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– So I no sooner read the previous article called The Power of Green by Thomas Friedman than I come across a strong rebuttal of that very piece by Jim Kunstler called Blowing Green Smoke on his website.

– It turns out that Kunstler, the author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, disagrees with a lot of what Friedman had to say and wades into him.

– Friedman and Kunstler are both smart guys and after I’ve read both pieces, now I’m feeing confused. These guys have both poured themselves into trying to understand the big issues before us and they’ve come to seriously divergent views about what to do about it all. Is it any wonder many of us are confused?

– Here. Now that you’ve hopefully read Friedmans piece here, try Kunstler’s piece below. Then, if you’re like me, it’ll be time for a Margarita, eh?

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Blowing Green Smoke

April 16, 2007

    Tom Friedman, celebrated New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat, riffed on (or around) the issues of climate change and energy in that newspaper’s Sunday Magazine this week (“The Power of Green”), and managed, in the process, to misunderstand just about every implication these conjoined problems present. Friedman’s specious thinking is symptomatic of exactly what is wrong with our public discussion of these matters generally, and their presentation in mainstream media in particular.

I’m fond of saying that if America could harness the power it wastes blowing smoke up its own ass, we could magically escape our energy-and-climate-change predicament. I say this repeatedly to counter the increasing volume of lies we tell ourselves in order to maintain the illusion that we can continue living the way we do. Like so many other commentators suffering from cranial-rectosis, Friedman believes that we can keep on running our Happy Motoring utopia if we just switch fuels.

Friedman gives no indication that he understands the fundamentals of the global oil situation. He writes:

     People change when they have to — not when we tell them — and falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking for a Plan B for Iraq — a way of pressing for political reform in the Middle East without going to war again — there is no better tool than bringing down the price of oil.

    This is a fascinating statement. It’s predicated on the idea that the US can achieve “energy independence,” which is itself predicated on the further idea that we can accomplish this by switching out gasoline for ethanol. This is such an elementary error in thinking that it would be funny if it wasn’t the lead story in the flagship of the mainstream media. As a Pennsylvania farmer put it to me in February: “It looks like we’re going to burn up the last remaining six inches of Midwest topsoil in our gas-tanks.” Friedman’s statement also ignores the facts that running cars on ethanol would make no material difference in the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, or that ethanol is 20 percent less efficient than gasoline, meaning we would have to produce and use that much more of the stuff just to stay where we are.

Where climate change is concerned, this is a variation of the “Red Queen syndrome” (from Alice in Wonderland) in which one has to run faster and faster to stay in place. It also fails to take into account the tragic ramifications of setting up competition between food for humans and crops for motor fuels just at the point when a growing scarcity of oil-and-gas-based soil “inputs” (as well increasing climate problems in the grain belt) will drastically lower American crop yields. The symptoms of this unintended consequence have already begun to present themselves — for instance, January’s food riots in Mexico, which resulted from Mexican corn being sold to American ethanol distillers rather than Mexican cornmeal millers, who couldn’t match their bids.

More… ➡

– This is a piece from Thomas Friedman in the NY Times from 15 Apr 07. It makes for an excellent read. There were several ideas, quotes and points that came out of reading this that were important for me.

One of the best was what he calls, “The China Price“. The China Price is basically what China pays now for coal-fired electricity. China is much too driven by various factors to consider energy sources that would cost them more than the China Price. So, if the world cannot come up with clean energy sources that are cheaper than the China Price, then it is very unlikely China that will use them.  And without China onboard the environmental movement, it isn’t likely the world will be able to stem the tide of global change now bearing down on us. So the China Price is a critical piece in the puzzle before us.

Another point made was that he feels that America will only truely ‘get green‘ when the American military does. And the key to getting them involved is to convince them that, “Energy independence is a national security issue.”

Here’s one quote about China which I found particularly telling:

“So, if you are a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: coughing workers are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers. That’s the key reason why China’s 10th five-year plan, which began in 2000, called for a 10 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide in China’s air – and when that plan concluded in 2005, sulfur dioxide pollution in China had increased by 27 percent.”

And, finally a quote from near the end of the piece when he’s discussing our current presidential hopefuls vs. the need for serious green activity in the US:

“Unfortunately, today’s presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like a carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge problems without asking the American people to do anything hard, you’re a fool or a fraud.”

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The Power of Green

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.”

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.

Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

More… ➡

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, recently, a friend of mine suggested the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

– research thanks as well to John P. for this article.

-Scary – you bet!   Consider the following two quote I’ve pullled from the linked article: 

“Inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are able to inspect only a tiny percentage of the millions of shipments that enter the U.S. each year.

Even so, shipments from China were rejected at the rate of about 200 per month this year, the largest from any country, compared to about 18 for Thailand, and 35 for Italy, also big exporters to the U.S., according to data posted on the FDA’s Web site.”

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Pet food crisis focuses attention on frightening potential health hazards

SHANGHAI, China – The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.

Yet, it took a much more obscure item, contaminated wheat gluten, to focus U.S. public attention on a very real and frightening fact: China’s chronic food safety woes are now an international concern.

In recent weeks, scores of cats and dogs in America have died of kidney failure blamed on eating pet food containing gluten from China that was tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilizers and flame retardants. While humans aren’t believed at risk, the incident has sharpened concerns over China’s food exports and the limited ability of U.S. inspectors to catch problem shipments.

“This really shows the risks of food purity problems combining with international trade,” said Michiel Keyzer, director of the Center for World Food Studies at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit.

Just as with manufactured goods, exports of meat, produce, and processed foods from China have soared in recent years, prompting outcries from foreign farm sectors that are feeling pinched by low Chinese prices.

Worried about losing access to foreign markets and stung by tainted food products scandals at home, China has in recent years tried to improve inspections, with limited success.

The problems the government faces are legion. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used in excess to boost yields while harmful antibiotics are widely administered to control disease in seafood and livestock. Rampant industrial pollution risks introducing heavy metals into the food chain.

Farmers have used cancer-causing industrial dye Sudan Red to boost the value of their eggs and fed an asthma medication to pigs to produce leaner meat. In a case that galvanized the public’s and government’s attention, shoddy infant formula with little or no nutritional value has been blamed for causing severe malnutrition in hundreds of babies and killing at least 12.

China’s Health Ministry reported almost 34,000 food-related illnesses in 2005, with spoiled food accounting for the largest number, followed by poisonous plants or animals and use of agricultural chemicals.

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– Research thanks to the deconsumption blog

There’s an excellent post over on the Reasic Blog which deals with the question of whether or not the recent IPCC report was censored. Many skeptics think that the science side of the global climate change debate is as skewed and biased as the opposition side. I think this piece does a good job of putting that notion to rest by explaining just how the IPCC Report was generated.

Here’s a link to the post: ➡

Science Daily — From the Amazon to the Himalayas, ten of the world’s greatest natural wonders face destruction if the climate continues to warm at the current rate, warns WWF.

Released ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Second Working Group Report, a WWF briefing — Saving the world’s natural wonders from climate change — reports on how the devastating impacts of global warming are damaging some of the world’s greatest natural wonders.

They include the: Amazon; Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs; Chihuahua Desert in Mexico and the US; hawksbill turtles in the Caribbean; Valdivian temperate rainforests in Chile; tigers and people in the Indian Sundarbans; Upper Yangtze River in China; wild salmon in the Bering Sea; melting glaciers in the Himalayas; and East African coastal forests.

More… ➡