Author Archives: hmcadmin

PLEA Network

29 December 2015 IACentre, Winner of Project Consored top 25 articles for 2009 – 2010 news stories: Pentagon’s role in global catastrophe. In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets — it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions? By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements. 

The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count. The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285 combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles run on oil. Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon. Read More here

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29 December 2015, New York Times, Countries Rush for Upper Hand in Antarctica. On a glacier-filled island with fjords and elephant seals, Russia has built Antarctica’s first Orthodox church on a hill overlooking its research base, transporting the logs all the way from Siberia. Less than an hour away by snowmobile, Chinese laborers have updated the Great Wall Station, a linchpin in China’s plan to operate five bases on Antarctica, complete with an indoor badminton court, domes to protect satellite stations and sleeping quarters for 150 people. Not to be outdone, India’s futuristic new Bharathi base, built on stilts using 134 interlocking shipping containers, resembles a spaceship. Turkey and Iran have announced plans to build bases, too. More than a century has passed since explorers raced to plant their flags at the bottom of the world, and for decades to come this continent is supposed to be protected as a scientific preserve, shielded from intrusions like military activities and mining. But an array of countries are rushing to assert greater influence here, with an eye not just toward the day those protective treaties expire, but also for the strategic and commercial opportunities that exist right now. “The newer players are stepping into what they view as a treasure house of resources,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a scholar at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who specializes in Antarctic politics. Read More here

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28 December 2015, Climate News network, Markets cannot solve the climate crisis. How did we get to where we are now? “Free range” capitalism could be the explanation for climate change, and needs taming, says one writer. It may not be polite to mention Karl Marx in America, but leading thinkers on the left think that capitalism may be the cause of climate change, and that to save the planet the system needs fundamental reform. According to a new book the profit motive, which drives capitalism above all other considerations, forces it to extract everything from the planet that will generate a surplus, at the expense of real benefits to humans and ecosystems. Fossil Capital: the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, by Andreas Malm, out in hardback from Verso in January 2016, analyses capitalism’s role in global warming by delving into its past. The book builds on the work of Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. Both ask whether catastrophic climate change can be averted without at least a major makeover – or the outright elimination – of capitalism. Malm, a professor of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University, starts with James Watt’s patenting of the rotating steam engine in 1784. This was also the first year that rising carbon dioxide and methane levels were observed in polar ice. First Malm attacks the accepted theories of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. who developed and reinforced the capitalist notion that markets are the cure for all social ills. He shows that mills adopted coal power instead of water only because it enabled mill owners to move to populated areas to find docile and skilled workers, who were in short supply in the countryside. More biddable Coal enabled this move because, once out of the ground, it is highly portable. The machines, of course, eliminated many jobs and made others both simpler and more difficult. Owners started hiring women and children because they were easier to control than adult men. Read more here

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23 December 2015, Carbon News Network, Improving soils cuts carbon and grows more food. One straightforward way to combat both climate change and mass hunger is to replace carbon lost from the soil. All sorts of clever, expensive and downright daft ideas for removing carbon from the atmosphere have been suggested, but one of the simplest and most effective – building up carbon in the soil – hardly rates a mention. It is a process that happens naturally, but intensive agriculture, deep ploughing, heavy artificial fertiliser use and cutting down forests have impoverished soils worldwide. If the process could be reversed by adding extra organic matter to the soil each year, then the worst effects of climate change could be averted. Although the issue was hardly raised in the two weeks of negotiations on theParis Agreement in early December, behind the scenes the way farmers produce crops remains central to knowing whether we can hope to avoid the full impact of the warming climate. More than 100 of the 196 countries present in Paris which submitted plans beforehand on how to reduce their own carbon emissions put agriculture, forestry and replacing carbon in soils into their programmes. Better yields Also, on the fringes of the conference, the CGIAR Consortium, a partnership of leading agricultural research organisations, announced a US$225 million five-year plan to mitigate climate change by putting carbon back into the soil while improving developing world agricultural yields. This is part of a much longer-running international initiative started by France,the 4% Initiative, which aims to increase the carbon content of soil by four parts per thousand each year, enough to counteract human interference with the climate from the continued burning of fossil fuels. Read More here