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Dear Sarah,

You and I first crossed paths on a fairly pleasant day in Ketchikan, Alaska, during the lonely part of your effort to unseat the deplorable Governor Frank Murkowski in 2006. Like you, I had a booth at the Ketchikan Blueberry Festival – and neither of us were very busy. You were the “outsider” tracking down the hometown boy, Murkowski, and I was the “radical” environmentalist undermining his work. The conservative town on Revillagigedo Island didn’t care much for either you or me at the time.

I approached you on your stroll of solitude around the festival, and you saw my approach out of the corner of your eye. If the signs and the t-shirts and the postcards at my booth didn’t label me a “greenie” right away, I know my introduction did: Gregory Vickrey of the Tongass Conservation Society and Alaska Conservation Voters, how do you do?

I knew why you were there, but you told me anyway. You knew I hated the Bridge to Nowhere scheduled for my town, but I told you anyway. And because you noticed I was wearing an Illinois Fighting Illini shirt both of us were more than capable of changing to a lighter topic of discussion. This would not be the last time we’d talk college hoops.

The world now knows you steamrolled through a primary with the aforementioned Murkowski and John Binkley, and overwhelmed the obsolete former governor Tony Knowles (Eric Croft would have been a better challenger, and we both know it) as well as independent nemesis Andrew Halcro in the general election. You had a campaign for change, and our beautiful state was prime for implementing it after the failures of King Frank. You had the wherewithal of keen foresight, and left the established network of good-ol’-boy politics behind. You had the will to challenge, and harnessed the brand of independence to achieve.

What happened?

Looking back, I see the Sarah Palin I knew in Juneau – the Sarah with a presence of mind to recall our debates about basketball; the Sarah who worked with the aforementioned Croft to remove corrupt individuals from the intertwined network between state government and the oil and coal industries; the Sarah who challenged the federal government and its continued effort to pillage Alaska’s natural resources.

The Sarah Palin who was approachable.

The Sarah Palin who helped our small environmental group kill the Bridge to Nowhere.

The Sarah Palin who couldn’t say for certain that humankind was the culprit behind climate change, but knew we had to mitigate and adapt to reality anyway.

We didn’t agree on a lot of things, Sarah. But when we did, you or your staff knew, and the “outsider” Republican and “radical” environmentalist made a go of it, sometimes quietly and other times not so. Bridge to Nowhere. Village erosion mitigation. Fire Island Wind Project. A calculated refusal to bow down to establishment Republicans over that oh-so-sensitive provision in the state constitution (you remember: they didn’t like you and wanted to expose a hypocrisy in you that didn’t exist at the time). Alaska Marine Highway System. University Lands. Oil tax reform.

What happened?

In 2008, I supported the ticket of Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez. I would do so again, because I know and admire both men and believe the views they hold and the work they do are desperately needed on this planet, and in this country. And I know what I am about to share with you in public will likely cause recoil amongst some of my colleagues and allies (no doubt this entire letter does!). But it should be clear in my writing: I have an agenda. And the following email snippet I sent to a rather conservative friend in 2008, after your nomination to Vice Presidential candidacy, serves that agenda.

“She is (was?) a really solid governor for Alaska, and a good person. I was quite lucky to get to know her, and had a good working relationship with her and her administration (as her cancellation of the Bridge to Nowhere in Ketchikan attests). She is extremely popular among the people of the state, and not so much amongst the legislature, which – to me – is great.

“I did not vote for her in 2006. I did not vote for the Democrat Tony Knowles either (and preferred her over him). I actually voted for Andrew Halcro, the Republican turned independent that is leading the charge of the Troopergate scandal. (I respect Andy deeply, and am glad he brought up the question of abuse of power, but I believe he has gone too far, and has done so for the sake of political ambition – it is obvious to me that he has a personal problem with Sarah.)

“My biggest fear of her prior to her victory was that she would be far too evangelical once in power. That concern was overblown, frankly. She is smart and savvy, and during her first two years she did a wonderful job of picking her political battles (the Bridge, budget vetoes, gasline, oil taxes, transportation), allowed state agencies to actually do their work, and enforced a sound fiscal policy while challenging corruption at every level of state government. She stayed away from social issues even though she had opportunities to push her evangelical side, and that was brilliant of her (Republican Lyda Green, our Senate President, can’t stand Sarah and tried to force an abortion debate – for the purposes of creating derision in the state and to loosen the support of Dems and independents for Sarah on non-social issues – over 6 different potential law changes – Sarah wouldn’t bite).

“It goes without saying that I did not agree with her on all things (like aerial shooting of wolves and ANWR), but I wouldn’t agree on all things with anyone, and she proved herself to be prudent once elected to the point where I am actually happy with her work, overall.

“I thoroughly enjoyed talking with her on the occasions we got together. We’d always talk basketball (she is a big fan) before getting down to business, and she was always kind, funny, and as open as she could be under the circumstances (radical vs. governor haha).

“I am surprised she accepted the role of VP, given the circumstances with her newest child, but I think the pick was brilliant. My immediate reaction was as follows:

“1. As long as she doesn’t totally bomb and embarrass herself, I think McCain improved his election chances with the pick of Sarah (barring any extenuating circumstances, inclusive of not letting her be herself). I knew social conservatives and the Christian right would love her (even though she never pushed that agenda in Alaska) and she could certainly garner more than a few Hillary voters.

“2. I fear for Alaska. Should they win, there will be a vacuum in the state, and that vacuum is most likely to be filled by the good ole boys she cleaned out and the oil companies she reigned in. The old guard Republicans – the corrupt ones – are quite pleased with the thought of her being gone, as are the oil companies she whipped into shape. If you want, I can detail more on the whys of this. They are specific.

“To conclude, the Sarah Palin I know I support. I like her, and I would even work for her on some issues. I hope the national stage and DC cronyism don’t change her too much. If they do, I will revisit this statement.”

(Gasp! The horror of it all! How could a “radical” leftie actually support anything Sarah Palin has ever done, uttered, or represented?!?)

It should be obvious to anyone: I have revisited this statement many times. I’m haunted by it, in innumerable ways. And not because I was wrong about you, then, Sarah. I wasn’t. Rather, I am haunted because I am right about you, today.

Some combination of fortune, fame, limelight, soundbite, ego, and inner circle of advisers has corrupted you and your approach to the point where your effective reality is no better – and in some cases, worse – than the shanty Republican you replaced (Murkowski) and the inept Democrat (Knowles) you demolished back home in Alaska more than four years ago. Misguided counsel, the parade of Johnny’s-come-lately, and cronyism have reduced you to a caricature of your character, and undermined your abilities (yes, I said abilities) to change the world for the better, and I’d like to understand why, and what you are going to do about it.

I don’t need you to see everything the way I see it, Sarah. I don’t expect you to publicly echo my alarm over methane feedback loops from melting permafrost in Alaska. I won’t beg you to forcefully acknowledge the climate catastrophe we have on our hands today as the world rapidly approaches states of peril in food security, clean water sourcing, and economic collapse. I can’t fathom a day when you will recognize the imperative of a zero carbon world.

But I know your real character – the one that still exists behind the cartoons and the cut-outs. I have seen your recognition of the state of the world and your ambition to affect it positively for the sake of the next seven generations instead of the next seven figures. I have witnessed your hands dirty with the earth of a dying community in Southeast Alaska. I have watched you manipulate with knowledge a massive budget so the imperative mitigation and adaptation could begin.

Don’t you think it is time the world sees?

Let me know.

An investigative report. [Part 1: http://bit.ly/fV8slf | Part II: http://bit.ly/gMITca ]

By Cory Morningstar

Part III

The Spin Doctors | Spinning the Potential for Abrupt and Catastrophic Climate Change

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley

It is now beyond obvious that those who control the world’s economy are hell-bent on burning all of our planet’s remaining fossil fuels – including those that not long ago, were considered impractical to exploit. Corporate-colluded states, corporate-controlled media and corporate-funded scientists will be red-lining the well-oiled engine of the propaganda machine as it works overtime.

They will try to convince you the methane hydrates in the world’s oceans are deep enough that the inevitable increased temperature will not affect them. (Think again. Take a look at the map – the methane hydrates, even outside of the Arctic, are almost all located on shallow continental shelves.) And if that doesn’t work they will try to convince you that mysterious bacteria will rapaciously devour all methane gas.

In the following paragraphs, the danger that this misinformation presents is outlined. Layered upon the aforementioned spin, at the same time they will try to convince you that because the methane hydrates are now destabilizing and melting (because governments have done nothing for decades to halt global warming), we have no choice but to extract the methane and burn it – for the safety of humanity. If the misinformation contradicts itself, this in itself is of little to no importance – as long as the key message is allowed to weave itself into the collective subconscious. The key message being: “There is no emergency. Methane risks are non-threatening.”

The truth is, there is one option, and one option only. We must stop burning fossil fuels. Completely.

“In an energy hungry world any new fossil fuel resource will only lead to additional carbon emissions.” – Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Tyndall Centre at Manchester University, January 2011

Corporatized states, media and scientists who have pledged allegiance to protect the current economic system will try to convince us that methane hydrates will provide society with a “clean,” “sustainable” fossil fuel. [14] Make no mistake – they are not clean or sustainable. Nor are they renewable. [15] The burning of fossil fuels – including natural gas/methane – creates CO2. All the spin in the world will not make this fact any less true. On 14 January 2001, Dr. Gideon Polya explains that a further phony approach that is now being implemented on a massive scale around the world is a coal-to-gas transition on the basis that natural gas is “clean”. He states, “The reality is that gas burning seriously threatens the Planet because (a) humanity should be urgently decreasing and certainly not increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution; (b) Natural Gas (mainly methane, CH4) is not a clean energy greenhouse gas-wise; and (c) pollutants from gas leakage and gas burning pose a chemical risk to residents, agriculture and the environment.” The asserted “clean-er” status of gas as a fossil fuel is contradicted in the recent analysis by Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell University, who has concluded that ” A complete consideration of all emissions from using natural gas seems likely to make natural gas far less attractive than oil and not significantly better than coal in terms of the consequences for global warming. ” It is grossly negligent to spend billions of tax dollars on a dangerous scheme that will lock humanity into what is essentially a promissory note for the annihilation of our children, grandchildren and all life. Polya states: “Top climate scientists state that we must urgently reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from the current damaging 392 parts per million (ppm) to a safe and sustainable 300 ppm for a safe and sustainable planet for all peoples and all species.” This is absolutely true. It is also true that only zero carbon can achieve any reduction in atmospheric CO2; only zero carbon can reduce ocean acidification.

If we do not stop burning all fossil fuels, the runaway greenhouse scenario will be upon us. The global scheme to drill methane hydrates ensures that there will be no real transition to clean, safe, renewable energy alternatives. Arctic carbon feedbacks are heating the oceans – enough to melt the slightly deeper methane hydrates on all of the continental shelves. Today, there are methane hydrates (for example, off of California) emitting methane gas into the oceans. Methane seeps have been identified along many passive and active continental margins. It will take very little additional warming (perhaps even no additional warming is needed) to add more methane emissions via methane hydrate feedback into the oceans. It is true that in relatively deeper water, much more methane will be dissolved and relatively less will be emitted to the air. (Yet this also produces catastrophic results in the form of further ocean acidification.)

This is why the stability of Arctic methane hydrates is so critical; they do not have this depth of water, therefore they are able to emit far more easily into the atmosphere. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf represents 25% of the Arctic Shelf and 8% of the total area of the World Ocean’s continental shelf. Of this shelf, 75% is shallower than 50 metres in depth (the mean depth of the continental shelf is 130 m); this provides a very short conduit for methane to escape to the atmosphere with almost no oxidation. The Arctic shelf methane hydrates are more vulnerable because they have naturally been experiencing warming by as much as 17°C, while deep oceanic hydrates have been warmed by less than 1°C. [16] Methane hydrates are only stable under specific pressure and temperature conditions.

Most scientists continue to ignore the oceans. Scientist David Archer, who has been pivotal in minimizing methane risks of late, proposes that increased leaking of methane will all dissolve in the oceans for a hundred thousand years – therefore inferring that destabilizing methane hydrates should not be considered a high risk “within our lifetime”. Yet, methane is oxidized in ocean water to CO2 – which acidifies it. It is a possibility that the increase in ocean acidification could be attributed to the melting of methane hydrates.

More acidic oceans must exchange additional CO2 to the atmosphere. Yes, methane-consuming bacteria will digest methane, however, this further depletes oxygen from the oceans and causes further acidification. The result of this is dead oceans. Dead oceans can be imagined as sewers spewing toxic gases like hydrogen sulphide into the air and onto an unrecognizable landscape void of life. Scientists continue to observe critical aspects of climate in a reductionist fashion – failing to acknowledge (or at least convey) that all elements of nature are interconnected. There will be no free lunch.

A 2010 paper addressing new constraints on methane fluxes in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that deep methane hydrates may leak vast amounts of methane into the ocean water, thus raising the concentration of methane in surface waters and ultimately the atmosphere. All of these fluxes and ocean-air exchanges are happening today, and will continue to increase. The report states: “A significant release of methane into the atmosphere could ultimately lead to a catastrophic greenhouse effect; this mechanism has been invoked as an explanation for past deglaciation [global warming] events.”

If we link this information to Archer’s suggestion that methane hydrates will continue to leak into the oceans for 100,000 years, we are looking at a creeping ocean catastrophe that has already commenced. Based on results of many recent studies, it appears there are now ocean regions where ocean water is supersaturated with methane, the result being more methane emitting into the air above. In one such 2010 study, scientists suggest that future sea-ice retreat may decrease the residence times of methane and nitrous oxide in the surface Arctic Ocean and thus enhance the sea-air flux of these climatically active gases.

The video below shows a large plume of methane-rich gas continuously bubbling in a tundra lake in Alaska. (2010 | 0:40)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM5WPl69Z18&w=480&h=390]

There is no precedent in the past for the abrupt and extreme rate of global climate forcing that this fossil fuel-based industrial civilization has created. Though the scientists are silent (except when justifying ongoing research), the fact is that we are now, most definitely, in an abrupt global climate change event, which is most likely unsurpassed in the history of life on the planet. Scientists condemn humanity by failing to call for the absolute ending of the current fossil fuel economy, as well as an ending to burning all fossil fuels – the only way to achieve zero carbon emissions – and the only way to stabilize the planet (recognized by IPCC).

Any science or policy that is accepting of any fossil fuels – inclusive of conventional oil and gas – condones and legitimizes current coal plants and drilling to continue and to expand, while ignoring the fact that nature cannot compromise. Therefore, those who accept false solutions such as CCS (carbon capture and storage) (already proven to be a spectacular failure) are complicit in protecting the current suicidal “business as usual” economic model that will bring us to a complete collapse of civilization.

Simply stated, it does not matter where methane carbon feedbacks come from. What matters is that these feedbacks will cascade and multiply – at some point causing a mass extinction event. Imagine a domino effect. It takes just one carbon feedback to add to our current state of global warming to trigger all other carbon feedbacks – this is definite. As world governments absolutely refuse to stop burning fossil fuels, continued accelerating warming of our increasingly fragile planet, caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions, will ensure such feedbacks are dead certainties.

Feedbacks that further amplify global warming (creating additional CO2 and additional feedbacks which are mostly unaccounted for in climate models and not reported as greenhouse gas emissions) include:

• warming soil (CO2)
• increased ground level ozone. (which reduces photosynthesis, making it toxic to all green growth)
• warming peatlands (methane)
• warming wetlands (methane from sources such as lakes, ponds, rivers, etc.)
• forest fires (CO2 and methane)
• forest die back (CO2)
• thawing permafrost (methane)
• melting methane hydrates (methane)
• warming ocean water (dissolves less CO2)
• ocean acidification (draws down less CO2)
• plankton die-off (less effective ocean biological carbon pump)(CO2)
• loss of sea ice (less cooling albedo)

The slightest risk/possibility of methane being added to the atmosphere from carbon feedbacks today – from any source – leaves no doubt that an absolutely expedient transition from fossil fuel energy to zero carbon energy is imperative for our survival. Yet, methane releases continue to accelerate. The fact that methane is 100 times more powerful than CO2 in the first 5-10 years after it’s been emitted creates an unparalleled world emergency of massive scale. State governments, media and scientists who minimize, ignore or deny methane risks condone the massive risk to civilization’s survival from methane carbon feedbacks.

Scientists and governments have known for decades that climate change accelerates the warming temperature in the Arctic far faster than anywhere else on Earth. Resulting warming of the Arctic Ocean will result in the destabilization, melting and venting of the methane hydrates. It is not surprising that we now find ourselves in a situation where we are “beyond dangerous atmospheric interference” (DAI) with the climate – as the world has done nothing to stop it. This situation will continue to accelerate even if we stop burning all fossil fuels today. This is why the emergency is unprecedented and unparalleled in magnitude.

The “laws of ecology” established by biologist Barry Commoner are essential in understanding the carbon cycle and the solutions we must seek for our climate crisis:

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.

3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system.”

4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance; for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.

All life on Earth is connected by carbon. The burning of carbon – carbon that has been sequestered over millennia by the accumulation of animal-based petroleum and plant-based coal – over the course of a few hundreds of years has proven not to be a “free lunch”. The relentless rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not going to stop and the relentless rise in temperature will continue. The only answer – which we resist, deny, refuse and are unwilling to accept – is that we must stop burning ALL fossil fuels. Not a reduction and not less. All. The Burning Age is over. And just as the Stone Age ended before they ran out of stones, so the Burning Age must end before we run out of fossil fuels.

Governments and global society as a whole continue to ignore safe, renewable energy sources – sentencing humanity and all life to a hell on Earth. Until we acknowledge why, nothing will change. A new foundation for a global society built on principles of sharing and the simple premise of “living well, not better” is the greatest threat to the current economic system and the current global power structures. Such a revolution is not about to be embraced by any major greenhouse gas-emitting, developed, obstructionist state who has clearly demonstrated in Cancún that the protection of economy is clearly more vital than protection of life. Make no mistake – everyday that our current global economic system is allowed to continue as is brings us one step closer to irreversible climate catastrophe and complete exhaustion of the planet’s last remaining natural resources. Our current economic system will lead us, in no uncertain terms, to our own annihilation.

Those who protect the current economic system – scientists in general, and “big green” co-opted environmental groups – are silent on what now constitutes a clear, unequivocal planetary climate emergency. They have played their role. Their funding is immense and secure. [18] Their professions and elite status remain secure. Ask yourself … why do environmental groups not disclose to their global audience what MUST happen if we are to avert catastrophe? Why do they ask us to buy t-shirts and high definition camcorders instead of telling us the danger that lies right outside our window? Is it so we can videotape our own demise? Ask yourself … why are those who claim to speak for civil society, who claim to represent us, not telling us we must fight for the lives of our own children? If society at large understood the unequivocal, unparalleled climate emergency about which wealthy states and key environmental groups remain silent, what would happen?

Universities as Bedfellows | Moral Nihilism

Education is …

“…one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.” – Bertrand A. Russell (1872-1970), English philosopher, mathematician, and writer

“…a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.” – Norman Douglas (1868-1952), British writer

Universities have been transformed into modern day brothels, where corporations can hire prostitutes under the guise of scientific research. Play nice = get rich. On 1 February 2007, BP announced an agreement with University of California, Berkeley for $500 million to research biofuels at a new Energy Biosciences Institute. In return, BP was given access to the university’s researchers and technology, built by decades of public investment.

Why would BP or any other corporation choose to pay for their own research institutes when they can, instead, essentially hijack a publicly funded one? BP will own all intellectual property rights of all resulting science, which it will use to effectively expand corporate profits. Such agreements most always ensure that any and all data from funded research is also owned by the funding corporation. This ensures that scientific research results that the corporations wish to be known to the public are divulged – and the scientific research results that could interfere with or even destroy corporate profit potential are buried from the public.

As neoconservative governments and governments straining under economic collapse continue to cut social programs and education, competing universities become more and more dependent on corporate funding. A brief and ultraconservative glimpse of other oil funding for university research: BP funds Princeton $15 million; Chevron funds University of California, Davis $25 million, Georgia Institute of Technology $12 million and Texas A&M, undisclosed; ConocoPhillips funds Iowa State University $22.5 million and Duke University $1 million; DuPont funds Iowa State University $1 million; and ExxonMobil funds Stanford $100 million (2007 figures). Funds provided by BP in June of 2010, after the oil spill, were dispersed to universities as follows: $5 million to Louisiana State University; $10 million to the Florida Institute of Oceanography hosted by the University of South Florida; and $10 million to the Northern Gulf Institute, a consortium led by Mississippi State University.

In June 2010, under mounting public pressure, BP agreed to provide research money to independent institutions in the Gulf region that could allocate the funds through a peer-review process – apparently with no strings attached. Writer Naomi Klein states that this is a model for research in the Gulf: paid for by the oil giants that reap the massive profits from oil and gas, but with no way for them to influence outcomes. However, BP had a back-up plan – and fortunately, there are still certain professors, scientists and perhaps universities who uphold ethics and are unwilling to compromise. On 22 July 2010, Cary Nelson, head of the American Association of University Professors, accused BP of trying to “buy” the best scientists and academics to help it contest litigation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. “This is really one huge corporation trying to buy faculty silence in a comprehensive way,” said Nelson. “Our ability to evaluate the disaster and write public policy and make decisions about it as a country can be impacted by the silence of the research scientists who are looking at conditions…. There is a problem for a faculty member who becomes closely associated with a corporation with such powerful financial interests.” Russ Lea from the University of South Alabama stated that some clauses in the contract “were very disturbing.”

An article published on 14 January 2011 in Nature reports that “[a]t least as far back as September, BP began issuing a standard letter to independent researchers who requested samples, stating ‘Requests for source oil will be delayed…’.” Independent research has been the thorn in the side of BP and BP’s allies, correcting the “official narrative” over and over again. BP’s humiliation began with the oil-flow estimates and continued through to the “all clear” on seafood contamination. BP has effectively slammed the door on independent research by refusing to supply official samples of the Deepwater Horizon oil.

Corporate funding effectively silences dissent and buys legitimacy where none is deserved. The corporate influence and domination, like a virus, crushes imagination, strangles creativity and kills individual thought. Education pursued for the collective good is dead. Transcendent values – dead. The nurturing of individual conscience – dead. Ethical and social equity issues are framed and accepted as “passé.” Political silence reigns. Moral independence within educational institutes is being effectively decimated. It is of little surprise that empathy has declined by 40% in college students since 2000.

“In England … education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.” – Oscar Wilde

In 2010, James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers warns that we need to defend professors and graduate students against powerful corporations – and their own universities. He calls this The Canadian Corporate-Academic Complex. He writes: “As universities more aggressively embrace corporate values, corporate management practices, corporate labor-relations policies, and corporate money, faculty associations face troubling challenges. The new reality is particularly hostile to academic freedom, and we see that hostility in the actions of corporate funders and university administrators, often simultaneously.”

Indoctrination starts early. Our children’s minds are vastly deteriorating in our current education system. Ken Robinson believes that “we shouldn’t be putting them asleep, we should be waking them up to what they have inside themselves. But the model we have is this: I believe we have a system of education that is modelled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it.” Robinson points to a test of 1,500 individuals – all tested for divergent thinking to show genius level. The individuals were kindergarten children and 98% of the children tested were genius level divergent thinkers. Five years later, the same children tested at 50%. His brilliant lecture is here and the transcript is here.

Economy is Sacrosanct

“How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.“ — Adolf Hitler

To understand why it is vital for the globally elite plutocracy to protect the current power structures that exist today, pretend you have been told that you only have a short time left to live. What would you do? Most people would work far less and probably stop working altogether if they could. Our children would become our focal point, as would time with other loved ones, and with nature. Consumer purchases and shopping would be the furthest thing from our mind. This would be the greatest threat to the global economy. If you can translate these ideas into a global society that actually understands that fossil fuels are literally killing us – that we are in a planetary emergency – would a similar shift in priorities not occur? Would our priority not become a full fledged effort to prepare our children for the future, indeed to try to ensure them a future? A complete boycott of all unnecessary consumer products. Unparalleled bank runs that would bring the entire system to its knees. All of these things that would likely happen if people were made to understand the magnitude of the climate emergency are the greatest threat to the global economy, driven and dominated by fossil fuels and the plutocracy that reaps obscene amounts of monetary wealth. Keep in mind the silent fact that the wealthiest 15% are responsible for 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Self-appointed environmental groups can claim all they like that the people cannot be told “the truth” as the fear will paralyze them into further inaction. We know this is not true. Yet NGOs continue to downplay the catastrophic risks of global climate change, even now as those risks are rapidly increasing. A paper for the Four Degrees and Beyond conference in September 2009 titled Psychological Adaptation to the Threats and Stresses of a Four Degree World, written by Clive Hamilton (Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University) and Tim Kasser (professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology at Knox College, Illinois, USA) states: “At present most governments and environmental organisations adopt a ‘don’t scare the horses’ approach, fearful that exposing people fully to the scientific predictions will immobilise them. With climate scientists now stressing the need for extremely urgent action and spelling out more catastrophic impacts if action is inadequate, this now seems to us a dangerous approach to undertake.”

In every natural disaster observed and every emergency laid in front of us, we bear witness to the deeply entrenched quality of humanity that surfaces. Although our humanity has been beaten down and crushed, it still lurks under our bar-coded, desensitized skin. And in the darkest hours, history shows that ordinary citizens have over and over again come together to help one another, often risking their own lives in the process. It is clear that people are not being told the dire reality of the climate emergency in order to protect the economy. Clean, safe, renewable and perpetual zero-carbon energy independence is the greatest threat to the status quo powers that be. Yet clean, safe, renewable and perpetual zero-carbon energy independence is the greatest key to freedom for regular people and the only chance our children have to live a full, decent life.

Ignoring the Necessity of a Plant-Based Diet at Our Own Peril

“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.” Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592

This is the section that outlines a necessary resolve, which in a healthy society most citizens would easily embrace. However, I won’t delude myself with such false illusions. Knowing of the displaced anger this issue creates, I will continue writing with no illusions that such solutions that such solutions will be embraced on a global scale. And we can thank the tobacco industry for this – the industry that brilliantly created the spin of “personal rights and freedoms” to such magnitude that we can’t get the monster back into the cage.

Today’s corporatized society consists of consumers (formerly known as citizens) who have been told – until they believe it – that it is their “right” to pollute our shared environment … their “right” to destroy our shared environment … and their “right” to poison our children, including their own. And disturbingly, our corporatized society fights for these rights whenever corporate media signals that such “rights” are about to come under threat. We have witnessed corporations in the US – a country with one of the worst health care systems in the world – successfully convince masses of followers to fight against their own healthcare reform. In Canada, instead of fighting for the right and respect to raise and nurture our own children, we demand daycare, where the lowest paid people in society raise our children. Recently in Canada, parents fought for the right to enroll their children in school at the exceptionally tender age of three.

Also in Canada, industry mobilized Canadians across the country to “fight for their right” to continue the use and expansion of the unnecessary drive-thrus at fast food joints (the lowest possible hanging fruit). The billion dollar restaurant industry convinced Canadians and politicians that it is better to leave our vehicles running than to turn them off. Tim Hortons led the battle. Who is Tim Hortons? A corporate coffee chain that uses the branding technique of patriotism, convincing consumers to wave their coffee cups like Canadian flags. Approximately one quarter of the province of Nova Scotia’s landfill is Tim Hortons garbage (2005).

The staggering number of asthmatic children (which continues to climb) and the staggering number of deaths due to air pollution were of no concern. Convenience and personal “rights” to convenience were all that mattered. And as the citizens in vulnerable countries literally die from temperatures of 52ºC, the self-entitled wealthy sit in their air-conditioned SUVs ordering McHeartAttacks and KillerCokes for their children who are now subject to an escalating health crisis of obesity and diabetes. Perhaps it is time to redefine what constitutes child abuse.

What is rarely discussed is the fact that as much as half of the annual worldwide greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change are now being attributed to the lifecycle and supply chain of domesticated animals raised for food. The livestock industry also contributes to massive deforestation, causing further acceleration of climate change. Due to the fact previously stated, that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas 72-100 times more powerful than carbon in the short term (5 to 20 years), how can it be that this issue is barely being discussed? Like heart disease – denying this issue constitutes a silent killer.

Livestock now accounts for up to 51% (Worldwatch Institute) of all greenhouse gas emissions. [19] Methane accounts for a vast amount of these emissions. Meat counts for more damage than all transportation combined on our finite planet. In June 2010 the United Nations issued a second urgent plea for a global united transition to a meat-free and dairy-free diet: “A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change.” Yet despite urgent warnings from the United Nations (the first in 2006) that countries must reduce meat consumption, this is just another lifestyle change the well-off would rather not discuss, even when this massive dent in emissions would cost nothing – we could all do it today, at our next meal. We could at least begin a transition today. Especially in light that this is one of the few solutions in the mitigation of climate change where citizens are free of government-asserted control over our decision of choice. The fact that it would be more effective in the fight to prevent catastrophic climate change to eliminate animal products from our diets than it would be to eradicate the entire globe of all vehicles of transportation combined is nothing less than incredible.

The fact that we dismiss such a simple action at the cost of future generations is revealing. What it sadly reveals is an increasingly unenlightened society that is effectively becoming more and more corroded by unadulterated individualism.

The Right to Destroy Ourselves

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” – Albert Einstein

But why give fair and just transition programs and subsidies to independent farmers for making the critical transition to organic plant-based agriculture when we can just keep giving the billion dollar multinational corporations the vast subsidies to keep destroying our planet? And why give our children – who are at the mercy of our poor decisions – a healthy and compassionate diet when we can slowly kill them with an escalating epidemic of obesity and diabetes, costing the health care system billions? But hey, as long as the cost belongs to the taxpayers while the profits from disease line the pockets of the rich, what’s the problem?

Let’s face it, there is too much money to be made by the multinational corporations, who view our families, and especially our children, as nothing more than neon-flashing dollar signs. There is just too much money to be made on drugs, treatment and disease. Prevention is the enemy of corporate profit. And why even consider transitioning to a healthy plant-based diet when, instead, corporations can set another unknown disaster into motion – in this instance, cloned meat. Our “brilliant” species can do anything – except change the very patterns that destroy our own habitat and ultimately ourselves. Burn baby burn. Drill till we’re dead. Message from corporations to consumers (formerly known as citizens): Stuff yourself with meat, hormones and additives until you explode (or the planet explodes – whichever comes first).

As an exporter of meat, dairy and wool, New Zealand’s highest climate gas emission is methane, despite having a per capita car ownership that rivals California’s. How to fix this? Simple – like the IPCC, the government simply accounts for greenhouse gas emissions but doesn’t add in agricultural methane, even though methane is far more potent than CO2. Presto! Methane is no longer a problem.

There is no choice – if we want to continue living, there must be generous subsidies to assist a global conversion from industrial livestock farming to organic, primarily plant-based, small-scale agriculture rich in biodiversity. Intensive livestock production and the intensive food production for livestock contributes to massive deforestation and loss of biodiversity. Much of the cleared land for livestock could be reforested or returned to grassland – becoming lush carbon sinks rather than degraded lands that emit deadly methane. Conserving biodiversity, as well as feeding humanity, must be a global priority over sustaining factory-farmed livestock.

Like fossil fuels, states must eliminate the massive livestock and dairy subsidies. Such subsidies continue to be accepted and relatively unchallenged as states vie for export dollars by selling meat to other nations. Trade is set to be the number one sector of all fossil fuel consumption by 2030. Further, both the fossil fuel industry and the livestock industry must internalize the full costs of all pollution, including water pollution, CO2 from deforestation, methane from decaying animal parts (among other sources) and nitrous oxide from animal waste.

Will governments create such legislation? Not likely. For behind the red velvet curtain, the corporations run the greatest puppet show on Earth. This certain cause of CO2 and methane is the easiest (and most affordable) one to tackle – yet, almost five years after the initial UN warning we are not even discussing it.

October, 2010: Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food states unequivocally:”There is currently little to rejoice about,” and “worse may still be ahead…. Current agricultural developments are… threatening the ability for our children’s children to feed themselves,” he said. “A fundamental shift is urgently required….”  He continued that “giving priority to approaches that increase reliance on fossil fuels is agriculture committing suicide.” Today agriculture continues to decline because of accelerating climate change. Feeding factory-farmed livestock rather than feeding people is just one more slap in the face to human rights and social equity.

October, 2010: Scientists warn of a livestock greenhouse gas boom: “Soaring international production of livestock could release enough carbon into the atmosphere by 2050 to single-handedly exceed ‘safe’ levels of climate change.… The livestock sector’s emissions alone could send temperatures above the 2 degrees Celsius rise commonly said to be the threshold above which climate change could be destabilising.” They also make a more conservative estimate: “The sector will contribute enough greenhouse gas emissions to take up 70 per cent of the ‘safe’ 2 degree temperature rise.” The authors of the study called on governments to prioritize the reining in of the livestock sector, adding that “mobilising the necessary political will to implement such policies is a daunting but necessary prospect.” They suggest the world will have to reduce emissions by roughly 87 per cent relative to performance at a global scale in 2000.

And again, remember that 2ºC was never considered safe. From the 1990 United Nations AGGG report: “Temperature increases beyond 1°C could trigger rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.” The absolute temperature limit of 2°C in the same report was motivated as the limit beyond which the risks of grave damage to ecosystems and of non-linear responses are expected to increase rapidly.

We Can’t Run Away from Runaway

Non-linear in this case means runaway climate change. Why was the extremely dangerous (now catastrophic) 2ºC “target” chosen? The adoption of 2ºC enabled the economic system to continue business as usual – further destruction will continue until the Earth reaches her maximum limit where catastrophe becomes unavoidable. It is now quite evident how scientists identified their role in the international climate change negotiations – to provide policymakers a danger limit rather than a limit for safety. (This race-to-the-bottom reasoning has become typical of government environmental health policymaking. Hazardous pollution and chemicals suspected of causing cancer are deemed innocent until it can be proved with virtually total certainty that they are dangerous.)

To date only James Hansen and Stephen Hawking have stated that a runaway greenhouse effect is in our realm of distinct possibility. “Runaway greenhouse effect” is a scientific term very different from the “runaway climate change” term frequently referred to. “Runaway climate change” implies an uncontrollable, rapid acceleration event – an event too extreme for humans to survive it. The scientific term “runaway greenhouse effect” means a dead Earth.

Yet scientists continue to miss the main point on what constitutes global climate catastrophe for humanity when it comes to rapid global warming and climate disruption. For humanity and animals, our survival depends on agriculture – not the Greenland ice sheet. Global climate catastrophe is already tipping agriculture into decline – yet the critical tipping point is never mentioned. All focus should be on protecting agriculture. Even the IPCC climate model ensemble states that at 3°C, our agriculture goes into decline for all crops in all regions. Even so, these ultra-conservative IPCC models do not capture approximately half of the adverse impacts. The IPCC makes the mistake of plotting crop yield change against transient temperature change rather than the full, long-term temperature change. 3°C is deadly. Therefore 2°C is deadly, because a global average temperature increase of 2ºC, along with carbon feedbacks, will lead to 3ºC. This is what makes the Arctic climate feedbacks so critical to understand. Further acceleration of global warming, coupled with the warming the planet is already committed to, sets us on a path to a certain extinction event for humanity.

A growing number of concerned scientists are now calling for urgent action to be taken on reducing methane emissions, recognizing that methane has, by far a greater and more immediate effect on the speed of temperature rise than CO2. In a world of open minds, these emissions could be dealt with in a far easier and far more expedient manner. Unfortunately, if history is any indication, instead of embracing positive change, our minds will deny the need for it – having swallowed the corporate philosophy that “personal rights trump environment” no matter what – no matter what such rights destroy in our shared environment and no matter what such rights destroy in our children’s increasingly bleak, dark future.

Turning a Blind Eye to Unintended but Entirely Predictable Consequences

Instead of realizing and embracing an opportunity for cleaner water, cleaner air and healthier bodies, we would rather risk the onslaught of new viruses cropping up due to our grossly inhumane treatment of animals. Nature has come back to bite us with foot-and-mouth disease, bird flu, avian influenza (with cases reported in the Jeolla and Chungcheong provinces of Korea caused by H5N1 virus), mad cow disease, and all other diseases related to over-consumption of meat by humans. In January 2011 it was reported that South Korea was burying thousands of pigs alive due to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. As many as 34,000 pigs have been killed in a single day. Not to mention health issues related to growth hormones and antibiotics. In the US, an estimated 70 percent of all antibiotics are fed to pigs, chickens, and cattle. American livestock consumes eight times the amount of antibiotics that humans do.

Meat production has increased a staggering 500 percent since 1950 to meet the ever-expanding demand. Factory farms supply 43 percent of the world’s cows and more than half of the world’s pigs and chickens for consumption. So ugly is the industry that we keep it behind closed doors, leaving the dehumanizing task for the most exploited workforce, the immigrant workforce. We do not use the language of the animals; rather we use palatable words that diminish the reality – beef, pork and poultry.

As well, the livestock industry is a primary contributor to deforestation. Since 1970, twenty million hectares (50 million acres) of tropical forest in Latin America have been cut down for livestock production. Meat production’s environmental toll on wilderness destruction, soil erosion, energy waste, and pollution is of such unbelievable scale and magnitude, it can be difficult to comprehend. Yet, it is barely even discussed let alone acted upon.

More False Solutions

In 2011, the giant agribusiness corporation Cargill announced its plan for a bacteria-based system to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous released into a river by its Fort Morgan, Colorado beef processing facility. Consider that Cargill corporation saw its profits soar 86% during the worst of the 2008 food crisis – tallying more than $1 billion in the second quarter of 2008 alone. During this same time, pesticide and seed seller Monsanto doubled its earnings. False solutions do not address the root cause of problems – they only add sensational profits to the bottom line of the corporations. Cargill’s bacteria system is certain to be a test-run for global distribution and patents. Destruction + pollution = corporate profit. Corporations serve to further enhance and expand their portfolios by effectively obtaining/creating government contracts that “clean up” the very destruction and environmental degradation they create. Climate degradation and climate-change-induced disasters will prove to be the ultimate shock doctrine for corporate profit.

And while our corporatized society dangerously distracts itself – by developing false-solution technologies and seeking grant money for further studies – the real issues, the root causes, remain unresolved. In Canada, rather than addressing the root of the problem – the massive environmental degradation and methane resulting from factory farmed pigs – the University of Guelph, heavily funded with corporate dollars, has created a genetically engineered “enviropig.”

An accepted example of the status quo “solution” is recycling. We neglect to critically examining the root cause – which is the production of the waste in the first place. We reject real solutions such as cradle to cradle life cycle analysis and zero waste/zero emissions (ZERI) concept principles, coupled with legislation that would demand that we achieve zero waste. Rather, we recycle. Yet, even if 100% of all private households in the US recycled 100% of their solid waste, this would add up to 1% of all the solid waste produced in the US. [20] This is what happens when you have the world’s largest waste management systems funding big greens such as Rockefeller’s lovechild, WWF. Of course, only if we evolve to a level of enlightenment where we are able to separate our wants from our needs while flat out rejecting consumerism and green capitalism, even meticulously critiqued production will fail us.

Next: Part IV:

• Today
• Compromised Science | Serving the Propaganda Machine
• The Seafloor is Teaming with Recently Discovered Life – A Vital Component of Earth’s Carbon Cycle that Governs Climate
• Coconut Revolution
• While We Sleep | Corporate Greed – How to Create a Market
• Crimestop

Cory Morningstar is climate justice activist whose recent writings can be found on Canadians for Action on Climate Change and The Art of Annihilation site where you can read her bio. You can follow her on Twitter: @elleprovocateur

References | Part III:

[14] Sustainable Development: ConocoPhillips: “Our company has been working on natural gas hydrate extraction technology since 2003 and is dedicating significant research and development resources to a field trial on Alaska’s North Slope. This well will be drilled to gain scientific knowledge and test a patented production technology which was developed by ConocoPhillips and the University of Bergen (Norway). ConocoPhillips and the University have been developing this technology since 2003. This trial represents the first experiment outside a laboratory of this production technology in which a carbon dioxide molecule is exchanged for the methane molecule locked up in the hydrate’s structure. The methane gas is produced, and the carbon dioxide is sequestered inside the hydrate structure. Methane hydrates hold a significant potential to supply the world with clean fossil fuel.  This trial is an important step in developing a promising production technology to access this potential and ultimately to produce methane from gas hydrates while sequestering carbon dioxide.”

[15] The formation of methane hydrates takes a very long time, so they cannot be considered as a renewable energy source: the present deposits have probably been formed over a period of several million years (Davie, M. K., and B. A. Buffett, A numerical model for the formation of gas hydrate below the seafloor, J. Geophys. Res., 106, 497–514, 2001)

[16] Further information presented on 30 November – 2 December 2010 in Washington, US, by leading scientists Natalia Shakhova (University of Alaska, Fairbanks, International Arctic Research Centre, USA) and Igor Semiletov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Far Eastern Branch, Pacific Oceanological Institute, Vladivostok, Russia) is briefly as follows: 80% of the total area of sub-sea permafrost is in the East Siberia Arctic Shelf (ESAS) with shallow hydrates underlain in more than 80% of the ESAS area. Observational data suggest 80% of the ESAS sea floor serves as a source of methane to the water column. Arctic warming affects the ESAS the strongest: Observed warming on the ESAS is the strongest in the entire Arctic and the region is now 5°C warmer compared with average springtime temperatures registered during the 20th century. During the last two decades areas of flaw polynyas in the ESAS increased 5 times (flaw polynyas allow atmospheric methane emissions during the ice-covered period). One additional factor serving to enhance permafrost destabilization in the ESAS has been the warming of bottom water – up to 3°C during the last three decades. Considering the significance of the ESAS methane reservoir and enhancing mechanism of its destabilization, this region should be considered the most potential in terms of possible climate change caused by abrupt release of methane.

[17] D Nicolsky and N Shakhova, Modeling sub-sea permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf: the Dmitry Laptev Strait: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/1/015006/

[18] Together, the top six big greens in the US received nearly $2.1 billion in total revenue from all sources in 2008. But not to worry, the average of $160 million per group that was government funded using your tax dollars wasn’t critical to the financial health of the six. This is just a drop in the bucket in the elitist non-profit industrial complex; Frederic Krupp, President of Environmental Defense Fund, $496,17; Cater Roberts, President of World Wildlife Fund, $486,394; Frances Beinecke, President of Natural Resources Defense Council, $432,959; David Yarnold, Executive Director of Environmental Defense Fund, $365,773; David Festa, V.P. West Coast Environmental Defense Fund, $360,872; Stephanie Meeks, Acting President of Nature Conservatory, $349,873; Larry Schweiger, President, National Wildlife Federation, $345,004; Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, $335,099; Roger Shlickeisen, President, Defenders of Wildlife, $312,896; William Meadows, President, The Wilderness Society, $308,465.

[19] The United Nations FAO calculates the total greenhouse gas emissions attributed to livestock to be 18%: The FAO states that “livestock-related deforestation as reported from, for example, Argentina is excluded ” from its GHG accounting. Second, the FAO omits farmed fish from its definition of livestock and so fails to count GHGs from their life cycle and supply chain. It also omits GHG emissions from portions of the construction and operation of marine and land-based industries dedicated to handling marine organisms destined to feed livestock (up to half the annual catch of marine organisms). Read a further explanation on why the UN calculation is lower here.

[20] C & J Plant (1991). Green business: hope or hoax. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers.

Further Reading:

A Killer in Our Midst | http://www.killerinourmidst.com/

Only Zero Carbon | http://www.onlyzerocarbon.org/

Videos:

Media Education Foundation | http://www.mediaed.org/

An investigative report. [Part 1: http://bit.ly/fV8slf | Part II: http://bit.ly/gMITca ]

By Cory Morningstar

Part II

Post Cancún: North America. The New Energy Kingdom

On 13 December 2010 directly following the disastrous Cancún conference (“one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War” [10]), a revealing post is found on the “oilprice.com” website. The article is titled North America: The New Energy Kingdom. From the article: “Beyond shale oil and shale gas, there’s the awesome energy promise of methane hydrates, frozen crystals of water and gas that lie beneath the northern permafrost and beneath oceans floors around the world in quantities that boggle the imagination.”

“Assuming 1 per cent recovery,” the US Geological Survey says, “these deposits [in US territory] could meet the natural gas needs of the country (at current rates of consumption) for 100 years.” The obstructionist corporate-colluded states – the ones responsible for climate change in the first place – have no intention of going to zero carbon in the single decade as direly warned by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) in 2009 – what is necessary for the world to avoid reaching and exceeding a global catastrophic 2ºC. They have no intention of going to zero, ever, until the Earth is literally drilled to death – or we annihilate humanity. Whichever comes first.

NASA Has Known All Along

As we work like the busy little worker proles we are, amusing ourselves with irrelevant trivia and nonsense, the global power structures that form the plutocracy have long understood our future demise at the expense of an insatiable economy – and have kept silent. In a 2007 NASA report titled Methane Hydrates: More Than a Viable Aviation Fuel Feedstock Option, NASA unequivocally states that it is not a matter of if the methane from hydrates escapes, rather it is only a matter of when: “The unabated release of methane sequestered in these hydrates could impact the planet to the point of extinction of life as we understand it. Considering the predicted Earth thermal events, the stability of methane hydrates, and the impact of methane on the environment, the question is not will this methane be released, but when. It is suggested in this report that enhanced efforts be placed on a comprehensive program to locate, assess, and recover the sequestered methane at surface levels to meet the energy demand rather than permitting natural release into the environment.” The report later states, “Still, the world energy producers and consumers are encouraged to turn to the Sun and learn to capture, store, condition, and transmit that energy to meet energy needs and to maintain planetary stability.” Fat chance. Corporations would only be interested in the sun if they could drill it.

Blinded by Addiction: Methane Hydrates – The Oil of the Future

The OECD originated in 1948 as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). In the early 1990s, intergovernmental negotiations soon transformed the vision of prevention into a more restricted mitigation/adaptation agenda. By 1992 it is clear that influential interest groups and powerful institutions had become heavily involved in the negotiations, including the OECD, OPEC countries, oil-importing developing nations and private industry/corporations. The OECD has been heavily criticized by several civil society groups as well as developing states. The main criticism has been the narrowness of the OECD on account of its limited membership to a select few wealthy states. [11]

An unclassified document was prepared in May 2003 by the OECD and the International Energy Agency (IEA) Secretariats at the request of the Annex I Expert Group on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The acknowledgements cite Cédric Philibert at the IEA who prepared the document while thanking the US’s Jonathan Pershing for the information, comments and ideas he provided.

From the unclassified document: Technology Innovation, Development and Diffusion – OECD/IEA Information Paper:

“No technology currently exists to use this enormous energy resource. Depressurisation, thermal stimulation and solvent injection are possible candidates for commercial exploitation – but a prerequisite would be to develop tools for identifying and characterising concentrated deposits. If a technology were to be developed, it could have, with respect to climate change, a kind of Janus’ double face. On the one hand, it could prolong the era of fossil fuels and ultimately add a supplementary 10 000 Pg of carbon into the atmosphere (on top of the 5 000 Pg from the combustion of the currently known fossil resource base). Absent associated developments of CO2 capture and storage technologies, such uses would imply an increase in atmospheric concentrations of up to 20-fold (substantially higher than the seven-fold increase projected with full combustion of current resources). On the other hand, such developments could stimulate the near-term replacement of coal and oil.” [Gas hydrates may contain three orders of magnitude more methane than exists in today's atmosphere. Because hydrate breakdown, causing release to the atmosphere, can be related to global temperature increases, gas hydrates may play an even more important role in global climate change.]

The introduction within this document correctly identifies that only zero carbon can stabilize our planet: “… the ultimate objective of the UN Convention on Climate Change: ‘stabilising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.’ Such an achievement is likely to eventually require near elimination of CO2 emissions. Without radical changes in lifestyles, only a massive deployment of carbon-free (or close to carbon-free) energy technologies can power the world economy and satisfy growing energy needs, especially of the developing world, while making stabilisation sustainable over the long term.”  Yet, the authors of this document cite the solution of “new technologies” as playing the critical role in achieving the UN objective of avoiding dangerous atmospheric interference — outlining pages of false solutions that will continue to line the bank vaults of corporate powers and keep the power structures intact.

The truth that few wish to acknowledge is that a radical change in our economic system must be the imperative central role and task of this ultimate objective, along with the existing clean, safe, renewable technologies we already possess – the ones that serve to benefit citizens throughout the world with energy independence but which are the greatest threat to the very foundation of corporate powers. A further truth is that we are already beyond dangerous climate interference in the climate system – made clear by John Holdren in 2006.

The OECD report says “without radical changes in lifestyles” – omitting the fact that the wealthiest 15% are responsible for 75% of global emissions. The remaining 85% of humanity emit only 25% of all emissions while the poorest 3 billion emit essentially nothing. Such brilliant tactics using language and framing have been essential in ensuring that current power structures remain unthreatened. Such tactics have thus far succeeded in keeping global citizens in the dark by essentially employing “big green” co-opted NGOs who reverberate the same messages and language. These co-opted groups serve their vital purpose – to successfully lend the illusion of democracy, which is critical in ensuring the public is kept passive, thereby ensuring the system will not be threatened in any meaningful way. The message is consistent and repetitive: place the emphasis on the individual, frame the climate issue around false solutions of green consumerism and symbolic actions, keep the dialogue successfully away from the root causes of climate change – thereby ensuring business as usual and uninterrupted profits.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), who wrote the unclassified document mentioned above:

• Fossil fuels account for almost 90% of the growth in energy demand between now and 2030. Energy trade between regions more than doubles by 2030, most of it still in the form of oil.
• Global emissions grow 62% between now and 2030.
• Global oil demand for transport increases very closely in line with GDP.
• World emissions increase by 1.8 % per year to 38 billion tonnes in 2030 – 70% above 2000 levels.

Make no mistake that world governments have no plans of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. Global emissions are set to soar and no one disputes this. A MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) video filmed in September 2010 showcasing the views of Shell and ExxonMobil executives begins with the statement: “But the truth is that a civilization is largely defined by the energy technologies they use.” If this is true, we can easily and truthfully define, at minimum, our own ethically bankrupt society 1) by the unconcealed disrespect for our Earth, which graciously sustains us; 2) as a society that commits and condones infanticide, genocide, ecocide and now progenycide; 3) as a society that condones occupations and invasions; 4) as a socially bankrupt society that easily exploits others with no empathy; and 5) as a society that places economic value over the value of life. In the film, a comment follows: ” … powering the planet we actually possess.” The narcissistic tendencies of those at the centre of the energy dialogue are spectacular beyond imagination.

Below: Shell promotional video. November 2010 (3:32). Shell Arctic Exploration Program. The Next Chapter in Alaska’s Oil and Gas History:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DciyZ05SExw&w=640&h=390]

Information not made public until July 18, 2007 in a working document by the National Petroleum Council’s Oil Shales and Hydrates Subgroup of the Technology Task Group of the NPC Committee on Global Oil & Gas Study showed that worldwide, only a few dozen boreholes have been drilled with most being drilled offshore Japan in 2004 and offshore India in 2006. [12][13] NPC further states that comprehensive reports of these campaigns are not in the public domain, so there is little public record available to assess the efficacy of exploration paradigms. NPC states it is unclear how much information from these tests will be made public.

Brief Timeline of Hydrate Drilling Development | Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil and Friends

In 1970, Soviet scientists discussed the possibility that methane hydrates could exist in large volumes in the earth’s crust. By 1972 methane hydrates were recovered from the Black Sea. Once the presence of global hydrates was confirmed and it was proven that the volume of gas was massive, the next question, for states and corporations, was how to exploit it. The US Geological Survey estimates that globally, there is twice as much methane trapped in hydrates as there is carbon in all the world’s conventional fossil fuels. One can imagine that the sheer volume of these hydrates would have had corporations with corporate-colluded governments salivating over the potential profits of what will become our species’ greatest assault and most reckless exploitation of our Earth to date.

1982: A US Department of Defense report states that following the discovery of massive hydrate deposits off the coast of Guatemala in 1982, the US Department of Energy (DOE), in collaboration with other organizations, embarked on a ten-year program to establish a foundation on methane hydrate science.

March 1995: Chemical Engineering News: Gas hydrates eyed as future energy source: “An icelike material that occurs in underground deposits all over the world and is composed largely of water and methane may turn out to be an unconventional energy source for the future – if scientists can find a way to tap it. Global deposits of this material, known as methane (or gas) hydrate, are estimated to contain twice as much carbon as all other fossil fuels on Earth. But tapping this enormous potential energy resource may not be as easy as drilling for oil or natural gas. Nevertheless, scientists and engineers are now beginning to develop strategies to exploit methane hydrate. And some of their ideas were aired in late February in Atlanta at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.”

Canada, Japan, India, and the United States launched ambitious research projects. Canada has led with university-driven research since 1985, focused mainly on the west coast and the Arctic.

In 1997, the US Department of Energy initiated a research program with intent of commercial production by 2015. In 2000, US Congress would authorize funding via the Methane Hydrate Research and Development Act of 2000. The Interagency Coordination Committee (ICC), a coalition of six government agencies, has been advancing research on several fronts. President Clinton signed the act, which authorized approximately $50 million over five years for research.

1998: Three very quiet research programs have also taken place over the last decade at the Mackenzie Delta at the Mallik research site. In 1998, led by leading climate obstructionist Canada along with Japan, the 1150 metre deep Mallik 2L-38 well was completed. For the first time, cores were brought to the surface from an Arctic methane hydrate. In 2002 the second phase of this research project commenced, this time with a country partnership: Canada, Japan, Germany, USA and India. Three additional wells were completed and the first production test was completed. This was the first time gas would be flared from a drilled hydrate. Canada conducted its efforts under its “New Canadian Gas Hydrate Research Program” supported by the Geological Survey of Canada. The Canadian gas hydrate program focused on the marine region around Vancouver Island and Arctic region around the Mackenzie Delta.

2000: The US government passed the Methane Hydrate Research and Development Act. The Act authorized the expenditure of $43 million over five years and directs the US Department of Energy in consultation with the US Geological Survey, the Minerals Management Service, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Commerce to commence basic and applied research to identify, explore, assess and develop methane hydrates as a source of energy.

2000: From the Gas Methane Hydrates – Research Status, Annoted Bibliography, and Energy Implications Final Report, prepared for the DoE: “Theoretically, it appears possible that a single explosive methane release, such as may occur with a large seafloor collapse event, could cause a significant climate change over a short time period.”

2002: This marketing video (posted on vimeo 12 June 2010) chronicles the Mallik 2002 gas hydrate research well program. The video is courtesy of the Japan National Oil Corporation Technology Research Center (JNOCTRC) and the Geological Survey of Canada.

2002: The US Department of Energy and BP Exploration (Alaska), Inc. (BPXA), in cooperation with the US Geological Survey (USGS), initiated a research program on Alaska North Slope (ANS) methane hydrates.

2002-2006: Gulf of Mexico Bush Hill Project: The project consisted of two field expeditions having the acronym GHOST to research methane gas hydrates at and near the seafloor in the northern Gulf of Mexico. The first of two research cruises took place June 6-14, 2002 aboard the R/V Seward Johnson. Two sites, Green Canyon 185 (Bush Hill) and Green Canyon 234, were selected for study based on their well-mapped and well-characterized shallow gas hydrate outcrops.

The USGS estimates about 2.4Tm³ (85Tcf; 15Bboe) of undiscovered, technically recoverable gas resources within gas hydrates in Alaska. The area is mostly Federal, State, and Native lands covering 145,000 km² (the equivalent of some 25 North Sea quadrants). Photo: OilEdge.com

US Department of Defense

“The worldwide distribution of this energy resource has the potential for changing the balance of power.” – Brad Tomer, Department of Defense “Future Energy Resources” Workshops, May 2003

17 December 2003: The US Department of Defense (DOD) brings forth major recommendations from a workshop series: 1) That the DOD immediately conduct an in-depth study to identify the S&T (science and technology) and later the R&D (research and development) needed to assure that its future fuel and energy needs are met. The report states: “In this regard, consideration should be given to establish a position in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy that would be responsible for future DOD energy needs. This position would report directly to the Secretary of Defense and would coordinate with the energy and fuel offices in the individual services and with the office of the Secretary of Energy. The results of the in-depth DOD study would be reported to the Secretary of Defense, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and the Secretary of Energy with the necessary information upon which to establish future programs.”

During the early 1990s it was recognized that more organic carbon is stored within hydrates than is present in all the world’s coal, oil and non-hydrate natural gas combined. The DOD report states that “Concerns were raised on the linkage of hydrate deposits to catastrophic instability of continental shelves and to the lack of understanding of the global carbon cycle. These preliminary findings also raised the question on the role of periodic and massive dissociation of methane from hydrates over geologic time in affecting the earth’s climate.” A structuring of a program plan was formulated from two workshops conducted by DOE in 1998 and 2000 with the Gulf of Mexico having been a focal point for extensive studies in partnership with industries such as ChevronTexaco, Schlumberger, Conoco Phillips and Halliburton. USGS, Center for Marine Resources and Environmental Technology (CMRET) and Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) were principal participants in this study. The other focal point in the Arctic fields, in collaboration with an international partnership, has been directed to drilling and tests at the Mallik well in the Mackenzie Delta of Canada.

Within the DOD report it is identified that energy corporations are short-term focused, as evidenced in the declining corporate support on energy research during the last decade. Any investment in research is driven only by expectations of short-term returns or prevention of losses in monetary profits. Investments made by Anadarko and BP on the North Slope of Alaska in pursuit of exploiting methane hydrates resulted from the Mallik well project in Canada and the US market for natural gas. A so-called “gas bubble” during the decade between 1985 and 1995 when it is said that an excess of natural gas on the market stabilized the gas price at $1.60 per thousand cubic feet (106 BTU), rapidly accelerated from 1996 to 1999 increasing to $2.35. It continued to increase during 2000 to an average price of $3.72, the price at the time of the Department of Defense workshop. And consider this – while the Earth burns, ecosystems collapse, species are decimated and people die – oil companies’ profits skyrocket. In 2007, the combined profits of Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips skyrocketed to $123.9 billion. In 2008, Exxon Mobil alone posted a record $45.2 billion profit. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens are left to pay for the phenomenal externalized costs ( oil-related health and environmental damage) – in the range of $232 billion annually. The United Nations reported that in 2008 the world’s largest corporations caused $2.2 trillion dollars’ worth of environmental damage. If these corporations were not able to externalize these costs by way of destroying and poisoning the natural environment, at least one-third of their profits would be lost. 

These are perfect examples of the fact that within the corporate world, where quarterly profits are sacrosanct, a simple pollution tax – to be taxed at the source – would effectively force the energy markets to transition to clean renewable technologies almost overnight. Remember – for corporations it is only the quarterly profits that matter – little else.   

Unfortunately we no longer have governments of the people – but rather governments of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation.  The US president may, for all illusionary purposes, be a man with the brand name of “Obama” – but he is certainly not the one pulling the strings in the greatest puppet show on Earth.

June 2004: The American Geological Institute, Tapping methane hydrates in the Gulf: “For decades, oil companies have punched through large deposits of icy hydrocarbons in the Gulf of Mexico to reach the regular oil and gas deposits that sit below them. Starting this fall, after some delays, an industry-government effort will finally begin to examine those methane hydrate deposits more carefully — for their stability during drilling and their potential as a future energy source…. Funded largely by DOE [US Department of Energy], the interdisciplinary project was first broached in August 2000. ChevronTexaco organized the research in 2001, and now more than half a dozen companies and agencies participate, including Japan National Oil Company, Halliburton, India’s Reliance Industries and TotalFinaElf.” [August, 2010: The Energy Vampires: "The global elite know that energy is paramount to life. Control over energy means control over people. Four giant companies are now making a play to own not just all the oil, but virtually all energy sources on the planet. Royal Dutch/Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco & BP Amoco."]

March 2005: An International Association of Drilling Contractors paper in reference to a the methane discussion at a conference in 2004: “To achieve the longterm goals of the US Federal Government in regard to energy supplies of the US, the Department of Energy (DOE) is committed to developing the knowledge and technology base to allow commercial production of methane from domestic hydrates deposits by the year 2015…. Under changing geological conditions hydrates can dissociate and be released gradually or explosively depending on how rapidly the pressure drops or on how the temperature increases. The magnitude of this previously unknown global storehouse of methane is staggering and has raised serious inquiries….”

The Mt. Elbert-01 stratigraphic test well, Milne Point Unit on the North Slope of Alaska, collected the first open-hole formation pressure response data in a gas hydrate reservoir. This test and reservoir simulations are some of the first steps that could lead to production of hydrate reservoirs. Photo: Tim Collett, USGS | OilEdge.com

February 2007: Petroleum News: “BP-operated Mount Elbert well confirms presence of gas hydrate accumulation and enables coring and testing of gas hydrate zone. A joint government, industry and university team investigating gas hydrate deposits under Alaska’s North Slope hit the jackpot in mid-February, when the BP-operated Mount Elbert stratigraphic test well successfully penetrated several hundred feet of hydrate bearing sandstone at Milne Point. The first ever retrieval of North Slope gas hydrate well cores and the second ever test anywhere in the world of the pressure response of gas hydrates.” The US DOE funded the $4.6 million test well. Due to the extraordinary amounts of hydrate, US Congress has taken a big interest in funding research, authorizing more than $200 million in spending since 2000.

2007 and 2008: Japan (JOGMEC) and Canada (NRCan) returned to the Mallik site to initiate a new testing program that focused on a full scale production draw down test. The 2007 tests were the world’s first gas production from exploiting methane hydrate.

Forbes 29 August 2008: Energy’s Most Dangerous Game: “Welcome to the final frontier in fossil fuels, the wild card in climate change theories and the dark horse in the scramble to secure access to clean energy. Meet methane hydrates, the world’s most promising and perilous energy resource…. A substantial amount of evidence suggests that weakening the lattice-like structure of gas hydrates has triggered underwater landslides on the continental margin. In other words, the extraction process, if done improperly, could cause sudden disruptions on the ocean floor, reducing ocean pressure rates and releasing methane gas from hydrates. A mass release of methane into the sea and atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences on the pace of climate change. More than 50 million years ago, undersea landslides resulted in the release of methane gas from methane hydrate, which contributed to global warming that lasted tens of thousands of years. ‘Methane hydrate was a key cause of the global warming that led to one of the largest extinctions in the earth’s history,’ Ryo Matsumoto, a professor at the University of Tokyo who has spent 20 years researching the subject, told Bloomberg in December.”

12 November 2008: USGS Director Mark Myers states that gas hydrates research has been going on for more than 25 years.

March 2008: The Mallik 5L-38 test produced the world’s first gas flare of methane from a hydrate reservoir. The test lasted six days producing 13,000 m³ of gas.

Photo: 2006-08 Canada-Japan Mallik Project - located in the Canadian Arctic off the Mackenzie Delta. Photo: OilEdge.com

2010: A small army of representatives from universities, scientists, oil executives and others write the 2005-page book titled Realizing the Energy Potential of Methane Hydrate for the United States. It includes a project summary table.

In 2010 “big green” organization WWF identifies on their website the fact that the extraction of methane hydrates from the Arctic region for energy use is banned by Arctic governments unless a comprehensive and verifiable legal agreement is in place to restrict their use to replace high carbon fuels like coal.

Video below (2010 | 0:55) created by PolarTREC teacher Bill Schmoker onboard the International Continental Shelf Survey. This was the first piston core that returned a gas hydrate sample in the core cutter. The hydrate was about 20 feet beneath the sea floor:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUluhIa-hzA&w=480&h=390]

Warnings

One of the largest landslides in Earth’s history occurred not on land, but underwater, off the coast of Norway during the Holocene epoch approximately 8,200 years ago. This event, known as the Storegga (big edge) Submarine Landslide, caused massive amounts of sediments to slide approximately 800 kilometres down the continental slope. This event triggered a massive tsunami, as high as 25 meters, that struck both Norway and Scotland. Afterwards, the seafloor was wiped clean of all life. Scientists suspect that the entire disaster happened in a very short time – a few weeks or perhaps a few days. Perhaps two hours. At the time of the Storegga slide, the hydrate was being melted by global warming. An earthquake possibly triggered the slide. More recently, in 1998, Russian scientists discovered an unstable hydrate field near the site of the Storegga slide. Scientists believe that a rapid decomposition of hydrates, related to temperature and pressure changes at the end of the last ice age, destabilized the sediments, causing the disaster. Methane hydrates should be considered as nature’s cement foundations. A frozen hydrate that cements sediments together – vital if you wish to keep ecosystems and lands intact. When you remove the methane hydrate, the seafloor destabilizes. Marine geologist James Kennett of the University of California suggests that bursts of methane from seafloor hydrates were synchronous with, and largely responsible for, virtually all the warmings the planet has experienced over the last 800,000 years. Other scientists suggest that changes in ocean currents triggered such methane bursts by channeling warmer water over continental slopes, as at Storegga.

A research paper published 21 June 2010 warns of a massive methane release triggered by seafloor erosion offshore near southwestern Japan: “Vast amounts of methane hydrate exist beneath continental margins, but whether this methane releases from sediment on a large scale and affects the oceans and atmosphere remains unclear. Analysis of newly acquired three-dimensional seismic images and drilling data from a large gas hydrate province reveal a recently eroded v-shaped depression. The depression sharply cuts through a relic bottom simulating reflection (BSR) and hydrate-laden sediments. The shape of the relic BSR indicates that the seafloor depression was once a large anticline that has recently been eroded and released an estimated 1.51 × 10¹¹ m³ of methane. We hypothesize that erosion of the seafloor via bottom-water currents unroofed buoyant hydrate-laden sediments and subhydrate overpressured free gas zones beneath the anticline. Once triggered, gas-driven erosion created a positive feedback mechanism, releasing gas and eroding hydrate-bearing sediment. We suggest that erosive currents in deep-water methane hydrate provinces act as hair triggers, destabilizing kilometer-scale swaths of the seafloor where large concentrations of underlying overpressured methane exist. Our analysis suggests that kilometer-scale degassing events are widespread, and that deep-water hydrate reservoirs can rapidly release methane in massive quantities.”

2010-2011

By 2010 internet searches for the word “methane” are quietly exposing the very silent discussions, papers and investment data on the quietly emerging topic of drilling methane hydrates. No longer surprising, the most lethal component of climate change is now being viewed by multinational corporations and corporate-colluded governments as the ultimate in potential climate wealth. Most recently, in a bid to shore up its precarious energy security, Japan is to start commercial test drilling for frozen methane gas along its coast early this year. (Japan’s trade ministry has requested a budget of $105.6 million (US) for the drilling.) The issue is barely controversial as few are hardly aware of it. A corporate consortium led by the Japanese government including Japan Oil and Gas and Metals National Corporation (Jogmec) will be sinking several wells off Japan’s southeastern coast to assess the commercial viability of extracting gas from frozen methane. Surveys suggest Japan has enough methane hydrate for 100 years at the current rate of usage. Tokyo plans to start commercial output of methane hydrates by 2018.

UNEP Climbs in Bed with Shell and EDF Energy

25 February 2010: United Nations Environment Programme announces the “UNEP Global Outlook on Methane Gas Hydrates” initiative: “UNEP/GRID-Arendal, a collaborating center of the United Nations Environment Programme, announces the launch of a new initiative dedicated with bringing to the attention of the general public, the media and decision makers the latest knowledge research and development being conducted in relation to occurrences of methane gas hydrates.” On March 4 and 5, 2010, 24 delegates from Norway, the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, Korea and India, representing government, academia, industry and the NGO community, gathered at the offices of UNEP/GRID-Arendal in Arendal, Norway to discuss the development of the Global Outlook on Methane Gas Hydrates. Who was representing the NGO community?  It was the consultant and former director of the WWF Arctic. In the 2007 Report to Congress, Richard Charter, representative of NGO Defenders of Wildlife, is listed as a member of the Methane Hydrate Advisory Committee.

Highlights of key decisions made by the steering committee in the first UNEP meeting held in March 2010 include:

• Engage with and include environmental NGOs and the media early on in the process.

• Develop a FAQ section that can be used both for marketing purposes and as a volume guide.

• Develop project material toolkits based on the different target audiences (government and industry toolkit, media toolkit, NGO toolkit, education system toolkit)

• General consensus is that a broad spectrum of the expert community needs to be engaged in the process to ensure its robustness to scrutiny.

August 2010: UNEP: “Expertise from 7 national research groups (US, Canada, Germany, Norway, Japan, India, Korea), industry (Statoil, Schlumberger) and NGOs (Forum for the Future) has been assembled to guide the development of the report. As a first milestone, a project website has now been launched.” So while your favourite big green NGO continues the symbolic echoing that “we need to work harder than ever!” (never telling us the truth of what we really must do or achieve – or how much time we have to do so), and while your favourite big green works to convince you that you merely need to keep hoping, while using other strategic language that is meaningless in the face of climate catastrophe – “Forum of the Future” NGOs are and will be partnered with “some of the best-known brands in the world” including giants like Royal Dutch Shell, EDF energy and many others. [The late Godfrey Rockefeller (1924-2010) was the WWF Executive Director. Godfrey Rockefeller played a vital role in the founding and creation of WWF, which has become the wealthiest "conservation" group in the world.]

January 2011: Canada’s Globe and Mail reports the UN Environment Program describes methane hydrates as “the most abundant form of organic carbon on Earth.”

Sampled and inferred gas hydrates occur world wide in oceanic sediment of continental margins and in permafrost regions. Inferred gas hydrates are from bottom simulating reflectors (BSRs) on seismic profiles. The Mt. Elbert and Mallik test sites are located at the top of the map. ©USGS | Photo: OilEdge.com

Burn Baby Burn

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences….” – Sir Winston Churchill

Countries have been exploring how to exploit methane hydrates for years, some for decades. These countries include: Russia (1969), U.S. (DoE has sponsored some research on methane hydrate since at least 1982), Canada (1985), Japan (1995), New Zealand (1997), Germany (2000), Chile (2001), South Korea (2000), Ireland (2003), China (2004), Mexico (2004), Taiwan (2004) and India (2006). United Kingdom, Norway and France also are participating in hydrate methane research though it appears they are not focusing on exploration. China and South Korea are seeking to develop the extraction technology, and each is now exploring the mining of methane hydrates from their own sea beds. In 2010, at a cost of $37 million, South Korea hired a deep-water drilling ship to sink 32 holes in a sea basin south of the Dokdo Islands, which are disputed with Japan. Japan has spent more than $260 million since 2001 on research into methane hydrates.

Recently (17 October 2009), Beijing (AsiaNews) reported that a huge methane reservoir was discovered under the tundra of Tibet. A representative of the Chinese Ministry for Land and Resources stated “The secret to energy independence for China is hidden, opening up the road to environmentally sustainable development without oil,” adding “Under the ice of Tibet and Qinghai our geologists have found the largest underground reservoir of methane hydrates. Immediately after the announcement, the Shanghai market witnessed the value of the energy company shares sky rocket.”

A recent study of the Indian continental margin has confirmed the presence of methane hydrates in four offshore basins. They found one of the richest methane hydrate accumulations yet documented as well as the thickest and deepest methane hydrate stability zone near the Andaman Islands, both in the Bay of Bengal.

The US Department of Energy is spending at minimum $12 million to help ConocoPhillips test an experimental extraction technique on Alaska’s North Slope, which will incorporate the false solution of CCS (carbon capture and storage, as with shale drilling, has already proven to be a spectacular failure). Although these Arctic hydrates could become commercially viable as soon as 2015, the US and corporations are currently enjoying massive profits from shale gas (fracking) on the backs of poisoning the people. In 2009, US available natural gas resources increased by 11 percent due to shale gas mining – the biggest single-year jump in history. But, as history shows, corporate greed is unapologetic, deadly and insatiable and the thirst to dominate this industry will soon rear its ugly head.

In 2009 Russia warned of war within a decade over “Arctic oil and gas riches”. In Canada, the Harper minority government has the propaganda machine working overtime, selling the lie of “Climate Prosperity” to Canadian citizens while investing 16 billion tax dollars to friends at Lockheed Martin for F-35 stealth fighter jets. Will Korea and Iran be the next Iraq and Afghanistan – to be decimated and occupied under imperialist countries such as US and Canada? Will Japan and South Korea go to war over the disputed Dokdo Islands? Future wars over waters that hold methane hydrates, in the midst of a global water crisis, are not implausible. The Caspian Sea (a basin) is a land-locked body of salt water bordered by Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. Not only does it harbour oil reserves (that could exceed $5 trillion, according to some estimates), the sea also holds massive amounts of natural gas (up to 325 trillion cubic feet) as well as an immense amount of methane hydrates. The dangers of drilling in the Caspian Sea have been made clear.

Naïveté is Deadly

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – Lord Acton

A scientific paper on methane hydrates in the Caspian Sea was prepared for presentation at the Offshore Technology Conference (Houston, Texas US, 6-9 May 2002) using Chevron’s internal reports and samples from 1998. From the report: “The gas hydrates of the South Caspian region prove to be widespread features of the deepwater of the South Caspian Sea, buried deposits well beneath the seafloor, and accordingly, they may represent significant and previously underestimated geo-hazards….From a structural viewpoint, the Absheron gas hydrates appear to control a large (~200 m2) zone of recent and possibly ongoing deformation on the continental slope of the South Caspian Sea. Such attributes make these gas hydrates important, and perhaps previously underestimated, geohazards of the South Caspian region. Primary among these are uncontrolled release of free gas trapped beneath the hydrate seal, or disruption of the gas hydrate stability field leading to either explosive dissociation of the gas hydrate, or reduction in sediment strength, slope instability, and mass sediment transport. Association of gas hydrates with active mud volcanoes in the South Caspian Sea increases the potential for offshore flaming eruptions, as attested to in historical records.”

There was a reason why the Cancún set of “agreements” was nothing more than an agreement to do nothing. Melting permafrost and venting methane hydrates – the greatest accelerating threat to all life on Earth – are seen to those blinded by stupidity, greed and psychopathic tendencies as nothing less than the ultimate climate wealth jackpot with global warming having opened up the Arctic.

Burn baby burn. Keep raping and pillaging our Earth to burn ever more earth-locked hydrocarbons as we apparently have not suffered enough to learn. And as we continue to burn the fossil fuels, burn with them the dreams of the children of those most vulnerable whose lives will be annihilated for short-term monetary wealth. The insanity is breathtaking.

Lying hundreds of metres below the sea and deeper still below sediments, frozen methane gas is exceedingly difficult and extremely dangerous to extract as the pressure is enormous. If Japan “succeeds,” it will have a massive impact, equivalent to the use of shale gas now being witnessed in the United States.

Global fossil fuel subsidies amount to hundreds of billions of dollars per year ($558 billion in 2008 – the year of the stealthily planned financial  crisis). To be clear, our corporate-controlled states have no intention of abandoning fossil fuels. On the contrary – in brilliant stealth – they have plans to expand fossil fuels even further. No one plans on stopping them. In contrast, union workers, citizens and activists who challenge corporate profit and power in developing countries are brutally assassinated – by the hundreds.

Without a mobilization of unparalleled magnitude to a zero carbon economy in greenhouse gas-emitting developed states such as the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia – within years, not decades – the world will not avoid a catastrophic 2ºC rise in global average temperature. It’s that simple. Nature will not compromise nor negotiate these terms.

Yes, Virginia – There is a Santa Claus | BP, A&M University and Corporate Media

“If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Barnays American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda. Combining ideas of crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Dr. Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious.

Drilling for frozen methane will undoubtedly destabilize the methane beds, which contain enough gas worldwide to diminish most complex life on our increasingly fragile Earth. Drilling methane will also undoubtedly result in landslides and advance devastation of marine life and stressed ecosystems. Further, drilling creates heat, which turns the frozen methane into gas, which will undoubtedly leak uncontrollably through the sea into our atmosphere. Such disasters will make the BP oil spill look like child’s play. After the 2010 BP oil spill, methane dead zones in the Gulf constituted gas levels as high as one million times normal.

Gulf shrimp make for exotic and quite intoxicating salad garnish now that they are self-oiling … and small miracles do appear in corporate media.  During this writing, corporate media have saturated mainstream media outlets with an anomaly – that all the methane has been eaten up by bacteria.

On 6 January 2011, the Washington Post publishes an article titled Bacteria devoured methane gas from gulf oil spill, scientists say. From the article: “Besides providing some good news for the gulf region, the finding has potential implications for climate change science, too. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and, as the earth warms, climate scientists worry that much more methane will be released from the oceans. ‘What this tells us is that natural releases of methane from the seafloor with similar characteristics will not make it up to the atmosphere, will not influence climate,’ Kessler says.” Kessler is a Texas A&M University oceanographer. Preliminary studies from both academia, including key work at Texas A&M working with and funded by industry, have supported the methane hydrate drilling project. Thomas Blasingame of Texas A&M University serves on the Methane Hydrate Advisory Committee – an Advisory Committee member to the Secretary of Energy in the US.

The fictionary has been scoured over for the most persuasive phrases and words – carefully chosen for maximum effect. Words and phrases such as ‘devoured’, ‘gobbled up’, ‘totally disappeared’, ‘incredible disappearing methane’, ‘massive microbial munching’, etc. The stealthily chosen list of words to appease all concern is endless. Corporate media has been unrelenting in pumping out falsehoods from both BP and the Obama administration that the Gulf of Mexico is safe from the effects of the BP oil disaster.

The impression is that ‘yes Virginia, miracles do happen and even the most destructive assaults on our natural environment are nothing to be concerned about’. BP’s disastrous oil spill is cleaned up – shiny and new.

Beyond such spin, the tragic state of the Gulf of Mexico is revealed by the oil and dispersants samplings on the Mississippi Coast. On 7 January 2011, federal and Louisiana officials took a boat tour of an area in southern Louisiana that remains contaminated with oil from the BP disaster. Barataria Bay is one such area where the oil continued to eat away at the fragile marshland. No cleanup crew could be found. Affected areas varied with some measuring up to 100 feet wide. “This is the biggest cover-up in the history of America,” Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told reporters. Nungesser was angered by the claims of the Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials present who claimed that a plan was under development to clean the area. “It’s like you’re in bed with BP,” Nungesser chided officials. “Don’t tell me I got a voice in the way you put together that crappy document … It ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on. That is bullshit.” Nungesser also told one of the federal officials, “You cover up for BP.”  And one could safely assume that many, including Stuart Smith, an internationally recognized attorney in New Orleans, believe that Nungesser is absolutely right. Smith’s opinion is that the NOAA Claims: “Gas-Gobbling” Bacteria Consumed Nearly All of the Estimated 200,000 Tons of Methane Spewed into Gulf – is mere junk science.

There is more.

Gregory Retallack a leading scientist with the University of Oregon (cited below) has been a leading voice on methane gases for decades suggesting that methane from below the seafloor produced a postapocalyptic greenhouse event that drained oxygen from the atmosphere, leaving animals gasping.

Now look at the instantaneous ‘about face’ below:

(From the article Methane Spill from the Deepwater Horizon Cleaned Up By Bacteria) “In April 2010, a drill column of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig hit a methane bubble, causing it to catch fire and sink, which allowed oil and gas to churn into the Gulf of Mexico for 83 days. Scientists predicted that the dissolved methane would stay in the gulf for years to come. But within four months, the methane had disappeared. John Kessler of Texas A&M University took three trips out to the gulf to find the methane, but made a discovery – he couldn’t find any substantial amount because it had been eaten by bacteria. The bacteria in question, aptly named methanotrophs, are able to use methane as their only source of energy. Kessler found millions of these bacteria, which appear to have eaten all of the methane from the spill. This discovery can tell us more about earth’s natural processes regarding methane bubbles that rise from the deep ocean. Methane naturally escapes from methane clathrates (cages of ice on the ocean floor) on a regular basis. If this methane, a potent greenhouse gas, got into the atmosphere, it could have serious negative effects on the climate. However, this gas does not appear to regularly reach the atmosphere, which Kessler attributes to these bacteria. Some researchers have hypothesized that this natural methane from clathrates might have played a major role in some of the great extinctions in Earth’s history, but this is seeming less and less plausible because of these new bacterial studies, according to Greg Retallack from the University of Oregon.”

The article ends with: These methane-eaters “have the ability to degrade over 300 other compounds,” according to Hazen, and can help clean-up efforts for methane contamination across the world.

In a separate article: “Some scientists have suggested that methane freed from clathrates could have contributed to the climate upheavals behind some of Earth’s greatest extinctions events, including the day when life nearly died – the Permian-Triassic extinction. * Greg Retallack from the University of Oregon initially backed this idea, but his mind has since changed. “I love this paper as it signals the final break with my long love affair with methane clathrate release as a cause of [the Permian-Triassic] mass extinction,” he says. “It seems that marine methane cannot even make it out of the ocean because it’s rapidly consumed there.” ** Richard Camilli, who has studied the Deepwater Horizon oil plume, agrees. He says that Kessler’s conclusions probably apply to natural methane leakages, as well as to other oil spills too. “[It] is likely to become a classic reference,” he says.

At the very end of the article under footnotes it states: ** It’s possible that the Permian-Triassic event might have involved methane in such large amounts that it “would have overwhelmed the methanotrophs capable of handling the small Gulf spill.” But Retallack can’t find enough methane clathrates in the ocean to account for such a large plume. He still thinks that methane was still involved in the Permian extinction but now he suspects it came from disturbed coal seams. [14]

The spin is intoxicating.

Such messages are not embraced by all scientists: “I despise that message—it’s blindly simplified,” says Ian MacDonald, a celebrated oceanographer at Florida State University. “The gulf is not all better now. We don’t know what we’ve done to it.” MacDonald’s views would be supported by scientific findings in December 2010, uncovered on an expedition led by David Hollander, marine geochemist at the University of South Florida. Such findings and opposing views are not just those of Hollander, but also of other independent scientists.

In the article published 13 January 2011 in The Nation titled The Search for BP’s Oil, Naomi Klein writes that in mid-December the joint government-BP body formed to oversee the spill response, released a fat report that seemed expressly designed to close the book on the disaster. Mike Utsler, BP’s Unified Area Commander, summed up its findings like this: “The beaches are safe, the water is safe, and the seafood is safe.” Klein reminds us that just four days prior, more than 8,000 pounds of tar balls were collected on Florida’s beaches —and that was an average day. Klein states by the end of 2010 investors were celebrating BP’s stock rebound. The corporation feeling so emboldened that it then revealed plans to challenge the official estimates of the amount of oil gushed out of its broken wellhead, claiming that the figures are as much as 50 percent too high. Klein reports that if BP succeeds, it could save the corporation as much as $10.5 billion in damages. Adding insult to injury the Obama administration has just given the go-ahead for sixteen deepwater drilling projects to resume in the gulf. Klein outlines the current state of the Gulf and the dire consequences of the gulf spill as conveyed by independent scientists here.

Klein states that “perhaps not coincidentally, the most outspoken scientists doing this research come from Florida and Georgia, coastal states that have so far managed to avoid offshore drilling. Their universities are far less beholden to Big Oil than, say, Louisiana State University, which has received tens of millions from the oil giants. Again and again these scientists have used their independence to correct the official record about how much oil is actually out there, and what it is doing under the waves.”

In the video below (2008 | 10:01) Roger Sassen from Texas A&M University tells us unequivocally that “when we run out of conventional oil and gas this [gas hydrate] is going to power the planet”. Sassen goes on to state, “I can’t escape from gas hydrate, it’s like my fate, my destiny at this point, I got to go along that road – I can’t escape from it.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-e5uGo-r1A&w=640&h=390]

Today, we have already reached the worst case scenario of the IPCC (IPCC 2007 AR4), which assumes that global CO2equivalent emissions (CO2e = CO2 + methane + nitrous oxide + halocarbons) will grow from the current level of about 40 billion tons CO2e per year to near 130 GtCO2e/year through the 21st century. The consequences of this IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios is a mean global temperature rise as high as 6.5°C by 2090-2099 relative to the period 1980-1999. However, the report takes only limited account of carbon cycle feedback effects and ice/water interaction feedback effects in raising global temperatures. It also acknowledges limited information regarding ice sheet melt and breakdown dynamics. Methane is excluded. The last time mean global temperatures reached 2-3°C above present levels, in the mid-Pliocene (3 million years ago) – an event associated with CO2 levels of about 400 ppm – polar regions were heated by nearly 8°C, and sea levels had risen by 25 metres relative to the present. This represents near-total melting of Greenland and West Antarctica Ice Sheets [Robinson et al, 2008, Pliocene role in assessing future climate impacts].

With large methane releases, most methane would reach the surface before bacteria could metabolize it. This is certainly what science tells us happened during the PETM extinction event 55 million years ago. And no magic wand appeared to create magical bacteria to eat the methane that caused such extinctions. Today, corporate forces using their furtive media techniques would like us to believe magic microbes can vapourize our stupidity. And all the corporate media reporting such wishful thinking will not make it so. The bacteria in the Arctic Ocean certainly do not appear to be as effective at gobbling up the methane that is now releasing into the atmosphere in the Arctic. Shall we cross our fingers that the Arctic Ocean will warm to the temperature to that of the Gulf of Mexico, hoping magical bacteria will be the solution to our madness everywhere? The way we are going, one need not hope. Of course, methane in the Arctic Ocean will have reached a runaway state long before the bacteria are warm enough to eat up our self-imposed nightmare, however, these are mere inconveniences – the type that Shell, BP, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil and friends do not contemplate. And as Arctic temperatures continue to accelerate, the warming of our dying world’s oceans will continue to acidify.

What corporate media powerhouse CNN et al does not report:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8WsIr7m-4w&w=480&h=390]

Next: Part III:

• The Spin Doctors | Spinning the Potential for Abrupt & Catastrophic Climate Change
• Universities as Bedfellows | Moral Nihilism
• Economy is Sacrosanct
• Ignoring the Necessity of a Plant-Based Diet at Our Own Peril
• The Right to Destroy Ourselves
• More False Solutions

Cory Morningstar is climate justice activist whose recent writings can be found on Canadians for Action on Climate Change and The Art of Annihilation site where you can read her bio. You can follow her on Twitter: @elleprovocateur

References:

Part II:

[10] COP16, Cancún, Mexico. The largest economic conference in history was an epic failure for humanity. And as the world burns, the wealthy elites stuffed their custom gold-lined Brioni pockets with dreams and promises of unsurpassed wealth predicated upon climate catastrophe in the 21st century. Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist who is co-chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change, stated in an interview on 14 November 2010: “The climate summit in Cancún at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.… [I]t’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization…. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.…”

[11] In 1997–1998, the draft Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was heavily criticized by developing states. Many argued that the agreement would threaten protection of human rights, labour and environmental standards, and the most vulnerable countries. Critics argued (correctly) that the MAI would result in a “race to the bottom” among countries willing to lower their labour and environmental standards to attract foreign investment. The OECD’s actions against harmful tax practices has also raised criticism. The primary objection is the sanctity of tax policy as a matter of sovereign entitlement. Saudi Arabia played a key role in interferingin  and shaping international climate policy since international negotiations began in the 1990s in order to ensure that the billion dollar oil industry would not be affected. As a consequence of such interference by many powerful players who sought to ensure the economic and political power structure would not be threatened, adaptation surfaced as the primary goal in international climate science and policy, effectively replacing the goals of prevention and mitigation from the 1980s.

[12] In Japan, the “National R&D Program for Methane /Hydrate Resources” is sponsored by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Japan National Oil Corporation (JNOC). Japan launched its program in 2001 for a 5-year study of methane hydrate deposits at the Nankai Trough and Okhotsk Sea. Additionally, it has also embarked on a comprehensive plan to be conducted over a period of 16 years in three phases focused on research areas related to exploration, modeling, field testing, development technology and health-safety-environmental assistance. Japan’s investment is perhaps the largest of its kind in this field of research. India has initiated its National Gas Hydrate Program (NGHP) under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas in 1997. This program was reconstituted in 2000 with the direction of the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH). Efforts addressing issues of drilling, production, geoscience, and environment are under the auspices of the Office of Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and the issue of transportation is under the guidance of Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL).

[13] India has completed a preliminary survey of the prospective regions with high gas hydrate concentrations beyond the 700 metre water depth using geologic and thermodynamic data and expected to complete its resource estimates by the end of 2003 and initiate assessment of realities through various laboratory studies, deep water coring and drilling operations development of gas hydrate production pilot and economic studies.

Since 1999 the Department of Energy has designated the National Energy Technology Laboratory to develop a comprehensive R&D plan in collaboration with MMS, NOAA, NRL, NSF and USGS.

Studies: 3/4/2002-3/3/2006: Final Technical Report on: Controls on Gas Hydrate Formation and Dissociation, Gulf of Mexico: In Situ Field Study with Laboratory Characterizations of Exposed and Buried Gas Hydrates (DOE Award Number: DE-FC26-02NT41328 – Dates: 3/4/02 – 3/3/06)

[14] The paper on coal seems proposes a thesis that igniting planetary coal deposits, triggered by the extreme volcanic action of the Siberian Steppes was the major factor in the end Permian extinction event. This paper  supports extreme global warming as the cause of the end-Permian extinction event with the initial trigger being massive amounts of CO2 emitted by extreme volcanic activity in the region of the Siberian Steppes. It cannot and does not exclude the contribution to extreme global warming by destabilized methane hydrates.

Further Reading:

A Killer in Our Midst | http://www.killerinourmidst.com/

Only Zero Carbon | http://www.onlyzerocarbon.org/

Videos:

Media Education Foundation | http://www.mediaed.org/

An investigative report. [Part 1: http://bit.ly/fV8slf ]

By Cory Morningstar

Part I

World Marches to Methane Annihilation

“[T]he question is not will this methane be released, but when.” – Robert C. Hendricks, NASA, November 2007

The architects of death: The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction are the melting permafrost, the destabilizing methane hydrates and the corporations such as Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil who, hand in hand with the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Defense, have been planning and waiting to exploit methane hydrates for decades. Methane hydrates are considered the ultimate in climate wealth opportunity because the control of these hydrocarbons could literally shift the balance of global power (US Department of Defense). It is clear that nothing has been done to prevent catastrophic climate change – and nothing will be done. Global emissions are set to skyrocket. This article attempts to clearly articulate why, almost two decades after the first international climate change summit, the world governments have failed to protect us from dangerous atmospheric interference. As we are now living in a world that is beyond dangerous, society must be aware of, be able to critically analyze, and ultimately reject the new onslaught of misinformation that is being perpetuated by the corporate elite and the current power structures that support their agenda.

The red dots indicate where researchers have proved that gas hydrates exist and where they are suspected to exist. But no matter where researchers now drill under the sea, they find methane, often in the form of a hydrate.

What the Governments and Environmental Groups Won’t Tell You

Thawing frozen soils could unleash a carbon bomb – massive volumes of carbon dioxide and methane frozen in the earth’s soils are a “time-bomb ticking under our feet.” – World Congress of Soil Science, 4 August 2010

For anyone interested in staying alive, the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in Cancún was a disaster. The world’s “leaders” – aside from those in Bolivia alone – have decided to trade off the lives of billions for insatiable corporate profits. And all the corporate-funded messages of progress and hope for the future pumped out by compromised and bought off NGOs do not make this reality any less true. Make no mistake, a mass genocide is in the making.

The end of the Permian Period, which happened 250 million years ago, was the greatest extinction event in the history of life. More than 90% of the species in existence perished. The end-Permian event was accompanied by a temperature rise of as little as 6ºC. Life took 50 million years to recover the diversity that had existed prior to this mass extinction. Although extinctions such as this one occurred long ago, today nature and science clearly indicate that such an extinction event is not far away in our future. The cataclysmic release of methane from Earth’s seafloor has already begun. This is our final warning – but is anyone listening? We must change our relationship with our planet – and fast. Market mechanisms and other false solutions that prey on ignorance and hope rather than acceptance of reality must be rejected. All fossil fuels must be left in the ground. There is no other way.

Gregory Ryskin, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, suggests that so much methane accumulated in stagnant seas at the end of the Permian, that when it finally erupted, it spontaneously ignited, creating a worldwide blanket of fire. He suggests that even marine organisms weren’t safe; the rising methane brought up anoxic water from the deep, suffocating them.

From Ryskin’s paper titled Methane-driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions: “The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region “boils over,” ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO₂, H₂S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide. Firestorms carry smoke and dust into the upper atmosphere, where they may remain for several years; the resulting darkness and global cooling may provide an additional kill mechanism. Conversely, carbon dioxide and the remaining methane create the greenhouse effect, which may lead to global warming. ”

For a deeper understanding of Ryskin’s methane theories, he suggests to watch this short video in which he discusses methane dangers. [Viewer discretion is advised – this video contains footage of 1986 Lake Nyos Tragedy, where a cloud of CO2 asphyxiated over 1700 people.]

Hells Bells

24 November 2010: “Greenhouse gases rise to record levels in 2009″ According to Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization: “If we continue business as usual, we will not achieve the level of atmospheric concentration that would allow a two degree Celsius target.” Further, Jarraud stated that to start decreasing the levels of greenhouse gases, it is necessary to “stop totally the emissions.” Jarraud states unequivocally that “this means that the usage of fossil energy should be halted.”

Keep in mind that the two-degree target was adopted in order to protect economic interests rather than to protect life, while the low risk recommendation in 1990 of 1ºC, recommended by the United Nations Greenhouse Gas Advisory Group (UN AGGG) was effectively buried. After the Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change (IPCC) emerged as the global voice on climate change, it quickly became controlled, directed and dominated by corporate-colluded governments, and economic interests soon crushed the best interests of the people. The IPCC, backed into a corner from its inception, is muzzled due to the interference and influence of corporate powers that have political control over all IPCC summary reports. For example, Exxon, the global catalyst for climate denialism, has been a member of the IPCC since 1992. Two Exxon scientists attend all meetings and have held positions as lead authors. By way of the IPCC unanimity rule, Exxon has a veto over the IPCC. Therefore, all science must be watered down until all parties – including Exxon – approve. One could perhaps compare this arrangement to having the Hells Angels write the legislation to define and protect women’s rights.

It’s a fine day for bananafish, mind pollution, delusion and boiling oceans

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” – Saul Bellow, Canadian writer

The short story It’s a Fine Day for Bananafish by J D Salinger, first appeared in the January 31st, 1948 issue of the New Yorker. [1] It tells the story of the disillusionment of Seymour (the main character) with those around him, who are preoccupied and enamoured by the superficial. Seymour tells a young girl named Sybil a sad story of innocent fish that find a hole full of bananas in the ocean. Upon finding the bananas, the bananafish become glutinous. They eat so many bananas that they become too fat to get out of the hole. Seymour ends his story with “Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die.” The story illustrates how affluence can foster materialism, thereby creating a life devoid of meaning. The story also illustrates how utter despair can lead one down the path of surrender. Perhaps Seymour is reflecting upon his own life – a life in high society where all too easily, he can have anything he wishes. Seymour perhaps views his own life as the banana hole where innocent fish are deceived by the appearance of a secure future – only to become trapped. Seymour is overcome with the feeling of isolation when he realizes he is no longer able to communicate in this shallow world. Perhaps believing his only hope is to escape – permanently – he sits “down on the unoccupied twin bed, [looks] at the girl, [aims] the pistol, and [fires] a bullet through his right temple.” Prior to the act of suicide Seymour’s actions are most poignant and revealing: “The young man suddenly picked up one of Sybil’s wet feet, which were drooping over the end of the float, and kissed the arch.” Seymour longed for truth, simplicity and innocence in an isolated, superficial world of illusions. This story could be and has been interpreted in many ways –  and it should be – as ultimately it is our shared humanity that connects us and challenges us. Nurturing and protecting this common thread is vital if we are to understand anything written or spoken with truth. Relentless advertising coupled with sophisticated propaganda results in mind pollution, the erosion of critical thinking and the crushing of independent thought, which effectively shuts out the truth – ultimately destroying ourselves.

Mind Pollution and Delusion

“Men die but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.”  – Sinclair Lewis

In 2001, a documentary titled “The Day the Oceans Boiled” was released. Segments of the largely overlooked documentary were posted on YouTube in July 2009. To date, just over 200 people have been interested enough to watch it – on a planet of almost seven billion people. Compare this to the “New Mario Bros. Movie Trailer – The Game Station Exclusive!” video, which provoked over one million views in less than 48 hours, and which now exceeds over three million views. A Business Insider newswire reports that in 2010, Stefani Germanotta – known as Lady Gaga sold more magazines than anyone in the world. The “newswire report” features her “top 13 weirdest covers.” Germanotta’s covers reflect her country and mirror the underlying American culture. The New York Magazine cover caption states “I will kill to get what I need.” On Rolling Stone, dressed in a thong, Germanotta wields a machine gun. Most predominant in the images are the messages of sex, narcissism, violence and sadism that dominate our culture – enticing and fueling the acquiescent corporate collective. The Vogue Japan cover features Germanotta with her mouth open (most always predominant in the sexual commercialization of women), nude with raw red meat covering her breasts, hips and head. Germanotta, famous for stuffing dildos down her pants and spreading her legs, has been named by corporate media powerhouse Time magazine as one of the “100 most influential people in the world.” Corporate icon Forbes also lists Germanotta as one of “the 100 most powerful and influential celebrities in the world.” Time names Germanotta’s raw meat ensemble as the number one fashion statement of the year.

The question is – which no one asks – who exactly is Germanotta influencing and in what way? We know the answer to the question as to why. Governments and corporations have brilliantly and seductively kept absolute focus on the task at hand: keeping an entire global society stupefied, corporatized, numbed, dumbed down and in the dark using an onslaught of irrelevant meaningless nonsense, sophisticated propaganda and unrelenting, trivial distraction. This is an easy enough task if citizens are exhausted from working their lives away in order to pay debt that can never be paid off. This is an even easier task in the developing countries, whose exploited citizens toil daily in the grinds of the most tedious, horrific jobs in order to provide the stuff that no one needs in the developed wealthy countries. These grossly exploited people do not require the same degree of inundation and mind pollution; they are simply exhausted from the laborious, dangerous, exploitive work they must succumb to in order to feed their hungry children. Massive corporate profits, personal fortunes of the plutocracy, and the success of political efforts that will ensure the current power structures are not threatened are all at stake. Protect the current economic system at all costs. Protect the fossil fuel industry at all costs.

Above photo: Stefani Germanotta.  US Brand President Barack Obama: “It’s a privilege to be here tonight to open for Lady Gaga,” Obama goes on to say: “I’ve made it!” (These remarks were made by President Obama to a receptive audience during a Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington, DC – all while innocent civilians continue to be killed in the US occupation in Iraq which continues today. The death toll to date is 1, 421, 933.) In a UK ‘Q’ Magazine interview Germanotta states: “Me and my fucking dick are out there for the world.” (Who knew that Obama and friends would be so receptive?) … God bless America. While that’s happening, please pass the Soma.

Toxins in, toxins out

Porn revenues top $96 billion worldwide in 2006. The more women are objectified and degraded, the higher the sales – women and young girls lose while corporate entities AT&T and General Motors 80% of the revenues. [2] Children’s social skills become inept and empathy becomes eroded as video games condition society to believe/accept violence is entertainment. Video games sales reach $46.2 billion in 2008 with the US military, psychologists and Coke executives playing pivotal roles in design, marketing and funding. Gambling brings in $92 billion in 2007. In 2009, US communications and media spending alone top $890 billion – AOL Time Warner, Viacom, General Electric, Disney and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup control almost all of it. Yet, we have no money for clean, safe, renewable energy sources to save humanity. We have no money to feed our children healthy food – all while gluttony reins. Like the planet’s failing carbon sinks, our minds are failing our collective past ability to absorb information, filter it and then emit clarity to improve our collective existence. Today our minds simply take in the pollution and regurgitate the pollution – what we give back, like the failing carbon sinks, will eventually kill us.

In the meantime, governments and corporations are very quietly at work tapping into the most dangerous aspect of climate change, which no one speaks of – the methane hydrates.

Methane’s Warming Potential

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, approximately 23 times more powerful than CO2 over the long term (100 years). In the short term (10 years), methane is 72 to 100 times more powerful than CO2. [3]

Over a long period, methane’s impact appears less threatening than CO2. However, over a short period from its release, methane’s impact is dramatic. In the first five years after its release, methane’s impact is more than 100 times as potent as carbon dioxide. In the absence of OH (hydroxyl radicals) to oxidize methane, much methane could persist locally with its full global warming potential for years, causing a dramatic greenhouse effect and thus warming locally. A recent study shows that increases in global methane emissions have caused a 26% OH decrease. This coupled with other feedback mechanisms, many of which are now operational, can dramatically amplify local warming in the Arctic, causing large-scale thawing and melting over a period of years, rather than centuries. Arctic amplification is for the most part overlooked by the IPCC which uses a period of a century to calculate methane’s impact. [Carana, Sam. The Threat of Methane Release from Permafrost and Clathrates: How important is hydroxyl depletion? 2010 Mar 10.]

Below video: Methane hydrate formation and release. (2010 | 1:50). The instability is clearly demonstrated at the end of the video when the robot merely touches the hydrate.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiIqDLqY5TI&w=480&h=390]

Boiling Oceans

“Abrupt Planetary Catastrophic Global Warming. It’s happened before. We have the planet headed that way again.” – A November 2010 statement by the Geological Society of London regarding catastrophic climate change and methane hydrates

During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) extinction event that took place 55 million years ago, the oceans were warming just as they are today.

The 2001 documentary “The Day the Oceans Boiled” examined what was new evidence in 1999. [4] Scientists had discovered that the expected rise in global temperature in the near future could be only the start of a much greater increase. The evidence uncovered warned that our Earth’s temperature could rise by 20 degrees within the next three generations. The documentary follows scientists uncovering evidence for what caused massive, abrupt climate shifts that happened 55 million years ago. *This was the last time the Earth’s temperature accelerated quickly, causing many animals to shrink, with horses becoming the size of modern domestic cats. It took the planet 60,000 years to cool down again.

Sediment samples drilled from the ocean sea floor provide scientists with the ability to uncover what took place in our Earth’s history hundreds of millions of years ago. In 1999, Santo Bains of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences was looking for clues as to what happened 55 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene. In particular, he was interested in one specific sediment core named core 690. Core 690 was to have the most detailed record of the Paleocene-Eocene climate change event. Bains took one sediment sample per centimeter of the entire core 690. Buried in the sludge along the bottom of the sea there are stories of the past. Within this sediment there are tiny sea creatures – deep-ocean microscopic foraminifera – that survived the asteroids that killed the dinosaurs. However, 55 million years ago, half of the tiny forams went extinct. Locked in their shells lies the story of why. As their shells were made of the carbon dioxide dissolved in the sea, their detailed composition revealed both the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the water temperature at the time of extinction. Bains dropped the tiny shells into acid, releasing the carbon dioxide that had last seen the atmosphere 55 million years ago.

Bains’s scientific analysis confirmed that at the time the mammals shrank, the atmospheric carbon levels had suddenly risen abruptly – causing a rapid warming of ocean waters. As he examined more samples, Bains discovered something extraordinary. There was not just one sudden rise in temperature. There were three. Temperatures accelerated dramatically in three succinct steps over a period of just a few of hundred years for a total temperature increase of approximately 8ºC. The rise in atmospheric carbon was just as dramatic. The jumps in Bains’s graph add up to one and a half trillion tonnes of carbon. His discovery was the first time this was recognized in the geological record. Where did all of the carbon come from? Methane hydrates are believed to be the only explanation. Methane hydrates quickly decomposed, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the oceans and into the atmosphere.

Bain’s research suggests that prior to the extinction, a massive release of methane caused a severe feedback, which then resulted in a second immense methane release. The second release caused an even greater amplifying effect, thereby causing a severe third release, which finally resulted in a runaway greenhouse event of mass extinction.

Methane hydrates have been formed over millions of years on the floor of our oceans and seas from decaying organic matter carried there by rivers. The methane takes the form of methane hydrates – methane gas frozen into lattices of ice (called clathrate [5]) that lie in ocean floor sediment off the continental coasts of our planet, storing massive amounts of carbon. When the frozen hydrates melt, 170 times the volume of methane gas comes bubbling out. The pressure only stays locked up if the pressure of the sea floor remains high and the temperature stays low. If this balance changes, the methane will quickly escape.

A more recent study in 2010 [6] uncovers that even though the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) was approximately 19ºC warmer than today, CO2 levels were only slightly higher than they are now.

*In 2010, researchers from the University of Zϋrich found that more than 100 bird species have shrunk in size over the past half a century. Ary Hoffmann, evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne, says: “The surprise is that you’re seeing these consistent patterns across a large number of species.”

Above: A block of methane gas hydrate – the mud around the hydrate has recently been discovered by scientists to be teaming with life. [Discussed in part III]

Clathrate Gun Hypothesis

The clathrate gun hypothesis is the theory that rises in ocean temperature can trigger the sudden release of methane from the methane hydrates buried in seabeds and permafrost. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, these releases would lead to feedbacks – further temperature rise and further methane clathrate destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun. In its original form, the hypothesis proposed that the “clathrate gun” could cause abrupt runaway warming in a timescale less than a human lifetime, and might be responsible for warming events in and at the end of the last ice age.

Methane Emergency

28 May 2008: The National Science Foundation issued an alarming press release largely ignored by mainstream corporate media. The report cautioned that methane release could cause abrupt, far-reaching climate change parallel to a catastrophic event of 635 million years ago – the ending of the last “snowball” ice age. The researchers believe that the catastrophic event was caused by the release of methane, which was released gradually at first and then very quickly from hydrates. When the ice sheets became unstable, they collapsed, releasing pressure on the hydrates, which then began to de-gas. Geologist Martin Kennedy of the University of California at Riverside (UCR), who led the research team, stated: “Our findings document an abrupt and catastrophic global warming that led from a very cold, seemingly stable climate state to a very warm, also stable, climate state – with no pause in between…. Once methane was released at low latitudes from destabilization in front of the ice sheets, warming caused other clathrates to destabilize…. Clathrates are held in a temperature-pressure balance of only a few degrees.” Kennedy further states that this trigger is a major concern, because it’s possible that very little warming could unleash our Earth’s trapped methane, which has been frozen for millions of years. Kennedy adds that uncovering the planet’s methane reservoir could potentially and rapidly warm our planet tens of degrees. ”Today we’re conducting a global-scale experiment with Earth’s climate system,” Kennedy says, “and witnessing an unprecedented rate of warming, all with little or no knowledge of what instabilities lurk in the climate system and how they can influence life on Earth…. Much the same experiment was done 635 million years ago, and the outcome is preserved in the geologic record. We see that strong forcing on the climate, not unlike the current carbon dioxide forcing, results in the activation of latent controls in the climate system that, once initiated, change climate to a completely different state.” The research team found the broadest range of oxygen isotopic variation ever reported from marine sediments, which they attribute to melting waters in ice sheets as well as destabilization of clathrates by glacial meltwater.

Video below: Year round methane bubbles create ice cavern (2010:0:30):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc2GH_6qEVY&w=480&h=390]

This is Not the Future – This is Today

March 2010: The National Science Foundation issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” Research finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH₄ [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”

The Arctic summer sea ice has now passed its tipping point to meltdown, having shifted to a new climate pattern where “normal” has become obsolete (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 21 October 2010).

Our oceans are warming – and acidifying. In “The Day the Oceans Boiled” (2001), a satellite image captures what is thought to be a small plume of methane escaping from the Arctic ocean. Today, just over 3 years after the first official reports of venting hydrates, we now witness melting permafrost and leaking hydrates accelerating all over the world.

With the Cancún outcome supporting a catastrophic 2ºC threshold that climate scientists consider to be, at minimum, 4ºC in real life, how will an extinction event not be repeated? A 4ºC rise will ensure the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest adding further billions of tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. Spontaneous releases of carbon 55 million years took global temperatures to a level perhaps 15 degrees higher than human beings have ever experienced – and we are in essence choosing to repeat the past. Yet we are doing so by way of anthropogenic carbon over a period of 200 years – versus 55 million years. This pace of change is unparalleled in Earth’s history. Insatiable corporate greed and the growth fetish virus have succeeded in setting the world on course for a series of events that will make this temperature rise inevitable.

Not in the future but today, the Arctic methane hydrate deposits are destabilizing, and if not re-stabilized will release vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere and add yet more acid to our oceans. The oceans will then become more acidified by dissolution of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This scenario will lead to the end of virtually all life on Earth. Today, the rate of ocean acidification exceeds anything witnessed in the past 65 million years. The increasing acidity reduces the amounts of calcium carbonate available to plankton and other species that require it in order to form shells and skeletons. Charlie Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science states that “for our coral reefs, as acidification progresses, they will all suffer from some form of coralline osteoporosis. The result will be that corals will no longer be able to build reefs or maintain them against the forces of erosion. What were once thriving coral gardens that supported the greatest biodiversity of the marine realm will become red-black bacterial slime, and they will stay that way. If coral reefs fail, the rest will follow in rapid succession, and the Sixth Mass Extinction will be upon us — and will be of our making.” If we continue burning fossil fuels, this will further acidify the ocean to levels not witnessed in the past third of a billion years. Organisms with calcium carbonate skeletons will be hard pressed to survive.

Recently scientists discovered that plankton, the organism responsible for every other breath we take, has been decimated in a massive way. Studies show phytoplankton have died off more than 40% since 1950 and continue to do so at an accelerating rate. “This is an almost unprecedented geological event,” stated Andy Ridgwell, an earth scientist at the University of Bristol. Phytoplankton account for half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth. Thus phytoplankton are responsible for much of the oxygen present in the Earth’s atmosphere – half of the total amount produced by all plant life. Climate scientist James Hansen warns that humanity is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere today at a rate that is 10,000 times higher than the rate during the extinction event of 55 million years ago.

Above image illustrates the vulnerability of the Amazon rain forest and the Arctic. The Met study concludes that, by the end of the century, the Arctic could warm by up to 27°F (15.2°C) for a high-emissions scenario, enhanced by melting of snow and ice causing more of the Sun’s radiation to be absorbed.

Prior to the Cancún climate talks, Nobel Physicist and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned of potential runaway feedback, expressing that many scientists view this as a distinct possibility:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHqKxWvcBdg

Hansen | The Venus Syndrome

“Two degrees Celsius is guaranteed disaster,” says Hansen scornfully. “It is equivalent to the early Pliocene epoch when the sea level was 25m higher.” - 4 January 2011

James Hansen, chief climate scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, posits a possible future Earth in which a “runaway greenhouse effect” takes over. Anthropogenic global warming from greenhouse gases causes a massive increase of water vapor into the atmosphere as the heated oceans evaporate, which in turn causes further warming. Hansen (along with many other scientists from several disciplines) believes that methane hydrates played a crucial role in the largest mass extinction, the “end-Permian” event 251 million years ago.

Hansen: “The paleoclimate record does not provide a case with a climate forcing of the magnitude and speed that will occur if fossil fuels are all burned. Models are nowhere near the stage at which they can predict reliably when major ice sheet disintegration will begin. Nor can we say how close we are to methane hydrate instability. But these are questions of when, not if. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the ice sheets almost surely will melt entirely, with the final sea level rise about 75 meters (250 feet), with most of that possibly occurring within a time scale of centuries. Methane hydrates are likely to be more extensive and vulnerable now than they were in the early Cenozoic. It is difficult to imagine how the methane clathrates could survive, once the ocean has had time to warm. In that event a PETM-like warming could be added on top of the fossil fuel warming. After the ice is gone, would Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet, perhaps permanently? While that is difficult to say based on present information, I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.”

Melting Permafrost

“Concerning permafrost there is – as with many other systems affected by global warming – a point of no return. Once we are beyond that point, the development can’t be stopped anymore. Permafrost is a slow system: The area is warming relatively slowly, but once it has started to melt, it goes fast. – Johann Stötter, geographer at the University of Innsbruck, head of the COMET K1 alpS – Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Technologies

“Warmer temperatures at high latitudes are already resulting in unprecedented permafrost degradation …Projections show that almost all near-surface permafrost will  by the end of this century exposing large carbon stores to decomposition and release of greenhouse gases.” – Dr. Pep Canadell, Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project at CSIRO (Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization)

Permafrost is the vital component that has kept deadly methane safely locked away in methane hydrates for millions of years. It has been melting and continues to melt at an unprecedented and accelerating rate. The methane “vaults” (seeing as methane hydrates have become Pandora’s box) are now being eyed foolishly by corporations and states as the greatest climate wealth opportunity. Ever.

Although the rate of permafrost thaw will likely triple (NCAR study), with the Arctic permafrost disappearing almost completely (90%) this century, no IPPC climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra. [7] Leading scientist Shakhova and colleagues estimate that roughly eight million tons of methane are now leaking into the atmosphere each year from the East Siberia Sea. Since 1992 it has been recognized that the shallow Arctic methane hydrates would be subject to melting by global warming, releasing methane gas into the atmosphere. [8]

Permafrost currently stores more than double the amount of all carbon in the atmosphere. Will our governments stop counting their GDP numbers long enough to comprehend the simple fact that there is absolutely no way we can possibly refreeze melting permafrost and the hydrates that are further deteriorating as I write? With the exception of Bolivia, the answer is no. Our governments were bought and sold long ago. We are on our own.

Arctic temperatures are rising 4 times faster than the global average. 50% of the permanent sea, ice that has existed for 64 million years, has disappeared since 1980. NASA predicts that the Arctic ice sheet will be gone by 2030. Others predict the Arctic Sea ice will disappear completely by as early as 2013. The loss of polar sea ice will further melt the Russian and Alaskan tundra. The release of tundra methane hydrates has the potential to double total atmospheric GHG emissions, adding 6,000 billion tonnes of CO2equivalent. By contrast, the total of atmospheric CO2 is projected to be 386 billion tonnes by 2030.

Permafrost serves as nature’s “cement” holding our “foundations” intact … a glue that holds steep mountain slopes together. Its degradation leads to not only venting hydrates, but to hazards such as falling rocks, “drunken” forests, landslides, broken pipelines, collapsing buildings and buckled highways like what we see happening already in the Arctic. Melting permafrost in northern Russia could lead to radioactive leaks from storage facilities and presents deadly scenarios for the  radioactive dump-sites on Novaya Zemlya, a former nuclear weapons testing range. More than half of Alaska’s surface, including its water, sits on permafrost. “The stability of Arctic ecosystems depends on the ice that holds them together,” according to University of Alaska–Fairbanks (UAF) permafrost scientist Vladimir Romanovsky.

According to scientists, such permafrost melting does not constitute a gradual change – it is a phase change, meaning that the ecosystem in such areas could be shifting within just a few years to an entirely different ecosystem. Scientist Dave Klein (UAF) explains, “So you could likely have a rapid transition from boreal forest to a grassland savannah, with groups of trees scattered around.” Permafrost, like the Boreal Forest, like peat, all former carbon sinks, have become carbon emitters, because we have failed to act. In Canada, our permafrost has moved north 80 miles in the past 50 years. In 2006 scientists announced that nearly 90 per cent of the permafrost in Arctic soils could melt in the coming century.

Consider this: if only 10% of the permafrost melts, scientists state that this will release enough carbon into the atmosphere to add a further 0.7°C of warming in addition to our current 0.8ºC of warming. This 10% melt consequence will be equivalent to all the warming that has already taken place since the beginning of the industrial age. Permafrost melt, even without methane hydrates destabilizing, could easily cause our planet to pass the tipping point where future melting becomes irreversible. If an additional 0.7°C is the result of 10% of permafrost melt, imagine what will happen if it all melts. And imagine, if you can, what will happen when the existing venting methane hydrates (below the currently frozen permafrost), already destabilizing at today’s temperatures, rapidly release the gases that have been locked up for 65 million years.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YegdEOSQotE&w=640&h=390]

Brief Timeline on Venting Methane Hydrates

7 September 2006: As the permafrost melts in North Siberia due to climate change, carbon sequestered and buried there since the Pleistocene era is bubbling up to the surface of Siberian thaw lakes and into the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

8 September 2006: Frozen bubbles in Siberian lakes are releasing methane, a greenhouse gas, at rates that appear to be “… five times higher than previously estimated” and acting as a positive feedback to climate warming.

17 September 2007: Lakes Boiling With Methane Discovered In Alaska.

26 October 2007: A team of scientists has identified a new likely source of a spike in atmospheric methane coming out of the North during the end of the last ice age.

April 2008: A Storehouse of Greenhouse Gases Is Opening in Siberia. It’s always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate researchers: Gas hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor – hard clumps of ice and methane, conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure – could grow unstable and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Until now this idea was mostly academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it seems more likely that it will.

April 2008: NOAA – Carbon Dioxide, Methane Rise Sharply in 2007.

10 June 2008: Permafrost Threatened by Rapid Retreat of Arctic Sea Ice, NCAR Study Finds

23 September 2008: Exclusive: The methane time bomb: Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide

25 September 2008: Hundreds of methane ‘plumes’ discovered. British scientists have discovered hundreds more methane ‘plumes’ bubbling up from the Arctic seabed, in an area to the west of the Norwegian island of Svalbard. It is the second time in a week that scientists have reported methane emissions from the Arctic.

March 2009: A sleeping giant? “These deposits rival fossil fuels in terms of their size. It’s like having a whole additional supply of coal, oil and natural gas out there that we can’t control.” A temperature rise of as little as 1°C at the sea floor could dissolve shallow subsea clathrates. If temperatures in the deep ocean were to rise by about 3°C, nearly a trillion tonnes of carbon could be released from subsea clathrates.

1 July 2009: “The research shows that the amount of carbon stored in soils surrounding the North Pole has been hugely underestimated….Warmer temperatures at high latitudes are already resulting in unprecedented permafrost degradation…. Projections show that almost all near-surface permafrost will disappear by the end of this century exposing large carbon stores to decomposition and release of greenhouse gases.”

September 2009: Methane gas likely spewing into the oceans through vents in sea floor. [In this video University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist Natalia Shakhova discusses the East Siberian Arctic Shelf area:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD8hU-lbqpE&w=640&h=390]

September 2010: Nevada researchers find receding permafrost in Siberian Arctic: “We see the permafrost receding hundreds of yards each year, and the ancient carbon from Pleistocene era plants and animals being unleashed into the air, soil and water.”

August 2010: Frozen CO2, methane a time bomb: experts – Massive volumes of carbon dioxide and methane frozen in the earth’s soils are a “time-bomb ticking under our feet,” soil scientists say.

September 2010: A ticking time bomb in Siberian marshes. ”The fact is that the permafrost covers millions of kilometers of swamps. While melting, swamps send to the atmosphere tons of methane, which, in turn, leads to more significant changes in the climate. In the pseudoscientific press, this process has already received the name “methane bomb” and “methane flywheel.”

November 2010: “Abrupt Planetary Catastrophic Global Warming. It’s happened before. We have the planet headed that way again.” A statement by the Geological Society of London regarding catastrophic climate and methane hydrates.

22 November 2010: Siberian Methane Marks Climate Tipping Point: “Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.”

So why do states and “co-opted green” greens continue to stay silent on declaring a global planetary emergency, called for by esteemed climate scientists John Holdren and James Hansen since 2006 and 2008 respectively? [9] The answer is always the same. Just follow the money.

Our world is securely on the path to global methane hell.

This is not the future – this is now.

We may be doomed if we face the truth but we are certainly doomed if we do not.

Next: Part II:

• Post Cancún: North America. The New Energy Kingdom
• NASA Has Known All Along
• Blinded by Addiction: Methane Hydrates – The Oil of the Future
• Brief Timeline | Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil and Friends
• US Department of Defense
• Warnings
• UNEP Climbs in Bed with Shell and EDF Energy
• Burn Baby Burn
• Naïveté is Deadly
• Yes, Virginia – There is a Santa Claus | BP, A&M University and Corporate Media

Cory Morningstar is climate justice activist whose recent writings can be found on Canadians for Action on Climate Change and The Art of Annihilation site where you can read her bio. You can follow her on Twitter: @elleprovocateur

References:

[1] It’s a fine day for bananafish – by JD Salinger | http://www.miguelmllop.com/stories/stories/bananafish.pdf

[2] The statistics are truly staggering. According to compiled numbers from respected news and research organizations, every second, $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography. Every second, 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography. In that same second, 372 internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines. Every 39 minutes, a new pornographic video is being created in the United States. It’s big business. The pornography industry has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined. 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues ballooned to $97.06 billion.

[3] Over a 20-year period methane’s GWP will be 72, while over a 100-year period its GWP will be 21, and over a 500-year period, its GWP will be 7.6. In AR4, the IPCC upgraded methane’s GWP to 25 over a 100-year period.

[4] Documentary – The Day the Oceans Boiled | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDBt07skLbQ

[5] Clathrate is derived from the Latin word for cage. Methane hydrates consist of molecules of methane trapped in cages of H₂0. Typically, six water molecules surround a single methane molecule, and many of those cages linked together form a crystal.

[6] Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council in Canada, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and the European Research Council.

[7] U.S. Geological Survey Marine and Coastal Geology Program, Gas (Methane) Hydrates – A New Frontier, September 1992.

[8] According to another study by David Lawrence, this means that the rate of permafrost thaw will likely triple.

[9] John Holdren on 3 November 2006: “Climate change is coming at us faster, with larger impacts and bigger risks, than even most climate scientists expected as recently as a few years ago. The stated goal of the UNFCCC – avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate – is in fact unattainable, because today we are already experiencing dangerous anthropogenic interference. The real question now is whether we can still avoid catastrophic anthro-pogenic interference in climate. There is no guarantee that catastrophe can be avoided even we start taking serious evasive action immediately; But it’s increasingly clear that the current level of anthropogenic interference is dangerous: Significant impacts in terms of floods, droughts, wildfires, species, melting ice already evident at ~0.8°C above pre-industrial Tavg. Current GHG concentrations commit us to 0.6°C more.” Holdren is advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Further Reading:

A Killer in Our Midst | http://www.killerinourmidst.com/

Only Zero Carbon | http://www.onlyzerocarbon.org/

Videos:

Media Education Foundation | http://www.mediaed.org/

Published on United Progressives October 8^th, 2010 | http://bit.ly/aiCAZg | http://bit.ly/dhSXCx

As we stand on the edge of apocalypse, we must wake up and acknowledge what the big greens are not saying is far more important than what they are saying.

Excerpts from a controversial new book to be released 2010-2011. Article one in a series, we discuss the connection between environmental campaigns and their corporate sponsors.

By Cory Morningstar  and Gregory Vickrey

CODE GREEN: “The good intentions of participants of 350 aside, requesting world leaders to reduce carbon emissions is unfortunately not going to work. Bill McKibben asserts that world leaders will listen “if we’re loud enough,” but that’s simply untrue. If we stick with symbolic action, the destruction will become progressively worse, and we will continuously lose ground and be reduced to begging for mercy that will never be granted. Those in power (and their political representatives) will only stop destroying the planet if they are forced to do so. The immediate threat of social disorder and economic disruption will make them listen. An immediate and serious threat to their wealth and well-being will make them listen.”

Understanding 10:10:10

All big greens and little greens alike are promoting the latest climate change campaign, 10:10:10, on the front page of every website and in every email. Two of the main promoters of 350.org’s 10:10:10 ‘Global Work Party’ are none other than corporate darling TckTckTck and, of course, Greenpeace International. Making the intimate link between the two, Kumi Naidoo is the Executive Director of the organization and chairs the Global Campaign for Climate Action, the group behind TckTckTck.

The escalating climate crisis – scientists now refer to it as the ‘6th extinction’ – has now been transformed to a party.

10:10:10 states, “A strong and vibrant climate movement will create the political space for our champions to lead; take-on the big polluters and bought-off politicians who are blocking progress; and help us implement innovative climate solutions from the ground up.” Completely ignoring the intent of their own rhetoric, some of the top ideas on the 10:10:10 website for the party are: organize a tree planting, work on a community garden or an organic farm, go for a bike ride, or do a trash cleanup. Once again, the emphasis of this latest symbolic big green campaign avoids the root causes of climate change; the current state of accelerating climate change according to the latest science; the false solutions being sold as just goods; and a stark, deafening silence on the People’s Agreement constructed in Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 2010. (It is important to note here that this is the only agreement to date that has the potential to save humanity from suicidal extinction. This last, despite 350.org’s presence in Cochabamba, with its own representatives positioned as ‘presidents’ of several working groups.)

The 10:10:10 campaign does not demand that all nations and all non-government organizations (NGOs) formally acknowledge the world is far beyond dangerous interference with the climate system. Why not? Leading scientist John Holdren has been explaining this since 2006.  Holdren is advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The 10:10:10 campaign does not demand that nations and NGOs declare a global climate state of emergency. Why not? NASA climate scientist James Hansen has appealed for such a declaration since 2008. Further, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that civil society must be the organ to make this declaration – yet those who claim to represent civil society — as 350.org often does — spew rhetoric instead of reality.

Nature’s Razor

The greatest danger to survival of life lies within combined Arctic feedback cycles, all of which are now operational. None of the climate models used by IPCC include any of the Arctic feedbacks below. This makes all projections of potential increase in global temperature, as well as any contrived limits on human emissions, dangerously misleading.

Arctic sea ice volume has reached the lowest level ever recorded, prompting the director of the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, Mark Serreze, to state, “The Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover…I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic.”

Methane release from melting permafrost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the carbon cycle. Earlier this year we were witness to a science stunner. Scientists found that the vast Siberian Arctic shelf methane stores are now destabilizing and venting. National Science Foundation issued our world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

Scientists have discovered that the seas are acidifying ten times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. The increasing acidity reduces the amounts of calcium carbonate available to plankton and other species which require it to form shells and skeletons. Studies show phytoplankton have died off more than 40% since 1950 and continue to do so at an accelerating rate. “This is an almost unprecedented geological event,” stated Andy Ridgwell, an earth scientist at the University of Bristol.

Making matters significantly worse for humanity, food security manifests itself as a second state of emergency intimately connected with climate.

The worst ever environmental and health catastrophe is now inevitable, and we must render a comprehensive global emergency response. Nations and NGOs who refuse to acknowledge destructive climate interference and the inherent state of global climate emergency are, in effect, supporting and perpetuating the status quo: a general state of denial of, and inaction toward, the worst crime ever committed against humanity.

In the presence of fact and a recognizable path to global extinction, the only target that now matters is zero carbon. To save humanity, fossil fuels must be completely abandoned. Every other target, without distinction, leads to irreversible climate catastrophe.

Yet we are told to throw a global day of action for 24 hours each year (this year, 10:10:10), no matter the challenges science purports and reality verifies. And somehow this party will grow into a new movement to take on these challenges, and this reality that no one discusses.

Symbolism must be an omnipotent force.

“Get to Work” – 350.org

“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.” – Chinua Achebe – Nigerian Writer

For too long, the environmental movement – led by the big greens – has locked the climate movement into a two-pronged strategy comprised of lobbying partisan, corrupt politicians, and climbing into bed with any – and nearly every – corporate power, in the pursuit of symbolic victories, the ecstasy of the illusion of power, and to integrate the DC cocktail circuit. Even in this, the movement has failed.

After the largest oil spill in history earlier this year, the movement and its most powerful leaders did not call for a ban on all offshore drilling; instead, they urged citizens to demand a temporary moratorium on new offshore drilling. Having no ability in the art of negotiation, and displaying an approach that was sophomoric, at best, they failed to properly secure the half-solution they sought, and the loopholes continue the cataclysmic trends that existed before the Deepwater Horizon entered our consciousness. Epic fail.

Nearly two decades after the first climate convention in Rio, global emissions are up over 40% and planetary boundaries are being crossed. We now stand on the cusp of humanity’s most dangerous moment. For those two decades the big greens have been flirting and sleeping with the enemy, and no matter their willingness are still shamed come morning, because the BPs of the world are welcome to plant their decadent seed in any of the big greens, and the governments around the globe besides, without any recourse.

What more evidence do we need to see in order to accept that backroom lobbying and symbolic campaigning has not worked and will not work?

“Politically feasible.”
“Politically possible.”
“Reasonable.”
“The best we can get.”
“Win-win.”

Big greens can’t yet comprehend the concept of morning remorse. It takes a spine to accept the guilt.

Fossil fuels must be completely abandoned. We have already stated that, from the perspective of reality. Let us say it again. Fossil fuels must be completely abandoned. Nature won’t be giving us a pat on the back or boost our resumes for what we deem politically feasible, and the physics of nature is not about to come to the table for negotiations on entropy. Better is not better when better still means dead. Massive climate emergency movements in every country are the only forces with the potential to drive politicians toward effective action against greenhouse gas emissions. That is the only way to win time for our Earth – and ourselves.

Symbolism

Image from Keith Farnish’s ‘The Unsuitablog’:

“it is an utterly pointless task trying to make Industrial Civilization sustainable or “environmentally friendly”, because the nature of civilization is to destroy, to take what it wants to achieve its aims and only stop when it runs out of energy, people or space. It only stops when it collapses – it never stops of its own accord.”

Thus, we find ourselves in yet another bizarre situation and ready to party on 10:10:10 with international climate change organization TckTckTck; with Greenpeace; with 350.org; with World Wildlife Federation (WWF); with more than 350 other dance partners; and, not without significance, with Havas Worldwide, the world’s sixth largest advertising company, and creator of the TckTckTck campaign. Havas clients include Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, BP and several other multinational conglomerates who indiscriminately rape and pillage our Earth, while exploiting the most vulnerable communities, cultures, and societies around the globe, in exchange for nothing more than financial profits and cash windfalls, seeking infinite gains on a finite planet.

When we fight multinationals, we call them corporate criminals. When we take their money, we call them partners.

The climate change movement is said to oppose oil giants controlled by Rockefeller and friends. Yet the foundations and charities of Rockefeller and friends generously fund progressive environmentalists with the purpose being to ultimately oversee and influence various and significant activities.

Recall the fairytale in which the witch decorates her home as a gingerbread house in order to entice the children inside and ultimately cook them to kibble in a pot of boiling water. We are those children – and we are being manipulated to admire the grand illusion of democracy set before us as we march as one towards our own demise.

Not so bad, says 10:10:10 and friends. We can throw a party along the way, and the conscientious among us can pre-order caskets made of green, sustainable bamboo manufactured in a Chinese sweatshop.

Last year, on 350.org’s Global Day of Action (October 24, 2009), TckTckTck was shiny, new and present. In Canada, on Parliament Hill, between 1,000 and 2,000 people assembled throughout the morning and afternoon. The crowd received instructions to move apart, and individuals were then told reach their hands to the sky and pretend they were clocks. Next, they were told to chant “TckTckTck!” while rotating arms in analog fashion. TckTckTck … TckTckTck … faster! Faster! It is no stretch of the imagination to envision Havas and their corporate CEO friends – friends who push for more nuclear power, more genetic engineering, more cloning, more water privatization, more growth, more consumption – sitting back and laughing their asses off at those of us at Parliament Hill and all around the globe that day, people-clocks chanting their corporate branded slogan TckTckTck as the world burned.

Denialism

Big greens want us to believe that we will fall into a pit of despair once we accept the situation as dire and will become immobilized. Is this true? No. In fact, history demonstrates time and time again that when faced with cataclysmic emergencies, people and communities pull together. Facing disaster, citizens of nations have shown they can unite for the common good. Sure, when we face the facts that now exist, despair is only human. The question is whether acknowledging our circumstances will immobilize us or give us the truth we need to face a daunting task. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche distinguished between what he called the “pessimism of strength” and the “pessimism of weakness”. “Pessimism of weakness” means succumbing to apathy in the face of overwhelming odds. “Pessimism of strength” means facing up to the facts, acknowledging the danger fully, and making a decision about how best to act. In other words, fear is good, and these parameters define our sense of responsibility.

Big greens are certainly aware that we are now in a death-spiral brought about by the capitalist, consumptive, and corporate domination of society. Yet they actively choose to remain muzzled on the subject. Power structures in place today do not act, and never will act, to stop climate change, because the changes so desperately needed by those most vulnerable on the planet are in direct conflict to the needs and rapacious desires of capital. Capital has no empathy. Capital has no children to love and protect. Capital has only one imperative, and that is to grow. Under the current economic system, the penultimate measure of success is profit. Corporations exist to maximize profits while externalizing costs. That is their nature. They cannot behave otherwise. Spewing greenhouse gases, toxins, and chemicals into the environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism employed by modern corporations and governments, and accounts for most of the pollutants directed into our air, water, and earth. Waste, pollution, and ecological destruction are built into the system.

Retribution

September 27^th, 2010.  From Chris Hedges Column on TruthDig:

“Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death. Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship.”

Are we ready for such reflection?  Is it past time to start talking about the core issues, the root causes of climate change?  Is it past time to start questioning why those who claim to speak for civil society refuse to discuss these very issues?

The most provocative tool for comprehending abject behavior we have learned as climate justice activists is this: when issues are not being tackled by directly addressing the root of the problem, one must ask why.

To answer this question, this “why”, we have discovered there is one tactic which uncovers more information than any other single tactic.

It is this:

Follow the money.

Funding 10:10:10

The 350.org project, 10:10:10, in whole or in part, is funded by Global Greengrants Fund (GGF), an entity which works with, and receives funding from, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and others, including ‘1% for the Planet’ (slogan: “Keep Earth in Business”). On July 21, 2010, GGF announced a partnership with 350.org: “Greengrants is excited to launch a new initiative of the Greengrants Climate Fund: the 350 Project Fund. Led by 350.org, the campaign to build a global movement for climate solutions, this initiative builds momentum and funds for climate solutions worldwide.”

Who is Global Greengrants? GGF states: “Our advisers and partners are currently focusing on REDD and REDD+ efforts around climate mitigation. REDD stands for ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and (forest) Degradation’. It is one of the areas of discussion at COP15 where some believe the most positive movement was made.”

In fact, REDD is one of the most contentious false solutions being fought by Indigenous peoples and grassroots climate activists all over the world. GGF has announced that through the establishment of their new pro-REDD ‘Climate Fund’, they were, and remain, involved in sponsoring delegates to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences such as COP15. This has proven to be a very successful formula for ensuring that anti-REDD Indigenous voices have been silenced from international conferences and climate talks, conveying to the general public the falsehood that REDD has been embraced far and wide. Those with no financial means to attend COP quite effectively have their mouths gagged and therefore become invisible on the global stage.

Those who agree with false solutions continue to be funded. Those who do not are replaced.

From the Rockefeller site:
RBF grantee Sustainable Markets Foundation’s 350.org launched its new web site, gearing up for “10/10/10, the Global Work Party” on October 10, 2010.  Organizers are encouraging individuals worldwide to do something to combat global warming in their communities.  More than a thousand groups in over 100 countries already have registered their events with 350.org, which include a bicycle repair day in New Zealand, planting thousands of trees in Uganda, and installing solar stoves for a carbon-neutral picnic in Bolivia.

These are all nice events, and are likely being organized by well-intentioned individuals. Unfortunately, none of them – or any semblance of them – will save us from catastrophic climate change.

Has the climate crisis (d)evolved into a mere Earth Day event to be held on an annual basis – a festive party to be celebrated? The symbolic Earth Hour, organized by industrial nonprofit complex World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), is now held each spring. 350.org a.k.a. Sustainable Markets Foundation a.k.a. 350.org Project a.k.a. 10:10:10 now claims a global climate party in the fall. Perhaps if we participate in Earth Hour or the Global Day of Action (or both!), and recycle our cans, bottles, and paper products at home, we can all feel we did our part until next year.

The Rockefellers certainly would like us to think so.

The Rockefeller family – think big oil (as big as oil gets) – is another primary funder of 350.org (Sustainable Markets Foundation). The Rockefellers, with other members of the plutocracy such as the Clinton family,  were also instrumental in the creation of 1Sky, sister of 350.org. An organization which pushes false solutions and grossly inadequate climate legislation under the guise of ‘grassroots’ democracy, 1Sky is a prime example of an NGO created for the power elite.  It operates as a think tank where past, present, and future policy analysts, high-ranking government officials, business leaders and CEOs, intellectuals, journalists, and conservative activists come together to develop political vision and strategy. Many well-intentioned, well-respected individuals are manipulated into lending their involvement to such institutes, which in turn lends credibility to 1Sky, 350.org, and their ilk when they deserve none.

We would like to name every foundation and corporate entity that funds 350.org and 10:10:10, and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they receive to implement the tactics of manipulation put forth by their corporate partners, but they choose not to respond to our requests for information. Likewise, they refuse to share the information on their websites, or in any other public forum.

Why it Matters

“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

Whether directly or indirectly, industry and industry-linked foundations steer environmental organizations away from grassroots movements and create an elite-structured caviar class of environmentalists financially motivated to pursue ‘business as usual’ solutions. Today there is a deafening silence as well as cries for censorship on this critical topic, even within the climate justice movement itself.

Silence kills and silence is complicity in the escalating climate disruption, climate emergency and climate genocide that is predicted to kill billions this century. Earth and paleoclimate scientist, Dr. Andrew Glikson of the Australian National University states that “informed people are now staring into the abyss”.

Pablo Eisenberg at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute has stated, “although we know that our socioeconomic, ecological, and political problems are interrelated, a growing portion of our nonprofit world nevertheless continues to operate in a way that fails to reflect this complexity and connectedness.” This unwillingness to confront the broader issues of climate change such as militarism, livestock, and the capitalistic practices inherent in the current corporatocracy, is at the heart of the crisis of the climate change movement. Behind closed doors, the organizations manipulating and exploiting 10:10:10 know and understand the dilemma created by their infatuation with the corporate power structure. Yet the big greens refuse to advance these fundamental issues. And to be fair, they can’t. For if they were to be effective, in a meaningful way that actually started a paradigm shift, they would quickly be cut off from their generous ‘partners’. These groups have become barriers to the movement. They no longer represent civil society, but stand as walls to protect the system. They utilize the coercive tactic of inviting supposed leaders of civil society into sanitized circles of power, and simultaneously repress the rank and file climate movement.

Why are the big greens and compromised NGOs spewing out meaningless targets for legislation which do nothing more than ensure a death sentence for humanity? It is because they have become corporations themselves. They are, in essence, subsidiaries of the very corporations that they claim to oppose. There can be no meaningful mass movement when dissent itself is generously funded by those same corporate interests who must be targets of the protest movement.

Reading Between the Lies

We must start turning off the faucets of the propaganda machine. Information flows from dominate forces that keep our society passive, dumbed down and stupefied. Humans display a universal propensity to deny uncomfortable realities—we actively repress intelligence and reason. Big Greens now employ marketing strategists to poll the public in order to ensure any messaging is palatable before campaigns and campaign messages are rolled out. This ensures the sad fact that the mainstream movement no longer leads, but rather capitulates to the status quo. The movement is now being shaped by marketing executives rather than activists. Big greens simply tell the public what they (the big greens) calculate the public wants to hear while at the same time protecting the system upon which they (the big greens) feast. Unfortunately, for ourselves and for our children, such denialism will ensure humanity’s certain famine – and ultimate demise.

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” – Gustave Le Bon 1895.

“For us to maintain our way of living, we must… tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves… the lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers… are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities” – Derrick Jensen 2000.

Now we have three partners slithering out of the rot of the decayed carcass that was the climate change movement: 350.org, Greenpeace, and Rainforest Action Network (RAN) have joined hands to sing a new version of Kumbayah with the grand illusion of waking the dead, and anyone can join the circle of song – provided we adhere to their guidelines. God forbid we challenge the system for what it is – a rapacious beast devouring humanity in the name of capitalism. Doing that doesn’t provide the win-win type of ‘solution’ these groups and their funders demand. Don’t begin to consider surprise actions that challenge corporate elites and the political structure directly. Don’t be provocative. Don’t plan for the potential need for self-defense. Don’t disturb dinner plans. Don’t miss yoga class.

Follow the lead of Bill McKibben (350.org), Phil Radford (Greenpeace USA), and Becky Tarbotton (RAN) and put three additional nails into the coffin of humanity. The Earth is beyond reacting to the tactics employed by those controlled by corporations, shared by tweets, and defined by actions that happen on a Saturday afternoon and end just in time for the next episode of Law and Order.

Aggressive action is required.

Mario Savio and Peter Camejo knew this. In the 1960’s they galvanized the souls of Berkeley into a force that would not be denied, and would not be repressed.

Those of us in the climate fight must not be denied, and we must not be repressed.

“Who raises money to protect rainforests yet greenwashes their first time logging? Who celebrates their 25th anniversary twice? Who has no scientists yet sets policy it refuses to defend? Rainforest Action Network @RAN of course.”  - Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet

Climate reality dictates that there are no solutions within our cushy envelopes of political negotiation. We no longer have the luxury of playing nice and limiting sacrifice. There is no reason for our favorite big environmental groups to sit down with industry and hammer out a compromise; the Earth is already screaming at us that half-measures won’t work. There is no reason to believe that if we change a bunch of light bulbs or recycle all those plastic bottles or rock our Prius on the way to a Global Work Party we are part of the solution. We aren’t. We must strive for what defeatists and their enablers deem impossible. The science dictates a systemic upheaval that will shock us all, and we can choose to endure, or choose to die.

The alarms are sounding. All 5 of them. And we ask you this: if your neighbor’s house is burning, and you called 911 twenty minutes ago, and there has been no response, what would you do? Would you fill a bucket from your sink, toss the water on the blaze, pat yourself on the back, and conclude you’ve done your part? Would you throw a party next to the blaze with other neighbors, cheering the fact that they also brought their buckets of water? Or would you realize the structure, as it once stood, is now lost, and it is time to rebuild a better one, perhaps resistant to flame?

None of the placating, enabling, corrupt entities herein is prepared to tell you the truth. Most of them recognize it, as they have seen the same science we have. They understand the deadly consequences of ocean acidification, plankton kills, methane releases, ice shelf deterioration, and temperature extremes; yet their agenda, cozy as it sounds through rhetoric and repetition, does nothing to curtail this reality: the truth will hurt.

We have no time to argue over strategy and tactics. We have limited time (and only the planet really knows what hour it is) to implement massive, global changes. And we have a system in place that will refuse and refute every critical mode for the required paradigm shift part and parcel. That leaves little choice for those of us alive today.

The carbon economy must end. An optimist should say we have until 2020 to accomplish that. By every means necessary we must bring it to an end. We believe that requires an absolute refusal on the part of us, the masses, to continue to participate in it.

Pick a date, and after? Don’t participate.

Attend the Global Work Party. And when you realize the effort is going nowhere, let that uncomfortable reality demonstrate that we should attend a Global Work Shutdown.

The truth is not, and will not be, televised. We must collectively recognize that the solution set we must enact is far more complex than any one of us currently believes, or can rightly handle within the constructs of current society. Tactics that generate financial upheaval, such as refusal to pay debts to banking institutions, must be employed. Corporations must be exorcised through aggressive carbon taxation in the short-term, and severed from the subsidizing bonds to governments of the people. Criminal prosecutions against complicit individuals, corporations, and countries must take place. The car must die. Corporate media and irrelevant distraction must be abandoned. The insatiable, commodified narcissism poisoning our culture must fade. As it does, an new age of creativity and imagination must reawaken with fervor, re-energizing both the spirit and the means of our global community.

Wake up. Tear down. Rise Up.

“Humans claim to be uniquely capable of logical thought, forward planning and moral judgment. None of these unique capabilities are evident in the mainstream international dialogue on responses to climate change. The time has come to rise above primitive tribal instincts and exercise our full human capacities in confronting climate change. The time has come to act with intelligence, foresight and compassion for the mutual benefit of all.”  - William Rees – originator of the “ecological footprint” concept and co-developer of the method.