish company Stora Enso and Brazilian-Norwegian Aracruz, obtains forest land in Brasil for planting monocultures of eucalyptus and builds polluting pulp mills. Seehttp://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/67/Brazil.html
Read more about the underlying causes of forest loss and market-based conservation here:
http://globalforestcoalition.org/resources/underlying-causes-of-forest-loss
http://globalforestcoalition.org/resources/market-based-conservation
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
Why the Green Economy is a wrong path to restore the equilibrium with nature, and what alternatives do we have?
May 16th, 2012
Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, the environmental crisis continues to worsen. The unsustainable development model that gained dominance in the world resulted to grave loss of biodiversity, melting of polar ice caps and mountain glaciers, alarming increase in deforestation and desertification and the looming danger of an at least 4ºC increase in temperature, which will threaten life as we know it. Science is saying that we are approaching a point of no return that will change the way our planet has behaved over 650,000 years.
The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio + 20) that will take place in Rio de Janeiro this coming June is expected by many to be a milestone opportunity to address the issue of the restoration of the equilibrium of the Earth’s system. But instead of moving the world towards a just and sustainable path, the document that is being negotiated for adoption in June is promoting new market mechanisms for the commodification and financialization of nature, life and ecosystem services under the mirage of a “Green Economy”.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) developed the concept of “Green Economy” on the argument that the recurring energy, climate, environmental, food and financial crises are results of “gross misallocation of capital.” The UNEP analysis does not acknowledge the problems inherent in treating nature as capital, which has led to the hyper-exploitation of the Earth’s resources and further expanded the already severe inequalities between and within nations, and among societies and peoples.
Promoters of the Green Economy consider it essential (and normal) to put a price on the free services that plants, animals and ecosystems provide for the conservation of biodiversity, water purification, pollination of plants, the protection of coral reefs and regulation of the climate. For the Green Economy to work, it is necessary to identify the specific functions of ecosystems and biodiversity and assign them monetary values, evaluate their current status, set a limit after which they will cease to provide services, and put a price on the cost of their conservation in order to develop a market for each particular environmental service. The architects of Green Economy believe that the instruments of the market are powerful tools for managing the “economic invisibility of nature.”
Since the publication of “Our Common Future,” or the UN Brundtland Report in 1987, policy makers have subscribed to the idea that a healthy environment and economic growth should be mutually supportive of each other. In practice, however, over the past two decades, governments have tended to prioritize economic growth over the environment and emphasized business interests and market mechanisms in their elaborations of sustainable development.
One example of how the Green Economy is being put in practice is the initiative known as REDD (Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which consists of isolating and measuring the natural capacity of a living forest to capture and store carbon dioxide, and predicting that the future intentions of the forest users / forest owners are to deforest that area, in order to issue certificates for “reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from avoided deforestation”. These certificates are expected to be traded in a variety of primary and derivatives markets, largely benefiting intermediaries, and yet even now there are signs that the complexity and non-transparent nature of these transactions could eventually bring about its own carbon market crash.
Nonetheless, the scheme is designed so that these certificates can be commercialized and acquired by companies in developed countries that cannot meet their climate mitigation commitments. Rather than reduce the excess carbon in the atmosphere, therefore, this “green market mechanism” at best allows pollution to continue to be emitted elsewhere. This is the essence of carbon trading. At worst, REDD runs risks of increasing overall carbon emissions, as accounting errors and falsehoods or relocated deforestation can be expected to release a steady stream of emissions, somewhere beyond the sight of the carbon credit buyers.
Despite the efforts of proponents to promote REDD+ as a viable forest conservation and climate change mitigation strategy, and the growing emphasis on putting safeguards and mechanisms to guarantee rights of indigenous peoples, many communities are concerned that REDD will cause further erosion of rights of indigenous peoples as well as other local communities over forest use, conservation and management.
Thus, REDD market mechanism, regardless of how inherently volatile and unstable it proves to be, will permit developed countries more time to continue polluting the world, while they are allowed to buy new forms of control over resources that rightfully should be in the custody of the peoples of the South. REDD illustrates many of the problems that are artificially created within carbon trading schemes. Other initiatives proposed under the paradigm of a Green Economy include the privatization of water, a push for agro-industrial business operations despite alarming impoverishment of small farmers channeled into these large-scale operations, the development of genetically modified organisms and geo-engineering amongst others.
A New Path for a Different, Better Future
The ideas of the first Rio conference and the false solutions adopted and strengthened over the last twenty years have not been able to abate the social-economic and environmental problems that continue to plague humanity and nature in this century. In order to stop the new offensive for the commodification and privatization of nature it is necessary to strengthen and articulate all the struggles in the world and in our region in defense of the commons.
Instead of putting a price on Nature we need to recognize that humans are part of Nature and that Nature is not a thing or mere supplier of resources. The Earth is a living system, it is our home and a community of interdependent beings and parts of one whole system. Nature has rules that govern its integrity, interrelationships, reproduction and transformation. In Rio+20 governments should recognize, respect and make sure that the rules of nature prevail.
Instead of applying the market rules to Nature what we need is to forge a new system based on the principles of:
- peace, harmony and balance among all and with all things;
- complementarity, solidarity, equality and social and environmental justice;
- collective well-being and the satisfaction of the basic necessities of all;
- recognition of human beings for what they are, not what they own;
- elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism and interventionism;
We cannot keep promoting such destructive model of development that does not acknowledge the planetary limits of economic growth
New technologies should not mean limitless, reckless economic growth propelled only by capitalist motives. Scientific advances, under some circumstances, can contribute to resolve certain problems of development but cannot ignore the natural limits of the Earth system.
All countries need to produce the goods and services necessary to satisfy the fundamental needs of their populations, but by no means can they continue to tread the path of development that has led the richest countries to have an ecological footprint five times bigger than what the planet is able to support. Currently, the regenerative capacity of the planet has already exceeded more than forty percent. If this pace of over-exploitation of our Mother Earth continues, we will need two planets by the year 2030.
In an interdependent system in which human beings are only one component of the whole, it is not possible to only recognize the rights of the human part without instigating an imbalance in the system. To guarantee human rights and to restore harmony with nature, it is necessary to effectively recognize and apply the rights of Nature.
We have to end the system of wasteful and luxury-oriented consumption that privileges the elite. Developed countries must change their unsustainable patterns of production and consumption through public policies, regulations, as well as conscious and active participation of society, particularly the marginalized sections, to address the grave inequities and inequalities in resource use and access within societies and between nations.
States must guarantee the human right to water, education, health, communication, transportation, energy and sanitation. The provision of these services should be essentially public and based on efficient social management, not private business. The principal goal should be common wellbeing and not merely private profit, in order to ensure that these services reach the poorest and most marginalized sectors in an equitable manner. It is necessary to ensure the right to proper nutrition by strengthening food sovereignty policies and not by promoting agri- businesses.
Under the framework of common but differentiated responsibilities established in the 1992 Rio Declaration, the so-called developed countries must assume and pay their historical ecological debt for having contributed the most to the deterioration of the Earth system. The payment of this ecological debt by developed countries to developing countries and the sectors most affected among their own populations should replace to the greatest possible degree the ecological damage done. Developed countries should transfer financial resources from public sources and also socially and ecologically appropriate technologies required by sovereign developing countries.
Rich and developed countries must not impose trade agreements on poor and developing countries that contribute to further exploitation and degradation of nature in the latter.
The enormous resources dedicated to defense, security and war budgets by developed countries should be reduced. These resources should instead be used to address the effects of climate change and the imbalance with nature. It is inexcusable that 1.5 trillion dollars in public funding are used on these activities, while just 100 billion US dollars from public, private funds and market sources are dedicated to address the impacts of climate change in developing countries.
A financial transaction tax should be created to help build a Sustainable Development Fund to attend to the sustainable development challenges faced by developing countries. This financing mechanism should generate new, stable and additional resources for developing countries and must be managed with utmost transparency and participation by citizens and not be left to international financial institutions that refuses to change their development framework and operations.
Intellectual property rights over genes, microorganisms and other forms of life are a threat to food sovereignty, biodiversity, access to medicine and other elements that are essential for the survival of low-income populations. All forms of intellectual property over life should be abolished.
The collective global response that is needed to confront the crisis we face requires structural changes. We must change the capitalist system, not the Earth system.
- May 3, 2012
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
How Occupy the Farm Gave a Breath of Fresh Air to the Occupy Movement and Asserted its Right to Reclaim the Commons
May 15th, 2012
A Climate Connections Exclusive, by Jeff Conant
Girl with Scarecrow and Wipala. Photo: Conant
Note: this is an update of an article first written for Climate Connections on May 8. When the original was published, the Gill Tract Farmers Collective was actively engaging local community members in reclaiming the last and best piece of arable farmland in the urban Bay Area. Today, a week later, the land is sealed off, and the core members of that collective have been arrested, cited and released from jail, and are awaiting trial. An alternate version of this updated article has been published on On The Commons. – Jeff Conant for Climate Connections
May 14, 2012 – When hundreds of people took up the banner of “Occupy the Farm” on April 22nd and laid claim to a patch of urban farmland owned by UC Berkeley, it was not the first time this 5-acre parcel had become the flashpoint of a struggle between the University and local communities. But it was the first time anyone had done something as brash as simply taking the land without asking.
Three weeks later, on May 14, a force of 100 police from at least 8 UC campus police forces converged on the site, blocked traffic, carted off nine of the organizers, and barricaded the 5-acre farm plot, as well as the perimeter of the 14 acre parcel of which it forms a part. Dozens of supporters arrived to watch the 7 a.m. action and to express outrage at the police. Of course, the police, in their riot shields and armed with teargas and pepper spray, are merely doing the job they were asked to do by the Chancellor of University of California – to uphold the rule of law.
In the scant three weeks that Occupy the Farm persisted as a physical occupation, it expanded the tactics, objectives, and vision of the Occupy Movement; it restored the frontlines of a local struggle to get the University of California to respond to community needs rather than corporate interests; it took an issue that is generally only spoken of in the so-called ‘Third World’ – that of food sovereignty and territorial rights – and dropped it into the heart of the urban San Francisco Bay Area; and, it asserted, in the flesh, a demand that many progressives have spoken of in recent years, but few have had sufficient vision, understanding, or bravery to manifest: Occupy the Farm was, and is, a bold, largely unprecedented act of reclaiming the Commons in the most immediate sense – taking land out of private speculation and putting it into community use.
Farmland is for farming. Photo: Conant
Occupy the Farm Takes the Land
On that sunny Sunday two weeks ago, an ad-hoc band of UC alumni, urban farming proponents, families, and veteran Occupy activists ended an Earth Day parade by arriving at the site, cutting the lock and pitching in to till and plant 3/4 of an acre of guerilla farm. On that first day and the days that followed, the action worked fantastically well. Fears of a police raid the first night went unfulfilled. Rather than sending its well-appointed riot squads to dismantle the trespass, the UC took the tack of firing up its public relations machine (and cutting off water to the site). Media, from Alternet to ABC to Forbes, picked up the story. Occupiers took the high road by engaging in direct dialogue with faculty, students, and administrators. For three weeks, the land continued to be occupied, and, more importantly, farmed.
But with the UC unwilling to accede to the terms of the sudden occupation or its community supporters, confrontation was always imminent. Soon after the land was taken, focus turned to the several UC research teams that needed to get their crops in the ground by mid-May. The occupiers made every attempt to negotiate with the researchers, but ultimately the university, and several of the researchers, were unwilling to meet the demands of the Gill Tract Farmers Collective. At the same time, having failed to meet community needs for decades, the University was witheringly unable to maintain even a slight scractch of moral high ground. It was clear from the first that the authorities did not have public opinion on their side, and would need to resort to the use of force to take the plot back.
Even the mainstream media was sympathetic to the cause. On May 10, Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “They are, like all the Occupy groups, protesting the growing corporatization of American life and the steadily increasing wealth gap between the very rich and everybody else. UC Berkeley – which, for all the good it does, is nevertheless definitely on the side of the 1 percent, which is the location of the butter on this particular piece of bread – is moving carefully, but it ain’t listening.”
The ‘particular piece of bread’ in question is the bit of land called the Gill tract, and it is significant not only because it is the last and best agricultural land in the East Bay, but because the struggle over this land is tied to the struggle to keep the public university serving the public interest. Over the last decade, through investments by Novartis, BP and other corporations, the University of California has become increasingly captured by private interests, which have come to control its research agenda and its land use policy. As one faculty member, who asked to remain anonymous, told me, “The UC doesn’t serve corporate interests; the UC is corporate interests.”
In the university’s first published response to the Occupiers, on April 27, Vice-Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer wrote, “We take issue with the protesters’ approach to property rights. By their logic they should be able to seize what they want if, in their minds, they have a better idea of how to use it.”
Blunt as the Vice-Chancellor’s thrust was, he hit on a key point: the occupiers do believe they have a better idea of how to use the land than the UC. And, once concerns about power, money, private property, and other systemic irritations are set aside, their case is perfectly rational. In a revolutionary sense, that is.
Without doubt there are very real issues to wrestle with about what the land is currently used for, whose interests are served by it, whose interests should be served by it, and how such decisions are best arbited. In the best democratic spirit, the bold action of the Occupiers forced these questions to the foreground. In a system dominated by private property, where possession is nine-tenths of the law, these decisions are usually made simple, by Money and Power. But imagine a system where we relax the hold that the Rule of Law has over public property, we unclench the Invisible Hand of the Market that governs private property, and we revive a third option – one with a long and largely invisible tradition: the Collective Stewardship of the Commons.
Farmland is for Farming
The principle motto taken up by the Gill Tract Farmers Collective is “Farmland is for farming.” The slogan echoes the visionary cry for agrarian reform that kicked off the Mexican Revolution – the first agrarian revolution of the Twentieth Century – when Emiliano Zapata set forth the basic Commons principle, “La tierra para quien la trabaja” – the land is for the people who work it.
Indeed, it is this spirit that brought the Gill Tract Occupation support from international peasant farmer movements La Via Campesina and the Movimento Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil. The act reflects what Ricado Jacobs, a South African member of La Via Campesina, told me during the UN Climate Conference in Durban last December: for farmers, food sovereignty depends on land sovereignty – and that means, taking land out of speculation, and putting it into production. Jacobs calls it “redistributive justice.”
“It’s not just about agrarian reform, or about taking land, but about transforming the whole food system,” Jacobs said at the time. “Where are we going to practice agro-ecology if we don’t take land?”
The first day of the occupation, the MST saw such importance in the Gill Tract occupation – an extremely rare occurrence in the US – that they sent a statement of support, in which they say “your land occupation is not an isolated act, but one of dozens of land occupations that are currently occurring across Brazil and the world, challenging the dominance of agribusiness in the countryside and asserting the right for peasants to own and work the land.”
Of course, the Gill Tract Farmers Collective is not made up of peasants. Anya Kamenskaya, one of the Farm’s spokespeople, says, “Obviously on a socio-economic scale our struggles are different than those of peasant farmers. But everyone in the world shares the problem of food access, because corporations control so much of global food production.”
Historically, this piece of land – not so much a farm as an open-air research lab – has been subject to much tussle between corporate-focused research and community-focused farming. As the Occupation has dug in, it has unearthed a long-term split between these divergent tendencies – a split that plays out in the current work going on there.
One set of researchers works with Professor Miguel Altieri, the man who coined the term “agro-ecology,” and whose program is aimed at encouraging “more ecological, biodiverse, sustainable, and socially just forms of agriculture.” Altieri works directly with peasant farmer movements in the global South, and, in keeping with the spirit of his work, has been vocally supportive of the Occupation of the land, while maintaining the position that research must continue there as well.
When the Gill Tract Farmers Collective offered to work with the researchers, to maintain their position but also support the academic work that needed to go ahead, Altieri engaged.
“I have no conflict with these people,” Altieri told Dean J. Keith Gilles of the UC’s College of Natural Resources. “I don’t see any reason why research on the land and the occupiers can’t coexist.”
Altieri’s plan was to work together with the occupiers and other community members, if they wanted to join him. “After all, extension is part of our job,” Altieri said. “We’re supposed to work with the community.”
But when Altieri showed up at the tract to plant on May 9, a dozen police officers had blocked the gates, and prevented him from entering the land. When Altieri was barred from entering the site, he appealed to the occupiers inside the fence: he described how to plant dry-farmed tomatoes – the subject of his research – and gave them several dozen plants, which they planted under the scrutiny of the UC police force.
Altieri was visibly frustrated at the UC’s handling of the situation. “It could be a coincidence, but I believe the raid was timed to prevent me from planting my tomatoes,” the professor said.
“The thing about dry farmed tomatoes is, they’re adaptive,” Altieri told me. “They don’t need any tilling, and they don’t need any water. I think this drove the college crazy.”
Altieri’s position that his research can be carried out not only in the presence of the occupiers, but with their assistance, flew in the face of the UC’s stated position. A letter signed by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer argued that the occupation of the land was incompatible with the research being carried out at the tract.
“By the middle of May, college staff need to begin work on the tract in support of faculty and student research,” the letter states, quoting CNR Dean J. Keith Gilles. “This requires that full control of the property revert to the university. These complicated projects require meticulous supervision and cannot be carried out in the midst of an encampment.”
Another group of researchers is involved in what they call “basic genetic isolation research concerning how all plants develop and how they regulate their genes.” Despite the Gill Tract Collective’s attempts to negotiate with them, and to offer them the space to continue their work, this group of researchers has demanded that the Occupiers clear off the land. As some of the land’s ‘legitimate’ occupants, they have acted to give credence to the university’s position.
Corporate Science
The split in attitudes of the two research groups to some extent reflects larger attitudes towards property, both intellectual and material, and has led the occupiers to ask the question, if farmland is for farming, what constitutes farming, and what doesn’t? Certainly, we need basic research, and in a world facing massive species die-offs, exponential population growth, and the uncalculated effects of Global Warming, the more knowledge we have of our crops, the better. But, in an economic climate dominated by private interests – at a University whose research priorities are determined largely by who pays, whether it is the Federal government or private corporations – who is to say what research may or may not advance corporate control of food systems, to the detriment of the global Commons?
While they have repeatedly denied that GMOs are grown on the Gill Tract itself, two of the researchers who have been most vocally opposed to the Farm occupation are deeply involved in GMO research. One of the genetics researchers on the land, Damon Lisch, is the inventor of a US Patent with the typically abstruse title: “Genetic functions required for gene silencing in maize.” The text of the patent states that “The availability of genetic stocks that prevent the establishment or maintenance of transgene silencing would be extremely useful for engineering and breeding new corn lines.”
In other words, Lisch’s work helps solve problems blocking the further genetic engineering of corn. Put in more ideological terms, his work plays a role in furthering the corporate control of seeds.
An article from 2004 that reviewed Novartis’ role at UC Berkeley traces Lisch’s job at the university – and ultimately his research on the Gill Tract – to the $25 million grant the company gave to the UC in 1997. Lisch received $950,000 over five years under the agreement.
“It changed my life,” he told the Sacramento Bee in 2004. But he insists that the money did nothing to compromise academic freedom. “It was very hard for me to rationalize not accepting the money when there were so few strings,” Lisch said. “They never told us what to do.”
But conflicts of interests in science do not occur only by way of researchers being directly “told what to do”. They occur by way of the financial incentives and professional opportunities that come when certain research pathways are chosen, and others not. The University is actively marketing Lisch’s research to biotechnology companies through the UCOP technology transfer office; his research is cited in numerous patents related to transgenic plants being marketed by the University of California to firms including Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto. It is hard to believe that such an outcome does not compromise, or even guide, the basic research.
Lisch has refused to negotiate with the occupiers, and his wife has been present at the Gill Tract daily, meditating for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. But for those who own the patents on seed and soil, in this case as in so many others, a peaceful resolution means giving in to Power with a capital P to maintain private control over Common resources – whether these resources are specific plots of land such as the Gill Tract, or whole lines of seed.
Another researcher on the plot, Sarah Hake, works with the USDA on precursors to biofuels. Her research helped to demonstrate that introducing a maize gene into switchgrass, one of the favored feedstocks for advanced biofuels, more than doubles the amount of starch in the plant’s cell walls, making it much easier to extract polysaccharides and convert them into fermentable sugars. In other words, her work on transferring genes from corn to switchgrass – a form of genetic modification – improves the switchgrass for more efficient biofuel production.
Hake, too, has said she would prefer not to have the occupation end in violence – and her preferred path toward nonviolence has been to side with university. Hake owns Gospel Flat Farms in Bolinas, CA, and is locally known less as a plant geneticist than as an organic farmer. In maintaining this apparently contradictory position, Hake may be among those who side with US Secretary of Agriculture and the biotech industry in arguing that genetically engineered crops and organics can coexist.
But can they? Can a Commons ethic co-exist with a predatory capitalist ethos determined to bulldoze the common good for the private profit?
These researchers may or may not be undertaking these processes on this particular plot of land; despite where their economic interests lie, they are perfectly friendly and approachable people, undeserving of the demonization that anti-corporate activists best reserve for the sociopathic tendencies of corporations themselves; and whether one sees their work as favorable or not depends on one’s position on biofuels, GMO’s, and intellectual property rights. But if a Commons argument is to be made for the use of the land, as it is by the Gill Tract Farmers’ Collective, such research, which serves the private interest of the biotech industry rather than the greater good of the neighboring community, fails to measure up to the “Farmland is for Farming” principle.
“If It’s the Right Thing to Do, We Have the Right to Do It”
The second part of the Farmland is for Farming principle is articulated by one of the Farm organizers, Gopal Dayaneni, of Movement Generation Justice Ecology Project: “If the right thing to do with farmland is farming, then we have the right to do it.”
As I write, a few hours after the police raid, Dayaneni is in jail along with eight other organizers. He and the other organizers are also facing a civil suit. If you fall on the UC’s side of the law, they are being tried for criminal trespass. If you fall on the Commons side, their crime is exercising their rights.
While the point has not been made visible in the press, after spending time with the occupiers, one thing becomes clear: The Gill Tract Farmers’ Collective’s ultimate goal was – and still is – to divest the University of the land in question. For most of us, with our minds thoroughly embedded in what Provost Breslauer calls “property rights,” such a notion is literally unthinkable. But, from a Commons perspective, it becomes quite reasonable.
Again, the history of the land is key: this is the last and best arable soil in the urban East Bay, and is the last farmable 14 acres of a 104 acre land grant given to the UC in 1928. All but 14 of the original acres have been developed into urban landscape. A few years ago, the university transferred the land from the College of Natural Resources to Capital Projects, its commercial arm that specializes in “development projects.” One of the key points brought to light by Occupy the Farm is that much of the property in question is slated for sale and development as soon as next year. In the Zapatista-inflected words of one organizer, “this is the Ya Basta! to the UC’s selling off this land.”
There have been many prior attempts by community members to work with UC faculty and administration to make good use of the land, with vocal support coming from the likes of Alice Waters, Food First, and the Black Panthers. In 2000, under the name Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), several professors, students, community members, and nonprofit organizations proposed turning the plot into the world’s first university center on sustainable urban agriculture and food systems. The proposal was ignored by the university.
In 2005 a group called “Urban Roots” advanced a proposal to create Village Creek Farm and Gardens, “a farm that would provide Bay Area students from preschool to community college and university with an educational resource par excellence.” Urban Roots argued at the time that the Center for Urban Agriculture at the Gill Tract offered UC Berkeley the opportunity to join other organizations and community members in teaching students and future urban dwellers these skills and the benefits of locally produced food. This proposal, too, was rejected.
As Professor Altieri wrote in an Op-ed in the Daily Cal, “From these facts, it can be concluded that until now, the university has shown little to no interest in requests for community involvement and benefit from the exceptionally high-quality lands at the Gill Tract.” Michael Beer, a former Albany schoolteacher and one of the forces behind the Urban Roots initiative put it more bluntly: “Our problem was we tried to talk to the university. These people just came in and took the land, and now the university has to deal with them.” Professor Altieri adds that, “To many people, the actions taken by the farm advocates are consistent with the university’s education and public mission as a land grant institution with a Cooperative Extension function (the latter established in the Smith-Lever Act of 1914) to promote community involvement and initiatives in agriculture. Their actions are also consistent with California public policy, as set forth in Section 815 of the Civil Code, to preserve and protect open space, particularly agricultural land that has historical significance — such as the Gill Tract.”
Professor Altieri cites the historical mission of the land grant university to preserve agricultural land, and it is important to cite such legal precedent. (An important recent report from Food Water Watch has much to say on the topic.) But, with the Commons framework in mind, it’s worth considering that it’s one thing to pressure the University to develop an urban farming program with a component that engages and educates local communities, as the institution’s mandate suggests; it’s another entirely to judge the University incompetent to steward the land, to declare the property a conservation easement, to put it in a land trust, and to restore it the Commons. Ultimately, in conversations had on hay bales and under impromptu tarps fluttering in the Bay breeze, this is what the Gill Tract Farming Collective was – and is – proposing. And like so many others who have challenged the power of private property in the interests of the public good, this is why, today, they are sitting in jail.
To Plant, You Have to Supplant; To Reclaim the Commons, You Have to Break the Law
A week ago, the university administration expressed alarm at Occupy the Farm’s tactics — ignoring property rights and establishing an illegal encampment for starters — and charged that the young farmers were trying to bulldoze their demands through without consideration for other community interests, such as the ballfields, the Whole Foods and the Senior Home that are awaiting construction on the Gill Tract. The charges were made with an eye to discrediting the Occupiers, but that effort failed. Now, the university has acted the way any property-owner acts when its interests are threatened – by calling in the Law.
When the alarm went out that a raid was underway, Gopal Dayaneni, one of the spokespeople for the Gill Tract Farmers Collective, rolled out of bed and headed straight to the Farm. An hour later, along with eight others, he was being carted off to jail. As Dayaneni said multiple times in the days leading up the raid and the arrests, “Occupy the Farm is an act of ongoing civil disobedience, and the action is farming.”
The point being, in a system that has no ground rules for governing land within a Commons framework, the old rules need to be cast aside. Civil disobedience spelled the other way around is moral obedience – standing for a higher principle. Doing it is messy, especially with so many divergent interests at stake. It takes courage, it takes commitment – and, in many cases, it requires breaking the law.
The Occupy Movement writ large has not been shy about any of these questions – from Zucotti Park to Oscar Grant plaza, to public squares everywhere, the movement has pushed the boundaries of the law. In return, it has received grim treatment that bears frequent recall: Scott Olsen, the Iraq War veteran who received a traumatic head injury from an Oakland Police Department projectile; the pepper-spraying and beatings of students at UC campuses; police abuse in New York City, and countless arrests are testament to the lengths the authorities will go, daily, to protect and serve private property and big financial interests. From abolition to civil rights to the anti-war movements, we know this is how the state responds when the Commons are reclaimed, whether the Commons in question are political spaces or physical territory.
That said, until this morning, when the police arrived in their militarized gear, being on the Occupied Gill Tract felt nothing like breaking the law. The plot is a flat piece of green and tilled pasture edged by palm and Russian olive trees and surrounded by high chain link fence, bordered by major urban thoroughfares, a mile from the highway and in plain view of the Albany Police Department and several gas stations. As of a few days ago, a mixed and scrubby bunch of people – occupiers, UC faculty, permaculturists, neighbors, children – sat on straw bales or under tent canopies talking, or walked with jugs of water down the 40 or so rows of crops that were tilled and planted over the past two weeks. Drugs and alcohol were prohibited, and dogs had to be leashed – after all, farmland is for farming.
During the family farm days they’ve held for the three weekends of the Farm’s existence, children dug and planted, musicians took the stage to strum or simply stroll through the fallow stretches of the land, folks sat in circles learning about the joys of composting or the complexities of the global food system. The first Sunday after the land was taken, several of us held a welcome home 
ceremony for the descendents of seeds that had been moved off the tract twelve years ago – just after the Novartis deal went through, when the university first prioritized genetic research over agro-ecology. The seeds had been saved year after year at the Bay Area Seed Library down the road. In less than an hour, a dozen people planted a permaculture plot to continue growing the seedstock that had been in diaspora for over a decade. My four-year old daughter helped out, and on many occasions since, she has asked to go back.
Despite the growing attention given to food, farming, and open land in the urban East Bay, there is no place I know that feels like this. Now, at least for the moment, that feeling – and that place – is gone.
When I drive by later, my daughter will be surprised to see that the land is barricaded and guarded by police in riot gear. If I have the parental guts, I may use the occasion as her first teachable moment to discuss private property and the Commons. It certainly is a poignant one.
There is no doubt that the joy of being on this little parcel of farmland during its three-week run was first and foremost that of getting a breath of fresh air in an urban environment. But could it be that part of the pleasure of setting foot there was that it was against the law? That it was neither a public park nor a private farm, but a brief and utopian step outside of the rules that surround and enclose us everywhere we go? That we were not supposed to be there?
Despite the enclosure of the land, the struggle of Occupy the Farm continues. In fact, it has only just begun. Now, with the Farmers facing criminal and civil charges, and with the crops trampled, and with the UC calling the shots, the struggle will take shape as a battle for public sympathy. Certainly the genetics researchers and university administrators and the UC Police and a fair number of law-abiding neighbors will be glad to see the farm back in private hands. Sarah Hake, the researcher with the biofuel interests and the organic farm, may find herself in an uncomfortable position as she commutes from her private family farm in the country to her private research station in the city, guarded by police.
Damon Lisch, the researcher with intellectual property rights to the technique that allows corn to be more efficiently modified, and whose wife prayed for a peaceful resolution, said about the occupiers, “They’re not bad people – they’re just good people on my land.” His statement points to one of the underlying issues: where one’s sympathies lie is determined, in large part, by whether or not one believes in the Commons.
Lesley Haddock, one of the Farmers, wrote in the Daily Cal last week “If this farm stays, and if farms like this one continue to spring up in urban centers around the world, we won’t need to rely on the massive industrial structures that feed us genetically contaminated and nutrient-poor foods. We can create our own sustainable models and grow food the way we know it should be grown.” That’s a big “if.” And it’s one that for now, looks extremely tenuous. But it’s the if that holds open the door onto the Commons. 
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
By Harvey Wasserman
May 15, 2012 – The projected price for Georgia’s Vogtle Double Reactor Project has jumped at least $900 million in just three months….and that’s just for starters.Will you pay for it? The future of new atomic power in the US hangs in the balance.
A national grassroots campaign is now working to stop tax/ratepayer handouts and kill the project.
Construction there is defined by faulty concrete and non-spec rebar steel that threaten public safety and could delay completion dates beyond those projected even before construction began.
South Carolina’s V.C. Summer, the only other new US reactor project now under construction, is meeting fierce rate payer resistance in two states. From Iowa to Brazil, Japan to France, the global reactor industry is collapsing in tandem. But what other nations will it bankrupt and irradiate before it’s finished?
President Obama has tagged $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for Vogtle’s construction. And Georgia ratepayers are being forced to pay for it in advance.
But the Office of Management and Budget is still dickering over terms with the Southern Company. Vogtle’s prime builders want to put up little or no money. They want interest rates lower than what you would pay to buy a new house. They expect you to take primary liability for future disasters. They can’t say what will happen to the radioactive waste.
The real price tags for both Vogtle and Summer are suspect. Original estimates have been as low as $2-4 billion/reactor. But Florida’s Progress Energy has just admitted its proposed reactors for Levy County, near Tampa, would go as high as $9.5 to $12 billion each. Given their delays and structural defects, there’s no reason to believe Vogtle or Summer could come in cheaper. At those prices, they cannot begin to compete with new renewables or efficiency.
So where does that leave Vogtle’s federal loan guarantees? George W. Bush set aside $18.5 billion at the Department of Energy for new reactor funding, but made no grants. Despite fierce lobbying, industry attempts to add to the fund have been defeated by national grassroots campaigns.
Obama designated the first $8.33 for Vogtle in 2010. But closed-door negotiations between his OMB, the DOE and Southern have been inconclusive.
The $535 million failure of Solyndra Solar loans has cast a shadow over the entire federal guarantee system. The proposed Vogtle guarantee is 15 times bigger. At least three national petitions are circulating to kill it.
Southern has hinted it might seek better terms from private lenders. But Wall Street has long scorned atomic investments. And Georgia ratepayers are already being soaked for hundreds of millions to pay in advance for reactors sinking in debt and increasingly unlikely to ever operate. In both South and North Carolina, ratepayers are revolting against skyrocketing rate hikes to build Summer.
In a major defeat for the nuclear industry, the Iowa legislature adjourned without voting advance rate hikes to build nukes there. Similar legislation is stalled in Missouri and under attack in Florida. Brazil has announced it will build no more reactors. Despite fierce federal attempts to reopen them, all Japan’s commercial reactors remain shut.
New President Francois Hollande has pledged to phase down France’s dependency on atomic power. A construction project at Flamanville (like one in Finland) is sinking in devastating overruns and delays. Whether Hollande will proceed there or at any other remains to be seen.
But France’s new nuclear hesitancy may kill new reactor projects in Great Britain. They have been posited on support from Electricite de France, now under attack from Hollande and a skeptical banking system being hammered by Europe’s financial crisis.
In India, many of the 350-plus women committed to a fast-unto-death against the Koodankulam reactors have entered critical life-threatening stages. Police-state tactics have escalated the mass confrontation at the site.
Only China still seems a hold out for large-scale new construction. As grassroots anti-nuclear campaign there begin, the central government has not yet announced its post-Fukushima decision on whether to proceed with some 30-plus proposed new reactors.
But at Fukushima itself, we still face a potentially catastrophic situation at Unit Four’s spent fuel pool, still perched 100 feet in the air. Tons of horrifically radioactive rods remain at the mercy of an earthquake that could send them crashing to the ground, spewing releases that can only be termed “apocalyptic.”
In California, a failed $960 million “upgrade” at California’s San Onofre has led to steam generator tube failures shutting two reactors with no firm reopening date. More than a $1 billion spent by Progress Energy at Florida’s Crystal River may also doom it to long overdue burial.
In Vermont, New York, Texas, Ohio and elsewhere else there are operating reactors, escalating leaks, flaws, errors and advanced aging define a supremely dangerous industry falling apart at its faulty welds.
So far there have been no balanced national hearings on the future of Vogtle’s loan guarantees, or continued construction at Summer. But this latest $900 million price jump casts yet another deadly shadow over America’s nuclear future.
It’s time to kill this loan—and this industry—and put our money into green-powering our planet.
Our economic and ecological survival depend on it.
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
By Harvey Wasserman
May 15, 2012 – The projected price for Georgia’s Vogtle Double Reactor Project has jumped at least $900 million in just three months….and that’s just for starters.Will you pay for it? The future of new atomic power in the US hangs in the balance.
A national grassroots campaign is now working to stop tax/ratepayer handouts and kill the project.
Construction there is defined by faulty concrete and non-spec rebar steel that threaten public safety and could delay completion dates beyond those projected even before construction began.
South Carolina’s V.C. Summer, the only other new US reactor project now under construction, is meeting fierce rate payer resistance in two states. From Iowa to Brazil, Japan to France, the global reactor industry is collapsing in tandem. But what other nations will it bankrupt and irradiate before it’s finished?
President Obama has tagged $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for Vogtle’s construction. And Georgia ratepayers are being forced to pay for it in advance.
But the Office of Management and Budget is still dickering over terms with the Southern Company. Vogtle’s prime builders want to put up little or no money. They want interest rates lower than what you would pay to buy a new house. They expect you to take primary liability for future disasters. They can’t say what will happen to the radioactive waste.
The real price tags for both Vogtle and Summer are suspect. Original estimates have been as low as $2-4 billion/reactor. But Florida’s Progress Energy has just admitted its proposed reactors for Levy County, near Tampa, would go as high as $9.5 to $12 billion each. Given their delays and structural defects, there’s no reason to believe Vogtle or Summer could come in cheaper. At those prices, they cannot begin to compete with new renewables or efficiency.
So where does that leave Vogtle’s federal loan guarantees? George W. Bush set aside $18.5 billion at the Department of Energy for new reactor funding, but made no grants. Despite fierce lobbying, industry attempts to add to the fund have been defeated by national grassroots campaigns.
Obama designated the first $8.33 for Vogtle in 2010. But closed-door negotiations between his OMB, the DOE and Southern have been inconclusive.
The $535 million failure of Solyndra Solar loans has cast a shadow over the entire federal guarantee system. The proposed Vogtle guarantee is 15 times bigger. At least three national petitions are circulating to kill it.
Southern has hinted it might seek better terms from private lenders. But Wall Street has long scorned atomic investments. And Georgia ratepayers are already being soaked for hundreds of millions to pay in advance for reactors sinking in debt and increasingly unlikely to ever operate. In both South and North Carolina, ratepayers are revolting against skyrocketing rate hikes to build Summer.
In a major defeat for the nuclear industry, the Iowa legislature adjourned without voting advance rate hikes to build nukes there. Similar legislation is stalled in Missouri and under attack in Florida. Brazil has announced it will build no more reactors. Despite fierce federal attempts to reopen them, all Japan’s commercial reactors remain shut.
New President Francois Hollande has pledged to phase down France’s dependency on atomic power. A construction project at Flamanville (like one in Finland) is sinking in devastating overruns and delays. Whether Hollande will proceed there or at any other remains to be seen.
But France’s new nuclear hesitancy may kill new reactor projects in Great Britain. They have been posited on support from Electricite de France, now under attack from Hollande and a skeptical banking system being hammered by Europe’s financial crisis.
In India, many of the 350-plus women committed to a fast-unto-death against the Koodankulam reactors have entered critical life-threatening stages. Police-state tactics have escalated the mass confrontation at the site.
Only China still seems a hold out for large-scale new construction. As grassroots anti-nuclear campaign there begin, the central government has not yet announced its post-Fukushima decision on whether to proceed with some 30-plus proposed new reactors.
But at Fukushima itself, we still face a potentially catastrophic situation at Unit Four’s spent fuel pool, still perched 100 feet in the air. Tons of horrifically radioactive rods remain at the mercy of an earthquake that could send them crashing to the ground, spewing releases that can only be termed “apocalyptic.”
In California, a failed $960 million “upgrade” at California’s San Onofre has led to steam generator tube failures shutting two reactors with no firm reopening date. More than a $1 billion spent by Progress Energy at Florida’s Crystal River may also doom it to long overdue burial.
In Vermont, New York, Texas, Ohio and elsewhere else there are operating reactors, escalating leaks, flaws, errors and advanced aging define a supremely dangerous industry falling apart at its faulty welds.
So far there have been no balanced national hearings on the future of Vogtle’s loan guarantees, or continued construction at Summer. But this latest $900 million price jump casts yet another deadly shadow over America’s nuclear future.
It’s time to kill this loan—and this industry—and put our money into green-powering our planet.
Our economic and ecological survival depend on it.
Koch-ing the Climate
May 15th, 2012
The Koch brothers.
By Andy Rowell
Last week, the god-father of climate science, James Hansen, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reiterated his warning about exploiting the tar sands in an op-ed in the New York Times.
His warning was dire: “Canada’s tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history,” he warned. “If Canada proceeds and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate … If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.”
Thanks to series of great Greenpeace investigations, we have long known about Koch’s funding of climate denial. We also know about their involvement in the tar sands, and both I and Steve have blogged before about this.
But a day after Hansen’s warning, with impeccable timing, Inside Climate News published the results of a long investigation into the secretive Koch brothers and their long involvement in Canada’s tar sands.
Although we already knew about their involvement, what is shocking is the extent of this involvement, which becomes apparent in this new investigation.
The new investigation reveals that “Koch Industries has touched virtually every aspect of the tar sands industry since the company established a toehold in Canada more than 50 years ago.”
At every step of the way the Koch brothers are involved.
The investigation reveals: “It has been involved in mining bitumen, the hydrocarbon resin found in the oil sands; in pipeline systems to collect and transport Canadian crude; in exporting the heavy oils to the U.S.; in refining the sulfurous, low-grade feedstock; and in the subsequent distribution and sale of a variety of finished products, from jet fuel to asphalt. The company has also created or collaborated with other companies that have become leading players in the development of Alberta’s oil resources, and it remains deeply invested in western Canada’s oil patch.”
The investigation discovered:
- The company is one Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters, with more than 130 crude oil customers.
- The Koch brothers are among the largest U.S. refiners of oil sands crude, responsible for about 25 percent of imports.
- They are one of the largest holders of mineral leases in Alberta, where most of Canada’s tar sands deposits are located. Almost 500 well sites and facilities tracked by regulators under the Koch name are scattered across the oil sands regions.
- Koch owns pipelines in Minnesota and Wisconsin that import western Canadian crude to U.S. refineries and also distribute finished products to customers.
- They own and operate a 675,000 barrel oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, a major tar sands export hub
- And this year they kicked off a 10,000 barrel-a-day mining project in Alberta that could be the seed of a much larger project.
- Koch Industries has repeatedly denied any connection to the Keystone XL, although evidence compiled by Inside Climate Newssuggests otherwise.
Just as the brothers are heavily involved in U.S. politics, they are also deeply embedded in Canadian politics too. As I have blogged before, in March last year the company added another lobbyist to its operations. Alberta’s lobbyist registry shows that Koch Industries signed up a Calgary-based lobbyist to lobby the Provincial government on energy and resource development policy issues.
No prizes for guessing what Koch will be lobbying for: unrestricted exploitation of the tar sands, even if this does mean “game over for the climate.”
Koch-ing the Climate
May 15th, 2012
The Koch brothers.
By Andy Rowell
Last week, the god-father of climate science, James Hansen, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reiterated his warning about exploiting the tar sands in an op-ed in the New York Times.
His warning was dire: “Canada’s tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history,” he warned. “If Canada proceeds and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate … If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.”
Thanks to series of great Greenpeaceinvestigations, we have long known aboutKoch’s funding of climate denial. We also know about their involvement in the tar sands, and both I and Steve have bloggedbefore about this.
But a day after Hansen’s warning, with impeccable timing, Inside Climate News published the results of a long investigation into the secretive Koch brothers and their long involvement in Canada’s tar sands.
Although we already knew about their involvement, what is shocking is the extent of this involvement, which becomes apparent in this new investigation.
The new investigation reveals that “Koch Industries has touched virtually every aspect of the tar sands industry since the company established a toehold in Canada more than 50 years ago.”
At every step of the way the Koch brothers are involved.
The investigation reveals: “It has been involved in mining bitumen, the hydrocarbon resin found in the oil sands; in pipeline systems to collect and transport Canadian crude; in exporting the heavy oils to the U.S.; in refining the sulfurous, low-grade feedstock; and in the subsequent distribution and sale of a variety of finished products, from jet fuel to asphalt. The company has also created or collaborated with other companies that have become leading players in the development of Alberta’s oil resources, and it remains deeply invested in western Canada’s oil patch.”
The investigation discovered:
- The company is one Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters, with more than 130 crude oil customers.
- The Koch brothers are among the largest U.S. refiners of oil sands crude, responsible for about 25 percent of imports.
- They are one of the largest holders of mineral leases in Alberta, where most of Canada’s tar sands deposits are located. Almost 500 well sites and facilities tracked by regulators under the Koch name are scattered across the oil sands regions.
- Koch owns pipelines in Minnesota and Wisconsin that import western Canadian crude to U.S. refineries and also distribute finished products to customers.
- They own and operate a 675,000 barrel oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, a major tar sands export hub
- And this year they kicked off a 10,000 barrel-a-day mining project in Alberta that could be the seed of a much larger project.
- Koch Industries has repeatedly denied any connection to the Keystone XL, although evidence compiled by Inside Climate Newssuggests otherwise.
Just as the brothers are heavily involved in U.S. politics, they are also deeply embedded in Canadian politics too. As I have blogged before, in March last year the company added another lobbyist to its operations. Alberta’s lobbyist registry shows that Koch Industries signed up a Calgary-based lobbyist to lobby the Provincial government on energy and resource development policy issues.
No prizes for guessing what Koch will be lobbying for: unrestricted exploitation of the tar sands, even if this does mean “game over for the climate.”
Koch-ing the Climate
May 15th, 2012
The Koch brothers.
By Andy Rowell
Last week, the god-father of climate science, James Hansen, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reiterated his warning about exploiting the tar sands in an op-ed in the New York Times.
His warning was dire: “Canada’s tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history,” he warned. “If Canada proceeds and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate … If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.”
Thanks to series of great Greenpeaceinvestigations, we have long known aboutKoch’s funding of climate denial. We also know about their involvement in the tar sands, and both I and Steve have bloggedbefore about this.
But a day after Hansen’s warning, with impeccable timing, Inside Climate News published the results of a long investigation into the secretive Koch brothers and their long involvement in Canada’s tar sands.
Although we already knew about their involvement, what is shocking is the extent of this involvement, which becomes apparent in this new investigation.
The new investigation reveals that “Koch Industries has touched virtually every aspect of the tar sands industry since the company established a toehold in Canada more than 50 years ago.”
At every step of the way the Koch brothers are involved.
The investigation reveals: “It has been involved in mining bitumen, the hydrocarbon resin found in the oil sands; in pipeline systems to collect and transport Canadian crude; in exporting the heavy oils to the U.S.; in refining the sulfurous, low-grade feedstock; and in the subsequent distribution and sale of a variety of finished products, from jet fuel to asphalt. The company has also created or collaborated with other companies that have become leading players in the development of Alberta’s oil resources, and it remains deeply invested in western Canada’s oil patch.”
The investigation discovered:
- The company is one Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters, with more than 130 crude oil customers.
- The Koch brothers are among the largest U.S. refiners of oil sands crude, responsible for about 25 percent of imports.
- They are one of the largest holders of mineral leases in Alberta, where most of Canada’s tar sands deposits are located. Almost 500 well sites and facilities tracked by regulators under the Koch name are scattered across the oil sands regions.
- Koch owns pipelines in Minnesota and Wisconsin that import western Canadian crude to U.S. refineries and also distribute finished products to customers.
- They own and operate a 675,000 barrel oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, a major tar sands export hub
- And this year they kicked off a 10,000 barrel-a-day mining project in Alberta that could be the seed of a much larger project.
- Koch Industries has repeatedly denied any connection to the Keystone XL, although evidence compiled by Inside Climate Newssuggests otherwise.
Just as the brothers are heavily involved in U.S. politics, they are also deeply embedded in Canadian politics too. As I have blogged before, in March last year the company added another lobbyist to its operations. Alberta’s lobbyist registry shows that Koch Industries signed up a Calgary-based lobbyist to lobby the Provincial government on energy and resource development policy issues.
No prizes for guessing what Koch will be lobbying for: unrestricted exploitation of the tar sands, even if this does mean “game over for the climate.”
Press statement in support of revision of PT Kalista Alam’s palm oil plantation concession in Moratorium Indicative Map
Supporting the Requests of the Chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce to the Minister of Forestry and the Ministry of Forestry to the National Land Agency
(Jakarta, 10 May 2012) – The letter of 18 April 2012 from Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce, to the Minister of Forestry regarding the updating of the status of PT Kalista Alam’s palm oil plantation concession on the Moratorium Indicative Map and the Ministry of Forestry’s response to the said letter are noteworthy as they reflect the extent to which Indonesia’s forestry sector moratorium is being implemented. The moratorium was launched by President Yudhoyono on 20 May 2011.
Greenomics Indonesia is of the view that these two letters are of major significance as regards the updating of the said Moratorium Indicative Map.
First of all, let us consider the letter from the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce to the Minister of Forestry, which commences with a chronology concerning the licensing and status of the PT Kalista Alam concession area as shown on the Moratorium Indicative Map. The sequence of events set out in the said chronology is as follows: 1) On 25 August 2011, the Governor of Aceh issued a palm oil plantation license to PT Kalista Alam covering 1,605 hectares in the Rawa Tripa Aceh area; 2) the said area, as mapped by Minister of Forestry Decree No. 323/2011 (dated 17 June 2011), comes within the area covered by the moratorium map; and 3) the PT Kalista Alam concession is not included in the revised Moratorium Indicative Map adopted by virtue of Minister of Forestry Decree No. 7416/2011 (dated 22 November 2011). The exclusion of the PT Kalista Alam concession was based on confirmation by the National Land Agency (BPN) that Land Title Rights (HGU) had been granted in respect of the concession.
The letter from the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce then stated that the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce had received complaints regarding this situation, and had in consequence conducted a field investigation on 1-3 April 2012, during which it was found that: 1) the 1,605 hectares of the PT Kalista Alam were not subject to HGU granted in the name of PT Kalista Alam or any other company; and 2) PT Kalista Alam had been issued with a Location Permit by the Regent of Nagan Raya – the said permit was valid for 3 years and expired on 5 February 2011.
The letter then pointed out that the findings of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce had been verified with the BPN on 12 April 2012, and the BPN had confirmed the findings.
Regarding land conditions on the ground, the letter said that its field investigations had found that part of the PT Kalista Alam concession had been planted with palms and other parts were ready for planting, while the remainder of the concession was still under forest cover. The Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce then pointed out that based on PT Kalista Alam’s environmental management and monitoring documents (UKL/UPL), the bulk of the concession consisted of peatland. The letter from the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce was accompanied by maps, photographs and relevant documents.
In conclusion, the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce asked the Minister of Forestry to study the matter in the light of the presidential instruction on the moratorium, and to reincorporate the PT Kalista Alam concession as moratorium land.
It is also interesting to study the response of the Director General of Planology – who signed the Moratorium Indicative Map on behalf of the Minister of Forestry – to the letter from the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce, having regard to the Director General’s letter of 4 May 2012 to the Head of the Head of National Land Agency, which was copied to, among other recipients, the Minister of Forestry and the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce.
In the said letter, it is stated that the final discussions on the first revision of the Moratorium Indicative Map were held on 18 November 2011. Among those attending the said discussions were representatives of the UKP4 (Presidential Working Unit for the Supervision and Management of Development), Ministry of Forestry, Ministry of Agriculture, the National Land Certification Coordinating Board (Bakosurtanal) and the BPN. Following the final discussions, Minister of Forestry Decree No. 7416/2011 (on the first revision of the Moratorium Indicative Map) was issued on 22 November 2011.
In the Director General’s letter, it was stated that, according to the letter from the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce, verification with the BPN had confirmed that no HGU had been issued in respect of the PT Kalista Alam concession area. The Director General’s letter then pointed out that there were differences in the data that had been received by the Ministry of Forestry from the BPN at the time the revised Moratorium Indicative Map was being prepared, and the data that had been supplied by the BPN to the UKP4.
In the light of this, the Director General sought clarification of all of the relevant licensing data and information supplied from the BPN for use in the preparation of the first revision of the Moratorium Indicative Map, and in particular the data on the PT Kalista Alam concession, as input for the preparation of the second revision of the Moratorium Indicative Map, which is due to be issued this month (May 2012).
Greenomics Indonesia views the purport of these two letters as follows:
- The Ministry of Forestry wishes to confirm that the excising of the PT Kalista Alam concession from the Moratorium Indicative Map has a valid basis, namely, data supplied by the BPN. In reality, the draft first revision of the Moratorium Indicative Map was determined following discussions with a variety of government-related parties, such as the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce/UKP4, BPN, Ministry of Agriculture, etc., prior to being legally adopted by virtue of Minister of Forestry Decree No. 7416/2011 (dated 22 November 2011).
- The acknowledgement by the Ministry of Forestry that there were differences in the data on the PT Kalista Alam concession supplied to the Ministry by the BPN and that supplied by the BPN to the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce gives rise to serious question marks over the credibility and quality of the overall data used in the Moratorium Indicative Map, especially given that the Ministry of Forestry has requested confirmation of all of licensing data and information from the BPN, not just the data that is relevant to PT Kalista Alam.
- Strangely, in respect of the excising of 4.8 million hectares of peatland from the first revision of the Moratorium Indicative Map (by virtue of of Minister of Forestry Decree No. 7416/2011), the Ministry of Forestry Decree claimed that this revision was based on a field survey. However, the PT Kalista Alam case clearly shows that the quality or comprehensiveness of this field survey is in serious doubt, particularly as regards the definition of the term “field survey” as employed by the Ministry of Forestry Decree.
- As regards the request by the Ministry of Forestry that the BPN clarify all licensing data and information that is being used in the preparation of the second revision to the Moratorium Indicative Map, which is due to be issued this month (May 2012), the question that immediately comes to mind is whether in fact it will be possible to clarify all this data and information in the time available? This is a fundamental question, and is likely to give rise to serious doubts over the accuracy of the second revision to the Moratorium Indicative Map.
In the light of the above discussion, Greenomics Indonesia fully supports:
- The request by the chairman of the Indonesia REDD+ Taskforce to the Minister of Forestry to restore the status of the PT Kalista Alam concession to moratorium land, and for this to be confirmed in the second revision to the Moratorium Indicative Map to be published this May.
- The request of the Ministry of Forestry to the BPN to clarify all of the licensing data and information supplied by the BPN as this data and information is crucial to the credibility and quality of the second revision to the Moratorium Indicative Map.
For further information please contact:
Elfian Effendi
Executive Director of Greenomics Indonesia
elfian@greenomics.org
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
No more evictions! Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala in defense of nature, lands and territories.
May 15th, 2012
Note: Evictions of community farmers from UC Berkeley land, peasants thrown off of their land all over the world for agrofuel feedstock production, deforestation, forest “protection,” large-scale hydroelectric projects, etc. It’s time for the end of neoliberalism, private property and unsustainable ecological abuses.
GJEP is preparing for the Rio+20 Earth Summit where business-as-usual will be greenwashed with a giant paintbrush called The Green[d] Economy. We will be covering this nonsense-fest from June 20-22 as well as the alternative Peoples’ Summit that is also happening in Rio from the 15th to the 23rd of June–where organizations, social movements and Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations will come together to build real solutions to the myriad crises we face.
–The GJEP Team
Guatemala/Netherlands 11 May 2012. Extractive industries, renewable energy infrastructure and agribusiness stand behind the violent land grabbing and mass evictions in Guatemala. Carbon Trade Watch denounces this in the report No More Evictions! (http://www.carbontradewatch.org/articles/no-more-evictions-indigenous-peoples-in-guatemala-in-defence-of-nature-lands-and-territories.html).
In response to protests against the construction of a hydroelectric dam the government of Guatemala on May 1st declared a “state of emergency” in Santa Cruz Barillas, effectively suspending most of the fundamental rights of local residents, including the right to community consultations. [1] Communities in San José del Golfo blockaded the entrance of machinery into the gold and silver mine El Tambor [2] and four oil fields in the Petén area are under bid. [3] Meanwhile, the Polochic valley continues to be covered by sugar cane, African palm and rubber plantations, proposed hydroelectric projects and mining concessions. [4]
Lazar Konforti, author of the report, denounces: “In a case, pick-up trucks filled with private mining security and police forcibly evicted the Lote Ocho community, razing their homes with chainsaws. Eleven women from Lote Ocho report that they were gang raped by groups of up to 12 men as they tried to defend their homes. Due to police participation in the raid, the women fear making an official complaint to the authorities. Impunity and violence are severe problems in Guatemala.”
Emerging and ongoing land struggles came to the national attention last March with the Indigenous and peasants march in defence of water and Mother Earth, when several thousand people marched 214-kilometre into the capital to demand a solution to some of the most pressing problems. The March also condemned the violent persecutions and the criminalization of dissent and social movements.
Joanna Cabello, researcher from Carbon Trade Watch affirms: “Hydroelectric dams are popping up throughout the region under the false pretence that renewable energy equals sustainability. Carbon markets are allowing corporations to further profit from these large-scale dams while legitimizing environmentally destructive practices at the expense of local communities.”
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
UC Police Assert Private Control Over Gill Tract; Farmers Respond: Farmland is for Farming
May 14th, 2012
Filed under Occupy Wall Street, Urban agrciculture
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
‘Hug The Monster’: Why So Many Climate Scientists Have Stopped Downplaying the Climate Threat
May 14th, 2012
Journalist Bill Blakemore has a great piece on ABC’s website:
‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming (or How to Transform Your Fearful Inner Climate).
He offers advice to journalists in covering climate change — and advice to the rest of us in a world captured by denial.
The piece helps dispel the myth that climate scientists have long been overhyping climate impacts — when everyone who actually follows climate science and talks to any significant number of climate scientists knows that the reverse is true. As Blakemore writes:
Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization”….
A few years ago, this reporter heard a prominent climate and environment scientist speaking at a large but off-the-record conference of experts and policy makers from around the world who had gathered at Harvard University’s Kennedy School….
He told us that he and most other climate scientists often simply didn’t want to speak openly about what they were learning about how disruptive and frightening the changes of manmade global warming were clearly going to be for “fear of paralyzing the public.”
That speaker now has an influential job in the Obama administration.
Climate scientists have been consistently downplaying and underestimating the risks for three main reasons. First, their models tended to ignore the myriad amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks that we now know are kicking in (such as the defrosting tundra).
Second, they never imagined that the nations of the world would completely ignore their warnings, that we would knowingly choose catastrophe. So until recently they hardly ever seriously considered or modeled the do-nothing scenario, which is a tripling (820 ppm) or quadrupling (1100 ppm) of preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide over the next hundred years or so. In the last 2 or 3 years, however, the literature in this area has exploded and the picture it paints is not pretty (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).
Third, as Blakemore (and others) have noted, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are generally reticent and cautious in stating results — all the more so in this case out of the mistaken fear that an accurate diagnosis would somehow make action less likely. Yes, it’d be like a doctor telling a two-pack-a-day patient with early-stage emphysema that their cough is really not that big a deal, but would they please quit smoking anyway. We live in a world, however, where anyone who tries to explain what the science suggests is likely to happen if we keep doing nothing is attacked as an alarmist by conservatives, disinformers, and their enablers in the media.
Back in 2005, the physicist Mark Bowen wrote about glaciologist Lonnie Thompson: “Scientists have an annoying habit of backing off when they’re asked to make a plain statement, and climatologists tend to be worse than most.”
The good news, if you can call it that, is that the climate situation has become so dire that even the most reticent climatologists are starting to speak more bluntly. By the end of 2010, Thompson was writing:
Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.
Blakemore points out some other climate scientists who are starting to speak out:
A few days ago in the New York Times, a thoroughgoing front page article about global warming quoted a range of scientists on the overall effect of the global upheavals that can be expected from manmade global warming. Here are three excerpts — bolded highlights mine:
- “‘The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,’ said Raymond T. Pierre-humbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. ‘Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.’” (Recent scientific studies report the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is proving to be higher than expected.)
- “Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late.”
- “‘Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, “We’re sure it’s not a problem,” ‘ said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. ‘It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.’“
‘A Risk to the Collective (Global) Civilization’
Global warming’s “risk to the collective civilization” (meaning global civilization) has been continually spoken of in secret or unofficial or private conversations among engaged climate scientists and government and policy leaders around the world.
Such terms — catastrophe, threat to civilization itself — have been commonplace in carefully worded private discussions among peer-reviewed experts that this reporter and other journalists have often experienced and sometimes engaged in.
I heard that from many, many climate scientists in private as far back as 2005 and 2006, which is why I titled my book, Hell and High Water. Other journalists heard the same, which is why, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote at the time:
“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”
So what does Blakemore mean by “Hug the Monster,” by his ”Metaphor to Change Fear Into Action and Extinguish the Panic and Despair so Deadly in a Great Crisis”? He explains:
“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.
The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.
If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.
But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.
Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all….
Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.
What to do about this fear?
Blakemore quotes from “Hug the Monster: How Fear Can Save Your Life,” the title of a chapter in The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, a book written by ABC’s Ben Sherwood before he became president of ABC News:
Nowhere in the book does Sherwood mention climate change, but here’s a passage from the end of that chapter that struck this reporter for its relevance to the increasingly public questions about how our global civilization will deal with the advance of global warming:
Fear as a Security System — When Properly Used (Air Force Mantra)
“Without a doubt, fear is the most ancient, efficient, and effective security system in the world. Over many thousands of years, our magnificently wired brains have sensed, reacted, and then acted upon every imaginable threat. Practically speaking, when you manage fear, your chances improve in almost every situation. But if your alarms go haywire, your odds plummet.”
He concludes:
“For survival then, here’s the bottom line. If you’re scared out of your mind, try to remember this Air Force mantra: Hug The monster. Wrap your arms around fear, wrestle it under control, and turn it into a driving force in your plan of attack. ‘Survival is not about bravery and heroics,’ award-winning journalist Laurence Gonzales writes in his superb book Deep Survival. ‘Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: They turn it into anger and focus.’ The good news is that you can learn to subdue the monster and extinguish some of the clanging bells. The more you practice, the easier it becomes. Indeed, with enough hugs, you can even tame the beast and turn him into your best friend and most dependable ally.”
And here is Blakemore’s advice for journalists covering this most important of stories:
As a growing number of professional journalists around the world are finding, the story of manmade global warming (and the other evil twin of excess carbon emissions, the rapid acidification of the oceans) is unprecedented in its scale, almost “too big to cover,” and frightening.
But there are now signs that, little by little, voices and personalities are beginning to emerge around the world who are starting to hug this monster, manage the fear, and turning the emotions it causes into action.
For us journalists, the core responsibilities of our profession include knowing how to report unpleasant but important facts — and to do so in ways that nonetheless engage groups small and large, even in a sense “entertain” them, as in entertaining the mind, and to try to win their tacit appreciation for doing so.
Obviously, when the news is horrendous, such as, say, a looming world war or the rapid climb in global temperature and ocean acidification, our job includes the very essence of what it means to hug the monster.
But as this reporter and a growing number of others now working the story can report, once we do so, manmade global warming transforms into “a great story” (in our profession’s term of art) — and even one in which it is possible to glimpse a number of reasons for “realistic hope.”
To be continued….
I look forward to Blakemore’s further writing on climate change, a subject that — considering its likely impact on humanit – has been woefully neglected by most of his fellow journalists.
Note: Michael Tobis (and Stephen Ban) gave us the top figure. It is probably time to update that chart, since our inaction has shifted “most informed opinion” to overlap almost exactly with “Considered Unreasonable: Not reported.”
Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
“When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer’s markets, the first one told me that ‘no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer’s markets were stocked with ‘black market vegetables’ that ‘are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.’ It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket.”
Unfortunately, she’s not alone. Conducting research requires funding, and today’s research follows the golden rule: The one with the gold makes the rules.
A report just released by Food and Water Watch examines the role of corporate funding of agricultural research at land grant universities, of which there are more than 100. “You hear again and again Congress and regulators clamoring for science-based rules, policies, regulations,” says Food and Water Watch researcher Tim
Schwab, explaining why he began investigating corporate influence in agricultural research. “So if the rules and regulations and policies are based on science that is industry-biased, then the fallout goes beyond academic articles. It really trickles down to farmer livelihoods and consumer choice.”
The report found that nearly one quarter of research funding at land grant universities now comes from corporations, compared to less than 15 percent from the USDA. Although corporate funding of research surpassed USDA funding at these universities in the mid-1990s, the gap is now larger than ever. What’s more, a broader look at all corporate agricultural research, $7.4 billion in 2006, dwarfs the mere $5.7 billion in all public funding of agricultural research spent the same year.
Influence does not end with research funding, however. In 2005, nearly one third of agricultural scientists reported consulting for private industry. Corporations endow professorships and donate money to universities in return for having buildings, labs and wings named for them. Purdue University’s Department of Nutrition Science blatantly offers corporate affiliates “corporate visibility with students and faculty” and “commitment by faculty and administration to address [corporate] members’ needs,” in return for the $6,000 each corporate affiliate pays annually.
In perhaps the most egregious cases, corporate boards and college leadership overlap. In 2009, South Dakota State’s president, for example, joined the board of directors of Monsanto, where he earns six figures each year. Bruce Rastetter is simultaneously the co-founder and managing director of a company called AgriSol Energy and a member of the Iowa Board of Regents. Under his influence, Iowa State joined AgriSol in a venture in Tanzania that would haveforcefully removed 162,000 people from their land, but the university later pulled out of the project after public outcry.
What is the impact of the flood of corporate cash? “We know from a number of meta-analyses, that corporate funding leads to results that are favorable to the corporate funder,” says Schwab. For example, one peer-reviewed study found that corporate-funded nutrition research on soft drinks, juice and milk were four to eight times more likely to reach conclusions in line with the sponsors’ interests. And when a scrupulous scientist publishes research that is unfavorable to the study’s funder, he or she should be prepared to look for a new source of funding.
That’s what happened to a team of researchers at University of Illinois who were funded by a statewide fertilizer “checkoff” after they published a finding that nitrogen fertilizer depletes organic matter in the soil. Checkoffs are a common method used to market agricultural products, and they are funded by a small amount from each sale of a product – in this case, fertilizer. Richard Mulvaney, one of the U of I researchers, feels it is twisted that, in this way, farmers fund research intended to promote fertilizer use with their own fertilizer purchases.
But often the industry influence may be more subtle. Joyce Lok, a graduate student at Iowa State University, said, “If a corporation funds your research, they want you to look at certain research questions that they want answered. So if that happens it’s not like you can explore other things they don’t want you to look at… I think they direct the research in that way.”
John Henry Wells, who spent several decades as a student, professor and administrator at land grant universities sees it a different way. As an academic, he hopes that his research is relevant to real world problems that agriculture faces at the time. “When you ask the question, did I ever outline a research plan with the explicit notion of is this going to be fundable, I would say no. But I thought very deeply about whether my research plan was going to be relevant, and one of the indicators of relevancy would be if the ideas I put forward would get the attention of trade associations, private industry, benefactors, etc.”
If scientists use fundability as an important criteria of selecting research topics, research intended to serve the needs of the poor and the powerless will be at a disadvantage. However, Wells says that this is hardly a new phenomenon: land grants have existed to serve the elites since their creation in the 19th century.
“As its basis, the land-grant university was intended to cater to a narrow political interest of landowners and homesteaders – individuals who had the right to vote and participate in the political structure of a representative democracy.” he says. “Contemporarily, it is not so much that the land-grant university has been corrupted by modern agro-industrial influence, as it has been historically successful in focusing on its mission in the context of our Constitutional framework of governance. For the land-grant university, its greatest strength – a political collaboration spanning the top-to-bottom echelons of influence – has been its greatest weakness.”
Land grant universities and the USDA itself first came into being at a time when the academic view of agriculture was fundamentally changing – even if most farmers at the time ignored the advice of academics, dismissing them as “book farmers” who knew little about actually working the land. Will Allen writes about this period in his book The War on Bugs, telling the story of Justus von Liebig, a prominent agricultural chemist in Germany.
“In the 1830s, Liebig began asserting that the most essential plant nutrients were nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. His theories fueled the development of chemical fertilizers and ushered in a new age of agricultural science and soil chemistry in the 1840s and 1850s. Though many of Liebig’s theories were wrong, he was the first great propagandist for chemistry and for chemical-industrial agriculture.” Perhaps the most significant of his mistakes was his belief that organic matter in the soil was unimportant.
Dozens of Americans studied under Liebig and returned to the U.S. to continue their work. Two of these students established labs at Harvard and Yale, and soon “all agricultural schools and experiment stations in the country followed their lead.” Thus, practically from the start, the elites in this country served the interests of those who peddled chemical fertilizers and other agricultural inputs – even if that wasn’t their intent. No doubt many were enticed by the prospect of founding a new, modern, scientific form of agriculture, as they felt they were doing.
The unholy trinity of industry, government and academics promoting industrial agriculture and de-emphasizing or dismissing sustainable methods has a long history and it continues today. In its report, Food and Water Watch advocates a return to robust federal funding of research at land grant universities. But government is hardly immune from serving the corporate agenda either.
Take, for example, Roger Beachy, the former head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the agency in the USDA that doles out research grants. Beachy spent much of his career as an academic, collaborating with Monsanto to produce the world’s first genetically engineered tomato. He later became the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Monsanto’s non-profit arm, before President Obama appointed him to lead NIFA.
As Schwab noted, policy is often based on research, but good policy requires a basis in unbiased, objective research. In a system in which corporations and government both fund research, but due to the revolving door, the same people switch between positions within industry, lobbying for industry, and within government, what is the solution?