American Pad and Paper Company: A Bain Capital Story

Mitt Romney has already made my list for his dangerous, reckless attitudes towards Iran, for which he runs the risk of getting us into another war in the Middle East should he be elected President. But Romney also brings big baggage in his defense of our current casino economic model and that is the subject of this posting. Mitt Romney started and ran Bain Capital from 1984-1999; he still gets profits from the company. It has been estimated that 1/4 of the companies bought or managed by Bain during his tenure were driven into bankruptcy.  One of the companies purchased and managed by Bain Capital, under Romney’s leadership, was American Pad and Paper (AmPad), purchased by Bain in 1992.   The accompanying visual representation of the AmPad’s history under Bain is summarized in the elegant, detailed graphic, put together and available as a pdf by the Boston Globe: you can download it, put it on the wall and distribute as an educational blueprint for how private equity firms operate. The story of AmPad has a beginning, when Bain purchased AmPad in 1992 and it has an ending, when AmPad was forced into bankruptcy and liquidation in 2001. In between those bookends is the story of how private equity firms generate profits for their owners and investors, but fail the company that generated those profits and the workers who ran the business. It tells the story of how a private equity firm ran the company into bankruptcy by forcing it to carry a huge debt load  (measured by the negative numbers and the green line), compared to the company’s sales, indicted by the blue line. The management fees Bain collected are illustrated with bright green circles, while the “other payments” and their amounts are represented by the dark green circles. This graph is not an outlier of the performance of private equity firms and how they manage the companies they buy or control as the major share holder. Rather, this is a graphical template of how private equity firms operate. A decent American, someone who is committed to better equity in America’s income distribution, as well as good management practices for American businesses, should be shocked by this story, but the financial industry of America and the Republican Party as its political representative, celebrate this kind of predatory behavior, because it’s the free market economy at work! If they get their way, the future will be more of the same and then some. A huge failure of our own regulatory agencies, including the SEC,  led to the era of corporate raiding, which forms the basis of our failure to support American manufacturing and the jobs that were slowly created through this process. Private equity firms are a festering wound in America’s manufacturing integrity.

Bain’s initial investment for AmPad was $ 5 million, after which they charged the company “advisory fees” for managerial services. As you can tell from their website describing the private equity branch of the firm, Bain specializes in “leveraged buyouts.” These buyouts are accomplished by putting very little money up front to purchase the company, financing the rest, either by using the companies assets if they have any or saddling the company with a substantial debt load, used to payoff the loan to purchase the company  and provide lucrative profits for the new managers–putting the company in debt is the primary means by which private equity firms generate short-term profit for their investors. Leveraged buyouts should be illegal!

The story of AmPad is hardly unique, but it encapsulates the mechanisms by which private equity firms extract money from the companies they purchase and ostensibly “manage.”  They are not interested in job creation. Their interest is purely in short-term profit-making. For Romney to talk about his work at Bain Capital as one of job creation is absurd–no one else in the private equity industry considers that as one of their motivations (see quote below from the LA Times below). The array of profit-making mechanisms imposed on companies is mind-boggling: no businessman committed to a sensible, strategic growth of their business would ever endanger his company with the kind of debt Bains put on AmPad: debt forms include leveraged buyout loans, management fees and when Bain decided to take the company public, the profits earned from the stock sale, as well as the administrative costs of issuing the IPO (Initial Public Offering) were derived from the stock sales or charged to the company. The purpose of the IPO was to was to generate stock with some value: shortly after AmPad went public Bain sold 40% of their shares, making even more money from their ownership. Private equity firms are also inclined to enhance the growth of the company through the purchase of other companies creating further debt and more job loss through additional downsizing, something usually associated with increased stock value. It should be evident that private equity firms manipulate manufacturing firms without any consideration about the future of the firm–instead they are only interested in short-term profit.

Perhaps the one thing that Texas Governor Rick Perry got right in his political campaign for the Presidency this year, was when he described private equity tactics as “vulture capitalism.” By forcing companies to run up huge debts and charging exorbitant “management fees,” companies lose their ability to make plant investments which would keep them more competitive and modernized. In its eagerness to provide a summary soundbite of private equity firms, the mainstream press is completely incapacitated. I watched on PBS news the other night as someone was trying to explain the value of private equity firms, based on whether they had created jobs or lost jobs. But that is only part of the problem–the major question is what are they doing to companies that secure their future and make them more competitive? What have they done to a company that couldn’t be done better by the ownership of the company and how stable was the company when acquired by the private equity firm?  It’s as if private equity firms and leveraged buyouts are an indication that financial institutions who make money through this sordid mechanism, have given up on American manufacturing and act as though it’s time to sell off the country’s assets and that is  a large part of what happened to the American manufacturing in the Neoliberal era (whose cloud hangs over us today). The first leveraged buyout took place in 1968, but gained momentum in the Reagan era. The practice could have been  stopped by the SEC and financial regulatory agencies, but they progressively proved to be emasculated by the frenzy of the corporate buyouts at the time. In addition, a hidden motivation for this strategy was the benefit of breaking the power of unions, whose presence made it more difficult to downsize companies and reduce wages. Wages, benefits and even whole retirement packages have been swallowed by the mechanisms that private equity firms have used to create wealth for a few investors.

Mitt Romney was hugely successful in running Bain Capital; during the time he ran the company, the investment return averaged 88 percent each year–phenomenal profit levels. These years were the fabulous growth years of our financial industry, which in the 1990s became the largest single sector of our economy and began to outpace manufacturing. In fact, the rise of financial America was created by buying, selling and destroying American manufacturing–that is how the financial sector grew–not by growing something new, but by tearing down what we already had built as a manufacturing economy. At one time America was the envy of the world for its manufacturing base. Where did it all go? And where is it written that a private equity company like Bain has people in their management structure that know how to run AmPad, better than the people running the firm in the first place? It is true that AmPad sales had a period of boom, accompanied by plant acquisitions and closures, but those kinds of performances are typically unsustainable: when a slowdown occurs or if good plant management doesn’t exist to make the appropriate investment decisions for maintaining productivity (and keeping the best people around that know what they’re doing), a company loaded with huge debts will show a drop in profits followed by a decline in the value of the stock, at which time it becomes more challenging for the company to stay afloat, something that AmPad couldn’t achieve. Many of the companies infected with the Bain virus were not new and had been around for a very long time. Take for example, Worldwide Grinding Systems (WGS), established in 1888; the went belly-up less than a decade after Bain became its majority stakeholder. Furthermore, WGS had to turn to a federal insurance agency to bailout its pension system, in large part because Bain  forced the company into a very heavy debt load.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times describes Bain Capital as follows:

• Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.
• Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm, his campaign staffers have said.
• Bain managers said their mission was clear. “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

Private equity firms are predatory capitalists, willing to force the companies they buy or control to take long-term risks for short-term profits. In the process, part of the short-term profit involves down-sizing the companies they own, eliminating jobs, reducing wages and creating conditions that jeopardize the long-term future of the company. The financial interests who run companies into the ground have absolutely no interest in long-term outcomes, whether it’s related to profits way down the road or our planetary future. They are hooked on short-term profits like junkies in search of a new high. We live in a country turned upside down. Too many economists, those with whom we placed a certain level of confidence that they would be our watchdogs and make certain that the country had a healthy economy, vitalized by a concern for important issues like social stability, equitable income distribution, education opportunities and retirement pensions and programs, have abandoned the ship: our faith in them turned out to be completely misplaced. Most economists are completely supportive of the role that private equity firms play in improving the “efficiency” of companies. This word “efficiency” as derived from their vernacular equates to “downsizing” and increased corporate profitability. Few economists of today have a sufficiently broad enough view of their subject to clearly see the destructive social damage that financial investment organizations like private equity firms have created, not only in terms of our economic future,  but also for the future of our species on this planet. We are badly in need of a new discipline, one that fuses our economic future with the environmental crisis that we are in today. We are deeply in need of new kinds of experts for our badly needed new economy–a new compass that takes into account the needs of a shrinking planet. Where will these new experts come from? Not from economics departments–they had their chance and blew it. We need to build a new economy and put in the kinds of safeguards needed to prevent predatory capitalism from destroying these businesses, while at the same time investing appropriately in the infrastructure improvements needed to place the globe on a better trajectory for the future.

Perhaps we will eventually thank Mitt Romney for the social service he is about to perform as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. By forcing the public as a whole to get better educated on the sinister motivations of greed that characterize companies like Bain Capital and how private equity firms create so much wealth for their investors, while actually diminishing the wealth of the Middle Class, Americans might finally wake up to the nature of the country we have become. Americans will also need to come to grip with their own naive trust of financial leaders and see the destructive swath that unfettered capitalism has reaped upon the stability of our society and the uncertain future we face as practicing humans trying to make it on this planet. We do not know how much of our manufacturing base was destroyed by the crazy leverage buyouts over the past thirty years and we can only imagine what kind of country we would have today if our government had intelligently stepped in and prevented these corporate disasters from ever taking place–they helped bring on the casino economy we have today.

In closing, I want to quote from a book by Walter Adams and James W. Brock, “Dangerous Pursuits: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Age of Wall Street” published in 1989, reflecting on the impact of leveraged buyout and the absurdity of the practice:

• “In 1983, Esmark, marketer of Swift meats, Butterball turkeys, Playtex products, and STP oil treatments, spent $1 billion to acquire Norton Simon, producer of Hunt’s tomato products, Wesson oil, Reddi-wip, Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn, Johnny Walker Scotch, the Avis car retinal service, and Max Factor cosmetics. The next year, Esmark-Noton Simon was acquired by Beatrice Foods, maker of La Choy, Rosarita, Tropicana fruits drinks, Jolly Rancher candies, Milk Duds, Air Stream motor homes, Samsonite luggage, Stiffel lamps and Culligan water softeners. Two years later, in 1986, Beatrice-Norton Simon-Esmark (which now ranked as the nations’s 26th largest industrial concern) was bought out by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in a $6.2 billion deal. And for what purpose? To sell off the various Beatrice-Norton Simon-Esmark divisions that had just been consolidated.”

Leveraged buyouts and corporate merger mania made no rational sense for building continuity in manufacturing experience and expertise. The government under Ronald Reagan helped to issue a new gaming license for a new kind of sport: corporate raiding. The new sport was aided by Reagan’s abandonment of antitrust enforcement, his corporate tax cuts and his relaxation of securities regulation. Reagan followed through with his political slogan that “government was the problem, not the solution.” These forces accelerated a reduced motivation to invest in America for fear of corporate takeover. The financial industry of America  had no problem adapting to this new gaming license and showed no concern for jobs lost, companies shattered or assets sold off for profit. The original corporate raiders and arbitrageurs had names like Ivan Boesky, T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn, who became the new robber barons preying on companies whose stock had been devalued by economic hard times and foreign competition, some of which was induced by the actions of these robber barons themselves. Bain capital is simply another version of the corporate raiders from an earlier era. We can’t afford to allow the continuation of this silly, but destructive behavior. Too much of our future depends on eliminating this disastrous “free-market” childish behavior and getting serious about human survival and our own economic well-being.

If you want to see how private equity funds have endangered the Danish Economy see my article “Borrowing From Denmark”

RFM

Iran Hostage Crisis U.S. Embassy Nov 4, 1979

It is the DNA of our foreign policy apparatus that forces us, perhaps in sync with some kind of diplomatic circadian rhythm, to periodically promote the idea that Iran is secretly building a nuclear bomb, in addition to the fact that they are the greatest satanic threat to world peace since the rise of fascism in Europe. Though we don’t officially use the term anymore, GW Bush’s characterization of Iran as part of the axis-of-evil is still emblematic of how we view and diplomatically treat Iran today. We can’t say enough bad things about the country and we are always looking for ways to tighten the sanctions against them we have already imposed (we are going to strengthen our sanctions since the British closed their embassy in Tehran terminated Iran’s foreign office in London). Yes the Iranian regime is a brutal dictatorship and no we don’t want them to develop a nuclear weapon. In fact, we want to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But ever since radicals overthrew the Shah and took our embassy members as hostages (we installed the Shah by overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossadegh in 1953, as a favor to British oil interests and what eventually became BP (British Petroleum) and is now bp (beyond petroleum)), we cannot shake the fact that we once had the Middle East oil situation fairly well worked out, with rulers who generally did our bidding, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait until Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic in 1979. We just can’t accept the humiliation we suffered in that episode and we want and need the current regime to topple. It’s obvious that the United States will not be happy until Iran goes through a change in leadership and we would obviously prefer someone more compliant with our own interests compared with the today’s intolerable situation: we demand regime change. But the reactionary posture we unavoidably display towards Iran, and refresh with predictable synchrony, is aided by our partner in sinister delusions, Likudian Israel, who shares in this paranoia and regularly feeds us information reinforcing our satanic interpretation of the country. But a definite pause was recently injected into the conversation about Iran: a recent report by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the watchdog of non-weapons nuclear technology transfer, claimed “the possible existence of undeclared nuclear facilities and material in Iran.” This was new because the same agency had reported in 2007 that there was no evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran (see below). But, that’s all it took. A lead story in the New York Times the day after the IAEA report came out advanced the idea that “United Nations weapons inspectors [IAEA] have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device.” You know that when the New York Times comes out with a forceful article like that, the story has legs and war chants begin, typically originating on Faux News (I didn’t check). Yet, later on the same day, the Times came out with a second, more cautionary report admitting “It is true that the basic allegations in the report are not substantially new, and have been discussed by experts for years. Many of them appear to be those first uncovered in the laptop stolen in 2004, said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Southern California who has written extensively on Iran’s nuclear program.“

I do not remember how many stories I have chased down, trying to discover the facts about these reports as they surface, but one always winds up debunking them as one fictional account after another, each fabricated or over-hyped to bring more sanctions against Iran and rally public opinion about the possibility of war, or at least initiating an air strike against their supposed nuclear facility–of course that would mean we knew where it was, which we don’t. The first story goes back to at least 2004 (I think I said it was 2001), when a “stolen laptop” was obtained that outlined Iran’s nuclear operations at the time, claiming they were developing a bomb. But that laptop was suspect from the time it first surfaced. For one thing it was in English and for another the government refused to have an independent agency check the dates and history of the computer to learn more about its past. After chasing that story down and a few other misfires, I got very tired of the misinformation campaign that our own government had developed, with the able assistance of Israel, such that I stopped looking into each and every threat. I believe that Iran is a suppressive, ruthless dictatorship that does not tolerate dissent, as we witnessed a few years ago in the streets of Tehran. I do not believe that a theocracy can ever achieve democracy. And, while I don’t put Israel in the same class as Iran, I believe that any government nurtured by a religious doctrine will always be in conflict with democracy. Our government has so inculcated us with misinformation about Iran that we are incapable of having a rational discussion on the subject of their intentions.

On many fronts, Iran has cooperated with us. For example we were allowed to land planes and fly over Iran territory when we first went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11.  During the Bush administration, Iran offered to put everything on the table for negotiation with us and Bush refused, presumably because he got more mileage out of Iran as part of the axis-of-evil rather than choosing to have Iran as a negotiating partner. For GW Bush, America needed enemies in many places, but most of all in the Middle East. Why turn an enemy into a friend, when it’s proven that you get more national mobilization ratings out of enemies compared to what you can expect from your partners. But, with the new threat that Iran might be developing a nuclear bomb, based on the most recent IAEA report, and given the election year hype that is bound to come out of this charge (it was a topic in the most recent Republican Presidential debates), I looked into this issue, beginning with my traditional sources of information, including Gordon Prather, a former nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In December 2007, I wrote a piece about the Bush administration and their false claims about the nuclear bomb plans of Iran, based on Prather’s reports and his inside information. I have not found anything by him on this most recent issue, at least not at the www.antiwar.com site where he usually posts his comments. However, the recent IAEA report, because of its departure from previous claims about Iran, requires another round of investigative effort and here is what I think is the likely explanation: To begin with, Syemour Hersh has reported on this issue in his New Yorker blog and reminds us that the two most recent reports from our own people, the National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.)–a summary of all of our intelligence agencies–concluded that, since 2003, Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program. From Hersh’s November 18 article in the New Yorker:

• “I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron [mass spectrometer],” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.“

To better understand the recent IAEA report, it is perhaps worth noting that the agency has had a relatively recent change of leadership. Until his retirement two years ago Mohammed ElBaradei was the I.A.E.A.’s Director General; he was so popular that he was asked to stay on for three consecutive terms (he is currently running for the Presidency of Egypt in their ongoing elections). Although disliked by Washington, his international reputation was one of objectivity and fairness and for his work, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, perhaps as a direct slam against the GW Bush administration who was constantly beating the war drums against Iran at that time. ElBaradei’s replacement is Yukiya Amano of Japan. The evidence points to the idea that Amano is more to the liking of Washington and that he resonates far better with the DNA of our foreign policy urges than ElBaradei ever did. What points us in this new direction–a change of leadership in the IAEA as the source of the problem, has come from an indispensable source of information: Wikileaks published a classified U.S. Embassy cable from Vienna, site of the IAEA headquarters, which revealed the following (taken from Hersh’s article):

• “According to the cable, which was obtained by WikiLeaks, in a meeting in September, 2009, with Glyn Davies, the American permanent representative to the I.A.E.A., said, “Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the group of developing countries], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every strategic decision, from high-level personnel.“ appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

Lyndon Johnson sworn in as President immediately after Kennedy was shot 1963

Those of us living in 1963 remember where we were and our station in life when Jack Kennedy was assassinated in November of that year. Who can forget the image of Jacqueline Kennedy standing next to Lyndon Johnson as he was sworn in as the new President of the United States, with the oath administered on Air Force One. And nearly thirty-eight years later, all of us remember where we were when the hijacked jets crashed into the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11/2001; we watched in televised horror as the buildings collapsed in such a way that they resembled an induced implosion, similar to those normally set off by explosive devices strategically placed on the building interior. Ten years after the Kennedy assassination, the nation had changed, but its fundamental character, that of a feel-good, do-good nation with a bright future had not altered: things would get better.  By that time, Johnson had been driven out of office into self-imposed exile by his own conduct of the Vietnam war. Hubert Humphrey lost the election of 1968 to Richard Nixon because of Vietnam and the Democratic Party Convention held in Chicago that year. Nixon, was president in 1973, elected with a vague promise of generating peace in Vietnam, but had escalated the bombing in North Vietnam and started secret bombing in Laos and Cambodia. At home,  the country was in a state of anger and confusion over the war, stagflation and oil prices, unable to connect the dots between them  in any meaningful way.  The break-in at the Watergate Hotel took place in June of 1972 and by 1973 the issue was heating up to the point that Nixon would resign as President a year later in August 1974.

The New Deal, established under FDR,  had started its own form of implosion, in part because no one stood up and explained things like stagflation in any satisfactory way. A replacement philosophy was offered through  neoliberalism and the free market economy, couched in phrases that seemed like personal freedom had been denied by the New Deal philosophy of embedded liberalism; the new arguments were provided by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, with Friedrich von Hayek serving as a historical figure and the “Miracle of Chile” under Pinochet as the primary example (people don’t need freedom, they just need a good income). No one seemed to care at the time that the “Miracle of Chile” marched the country towards an increasing disparity in wealth distribution–a Chilean gilded age. Eventually, the neoliberal formulation would come to dominate the global economy and generate our current gilded age disparity in our national wealth distribution. The income disparity in America, coupled with having elected a black President in 2008, has resulted in a division between the two political parties that is so divided  their congressional voting behavior that it threatens our economic future. But even more telling about the nature of our country is that, when Kennedy was alive, the Cold War was raging and an Armageddon of sorts was avoided during the Cuban Missile crisis a year before his death. In between then and now the Cold War ended,  yet the military budget has remained alarmingly high for a country that before 9/11, was at peace.

What about ten years after 9/11, a date fast approaching? As a result of the memory searing 9/11  event, in very short order, we started two wars we cannot finish and have a President that promised to stop the war in Iraq, but there are doubts today whether our military involvement in that country will ever be finished, largely because we are still in conflict with Iran, whose influence in the Middle East was enhanced by our invasion of Iraq. So here is the new American logic of war–we invade a country under false pretenses but in reality do so to gain control of their oil and sell off all their assets–a free market economy from the get-go. Then, when the war and occupation got ugly, we put in a puppet government at a time when George Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites (he said he thought everyone was an Arab); it was in the election of this puppet government that a Shiite government was formed (not surprisingly because the majority of Iraqis are Shiites), whose natural ally is Iran–the number one enemy of the United States. So, we are occupying a Shiite country to protect them from a neighboring Shiite country with whom they are natural allies and we don’t quite know who the enemies there will really be, except we know that we didn’t quite get control of the oil as we had planned and someone finally told Paul Bremmer that selling off the assets of an invaded country was a crime against humanity and that he could be arrested and tried at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. That could still happen: maybe America could begin a healing process of sorts if it did.

In the meantime, the war in Afghanistan, the right war according to candidate Obama, cannot be won, but our military insists that we are making progress, which cannot be confirmed by journalists other than those embedded within the military. Americans badly need to feel that we should be able to win at least one war, so the press seems willing to try and provide us with a sense of imminent victory if we can stay the course for a few more decades. Along the way, America became a security state, with a security apparatus that no one can comprehend, but it has a completely black budget and will be with us forever. Numerous agencies now constitute our intelligence system. The military tells us that the Afghanistan war will take as many as ten more years at the current rate of progress. Surely, at $ 2 billion a week,  America will not wait that long!

No President will ever authorize a reduction in the budget of our heavily privatized and overly-inflated security system, with buildings distributed in every state (a well-known military strategy for weapons manufacturing). If a terrorist attack should occur after a President cut the budget of our national security system,  the mood of the country would place the President’s political future, as well as that of his party into doubt as the relaxation of security expenditures would be blamed for the attack.  So, on top of the military budget, which is already close to the combined military budgets for the rest of the world, we add an additional layer for a security budget, but that’s an add-on we can’t even sink our teeth into because it is entirely secret. It is a highly privatized security system that has the right to examine any of our emails or phone messages for critical words, so be careful what you say on the phone. Any American can be arrested, detained and exposed to a long period of incarceration. Do we feel more secure because of this new, massive security state? No: our new source of insecurity comes from the threat of this large, secretive , uncontrollable organization. Did securitized America help capture the underwear Christmas bomber? No! Did it help eliminate Osama bin Laden? Not according to Richard Clarke, who appeared on Frontline earlier. In fact, you might want to watch Frontline’s “Top Secret America“ to get a feel for the unwieldy nature of our security system that developed after 9/11. Here are some of the uncomfortable facts: currently, 854,000 people in America have top-security clearance (this is not easy to get: some universities give classes on how to get this top level of security clearance); 1200 government organizations and 2000 private companies contribute to our intelligence apparatus, all of which was created after 9/11.  A slight expansion on this topic has appeared in these postings.

Though the intelligence system we created after 9/11 is largely unknown to us, lurking in the dark recesses of our national fabric, we can articulate what is more obvious about the changes we have made in our national character–we ourselves have became terrorists after 9/11! No one gets their head around this aspect of our cultural transition better than Noam Chomsky. I recommend that you read his article, which appeared in the Tomgram, just this past week. Kidnapping, torture and assassination are now part of our new national culture and people like Dick Cheney are publishing to reinforce this character change and, in the process, help him elude criminal charges that might someday come to rest on his doorstep. Polls show that many Americans accept this new form of behavior as necessary for our national safety, despite the fact that torture experts tell us that applying things such as waterboarding get people to say whatever you want from them to in order to get you to stop. But, waterboarding and torture are only part of the story. To assess the scope of this change in our  national character, we have to go all the way back to the close of WW II and the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war machine leaders. From Chomsky’s article, part of which describes how we treated Osama bin Laden in comparison with how we handled Nazi trials after WW II:

• “When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden — the Nazi leadership — the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson’s summary execution ‘would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride… the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.’”
  

  World Trade Centers on 9/11

then, comparing Bush’s invasion of Iraq and his overall behavior in conducting war policies, Chomsky says,

• “Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime” — the crime of aggression. That crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg.  An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “[i]nvasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State ….” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.” Problem stated problem solved for it doesn’t matter if Bush and company deny it, that it happened and was an unprovoked act of aggression is an undisputed fact. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are international criminals.

Quoting again from Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg,

• “We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.””

America was deeply, pathologically changed by 9/11. The inflexibility of Tea Party members reflects this new pathological state. We were unprepared by our leadership for what happened to us, largely because our leadership wanted to keep our foreign policy actions a secret from the American public, who they knew would never approve of our foreign policy actions, once exposed as being so foreign to the international image we like to project about ourselves. When you look at the polls that show a majority of Americans believe that their children will not have the same opportunities for success that they did, that the country is headed in the wrong direction, combined with the general pessimism about our economy and the global state of affairs, perhaps turning to Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry for the answers doesn’t seem as outrageous as it would have ten years after Kennedy’s assassination. After all, we tried everything else, didn’t we? When your own country abandons  your ideals and sense of responsibility, a bewildering emotion of abandonment makes us all confused about what it was we had in the first place–in the form of a country. As one outcome of this betrayal, one has to assume that we have not seen the end of terrorist attacks against the United States, but we are unable to see that if we restored justice to the Middle East and helped create a workable Palestinian state, a major motivation for these terrorist attacks would be mitigated. Imagine that we have been led by international criminals, who should be tried in a World Court for their crimes against humanity and then imagine where our standing would be in the world of public opinion, if we followed through with that obligation. In time, we might reduce the securitized state of America.

RFM

Fig. 1 Planet Earth (NASA)

Every educated person on the planet has heard about the threats to human existence imposed by Global Warming. Yet, few of us are knowledgeable enough to explain the basic mechanisms that determine our climate, especially when talking to those among whom are doubting members of the choir. Understanding the essential elements of Global Warming requires effort and an intellectual expenditure, but you can converse intelligently on the subject, while stopping short of explaining the situation on the basis of a thermodynamic theory of equilibrium. Besides, the earth’s climate has never truly been in any form of equilibrium–some positive or negative driving force or energy imbalance has always been trying to change our climate, though, until now, such changes have taken place over millenia, not over the two hundred plus years of the industrial revolution.  Our climate has always been changing, even though the time constants for change are way beyond a human lifetime, and lie properly scaled and recorded within the geological and paleoclimatological record, which gives up its secrets slowly. But once properly deciphered that record reveals a surprisingly coherent history for those willing to put the effort into interpreting the scrolls, or to be more accurate, deciphering the core drillings of oceans and glaciers. Of course, we don’t yet have a complete story. There are large gaps in our knowledge, but we know enough already to be mesmerized by our planetary history and the forces that have shaped our climate. And we should know enough to be alarmed and very wary about our future.

It is now clear that never before in our climate history have we witnessed the kind of experiment now underway–the forcing of our planet to go through something it has never experienced before–a sharp, man-made increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that is now taking place and pushing us towards a climatological precipice that we might not be able to escape. But if we act quickly, this experiment is still under our control, depending on whether we can muster the political will to curb our use of fossil fuels and restore energy balance to keep the planet as it was, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (ppm) or less ; it is now at 387 ppm and rising at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. The alternative is that we run the risk of higher levels of carbon dioxide that will trigger the melting of Greenland and the polar ice caps and eventually raise our sea level by 270 feet! We are probably not at risk for a sea level increase of that magnitude during this century, but we do run the risk of having this kind of sea level rise take place, and once it starts, there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Not only will this massive ice melting proceed out of our control, it will cool the local regions where the melting takes place, impact our weather systems and change the driving forces for oceanic currents. The emergency we must address now has been created by the fact that the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere has a very long half-life and its actions on our planet will be with us for a  very long time. Couple this reality to the fact that we are already seeing weather patterns that reflect Global Warming and you inescapably conclude that our short-term climate does not look good–it will inescapably be more violent. But, we can still do something for the long-term, by acting soon and now is not too early. There is little doubt that if we continue to burn fossil fuels through a business-as-usual mode, our planet will be markedly different and our planetary future will be seriously in doubt. In many ways, that’s the shock–not only that the climate is never in equilibrium, but that it is also super-sensitive to the very fuels we have chosen as our cheapest form of energy. For too long we have assumed constancy in our climate lives: that luxury has now gone, at least the assumption part of it.

Until Homo sapiens came along and started adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, climate change took place over thousands or millions of years and every hundred thousand years or so, we would go through another ice age, created by changes in the tilting of the planet on its axis and slight changes in the elliptical pattern of our annual trek around the sun. These two precession parameters change the amount of sun that radiates to earth (insolation), increasing with greater axis tilt and decreasing with less. Planetary alignments within our solar system create these different elliptical shapes and the axial rotational wobbling–the earth spins like a wobbly top–but wobbles on a very long time scale. The axis of the Earth’s rotation is actually becoming more vertical now, so we would normally expect to see another ice age, perhaps in 7,000 years or so. However, our carbon loading of the atmosphere precludes that possibility. Until humans brought the industrial revolution, the planetary environment changed on a very different time scale, usually thousands of years, even though cataclysmic events in our climate history have been known to happen. The question for our generation is whether we have put in motion a new and ultra-rapid set of events that we will not be able to control. Most climatologists say at best, it will be a close call if we are going to avoid a tipping point, after which it won’t matter what we do. But saving the planet as we have known it is still possible and the science is at a point where only non-scientists or discredited ones believe otherwise.

The value of knowing more about climate change is not to convince those like the Tea Party members, because they are beyond hope. The real function of becoming more knowledgeable about this issue is to convince ourselves and other like-minded colleagues that we are facing an imminent global catastrophe if we don’t act quickly. This is one branch of science we can’t afford to be cautious about. We have enough knowledge about our climate future that we should be ready to support a WW II-like mobilization strategy to begin shaping the new economy that will be required if we are going to ride this thing out and eventually reverse the 250 year trend of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  This dire need for a cooperative spirit to save the planet should greatly reduce the international barriers for interactive productivity towards this end.  And we need to get beyond simplicity. You can’t summarize the anticipated changes with simple phrases. Phraseology for climate change is dead–it’s silly to think in those terms. A warmer earth means a drier earth in some places and at some times, but also a wetter earth in some places at some times. And it means rising sea levels because the polar and Greenland ice pacts are melting, even though we don’t understand at what rate that will be happening and over what time–that’s the new threat! Almost none of the projections in our future are what we have been used to in the past and the threats that confront us all point to a fragility of our climate that, until now, completely escaped our attention. Fortunately, the science underlying our climate change has been advancing with new insights and theories appearing on a regular basis. This is still an intense on-going topic of investigation and insight. But, the science has passed judgment on our basic future and now it’s up to the public to catch up with their vision. Although it is already late, it is not too late to save the planet and preserve decent lives for our children and grandchildren. But it is in their future interests and well being that we must act now. So, an essential grasp of these concepts is increasingly important if we, as humans, are going to avoid falling off a cultural survival cliff that lies in our future if we don’t think and act more decisively to curb the new summers of our discontent.  The first person we have to mobilize is ourselves and after that, we can worry about our neighbors and friends. There are plenty of reasonable people out there that need to be convinced about the alarming situation that confronts us and the best way to do that is begin by developing our own educational skills about climate change and the emergency we face. We must quickly rid ourselves of coal-burning sources of electricity and put the kibosh on the use of Canadian tar sand sources. We need to reach a point where we leave the remaining energy in the ground and stop destroying mountain tops for coal.

Although it’s a common default cause for the media, we can no longer blame our current and future weather on El Nino/ La Nino or even a Super El Nino that climatologists talk about. There is some speculation that El Nino could become a permanent fixture to the environmental makeup. It used to be that these special events, which can bring about disastrous drought and flood conditions (depending on where you are), happened every ten years or so, but now they are more frequent, occurring about every four years. We have skewed the climate curve and most of us don’t know how or why, but increasingly we think it’s serious and we have to engage the rest of the world on a rational basis for believing that action needs to begin now and inaction will be a crime against humanity’s future.  Actually, we don’t have to convince the rest of the world–they already get it. We have to convince the rest of America and we have to begin to assume a leadership role in planetary revivalism. The new more violent weather patterns we have been seeing throughout the planet point an uncomfortable finger towards the unavoidable: there is more energy in the atmosphere and that excess energy needs to dissipate itself in some new, often more violent way. A small part of that expression will be in the form of dust storms that we have seen recently in the Phoenix Haboob and before that in the monstrous dust storm that moved across Australia (A NASA image of the Australian dust storm of 2009 is in the second figure). These dust storms are not unlike the dust bowl storms of the 1930s in the American and Canadian prairie lands, though they have a different origin this time around (dust storms of the 1930s have been attributed to soil erosion whereas global warming storms express increased energy in the atmosphere unleashed by condensation). Concurrent collisions between two storm centers can generate massive, uplifting air currents, scooping up dust and throwing it high enough into the atmosphere to be easily seen from satellites. More moisture in the air creates more storms and they will get more violent  In many ways, Australia and New Zealand are like Global Warming laboratories which illustrate both extremes of climate-warming weather gyrations, including severe droughts and record-breaking floods in 2010, in which a region the size of Germany and France combined, was under water, with the storm actions centered in Queensland. Global Warming weather is here and it will not go away.

The concepts that underlie Global Warming need to be learned and instilled among students in all of our public schools at all ages and we need to enlist the young  in experiments that can teach them about climate science and the emergency we find ourselves in. The students then need to bring this scientific knowledge into their homes and educate and invigorate their parents. The new generation needs to face the threats of climate change like no other generation before it. Until now we have assumed planetary constancy but the luxury of that assumption is gone. We need to have this topic constantly on the airways–it’s that serious. On the one hand, it’s like a modern iteration of Galileo telling us that the earth is not the center of the universe (as first suggested by Copernicus), but with one big difference–nothing changed when we learned the new rules of planetary rotations, although Galileo went into house arrest for blasphemy against the church and stayed there until his death.  But except for him and the impact his house arrest had on his young colleagues, the rest of contemporary society could just sit back and claim indifference or belief, without any action required.  The threat of Global Warming is at the opposite end of this analogy spectrum because if we don’t convert this new knowledge of climate change into action, to reduce our carbon emissions, we may be putting all species on the planet at increased risk for survival, including the one we have named  Homo sapiens. Indeed, for some species, such as the polar bear, the possibility of extinction through our greenhouse gas emissions has already been foretold and could be unavoidable; then too, coral reefs  are disappearing as the oceans become more acidic by absorbing more carbon dioxide. We can’t be neutral because the oceans no longer are and they are already talking back to us about we have done to them. Imagine the oceans without any coral reefs: where will all the fish go? We can’t wait to see if the science is wrong or whether some unknown force will emerge to wipe our carbon mess away.  Faux News will have to go–we need nothing but objectivity and action with an arrow pointing in the right direction. Those oars that are not pulling us all in the same direction need to be silenced or nullified. The world cries out for the return simple things like verifiable truth, not the muted information we get from our corporate news media. I agree with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now when she says that “mainstream media” is a misnomer, because they don’t really reflect the views of mainstream America at all. But that’s another story.

While I am a scientist (neuroscientist), I do not feel any special advantage over non-scientists when it comes to learning something about our climate and its history. The topic covers virtually all aspects of our scientific knowledge base, from physics to biology through paleontology,  evolution, geology, chemistry and astrophysics, while at least touching on everything in between. Hanging on the forces that created our climate is the tree of life itself. And increasingly there is the question of human ethics if we don’t act soon in the interest of protecting those that follow. I began reading and writing on this topic as I went along, expressing myself periodically in this forum, at the same time that I was assimilating some of the basics of our climate history and the essential mechanisms of climate change.  At one level, it’s all too simple: the carbon dioxide we have been dumping into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels from the beginning of the industrial revolution reflects heat energy from the earth that would normally go out into space (the shorter wavelengths of light coming from the sun do not interact with carbon dioxide–it’s the longer wavelengths that represent reflected heat (infrared) emission coming from the Earth that interacts with carbon dioxide molecules); part of the energy reflected by carbon dioxide heads back towards the earth and makes our planet warmer, just like what happens in a greenhouse and that’s why they call carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas. However, that’s the easy part–the hard part is understanding how the planet will react to this increased global warmth and those studies are still evolving and being refreshed and updated. But the basics are known–the planet is out of energy balance and it is beginning to speak back to us in predictable ways, few of which are desirable.

As I attempted to learn more about our climate, I took many diversions along the way, reading for example about foraminifera (forams) protists and their role in giving us information about our climate history and the importance of knowing the ratio of oxygen isotopes (O18 and O16) to measure ice and sea levels and ocean temperatures in the past. There is a giant literature on these topics and they all coalesce to give increasing confidence in the reliability of our knowledge about paleoclimatology–the science of knowing our past climate history. One thing seems clear to me: insights from paleoclimatology are essential for understanding our future, even though we have embarked on a climate experiment that is unlike anything that ever took place in the history of our planet. Two divergent methods give us information about the future of our climate. One is through modeling, using large-scale models to predict our climate future. These models are getting better, but they are still deficient in several important respects. The other method is through paleoclimatology, the idea that our climate has gone through many different changes in the past and the analytical techniques, largely applied to core drillings of ice sheets and the ocean floor, have provided us with an increasingly confident if incomplete understanding of our past environment and the factors that influenced our transitions through large climate excursions. It’s very fascinating stuff!

Fig. 2 Dust Storm Over Australia (September 2009)

What Are the Essential Questions? Early on, there was one over-riding question that I felt was an essential element to the core issues of global climate change and how I was going to address it. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate has seen fairly dramatic excursions of global temperatures over the documented history in which humans have provided some record of their presence and the question is what forces were responsible for those temperature excursions? How big were they and how did they happen? Are the same forces at work today?  Modern humans appeared about 200,00 years ago and human activity was observed about 130,000 years ago in Africa, where human evolution began. This time line of the fossil record took place during an interglacial period known as the Eemian, in which the average global temperature was only 1 degree Celsius warmer than what we have today. The warm Eemian period gave way to the last ice age, which developed over a period of thousands of years. However, the final descent into the last ice age happened about 70,000 years ago, was very rapid and coincided with the near extinction of humans. Genetic variance studies suggest that that as few as 1000 breeding pairs of humans survived the precipitous onset of the ice age and went on to procreate our contemporary human population. One theory for this rapid excursion into the ice age was the explosion of the Toba supervolcano which blocked the sun, significantly cooled the earth and challenged human survival by creating a long “nuclear winter.” So we know that our climate has changed quite dramatically, such that at one time it challenged the future of human existence, and perhaps it can change more dramatically than we think. But how do we know that the forces responsible for the last ice age won’t come along and create another one, rendering the issue of Global Warming as an irrelevant topic best left to climatologists and paleoclimatologists? One could ask is there really a need to learn something about climate change? Won’t the earth fix itself as some early climate doubters claimed?

The climate experiment we have embarked on has never been executed before. This is a new experiment. Whereas the Earth’s climate has typically evolved over millennia, we have, during the last two centuries, taken a giant syringe and injected our atmosphere with 130 ppm of additional carbon dioxide (along with some serious levels of methane and other atmospheric contaminants) and now we are waiting for the rest of the experiment to unfold. We finally recognize from early reports about this experiment, that we would like to stop it, remove the carbon dioxide we added and get back to the business of being humans again, but this time without the recent weather patterns that include giant floods, excessive droughts and global threats to our water supply. So that’s the message: how do we stop the experiment we started now that it’s going so badly? Stop the experiment–I want to get off. According to scientist James Hansen, if we eliminated all coal-burning sources of energy, and did so within decades, we would come very close to ending our carbon nightmare. But, right now, the world is building more coal-burning energy sources, so we are still moving in the wrong direction.Then too there is the problem of what we would use to replace this source of energy. Renewable energy sources? Unfortunately, we are a long way from having that as a reliable energy source, so we are left with a miracle biofuel or perhaps nuclear energy. Nuclear energy as we have known it is out of the question, because of our inability to handle the nuclear waste and the accident that took place earlier this year in Fukushima Japan. But fast breeder reactors, that have very little nuclear waste and can use up the nuclear waste we have stock piled, could emerge as an alternative. The plan to build one of those reactors was started under the Nixon administration, but killed under Clinton.

The Human Drive for Knowledge and the Best Way to Get it: The great beauty of the university classroom is that professors stand in front of you and condense vast knowledge into a small crystal that dissolves in your brain and creates an image of clarity, where before there was only confusion and uncertainty. Of course, as we all know, you can’t absorb all this by sitting  passively even if you are on the front row. Everyone who gains through this process has to study, read and ponder things, and all of us know that learning requires dedication to the task. Repetition breeds familiarity with the subject and stimulates the need to know more. We learn far more effectively from a knowledgeable person standing in front of us, engaging our brains on the topic of our mutual interest, when compared to any other forum of learning. Now that this form of learning is under threat, we realize that it has been both under appreciated and not well understood, though it requires human dialogue and interaction to work effectively. After forty years of being a university professor, I profess that this mechanism we have established to transmit knowledge by learned scholars standing in front of us, tickling our brains with integrated facts and a lifetime of research experience, is the highest standard of educational sophistication that we have attained in human history and any efforts to destroy this high form of learning will in turn destroy our culture. We should be expanding that experience not contracting it, as we are doing by such things as “distance learning” and “for profit” educational institutions. It is such a profound mode of learning that every human should have the opportunity to experience it and the intellectual stimulation it evokes; otherwise they are robbed of insight from the best form of education humans have ever developed. If expanding this form of didactic/Socratic learning became a more universal form of education, we might have hope of accommodating the 9 billion people on this planet, the expected population by the middle of this century. But even by then, there will still be more cells in a single human brain than humans on the planet and the lust for knowledge will pulsate within each of them.  It is up to us in the new culture to make sure that the innate thirst humans have for knowledge is met by teachers with expertise and enthusiasm for the work. As parents, all of us had to be teachers to our children and now the demand placed on us is to be a parent to the planet: it has been abused.

A First Among Us–the Tea Party Brain: Tea Party climate denial is hard to understand, for it is in this sector of humanity that the thirst for knowledge has died out, extinguished beyond any hope of repair. We might wonder whether this is a new stage in the human evolutionary experience. Someone must do an fMRI study on these Tea Party members to learn how it is possible for a member of our species to suppress frontal lobe function, when in fact that is what the human brain was designed to engage in–the need to figure things out. Normally, it carries out this function unavoidably–it’s human nature.  Until confronted by this group, I did not know that we as humans came with an off switch for this form of brain activity–I thought the use of frontal lobes for longitudinal thinking was obligatory, unavoidable and indigenous to our species. What surprises me even more, but seems consistent with the facts, is that once you turn that switch off and leave it in the off position for a while, it can’t be turned back to on–there’s no more light in that particular brain cavity. Apparently, for the Tea Party Republicans, energy for frontal lobe brain activity was permanently diverted to other centers that remain active, including brainstem functions. It follows that Tea Party members probably have excellent respiration. If so, they should be our first canary in the coal mine. Perhaps that will be their major contribution in the future. Climate denialists working to promote climate disaster, while steadfastly acquiring emphysema.

Creative Confusion: In the early phase of what I call “creative confusion” over my ignorance about climate mechanisms, I sat in on a class,  Mathematical Modeling of Climate Change directed by Professor Richard McGehee of the Mathematics Department at the University of Minnesota. A linked site provides references to some of the important publications in the field of climate science. If you go there you can get a copy of Jim Hansen’s 2008 paper  Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim. It will be a useful reference for his book which I describe below. The modeling course by McGehee was an excellent learning experience, aided by PowerPoint slides from major scientific studies, it was pivotal in getting me to realize how little I knew about Global Climate Change, even though it was not my first introduction to climatology, as I had read a number of scientific papers as well as some of the published reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is of course a massive literature on the topic of climate change and crystallizing it into a more manageable form is not really possible, so we have to settle for some of the major principles and focus at first on books that have tried to summarize and coalesce the science; then there is the question about how far you want to go, particularly if you still have a day job. I am still on that journey, but I write here to recommend a few books that I have read along the way that others might find useful.

Fig. 3 Mount Rongbuk glaciers in the Himalayas; top is 1968, botton is 2007 (from James Hansen)

Book One: Five different books have given me new insights on global climate change that you might find useful in understanding the problem, its origins, what we can do about it and what is being done today.  I have already reported on one, “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart, Harvard University Press, 2008. This is a short, highly readable book on the history of Global Warming and the mechanisms of climate change. Weart has a website where you can essentially download most of the book and other features, such as a timeline of Global Warming history. If you want to assist the cause, allowing your idle computer to work solving global climate models, you can do that as well by going here. Weart also offers advice on how to talk to a climate skeptic which I am not following in this posting.  His site is worth more than one visit. I always get something new each time I tune-in.

More work is being carried out on adaptation than you might realize and future possibilities might work out, but only if we soon begin to mitigate the carbon dioxide levels that we have been adding to our atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. One should no longer be thought of as an alarmist to suggest that the fate of civilization as we know it is at stake, with the serious possibility that our inaction could dramatically truncate the human population to a point where survival can occur but only under very primitive living conditions if at all. Perhaps the most important point that one can make, is that all those who have studied climate change for any significant period in their lives come away from that experience, believing as I do, that our planetary future is in peril and emergency, knowledgeable action is required.  “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet“ by Mark Lynas was published in 2008 by The National Geographic Society in collaboration with HarperCollins. I don’t see this book available on Kindle. To research this book,  Lynas went the to the Oxford library for months and took notes on tens of thousands of articles, reading original, peer-reviewed publications on global climate studies as he classified each paper, based on the degrees with which the study projected the global temperature increase during this century. He also relied on the IPCC report, which in 2007, based its predictions on probabilistic outcomes, and the use of phrases like “Virtually certain = greater than 99% probability” all the way to “Exceptionally unlikely as less 1% probability” and of course, many levels in between. The book is organized by chapters based on projections of the average global temperature increase during the 21st century. It is thus more futuristic and predictive than teasing apart the mechanisms of climate change, though some of that is touched upon. Separate chapters are devoted to (1) One Degree, (2) Two Degrees, (3) Three Degrees…all the way up to (6) Six Degrees. Each chapter describes the kind of climate changes expected if the mean global temperature should reach the degree predictions specified by the chapter title. Every chapter has references in the back “note” section to validate the author’s projections. Keep in mind that these are degrees Centigrade, so remember that 1 degree centigrade=1.8 degrees Fahrenheit; thus the outside projection of six degrees, where all hell breaks loose, would be 10.8 degrees F, a whopping change and one that is hard to imagine, but definitely achievable if we don’t act quickly. At those temperatures, human adjustment is not just a matter of turning up the air conditioner, its a matter that food won’t grow, deserts will get larger, sea levels will rise by more than 270 feet and the polar ice caps and Greenland ice will all be gone. We can’t let that happen, but we have to act now to make sure such a dire projection is avoided.

The One Degree Picture: The minimal One Degree picture for the Southwest United States is not pretty, as drought conditions are projected to increase. Humans have already experienced severe drought conditions in that region, both in the pre-industral era, as well as those taking place today. Lynas describes the Pueblo Indian society that lived in Chaco Canyon, located in New Mexico, where the inhabitants erected the largest stone building on the North American Continent before the European invasion–four stories high with 600 rooms. When a significant drought came to the region in AD 1130 the culture collapsed; many died, while  survivors  eked out a living within the steep cliffs nearby. There is evidence for a violent ending for many in Chaco canyon, attended by cannibalism. In the One Degree future for the Southwest, projections include 40% less rainfall, sustained over decades. The primary reason for drought conditions in these areas is that warmer air can hold more moisture, so that it can further dry the earth surface and make the region more vulnerable to fires and failed crop production. Other problems include water shortages interspersed with flooding and enhanced and more dangerous hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with more widespread, powerful storms that will make many regions of the country far less habitable and living conditions more uncertain. The places on the planet where humans can live comfortably will shrink.

Mount Kilimanjaro: Scientists are now rushing to Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, to obtain ice core samples that provide information about Africa’s geologic past, obtained by dissecting through the ice cores for layers of dust, oxygen isotopes and gas bubbles frozen in isolation within discrete layers. Studies estimate that 80% of the glacier on the top of Kilimanjaro melted during the 20th century and by roughly 2015, four years from now, it will all be gone. The only ice from the mountain that will still be in existence will be in the form of ice cores in the freezers of scientists’ laboratories. Glaciers are melting throughout the globe and cultures that depend on glacier melting for their water supply will face an increasing challenge for water as the glacier runoffs are reduced to a trickle (see figure above on Mt Rongbuck in the Himalayas)

Fig. 4 Surface Greenland Ice Flowing into a Moulin

More Than One Degree: From the one degree scenario things, as you might predict, get much worse and Lynas covers issues like polar bear extinction, which I have touched on previously and failed agriculture in China. At three degrees, an alarming result has been reported in a 2000 paper published in Nature–in which a massive positive carbon feedback forcing was modeled, involving release of huge amounts of carbon from land sources, adding 250 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2100 and adding an additional 1.5 degrees to the global temperature; this model resulted in the creation of a huge desert in the Amazon rain forest! Imagine that–from jungle to desert! According to this model global temperature could reach 4.0 to 5.5 degrees C by 2100 reaching close to the outer limits projected by the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. Lynas’ book does not have many positive outcomes, though there may be some regions that continue to have a climate where humans can survive and maintain the culture we have grown up in, minus of course the luxury of polluting our atmosphere with carbon fuels. The point of all this is that surviving humans need to have access to good technologies for generating heat and cooling while not adding to the carbon load and hopefully reducing it in time to prevent the full blown, worst case scenarios generated by climate science. It is up to us.

Six Degrees: When you reach the outer limits of projected global temperature change, that of six degrees, you can find a period when the earth was that warm to compare with what we might face under the same temperature conditions,  but you need to go all the way back to the Cretaceous period, some 65 to 144 million years ago. At that time the continents were still united into a single land mass (Pangaea), though the Atlantic Ocean was beginning to form–about as big as the Mediterranean–and sea levels were 200 or more meters higher than they are today; only 80% of the current land mass was above water and the average temperature was ten to fifteen degrees hotter than today. Africa, South America and southern portions of North America and Europe were dry and inhospitable, though the northern latitudes were warm and humid and, importantly,  no ice caps were evident at either pole. In the last chapter of his book, Lynas emphasizes that right now, perhaps for a period of only a few years, we have a choice about the world in which we want our children and grandchildren to live. The one degree scenario probably can’t be avoided, or if we did avoid it, we would have to get back to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide (right now we are at 387) and do so very quickly. Even then we would be faced with decades of an altered climate and if we returned to 350 ppm, at the very least there would be fewer non-human species.  The two degree scenario is fast approaching, with carbon dioxide at 400 ppm, a level projected for 2015. Beyond that, all bets are off because we could enter into the carbon-cycle feedback that might generate a potentially disastrous and irreversible climate change–a true tipping point to our climate future. On the whole this is an excellent book which properly frames our future insofar as we can make sound judgments derived from the science and models that are currently available. Lynas closes the introduction to his book by remarking, “Of this I have no doubt: Climate change is the canvas on which the history of the 21st century will be painted. Forewarned is forearmed.”

A Second Book: The second book I recommend is “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth“ by Mark Hertzgaard. This was published a few months ago (2011) and is available on Kindle. Hertzgaard has written extensively on climate change in articles published in The New Yorker, The Nation and Vanity Fair. He has covered global climate issues for years and has traveled throughout the world interviewing scientists, experts, city planners, hydrologists and farmers to learn more about the hardships we can expect from global climate change. He is doubtful that the Monsanto monoculture farming technique, that is widespread in America and China can succeed, and suggests that farmers must increasingly rely on using biodiversity/organic farming techniques. Otherwise there is a risk, like that of the potato famine in Ireland, of having crops wiped out because they are all the same, heat intolerant, drought susceptible, or disease prone. Many farmers are speaking out against the Monsanto strategy of genetically altered crops that are resistant to Roundup, so that the herbicide can be used more effectively against weeds.   One of the positive achievements taking place is that farmers in the Sahel region of Africa, including Kenya, Sudan and Uganda increasingly use a method referred to as “farmer-managed natural regeneration” (FMNR) in which they are recapturing and creating fertile, farmable soil by planting trees to help them push back the desert. The mulch generated by the leaves of trees retains more moisture and improves the nurturing quality of the soil, leading to improved productivity of the land. Time will tell whether the pressure of climate change can be overcome with FMNR. It is one of the many fascinating issues currently evolving as one component to the world’s food supply. Manage the unavoidable and avoid the unimaginable is the guiding paradigm of those trying to adapt, but all the while keeping up the pressure for mitigation to reduce greenhouse gases. Without the latter, avoiding the unimaginable is not possible. Right now we are witnessing a human catastrophe in Africa where the most intense drought conditions in decades are forcing mass movements of people attended by widespread starvation. This too is a consequence of Global Warming which works by exaggerating conditions, including desertification,  that have taken place before.

This is a fascinating book and quite different from “Six Degrees.” This book presents an early summary of some of the changes that are shaping our climate, but Hertzgaard quickly moves on to discuss how his daughter Chiara, now five, must adapt successfully and survive the climate changes that are in her future. His thesis is that the intensity of Global Warming has arrived nearly a century before projections and that even if our global society is smart enough to get busy and reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere, we will still have to contend with an excessively warm planet for at least fifty years, because of the long half-life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Much of his book covers the success and attempts that others have and are making to adjust to the expected climate change and his book is focused on what his daughter must do to live through what is hopefully a temporary glitch, before our atmosphere returns to the conditions under which we and all other species have evolved and currently survive. The personal touch of looking towards the future, trying to protect a young daughter who is just beginning life and had nothing to do with creating climate change, gives the book a tone of emergency and sensitivity that  would otherwise be lacking. Discussing the impact of our climate future through the eyes of someone trying to protect their child, gives emphasis to the idea that Hertzgaard does not shy away from–those who oppose immediate action on our greenhouse emissions are guilty of crimes, serious crimes against the future of humanity.

Global Warming vs Global Climate Change: like many others, Hertzgaard distinguishes between Global Warming and Global Climate Change. The former is the actual increase in the mean global temperature as a result of greenhouse gases and the latter refers to the planet’s reaction to the increased temperature, or in other words, just about everything else. He also separates the concept of “adaptation,” meaning the things we must do to live through the next fifty years and “mitigation,” the international efforts that must be expanded to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so that the period of adaptation will be confined to fifty years and not much longer. This terminology and distinction is also part of the most recent IPCC report (2007). Many scientists are leery of  adaptation because they fear it will relax the serious efforts we must take to mitigate the problem by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Adaptation by itself will not prevent the problem, in fact, it will get far worse if it leaves us with a false sense of security, feeling that we have done enough and we don’t have to deal further with the problem. Then it will truly get worse and may spin out of control.

Fig. 5 Greenland Ice Breakup

One issue which Hertzgaard addresses is the failure of the fourth IPCC to undertake serious recommendations about sea level rise. When he interviewed one of the reports’ authors, he found out that the fourth IPCC report committee  knew that the models they had been relying on for insights into sea level changes were wrong, so they minimized those aspects of the report and emphasized the need to await better modeling results, which would take into account the new realities of polar ice cap melting and the melting of Greenland’s vast ice stores (Figs 4 & 5). Climate models are furiously being revised to more accurately project sea level rise based on the new realities of massive melting conditions in the three regions of the globe that hold most of the ice and could impose an entirely different future for us if they melt more quickly that we presently assume. In other words, the IPCC fourth report of 2007 is flawed and its projections for sea level changes (which were less than the previous report) cannot be taken seriously. That issue is where James Hansen’s work comes in more forcefully (see below).

This is an informative book that speaks passionately about how it is too late to avoid climate change, so we have to learn to live through decades of these anticipated alterations in our climate, but we can still avoid the full throttle of these effects, unless we reach a tipping point beyond which we cannot escape and, should that turn out to be true, we will watch helplessly as things we do then will have no meaning for our climate future.  Nevertheless, the tone and outlook of Hertzgaard’s message is upbeat: we can adapt, but we have to increase the public pressure for mitigating carbon dioxide down to levels commensurate with a full life, like the one we used to be able to promise to our children and grandchildren. Right now, that promise is up for grabs.

A Third Book: Global climate scientist James Hansen has written a very readable book, “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity”, published in 2009 by Bloomsbury. It’s available on Kindle and was reviewed in the LA Times If you read no other book, this is the one I would recommend because it blends the science of climatology together with Hansen’s personal history in bringing the attention of this threat into the public arena: it combines science with a personal narrative and some of it shamefully recreates how the Bush administration suppressed scientific information that Hansen tried to promote as a climate scientist.  I have commented many times on how the Republican Party and GW Bush have suppressed science to favor their own political interpretation over those generated through the laboratory. I have also provided a little slide show illustrating how we veered off course. Although it is written by an expert, it is done in such a way that you feel well informed and not intimidated by an overwhelming level of science and technogarble. No one in the world is in a better position to write on this topic and use this kind of title than James Hansen. He was the first to testify before Congress in 1988 and warn of the coming weather hardships if we don’t address the issue of greenhouse gases. He has written numerous articles on this topic and has been a leader, both scientifically and sociologically for a good part of his career. Bill McKibben, coordinator of 350.org, has referred to Hansen at “the planet’s great hero.” As the most outspoken advocate of immediate action to avert planetary disaster from climate change, you can imagine that Hansen is one of the prime targets of the climate change denial community. But, to our great benefit, Hansen is fearless in asserting what the science tells him needs to be done.

No scientist feels comfortable predicting and projecting the future, especially if it is something as complex as our global climate and a subject which is likely to attract international attention. We admonish meteorologists who don’t accurately predict the weather a few days in advance, so imagine what many reserve for a climatologist who can’t explain today’s weather hardly at all, but then has no doubt about the future weather trends. So what’s missing? Whereas many climatologists rely on computer models for projecting the future, Hansen instead is committed to paleoclimatology which he feels is on firmer ground, though he does not shy away from climate modeling and his worked has involved both approaches to the problem. However, he is cautious about modeling because models, while getting better, still leave out many important details. One of the model deficiencies that has come to light recently is that of the failure of such models to deal effectively with melting the polar ice caps and Greenland ice. Until recently the models treated these giant structures as ice cubes melting in a glass of water, but it is clear that the these ice sheets are disappearing much faster than this kind of model projects. The moulin figure on the right shows surface melt water that carved a hole into the ice and allows melt water to fall to the bottom, accelerating the ice melting process, including ice sheets that normally resist the flow of a glacier. The elimination of deeply buried ice sheets leads to an accelerated movement and melting of glaciers. As far as models of major ice pack melting goes, it’s back to the drawing board for this aspect of modeling, and while they are still trying to get those models up and running properly, Hansen maintains that the science of paleoclimatology is sufficiently well understood that we can look backwards in order for us to project our future. Although we have been there before, the promise is that the trip we have embarked upon is unlike any trip we have been on before.

Fig. 6 Forest Fires Are Increasing in Frequency and Magnitude

In 1750, the carbon dioxide levels in the air were 280 ppm or .028%; in 2009 the carbon dioxide was 387 ppm or .039%; by 2015 we are expected to hit the magic 400 mark. Imagine that a small change in our atmospheric carbon dioxide could potentially threaten the future of the planet. But that small % change in carbon dioxide, coupled with some of the other greenhouse emissions (such as methane), means that a new net forcing from this factor alone accounts for 1.5 to 2.0 watts of additional energy/for every square meter of the planet, with an error of perhaps a watt. That amounts to turning on a couple of Christmas tree lights for each square meter of the earth’s surface, which seems like a trivial force; in the short run, it cannot interrupt a storm or change a storm path and yet that seemingly minuscule change in net energy is sufficient over a long period of time to effect our climate future. Such an effect pushes the earth’s climate further out of balance. Right now, we are being saved further warming of the planet from greenhouse gases by another factor, also a product of our industrial age, but one whose impact we don’t know a lot about–aerosols. These are man made dust particles, including soot, sulfur dioxide, chlorofluorcarbons and many other particulates. Their effect, when put into the atmosphere is to reflect sunlight and in a way protect us from further warming. They do this in a manner similar to what happens when a volcano erupts and spreads ash into the atmosphere. This will tend to cool the air by reflecting sunlight and can do so for a few years depending on the tonnage of ash delivered by the explosion. But, unless replenished (as we are doing with our fossil fuel usage), the ash will be removed from the atmosphere and lead to restoration from the climate trends that were ongoing at the time. So the efforts that are being generated to reduce particulates as part of our overall atmosphere cleanup, may give rise to a new shift in the global warming cycle and that has led some scientists to suggest that we add reflective particles to the atmosphere to achieve cooling by reflection. Many scientists, including this one, do not see this as a sensible way out of our carbon dilemma.

Hansen’s strategy to deal with our carbon footprint is to analyze the carbon levels that are being added to the atmosphere and then ask where they go? His analysis tells us that global emissions of carbon dioxide increased from less than 2 gigatons (GtC) a year in 1950 to more than 8GtC per year in the last few years. Oddly enough, there are two measurable features to the carbon emission pattern, one of which is the global amount of carbon dioxide emission and the other is the carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere–two known quantities. Divide the annual increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the fossil fuel emissions and you get another parameter known as the airborne fraction or the fraction of the emission that is in the atmosphere. Oddly enough, that quantity has remained constant from 1950 to 2010, meaning that a constant fraction of what we are adding to the environment is going into a carbon sink. Carbon sinks include the ocean, forests and soils. Without these sinks our carbon loading of the atmosphere would be much greater that it is today. It has been estimated that the ocean takes up about 3 GtC per year; thus a fossil fuel load of 8.5 GtC per year, which leads to an average 4.5 GtC per year in the atmosphere,  add the ocean sink of 3 GtC per year and we get a net carbon sink for vegetation and soil of about 1 GtC per year. It is encouraging that this land sink for carbon dioxide exists despite the massive deforestation our planet has undergone during the last several hundred years. In the United States, 99% of the old growth forest has been cut down, reducing considerably the contribution from forests which would ordinarily form another large carbon sink. If we continue to use fossil fuels, the land sink for carbon dioxide could become saturated, leading to a much larger atmospheric carbon loading. It is important that we help reforest the planet, for better carbon balance.

Hansen’s book is an educational experience embedded in a fascinating narrative of his scientific life, with stories of his grandchildren added to invoke a proper sense of urgency to our current climate crisis. Hansen travels as a kind of international celebrity and the gold standard for frank discussion of our global threat. He has written letters to leaders of the world, imploring them to take climate issues seriously and begin by eliminating the use of coal. He insists that we must give up on the use of coal immediately–no more mountain tops removed–coal is the worst form of  polluting energy we have. Not only does it heavily pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, but coal mining creates huge levels of polluted water and adds toxins such as mercury to our global air supply and the oceans.  Hansen’s idea is that if we could eliminate the use of coal, we would solve the carbon dioxide problem and begin to head back to 350 ppm carbon dioxide by the latter half of this century. He believes that a carbon tax needs to be applied at the source of each form of fossil fuel, with the money generated given back to the public as a dividend.  In that way the “fee-and-dividend strategy,” as models suggest, could reduce carbon emissions by 28 percent compared to what we have today. Hansen is forcefully opposed to cap-and-trade, which he believes is unworkable and nothing more than a political scam. Tragically, cap-and-trade is the basis of the law that is likely to be passed by Congress, though don’t hold your breath when that might happen.

In case you remain skeptical about Hansen’s sense of urgency concerning our planetary future and the need to act quickly, one of his later chapters (10) is titled “The Venus Syndrome,” in which he lays out how Venus, whose surface temperature is currently  +450 degrees C was once a planet, that like Mars and Earth, probably had oceans. At the time Venus was formed, the sun was 30 percent dimmer, so Venus was probably cool enough to have oceans. Mars on the other hand had its water frozen with a surface temperature of -50 degrees C, as its orbit is further out. But as the sun got brighter, the surface of Venus got hotter and the oceans became water vapor while carbon dioxide, from carbon sources of the planet, became the dominant gas, currently constituting about 97 percent of the atmosphere. Hansen argues that the earth could replicate the sequence of events that made Venus uninhabitable by going through a runaway greenhouse gas emission levels that reach 10 to 20 watts per square meter. This level could be achieved with a relatively small increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, though the exact levels required are unknown. But, such levels are in the ballpark of what we might get to by burning every last stitch of our fossil fuel supply and may be unavoidable if we don’t stop emitting greenhouse gases before we reach a tipping point where this planetary scenario is unavoidable. Right now we are “enjoying” a minimal period of solar radiation, based on the historical record from satellite data that was first obtained in the 1970s. Should the sun pull out of its current minimum in radiation, it could serve to further accelerate our date with a climate disaster.

Hansen’s final chapter describes the kinds of storms that our children and grandchildren are likely to experience, as he emphasizes that we are already going through these kinds of changes in our weather patterns; he uses concrete examples of past storms to illustrate the connection. Not every storm we see will have an obvious Global Warming signature. But collisions between warm, moist air and cool dry air will increasingly reflect the new energy stored in our atmosphere and released through condensation. His point is that the increase in the violence of the storms we have encountered so far pales in comparison to what we can expect in the near future. The additional energy in the atmosphere will drive larger storms, with more moisture, higher winds, more violent hail storms and give rise to larger and more deadly tornadoes. A mere 10 percent increase in wind speed increases the destructive potential of the storm by one-third. These supercell storms will increase in frequency and magnitude. The devastating tornadoes,  such as those that horrified us this year in Oklahoma, Alabama and Joplin Missouri will only increase in magnitude and destructive force. Thundersnow storms such as the giant cyclonic blizzard  Superstorm that struck the East Coast in mid-March 1993 had 100 mile per hour winds and stretched from Central America to Nova Scotia, Canada. Once the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers begin serious melting, north-south temperature gradients will further increase and likely change the ocean currents with yet more devastating storms like the Superstorm of 1993.  Now add the rise in sea levels anticipated and you have the additional capacity of windstorm floods reaching into new regions, not storm-flooded before. In America, we are not even remotely prepared to face these kinds of forces or admit to their origin.This is a special tragedy, since this country has supported much of the science that went into discovering these man-made threats to our future.

This book is Hansen’s clarion call for action. He advises those alarmed by these environmental threats to join Bill McKibben’s 350.org and participate in the events that are needed to change the way we live and revert the planet to one we can live on in the absence of a man-made threat that will make life on earth virtually impossible if we do nothing about atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite the alarmist nature of Hansen’s message, he remains an optimist about our future and continues to give lectures and advise governments on what lies ahead if we don’t act now. He also has grandchildren that he hopes to help protect from a future that none of us want, but few of us are prepared to help prevent.

RFM

Hubert H. Humphrey 1911-1978

We were overwhelmed  with news that this year is the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, but we heard nothing about Hubert Humphrey, whose birth has also reached the centennial mark this year. But Rick Perlstein, writing in the New York Times OP-ED section today has not forgotten him and his remarks remind us how much better off we would be as a country today if we had elected him as President in 1968 and adhered to his plans for the nation.  Humphrey was a historic labor figure here in Minnesota, before he became a national figure, as he played a major role in forming the Democratic Farm Labor party (DFL), which remains as the prominent Democratic party in Minnesota today. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1948, Humphrey led the Minnesota delegation to the Democratic National Convention. His insistence on a platform favoring a civil rights issue, led to threats from the segregationists that they would walk out if the platform was approved. No one would have blamed Humphrey if he dropped the issue for the sake of party harmony, but Humphrey bounded onto the floor and gave one of the greatest speeches in political history when he said “To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” The motion carried, the Southerners walked out and ran Strom Thurmond for President and Harry Truman eventually won the election, as Hubert Humphrey helped to shape the Democratic Party into the party for civil rights. It was Hubert Humphrey, known as the “happy warrior,” who proved instrumental in getting civil rights legislation passed, through his political skills and tireless energy in the 1960s. Contrast Humphrey’s actions with those of the Republican Party who used the civil rights legislation to successfully recruit southerners into the Republican Party. The segregationist south merely switched parties, and they remain an obstacle today for any progressive legislation.
It was tragic that Humphrey lost to Nixon in the 1968 Presidential race, but Humphrey was scarred by the Vietnam War and the divisive Democratic Convention in Chicago of that year. Humphrey hated the war, but running for the Presidency in 1968, he was tethered to Johnson who insisted throughout most of the election that Humphrey needed to adhere to the Johnson war policies, or face his (Johnson’s) efforts to deny his candidacy important sources of campaign revenue. More than half of the U.S. soldier deaths in Vietnam took place after Nixon was elected. But later, at a time when the Democrats began to think in terms of affirmative action, it was Humphrey’s contention that too many jobs were disappearing in America and that affirmative action could only be effective if job opportunities were broadly available. In 1976, now fighting as a Senator, Humphrey and Hawkins, a Democrat from Los Angeles, introduced a bill requiring the Federal Government to keep the unemployment below 3 percent and if it fell below that number, the government had to supply emergency jobs to the unemployed. At that time, not only did the New York Times endorse the bill, but 70% of Americans supported it and believed it was an appropriate function of the Federal Government. This, at a time, mind you that the country was just four years away from their first dose of Reaganomics. How times have changed.
Both Carter and Clinton, two southern Democrats, lost sight of the New Deal, whose torch Humphrey had carried forward for many decades. In his 1978 State of the Union Address, Carter said that “government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure our literacy or provide energy.” By spelling out what government couldn’t do, Carter in many ways was admitting that maybe it was already doing too much and this attitude helped to infuse Reagan’s policy that “government was part of the problem.” This Republican Mantra carries over still today despite the overwhelming evidence that government does many things better and for less cost than private companies. Our healthcare costs today have been driven higher by the for-profit healthcare industry than any other single factor.

When Hubert Humphrey died of cancer in January 1978, the last courageous warrior for the New Deal was gone, though Ted Kennedy carried on in a climate that was increasingly hostile to government.  What we encountered after that was deregulation, elimination of manufacturing jobs, the financialization of America and the increasing disparity between the wealthy and the poor and the stagnation of Middle Class incomes.  Under the overdose of too much Republican rule, our government is no longer viewed as an instrument of wealth redistribution, one of its main functions under the philosophy of the New Deal. Today we have a Republican Party that has been so ideologized, that they believe all government involvement has been a mistake–let private enterprise do it instead. In other words, the Republican party of today would prefer that we have no Erie Canal (supported by New York State, which created Buffalo New York and allowed New York City to develop into America’s greatest shipping port), no transcontinental railway (accomplished with government investment under Lincoln), no Social Security System (FDR), no interstate highway system (Eisenhower), no civil rights legislation (Johnson), no Medicare or Medicaid (Johnson) and no national healthcare patchwork system (Obama): in fact they are trying very hard to undo the last item on the list.  Imagine the country that might have been if Humphrey had been elected in 1968. First, he wanted very badly to end the Vietnam War, so that tragic war would have ended without the inhumane bombing strategy that Nixon and Kissinger brought to the table.  Second, Humphrey wanted to insure that America would be a strong source of manufacturing employment and wealth and he would have strongly opposed many of the deregulatory changes that led to our current economic collapse. So, if we have to endure an unending level of praise for a president (Reagan) whose actions led to the destruction of a government that once aspired to be fair, and whose actions led to a complete  ruination of  the concept of public service, let’s at least remember someone who held public service as an act of the highest possible esteem and lived his life as an exemplary model of a public servant. In Minnesota, after eight long years of Governor Tim Palenty, now a candidate for the Republican nomination for President, we can see in Minnesota the disastrous ruination of a state that was once proud to live and foster the standards that led to Humphrey’s political career. Today, in light of what we see all around us, what wouldn’t we do to let history roll the dice again, beginning with the election of 1968? I confess that I was very strongly against Humphrey in the election of 1968, though I voted for him because of the odious nature of his opponent. To me, Humphrey was too obligated to Johnson’s war policy, which at the time was all that mattered. But, in retrospect, one can now realize that the outcome of the 1968 election began to seal the future of America as it tilted towards social and political disintegration.

For those of you more interested in Humphrey’s life and political impact, there is an excellent two-hour documentary “Hubert H. Humphrey: The Art of the Possible” available and you can go here for general information on the film as well as a more complete description of his life and its impact. A truly remarkable public servant and a model for all who aspire to public service as a tool for social good, not as a tool for destroying government functions.

RFM

Tahrir Square, 2/11/2011 (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

One-half of the Cold War ended dramatically when Mikhail Gorbachev let the Soviet Union disintegrate as he looked for peaceful alliances and a soft landing. But, the other half of the Cold War, our half, kept on going. America was unprepared for unilateral Soviet withdrawal from the Cold War. Russia was such a nice, easy enemy. But when they collapsed, we needed the Cold War to continue–it was our excuse for maintaining our hegemony over what we called “the free world.” The CIA had missed the clues of Soviet decline, despite the fact that signs of Soviet collapse had been present all along. Russia was a “superpower” in name only, granted by her huge nuclear arsenal. On the other hand, that was good enough for government work. The Soviets were a wonderful enemy to have: we simply don’t have enemies like that anymore. They were easy to deal with and easy to identify, as they all wore over-sized top coats.  We got used to enemies who don’t like democracy and when confronted with that possibility among our adversaries, we didn’t know whether to kiss them or throw stones. But, the Soviets were perfect for us; in fact we helped create and shape them into what we needed. They allowed us to build an unimaginable arsenal of weapons, as they responded in kind and they also occasionally invaded a Soviet block, whenever their citizens tried to reverse the boundaries created by WW II, thinking of course that we would support the revolutionaries looking for democracy and rejoining Europe. Think again–we were not for freedom and democracy, but rather dominance and stability.  The good thing about the Cold War was that, when it ended, when the Soviet Union threw in the towel, the borders were exactly the same as they had been at the close of WW II, with a divided Germany and a group of Eastern European buffer states that the Red Army had moved through on their way to defeat Hitler in Berlin. But the Cold War was not without very heavy costs. Not only did America keep remaking itself into an increasingly more militaristic country, but millions of lives were lost along the way, as America pursued wars in Korea and Vietnam, thinking at the time that we were fighting Russian expansionism. When huge enemy weapons caches were discovered during the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson assumed they would turn out to be made in the Soviet Union and provide proof of his belief that he was standing up to Soviet communism and aggression. So, he was surprised to learn that in fact those weapons were made in the USA–all stolen from arms shipments we sent to our soldiers and surrogates in Vietnam. Our enemies in Vietnam were number one, ourselves, and number two, a country of peasants that wanted to have a unified nation while formed by breaking the bonds of colonialism–pretty much the end of the story.

Many Americans mistakenly believed that, once the Cold War was over, we would get a big “peace dividend” because we didn’t have enemies anymore. Without enemies, what’s the point of having such a big military? Besides, the Pentagon was built during WW II and fabricated with non-reinforced concrete, because it was supposed to be torn down at the end of the war. So, why not tear it down now, forty five years later and save ourselves huge costs. Why not a peace dividend? After all, we are an island nation without natural enemies on either border, so why do we need a global defense structure? At least that’s what a few people thought. But the notion of a peace dividend was profoundly mistaken and naive. The purpose of the Cold War was to establish American hegemony, through a confrontation that we started with the Soviets only weeks after FDR died when Truman assumed leadership of the country. The end of the Cold War meant that, until we could find some new enemies, we would have to be the emperor with no clothes. The truth had to come out of course and those Americans who wanted to believe that we fought the Cold War to defend our liberties and freedoms and prevent tyranny by the Russians, needed to have their own political party to continue on with such beliefs and eventually, God granted that they should have the Tea Party. And so, they assembled under the fig leaf of hypocrisy and created a domestic enemy in the form of illegal and legal immigrants. As far as the foreign enemy is concerned, no need to worry. GW Bush was able to provide that with Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars and new enemies (we have never defined the enemy in Iraq, because we didn’t have one–that war was created by our lust for controlling more oil). Both of those wars are now much longer than WW II and there is no real indication that either one of them will soon be over. We may be thrown out of Iraq, but, if so, what are all those big bases and diplomatic offices we built there going to be used for. The drive for American hegemony continued unabated when the Cold War ended. In fact we had new opportunities. For example now that the Soviets were no longer our enemies, we could hegemonize them and their new surrounding states. And, we did, as we helped to setup a plutocracy that bought, but mostly sold, the assets of that country and acquired a whole new set of enemies among the Russian population.  The only requirement for continued American dominance was that the real motivation behind our quest had to be shielded from the American public or we couldn’t become the new Rome. Americans didn’t want to hear that the first Gulf War was all about oil, so one had to float the idea that Saddam was committing acts of atrocity in Kuwait, by throwing babies out of their incubators. In the process of our continued march towards complete hegemony of the world, we divided it up into sectors, each assigned to a specific geographical command structure within our military, including (from Wikipedia)

• United States Army Central headquartered at Fort McPherson, Georgia
• United States Army North headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, Texas
• United States Army South headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, Texas
• United States Army Europe headquartered at Campbell Barracks, Germany
• United States Army Pacific headquartered at Fort Shafter, Hawaii (eventually to be merged with the Eighth Army).
• United States Army Africa headquartered at Vicenza, Italy

In the process, we created a global distribution of military bases that numbered more than 700, but that astronomical number includes only those for which we were willing to admit. The real number is classified.

There are many observers of the American scene who believe that, with the public revolutions taking place in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan, American hegemony is disintegrating before our eyes and we are unequipped for alternative strategies. A few weeks ago, when Egypt erupted, stocks connected to Saudi Arabia dropped and if something similar to what is going on in Egypt, should migrate to that country, which still has the single largest source of oil,  the American empire would suddenly be one without any clothes again. Nudity is unbecoming to a member of the Tea Party. Now that an entirely new era has started for the Egyptian people, the rest of the world stands in awe of their achievements and shares in the belief that no matter what the future holds, the Middle East will never be the same again and America’s role is being shaped by new forces that it cannot control, but needs instead to find a place on the right side of the conflict. Freedom and democracy are supposed to be in our DNA, but remnants of those feelings are hard to find after seventy-five years of militarism.

Tom Englehardt is a keen observer of American hegemony and Cold War history; he comes from an academic career in journalism and teaches at the School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He often writes on his own blog, TomDispatch, and a few days ago wrote an article entitled “Pox Americana“ in which he dissects how the false choices of American dominance led us into so many failures that we cannot reconcile, yet we continue to commit the same kinds of errors, somewhat like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day“: you get up and repeat the same experiences every day, because you don’t know how to do otherwise.  It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic and if it weren’t so costly to Americans and the people of the countries we have insisted on dominating. Is it all coming to an end now and if so, will it be possible for Americans to recognize how the revolutionary events of today in the Middle East are going to impact on us tomorrow? These next few years will perhaps be the most critical years for our future and the future of the planet. Will we be teacher who learns while teaching or a student who teaches without learning? We can’t do both and where was there room for military action in Tahrir Square?

RFM

More than 20 million of these ant farms were sold and the company, Uncle Milton Industries was sold last year for $20 million. You can still buy an ant farm and the price has only gone from $1.98 in 1956 to $10.99 before the company was sold. When asked about the staying power of ants, Milton Levine remarked “I found out their most amazing feat yet,” he said. “They put three kids through college.” Levine was a WW II veteran.
Why aren’t we generating new industries like Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm here in America?
If by any chance, you have been stimulated to learn more about ants, I strongly recommend The Ants by B. Holldobler and E.O. Wilson. That book will convince you that we know more about the communal life of different ant species compared to our knowledge of any other living animal. Although this is a rather amazing book, it does not contain any bedtime stories and is not recommended as an overall bedtime reading book.
RFM

You can view a summary of the McCoy project at the University of Wisconsin (where McCoy is a history professor) Harvey Goldberg Center website. This effort has been defined as the “Empires in Transition Project”, which led to a publication last year “Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). McCoy has also written a recent summary of this work, “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire”, which can be viewed at the TomDispatch website. No matter what you may think of doomsday prophecies, you don’t want to miss McCoy’s article. It is a sobering view of the future we face, as the resources we used to rely on, such as the energetic inventive economic dynamism that served as the basis of our success after the Second World War has been dissipated to the point where we are increasingly less competitive in the world we still want to dominate. There is a huge mismatch in our will to dominate the world and the backing we have to match our intentions. McCoy’s article was written to alarm us about the future of our country and it undoubtedly achieves its objective. The projected scenarios for our future are partially based on an assessment by the National Intelligence Committee (see below; from the McCoy’s article):

“Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar’s privileged status as the global reserve currency.”

“By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union.  There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.”

“Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000.  A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade.  Adding substance to these statistics, in October China’s Defense Ministry unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.”

If you thought that empires decay very slowly and that America will be given plenty of time for error correction to avoid the anticipated crash, McCoy’s message is this– think again! His point is that great empires are fragile entities and unravel very quickly (from the TomDispatch article):

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.”

McCoy suggests that future historians will mark 2003 as the beginning of the end of the American Empire; that was the year in which GW Bush hoodwinked the country into invading Iraq. He bookends the end of the American Empire taking place between 2020 and 2030, the projected decade in which the Chinese economy will become larger than that of the United States. In 2050, India’s economy is projected to overtake that of the U.S. But it is not the second place status of the American economy that puts the United States in jeopardy of empire decay according to McCoy. It is an over extension of power, too much debt and too little investment in supporting the strengths of a modern civilization, including education, science and technology. The disinvestment strategy we have had towards to elemental features of a thriving culture has us in line for a hard landing in our international relations and dominance.  The projected end however will be unlike that of Rome, which was sacked as its empire was destroyed and the city ravaged. The end of the American Empire is more likely to be through our economic decay and collapse from excessive debt, abandonment of the dollar as the international currency mark, accompanied by holding onto our military bases far too long; the actual projected ending has one of four possible outcomes, one of which includes the loss of a cyberwar with China, which we could lose because by then the Chinese will have better and faster computers and more sophisticated satellite capabilities, driven by better trained scientists and technologists. We are already weaponizing space where the next and last war may take place and be won or lost without a single life given up before victory is secured.

What is most interesting about McCoy’s hypotheses is that they were derived from our own National Intelligence Council estimate of 2008, based on the fact that we have been responsible for one of the greatest transfers of wealth in the history of the world (West to East; quoting from the article):

“Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America’s global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East” and “without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.”

So McCoy’s group has merely applied the 2008 NIC estimate, but removed the slow decay factor and replaced it with a more rapid one commensurate with historical reality. The idea that the United States would have a long period of global dominance in the face of its declining power and influence is precisely what McCoy argues is not supported by the historical record of empires–they can spin out of dominance very quickly and it seems likely that we will follow such a path over the next ten to twenty years.  If China should impose a new form of global dominance, let’s just remember who financed their rise to power–yes we did it!

It has always been my gut reaction that America is a country that should never go to war unless it is absolutely unavoidable. The supposedly unavoidable wars for us were WW II and our own Revolutionary War. All the others were optional and had we insisted on a more just peace at the end of WW I, at the Paris peace conference, as Wilson had promised, WW II would almost surely never have happened, at least not on the scale that took place. The reason I give for America as a country that shouldn’t go to war is that virtually every conflict we have engaged in, especially those since the Korean War,  have produced a huge controversy here at home and contributed significantly to the deep polarization we see in the domestic politics of today. It seems like every new war produces a new fissure in America. The Vietnam War is still with us today and was  lurking around the corner as John Kerry discovered with the Swift Boat antagonists to his bid for the Presidency as they appeared with force and heavy funding in 2004. So successful were the Swift Boaters, that exit polls on the day of election showed that the majority polled did not believe Kerry was a Vietnam hero entitled to medals.  One has to recognize that the current level of polarization politics in our country is designed to prevent us from having a discussion about whether it is wise for us to continue with our global dominance policies, which includes the $ billions we spend on maintaining hundreds of military bases throughout the planet. If we were able to have that discussion, we would certainly be in a better position to avoid the hard fall that McCoy is talking about. Of course, this is not just McCoy, but more than a hundred other historians who have contributed to this project, which tries to identify common threads in the decline of imperial powers: empires never last and our projected future by this group suggests that the American Empire will not last more than a hundred years, from the close of WW II to the projected decade of 2020-2030. We cannot respond to this threat in front of us because we live with the false narratives of our country that have us hopelessly divided and truly naive about the rest of the world. According to McCoy, we are nearly half way home to the bewitching hour, when we will see that the emperor or empire has no clothes.

According to McCoy, the victor in this struggle is likely to be the multinational corporations: the struggle for this century will be centered around global energy and international currency. China’s central bank officer has suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency, “disconnected from individual states” (namly the U.S. dollar). Such a move is now openly discussed and would likely lead to massive inflation of the dollar and make our energy imports that much more expensive, bringing on a fiscal crisis unlike anything seen since the Great Depression and far worse than what we are going through today. Under such conditions, defaulting on U.S. Treasuries is not out of the question and could add further to the American index of misery. Such an event would force us to bring home troops stationed at our bases throughout the world and adopt a more perimeter troop distribution.  Of course, it is always possible that some charismatic American leader could come along and plunge us into wars over oil, but a cyberwar could end that likelihood if the weaponization of space, which was supposed to be our ace in the hole, turned out to favor the Chinese.

We don’t generally give lots of attention to historians who try to project the future. Their main contribution is interpreting the past, and usually we take them more seriously when they are dealing with a much older past rather than a more recent one.  Yet there is an uneasy feeling in America and the McCoy group is not talking nonsense when they cite the facts that support their arguments and conclusions.  Ten to twenty years is not a lot of time to react with a new strategy that would give us a much softer landing, even though it seems likely that we will have to give up thinking and acting as if we still ruled the world. That will be the hard part–we’ve enjoyed our role as leader of the “free world” and we are unlikely to retreat quietly on this issue. But here is a dose of reality:  what did American hegemony really do for us? For one thing, the false war we initiated against communism got us into serious wars in which we were defeated in spirit (Korea) or on the battlefield (Vietnam).and certainly the trends McCoy has enumerated over the past decade or so, are all moving in the wrong direction. More meetings, summaries and books will yet emerge from the coalition of historians that McCoy has put together; in my opinion, McCoy is one of the best historians in America and he is one historian we need to listen to as he engages in future projections for the American Empire. Just don’t expect any pretty stories!

RFM

In  Stephen Kinzer’s recent book “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future,” the author, writing as a regional expert in Middle East  history and politics, has attempted to formulate a new pathway for reconciliation in the Middle East, one that advocates a lasting peace and insures prosperity for the region, by reducing the tensions through recruiting two new players in the peace process that heretofore have not been inserted as major partners for a settlement. This new vision for peace, includes the participation of  Turkey and Iran as major players, two countries that would probably not be on the top of the list drawn up by most Americans. We are still locked in a mode in which we think negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel can lead to a magical formula for peace, but only if thousands of clauses and sub-agreements get adopted as conditions for talks or preconditions for peace. But Kinzer argues that until all the major players in the region are included, such negotiations are all destined to fail. He argues that a negotiation strategy between two partners only is completely naive and that the United States needs to more maturely step up to the plate and insist on a peaceful solution involving all those in the region, because the stakes are too high for the economies of the world to continue taking oil in exchange for arming every country to the teeth, in order to protect the national interests of each new nation that comes to the area looking for black gold. Furthermore, Kinzer argues that bringing in Iran and Turkey will make the peace process easier, though the United States will have to deal with Iran more effectively than what we have done to date, and a big step forward for that objective could be achieved if the U.S. stopped behaving like an emotional child towards Iran and finally recognized the fact that Iran is a major player, not a minor leaguer, and that our invasion of Iraq helped to make it that way. Are you listening Dick Cheney?

Continued conflict in the Middle East increasingly risks the danger of evoking a wider conflict between any number of countries that are increasingly competitive with one another in hopes of establishing oil contracts in the new cutthroat game of searching for scarce new oil and gas leases, as China, India, Japan, South Korea and many other countries have become and will continue to insist on being players in the region. The history of the United States in viewing Persian Gulf oil as something that it owns, sparked in part by the “Carter policy,” and preceded by FDR’s secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945, to provide their protection in exchange for rights to the Saudi oil fields–all that history seems to be the policy mantra that we are moving forward with, which cannot help but evoke serious conflicts in the future: not that the region needs any new ones. It wasn’t just 9/11 that changed things for us, it was the emergence of a new world-wide panic that we are headed for “global peak oil.”

Kinzer has written several books about the Middle East. One of my favorites is “All the Shah’s Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” published in 2003 that explains how the CIA, at the request of the British Government, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 because he had nationalized what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (today’s BP); the United States replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza, the son of Reza Pahlavi), who in turn, was overthrown in the 1979 coup that led to the Islamic cleric Khomeini as Iran’s new leader.   The success the CIA had in overthrowing Mossadegh, served as the U.S. template for eliminating other democratic governments in favor of installing autocratic despots, especially in South American countries, beginning with Guatemala in 1954. The point of all this CIA intrigue was supposedly based on an assault against communism, but every American should know by now that it was really all about securing a favorable climate for American corporate interests. The Truman administration refused to act on the British outrage (Truman apparently admired Mossadegh), of the nationalized oil company, as they demanded return and control of Iranian oil. In fact, they had an embargo against Iran.   But, a few years later, during the Eisenhower years, when the CIA and the Secretary of State positions were occupied by  Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (each of whom favored American corporate interests over the sanctity of internal nationalist movements), they agreed to help the British re-establish their control of Iranian oil. According to Kinzer, we are still paying the price for what we did in overthrowing Moassadegh in 1953. When the Iranians revolted against the Shah, the Mossadegh story was the first one they mentioned to their American captives. Americans didn’t find out about the CIA overthrow until 2000, when the New York Times got hold of a secret CIA document and published the details of the story.

In his book “Reset,” Kinzer takes us through the early 20th century history of Turkey, the first democratic Muslim state and Iran, a more troubled country, but one with deep democratic instincts, as we all witnessed by the turmoil that took place following last year’s presidential election. In the 1920s, both Turkey and Iran generated leadership who were committed to advancing their countries through a pathway of secular modernity. In the case of Turkey, it was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, made famous by his military success at Galipoli,  who led Turkey from its planned destruction and occupation by the victors of WW I, through a decisive military victory over the Greek army,  followed by the consolidation of modern Turkey into a secular state. For Iran, the new leader to emerge was Reza Pahlavi who wanted to help modernize Iran through the formation of a secular state, using the Turkish model he admired. However, Reza had to settle for a new monarchy in which he was crowned king, as the 132 year old Qajar dynasty was abolished. The difference between the two countries was that Mustafa Kemal was successful in unseating the power of the clerics in Turkey, whereas Reza had to accommodate the religious leaders, which remains today as one of the fundamental differences between the two countries. But, as Kinzer points out, we need to form relationships with large countries that are committed to peace and democratic reforms. Turkey is already there and could be the first Muslim c0untry admitted to the European Union. They also have good relationships with Israel and they have gained experience in their diplomatic dealings with neighboring countries. Iran right now is a conflicted state, but one that cannot be ignored as a major player in any peace settlement for the region. Kinzer suggests that it may not be possible to deal with Iran right now, but our hardline attitude towards the country only insures that hardliners within Iran will have the advantage of leadership, much like how our attitude towards the Soviets during the Cold War extended the lifespan of their dictatorship; we surely prolonged the life of the Soviet Communist state through our obsessive confrontational policies.

Now is the time to recognize that the primary result of our invasion of Iraq was to strengthen the hand of Iran, who has become a far more important player in the region in the post-Iraq invasion world; our actions served to push Shiites in Iraq into leadership positions, and they have established friendly relationships with Iran. That’s as it should be and there’s no getting around it.  That train left the station the moment we entered Iraq and declared war on the Bathists. Today, we continually tell ourselves that our main fear is that Iran may be enriching Uranium on its way to building nuclear weapons. But there is very little evidence supporting that view and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which,  neither Israel nor India has signed.  In reality, what we are worried about with Iran is having a hostile country that is too close to our prized partner in oil production–Saudi Arabia. We had relied on the Shah of Iran, whom we armed to the teeth with American weapons, to serve as our surrogate army in the Middle East. But with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, something that dumbfounded our State Department,  together with the humiliation we endured when our embassy workers were kept hostage for more than a year, Iran quickly converted from friend to foe and ever since we have reacted like an emotional child to Iran, insuring that they in turn react emotionally towards us. Bush calling Iran a member of the “axis of evil” was hardly realistic or knowledgeable about our mutual history. But any realist can see that no peace settlement in the Middle East is possible without the inclusion of Iran as a major player and we have to recognize that our best partner for approaching the peace process is  Turkey. So we should be doing everything we can to facilitate Iran’s conversion to a more cooperative partner, and engaging Turkey as a full partner, not a messenger boy.

Few Americans are aware that Iran has been very cooperative with America in the post-9/11 era. Iran is a bitter enemy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the months following 9/11,  Iran and American officials met constantly. At the request of the U.S., Iran expelled hundreds of foreigners within its borders that the U.S. believed were connected to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  Iran connected the U.S. to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,  which we engaged to fight a proxy war in that country. In early 2003, after Bush’s silly “axis of evil” speech,  Iran tried to approach the United States in a cooperative mode. They proposed comprehensive talks and laid out an agenda in which the United States would end its “hostile behavior” towards Iran, lift the economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology and recognize its legitimate security interests. In exchange, Iran offered to do the two things demanded of them by the U.S.: full transparency in its nuclear program and the elimination of any material support for militant groups in the Middle East, specifically referring to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was the most forward-looking proposal that the U.S. had received from Iran in a quarter century and quite astonishingly (maybe not so surprising when you think about the American actors on the stage at the time), Bush turned the offer down because he and his cohorts wanted to destroy Iran not compromise with it. It is is simply mind-boggling to think that GWB would  turn down the Iranian offer for negotiations on the very issues we claimed were important to us, and all of this took place after he had given his axis of evil speech. It is sometimes hard to know whether the destructive hard line attitudes that prevent reproach between the two countries belong to the U.S. or Iran. Perhaps a little of both. But if our objective is that of establishing peace rather than dominance, we must recognize that Iran cannot be left out of the equation. I haven’t done justice to Kinzer’s book “Reset,” but it’s a fascinating read and brings a whole new perspective to the  equation table that we will need before we have a legitimate and just fix for the Middle East. One of the problems we face in confronting issues of the Middle East is that of basic competency and judgment on the part of our State Department. Kinzer talks about the acute need for sage officials among our diplomatic corps, and stresses a time when we did have a better, more informed State, which had a more longitudinal view of the world. As he talks about the need for more cultural knowledge of Iran, he quotes Nassir Ghaemi who is knowledgeable about both countries. Ghaemi points out that i) Americans are willing to compromise principle for results; Iranians are willing to sacrifice results to principle; ii) Americans worship the future, Iranians the past; iii) Americans value forthrightness and simplicity while Iranians prefer complexity and iv) Americans have imbibed science while Iranians have done the same with literature. Yet, despite these cultural differences, Americans and Iranians have far more in common and it is this larger, common set of values that should bring Iran and America into a much closer alignment, particularly when thinking about the gravity of the issues that must be solved if more serious conflict is to be avoided.

RFM

Peak Oil Production and Imports in U.S.

In response to CNOOC’s offer for UNOCAL, the Republicans, ever anxious to demonstrate why the free market system doesn’t apply to essential commodities, moved to prevent the sale by attaching an amendment to the Energy Policy Act on July 26, 2005, calling for a four-month review of China’s energy policies. This effectively killed CNOOC’s chances for acquiring UNOCAL, as another bid for the company from Chevron was coming up. The Chinese saw the writing on the wall and withdrew their offer, but remained in hot pursuit of oil contracts throughout the far reaches of the globe.

The unsolicited offer from the Chinese to purchase UNOCAL brought chills to the American spine about energy policies and raised new questions about whether the United States had the right policies in place to secure its own energy future. If China was looking for oil in America’s backyard, maybe that’s because there isn’t any more oil in all the other backyards? That was a question for which Americans wanted an answer. Or maybe not.  One of the problems that traditional oil companies face is the rising tide of nationalism in oil company ownership.  Thirteen of the top fifteen oil producing and reserve holding companies are nationally owned, including Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil, Iraq National Oil, Kuwait Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Oil, Pertoleos de Venezuela S.A., National Oil Corp of Libya and the  Nigerian National Petroleum. The top eight companies in terms of oil reserves are all nationally owned.  The only international oil companies in the top fifteen include Lukoil (Russia) and Chevron (USA).  Many have argued that with nationalization of such an essential economic commodity as oil, those companies that remain private will increasingly operate at a disadvantage, as nationalized companies form relationships between governments that enhance shared oil reserves but also go deeper to promote trade and solve other issues to enhance the arrangement. International oil companies, like Shell, Chevron and BP can’t negotiate such holistic deals. Thus, Saudi Arabia is increasingly selling oil to China.

The urgent state of Americans over oil reserves was a driving force for the new gas and oil drilling leases that the Obama administration announced earlier this year, many of which are now on hold because of the Gulf spill, though I doubt this action will last for very long–there’s too much American panic. A state of  urgency  has now reached every oil and gas producing organization around the globe, as countries and companies try to enter into new relationships to secure oil and gas reserves as far into the future as possible.  It appears that no stone will be too sacred in our global thirst for oil and gas. While we move sluggishly to think and talk about getting off the oil habit by becoming more self-sufficient in energy, and moving away from fossil fuels, the rest of the world is buying up as much of the reserve oil supply as new energies are unleashed to discover more. But, while drilling more, they are finding less. The United States could reach a permanent new oil crisis before any transition in energy dependency takes place. That fear will haunt every administration beginning with the current one. Suddenly, a new world order is taking shape out there, one based, not on the size and extent of one’s economy or military, but instead derived from the sense of national security that a country can bestow on its citizens by guaranteeing energy capacity well into the future. Right now that future seems to be measured in twenty year increments. So alarmed was the Bush administration over the future of oil in the American gunsights, that in January 2008, Bush met with the Saudi king Abudllah during a swing through the Middle East and and pleaded on behalf of the beleaguered American public for increased production to ease the price of gasoline. Normally that would be a role for an oil company executive, but those days are over. We are now talking about the future of our national economy.

The global need for energy promises to expand in a major way within the next twenty years, primarily because of the huge growth anticipated by the expansion of the Chinese and Indian economies. China’s energy demands were at 68.6 quadrillion BTUs in 2006, amounting to 15.6% of the world’s energy consumption. But in 2030, the Chinese energy projection is for 145.4 quadrillion BTUs and 20.1% of the world’s oil consumption.  In the next 20 years, China will have to add the equivalent of what Europeans currently consume if they are to meet this expectation. Projections for India are almost  equally  expansive, though less overall: in 2006 India energy consumption was at 17.1 quadrillion BTUs and in 2030, they are projected to need 31.9 quadrillion BTUs or about 4.5% of the world’s energy. Right now things look best for China. They have a lot of hard currency on hand and can afford to pay top $ for energy contracts. In the meantime, America is bogged down in wars that we cannot possibly win and we suddenly appear to be very disadvantaged in many cases when competing with nationalized oil companies.

The major unanswered question about our oil future is this: Obama recently used the BP Gulf oil spill to sound a clarion call for national action to get out from underneath the heal of oil companies, begin to diversify our energy sources and move away from fossil fuels. It seems simple enough: diversify our economy by expanding it into the production of renewable forms of energy and conservation and, as an added benefit, save the planet. But, if you were sitting in the White House and you had a choice to remove subsidies from oil companies, or better yet, begin to charge oil companies and gas consumers a tax to support this energy transition, would you do it,  given the new form of panic that seems to have set in by the CNOOC offer for UNOCAL and the ongoing BP Gulf oil spill? It will take a considerable and risky amount of political capital to make the sensible choice, because one oil shortage later and your ticket to Mount Rushmore, if you think that’s where you were headed, would be suddenly exchanged for a ticket to Palookaville.

Note added: the quantitative numbers on energy consumption and projections were taken from Michael T. Klare’s book “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: the New Geopolitics of Energy.”

RFM