1555. Global Heat Records Set for Month and Season

By Associated Press, The New York Times, September 18, 2014

The globe smashed more heat records last month, including earth’s hottest August and summer, federal meteorologists said on Thursday. May, June and August all set global heat records this year. Meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average world temperature in August was 61.36 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking a record set in 1998. Scientists at NASA, who calculate global temperature in a slightly different way, also found that August was the hottest on record. The month was especially hot in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and Africa, but cooler in parts of the United States, Europe and Australia. For the United States, it was the coolest August and summer since 2009. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records go back to 1880. But it is more than just one month. It was the warmest meteorological summer — June, July and August — on record for the globe, again beating out 1998. This year so far is the globe’s third warmest on record. “It’s not a done deal, but we are increasingly moving” toward breaking the hottest year record set in 2010, said Derek Arndt, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief. “This is the outcome of warming over the long term.” 

1554. U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms

By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, The New York Times, September 21, 2o14

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A sprawling new plant here in a former soybean field makes the mechanical guts of America’s atomic warheads. Bigger than the Pentagon, full of futuristic gear and thousands of workers, the plant, dedicated last month, modernizes the aging weapons that the United States can fire from missiles, bombers and submarines.

It is part of a nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapon carriers. A recent federal study put the collective price tag, over the next three decades, at up to a trillion dollars.

This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. The original idea was that modest rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling nuclear complex would speed arms refurbishment, raising confidence in the arsenal’s reliability and paving the way for new treaties that would significantly cut the number of warheads.

Instead, because of political deals and geopolitical crises, the Obama administration is engaging in extensive atomic rebuilding while getting only modest arms reductions in return.

Supporters of arms control, as well as some of President Obama’s closest advisers, say their hopes for the president’s vision have turned to baffled disappointment as the modernization of nuclear capabilities has become an end unto itself.

“A lot of it is hard to explain,” said Sam Nunn, the former senator whose writings on nuclear disarmament deeply influenced Mr. Obama. “The president’s vision was a significant change in direction. But the process has preserved the status quo.”

With Russia on the warpath, China pressing its own territorial claims and Pakistan expanding its arsenal, the overall chances for Mr. Obama’s legacy of disarmament look increasingly dim, analysts say. Congress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington’s escalating confrontation with Moscow.

“The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top nuclear adviser in his first term and now a scholar at Harvard. “That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”

That suits hawks just fine. They see the investments as putting the United States in a stronger position if a new arms race breaks out. In fact, the renovated plants that Mr. Obama has approved for a smaller force of more precise, reliable weapons could, under a different president, let the arsenal expand rapidly.

Arms controllers say the White House has made some progress toward Mr. Obama’s broader agenda. Mr. Nunn credits the president with improving nuclear security around the globe, persuading other leaders to sweep up loose nuclear materials that terrorists could seize.

In the end, however, budget realities may do more than nuclear philosophies to curb the atomic upgrades. “There isn’t enough money,” said Jeffrey Lewis, of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, an expert on the modernization effort. “You’re going to get a train wreck.”

While the Kansas City plant is considered a success — it opened ahead of schedule and under budget — other planned renovations are mired in delays and cost overruns. Even so, Congress can fight hard for projects that represent big-ticket items in important districts.

Skeptics say that the arsenal is already dependable and that the costly overhauls are aimed less at arms control than at seeking votes and attracting top talent, people who might otherwise gravitate to other fields.

But the Obama administration insists that the improvements to the nuclear arsenal are vital to making it smaller, more flexible and better able to fulfill Mr. Obama’s original vision.

Daniel B. Poneman, the departing deputy secretary of energy, whose department runs the complex, said, “The whole design of the modernization enables us to make reductions.”

In the fall of 2008, as Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency, a coalition of peace groups sued to halt work on a replacement bomb plant in Kansas City. They cited the prospect of a new administration that might, as one litigant put it, kill the project in “a few months.”

The Kansas City plant, an initiative of the Bush years, seemed like a good target, since Mr. Obama had declared his support for nuclear disarmament.

The $700 million weapons plant survived. But in April 2009, the new president and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev, vowed to rapidly complete an arms treaty called New Start, and committed their nations “to achieving a nuclear-free world.”

Five days later, Mr. Obama spoke in Prague to a cheering throng, saying the United States had a moral responsibility to seek the “security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

“I’m not naïve,” he added. “This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.”

That October, the Nobel committee, citing his disarmament efforts, announced it would award Mr. Obama the Peace Prize.

The accord with Moscow was hammered out quickly. The countries agreed to cut strategic arms by roughly 30 percent — from 2,200 to 1,550 deployed weapons apiece — over seven years. It was a modest step. The Russian arsenal was already declining, and today has dropped below the agreed number, military experts say.

Even so, to win Senate approval of the treaty, Mr. Obama struck a deal with Republicans in 2010 that would set the country’s nuclear agenda for decades to come.

Republicans objected to the treaty unless the president agreed to an aggressive rehabilitation of American nuclear forces and manufacturing sites. Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, led the opposition. He likened the bomb complex to a rundown garage — a description some in the administration considered accurate.

Under fire, the administration promised to add $14 billion over a decade for atomic renovations. Then Senator Kyl refused to conclude a deal.

Facing the possible defeat of his first major treaty, Mr. Obama and the floor manager for the effort, Senator John Kerry, now the secretary of state, set up a war room and made deals to widen Republican support. In late December, the five-week campaign paid off, although the 71-to-26 vote represented the smallest margin ever for the ratification of a nuclear pact between Washington and Moscow.

The Democrats were unanimous in favor, their ranks including six senators with atomic plants in their states. Among the Republicans joining the Democrats were Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, both of Tennessee and both strong backers of modernization. (“We’re glad to have the thousands of jobs,” Mr. Alexander said recently in announcing financing for a new plant.)

In open and classified reports to Congress, Mr. Obama laid out his atomic refurbishment plans, which the Congressional Budget Office now estimates will cost $355 billion dollars over the next decade. But that is just the start. The price tag will soar after 10 years as missiles, bombers and submarines made in the last century reach the end of their useful lives and replacements are built.

“That’s where all the big money is,” Ashton B. Carter, the former deputy secretary of defense, said last year. “By comparison, everything that we’re doing now is cheap.”

A Wave of Modernization

The money is flowing into a sprawling complex for making warheads that includes eight major plants and laboratories employing more than 40,000 people. Its oldest elements, some dating to 1943, have long struggled with fires, explosions and workplace injuries. This March, a concrete roof collapsed in Tennessee. More recently, chunks of ceiling clattered down a stairwell there, and employees were told to wear hard hats.

“It’s deplorable,” Representative Chuck Fleischmann, Republican of Tennessee, said at an April hearing. Equipment, he added, “breaks down on a daily basis.”

In some ways, the challenge is similar to what Detroit’s auto industry faces: Does it make sense to pour money into old structures or build new ones that are more secure, are fully computerized and adhere to modern environmental standards?

And if the government chooses the latter course, how does it justify that investment if the president’s avowed policy is to wean the world off nuclear arms?

The old bomb plant in Kansas City embodies the dilemma. It was built in World War II to produce aircraft engines and went nuclear in 1949, making the mechanical and electrical parts for warheads.

But a river flooded it repeatedly, and in the past year it was gradually shut down. Today, visitors see tacky furniture, old machinery and floors caked with mud.

Its replacement, eight miles south, sits on higher ground. Its five buildings hold 2,700 employees — just like the old plant — but officials say it uses half the energy, saving about $150 million annually. Everything is bright and modern, from the sleek lobby and cafeteria to the fitness center. Clean rooms for delicate manufacturing have tighter dust standards than hospital operating rooms.

It is called the National Security Campus, evoking a college rather than a factory for weapons that can pound cities into radioactive dust.

Rick L. Lavelock, a senior plant manager, said during a tour in July that employees had a “very great sense of mission” in keeping the arsenal safe and reliable.

Their main job now is extending the life of a nearly 40-year-old submarine warhead called the W-76. Drawing on thousands of parts, they seek to make it last 60 years — three times as long as originally planned.

The warhead’s new guts, a colorful assortment of electronic and mechanical parts, lay alongside a shiny nose cone on a metal table outside an assembly hall.

The last stop on the tour was a giant storage room. Mr. Lavelock said it covered 60,000 square feet — bigger than a football field. Laughing, he likened it to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” scene showing a vast federal warehouse that seemed to go on forever.

If the Kansas City plant is the crown jewel of the modernization effort, other projects are reminders of how many billions have yet to be spent, and how even facilities completed successfully can go awry.

At Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, birthplace of the atomic bomb, plans for a new complex to shape plutonium fuel emerged a decade ago with a $660 million price tag. But antinuclear groups kept publicizing embarrassing details, like the discovery of a geologic fault under the site. The estimated cost soared to $5.8 billion, and in 2012, the Obama administration suspended the project.

“In the current fiscal crisis,” Charles F. McMillan, the director of Los Alamos, told a nuclear conference last year, building large facilities “may no longer be practical.”

A different problem hit the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. A $550 million fortress was erected there to safeguard the nation’s main supplies of highly enriched uranium, a bomb fuel considered relatively easy for terrorists to make into deadly weapons.

In 2012, an 82-year-old Roman Catholic nun, Megan Rice, and two accomplices cut through fences, splashed blood on the stronghold and sprayed its walls with peace slogans. The security breach set off major investigations, and the nun was sentenced to almost three years in prison.

Now, the site’s woes have deepened. As Oak Ridge prepared for an even bigger upgrade — replacing buildings that process uranium — the price tag soared from $6.5 billion to $19 billion. This year, the Obama administration scuttled the current plan, and the lab is struggling to revise the blueprint.

Robert Alvarez, a policy adviser to the energy secretary during the Clinton administration, recently wrote in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that Oak Ridge was the “poster child” of a dysfunctional nuclear complex.

Across the nation, 21 major upgrades have been approved and 36 more proposed, according to the Government Accountability Office. In nearly two dozen reports over five years, the congressional investigators have described the modernization push as poorly managed and financially unaccountable.

They recently warned — in typically understated language — that the managers of the atomic complex had repeatedly omitted and underestimated billions of dollars in costs, leaving the plan with “less funding than will be needed.”

The Military Deployments

The Obama administration says it sees no contradiction between rebuilding the nation’s atomic complex and the president’s vow to make the world less dependent on nuclear arms.

“While we still have weapons, the most important thing is to make sure they are safe, secure and reliable,” said Mr. Poneman, the deputy energy secretary. The improvements, he said, have reassured allies. “It’s important to our extended deterrent,” he said, referring to the American nuclear umbrella over nations in Asia and the Middle East, which has instilled a sense of military security and kept many from building their own arsenals.

The administration has told the Pentagon to plan for 12 new missile submarines, up to 100 new bombers and 400 land-based missiles, either new or refurbished. Manufacturing costs for these forces, if approved, will peak between 2024 and 2029, according to a recent study by Dr. Lewis and colleagues at the Monterey Institute.

It estimated the total cost of the nuclear enterprise over the next three decades at roughly $900 billion to $1.1 trillion. Policy makers, the report said, “are only now beginning to appreciate the full scope of these procurement costs.”

Nonetheless, lobbying for the new forces is heating up, with military officials often eager to show off dilapidated gear. In April, a “60 Minutes” segment featured a tour of aging missile silos. Officials pointed out antiquated phones, broken doors, a missile damaged from water leaks and an old computer that relied on enormous diskettes.

The looming crackup between trillion-dollar plans and tight budgets is starting to get Washington’s attention. Modernization delays are multiplying and cost estimates are rising. Panels of experts are bluntly describing the current path as unacceptable.

A new generation of missiles, bombers and submarines “is unaffordable,” a bipartisan, independent panel commissioned by Congress and the Defense Department declared in July. Its 10 experts, including former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, echoed other estimates in putting the cost at up to $1 trillion.

The overall investment, the panel said, “would likely come at the expense of needed improvements in conventional forces.”

In August, the White House announced it was reviewing the atomic spending plans in preparation for next year’s budget request to Congress, which will set federal spending for 2016.

“This is Obama’s legacy budget,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the topic’s political delicacy. “It’s his last chance to make the hard choices and prioritize.”

Already, the administration has delayed plans for the Navy’s new submarines, the atomic certification of new bombers and a new generation of warheads meant to fit more than one delivery system. And debate is rising on whether to ax production of the air-launched cruise missile, a new nuclear weapon for bombers, its cost estimated at One of the most dramatic calls for reductions came from Chuck Hagel shortly before he became defense secretary last year. He signed a study, headed by retired Gen. James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that proposed cutting the nuclear arsenal to 900 warheads and eliminating most of the 3,500 weapons in storage. The nation’s military plan, the study concluded, “artificially sustains nuclear stockpiles that are much larger than required for deterrence today.”

In a speech in Berlin last year, the president said he would cut the arsenal to roughly 1,000 weapons — but only as part of a broader deal requiring Russian reductions. So far, the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, has shown no interest, and Mr. Obama has made clear he will not cut weapons unilaterally. Unless either man changes his approach, the president’s legacy will be one of modest nuclear cuts and a significantly modernized atomic complex.

“I could imagine Putin might well decide it’s in his interest to seek more cuts,” said Rose Gottemoeller, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and the country’s top arms negotiator. “I don’t discard the notion we could do it again.”

Few of her colleagues are so optimistic. They predict that if Mr. Obama is to achieve the kind of vision he entered office with, he will have to act alone.

1553. Climate Change: On Krugman's Errors and Omissions

By Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute, September 21, 2014

Richard Heinberg

In a New York Times op-ed published September 18 titled “Errors and Emissions,” economist-columnist Paul Krugman took a swipe at my organization, Post Carbon Institute, lumping us together with the Koch brothers as purveyors of “climate despair.” No, the Koch brothers are not in despair about the climate; apparently our shared error is that we say fighting climate change and growing the economy are incompatible. And, according to Krugman, a new report from the New Climate Economy Project (NCEP) and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that the falling cost of renewable energy means this is happily not the case.

But in our view Krugman himself is guilty of five critical errors, and three equally serious omissions. First the errors:

1. He mistakes post-growth realism for anti-growth activism. While Krugman linked to my book The End of Growth, it seems he may not have actually read it. If he had he would understand that we are not advocating the deliberate termination of growth that could otherwise be easily sustained; rather, we see clear evidence that growth is ending of its own accord because our economy is hitting biophysical limits at a speed and scale that are outpacing humanity’s ability to adapt. The most critical limit to economic growth is the availability of affordable fossil fuels, those extraordinary resources around which we’ve organized the entire global economy (and its hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure) over the last century. Economists do generally recognize this limit, but summarily dismiss it as a problem seamlessly fixable by the market. 

2. He misrepresents his sources. According to our reading, the IMF working paper suggests that the majority of emissions cuts (above 10.8 percent reduction) will be at a net economic cost, even considering co-benefits. The NCEP report—commissioned by former heads of state, the CEOs of major banks and the head of the International Energy Agency—itself admitted that “On their own, these measures would not be sufficient to achieve the full range of emissions reductions likely to be needed by 2030 to prevent dangerous climate change.” In fact, the report’s authors made clear “The question the project has sought to explore is not ‘how can greenhouse gas emissions be reduced?'...but ‘how can economic decision-makers achieve their principal goals while also reducing their impact on the climate?’”

3. He assumes that wind and solar can substitute for all uses of fossil fuels. Oil fuels transportation, which is at the core of the trade-dependent global economy. It is far and away the world’s largest single source of energy—and there just aren’t any alternatives ready to replace oil in all the ways we use it, at the scale required, and in the time available. Electric cars are making inroads, but we’re not about to see battery-powered airliners, bulldozers, container ships, tractors, or long-haul trucks. Compressed natural gas is no help from a climate perspective, and methane is another depleting fossil fuel. America’s experiment with biofuels has been an expensive failure.  How do we get more growth with less trade?

4. He claims it is easy to slash carbon emissions. The rapid build-out of renewables constitutes an enormous infrastructure project that will itself consume significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy. New solar panels won’t immediately pay for themselves in energy terms; indeed, research at Stanford University recently showed that all solar PV technology installed until about 2010 was a net energy sink. It will fully “pay back the electrical energy required for its early growth by about 2020,” but if we hasten the transition, energy break-even gets delayed: it is only once solar build-out rates level off that the system as a whole will start to turn a significant energy profit. That leads to the deep irony that we’ll be powering the energy transition largely with fossil fuels. The faster we push the transition, the more fossil fuels we’ll use for that purpose, and this could lead to the extraction of more tar sands, fracked tight oil and shale gas, deepwater oil, and Arctic oil (we’ve already used up the cheap, conventional oil; what’s left will be expensive and dirty—and expensive oil is itself a drag on economic growth). 

5. He assumes that a meaningful price on carbon would only impact direct energy prices. The entire economy is energy-dependent. One example: as minerals deplete, we have to use more energy (per unit of output) in mining and refining ever-lower grades of ores. When energy prices rise, that impacts all we do. Does Krugman believe that the global economy can continue to grow despite higher prices across the board?

Now Paul Krugman’s omissions: 

1. He omits mentioning what rate of greenhouse gas emissions reduction he thinks is necessary. Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, who has taken the important step of producing a carbon budget that puts society on a safe trajectory to the internationally agreed-upon limit of 2 degrees Celsius warming, calculates that industrialized nations need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over 10 percent per year starting now.  In Anderson’s opinion, this is “incompatible with economic growth.” The only hope of maintaining economic growth while cutting emissions at such a pace is to rapidly decouple GDP from CO2; PriceWaterhouseCoopers says  the decoupling would have to proceed at 6 percent per year, which is entirely unprecedented. Is that rate achievable, in view of errors 3, 4, and 5 above? 

2. He omits mention of constraints to fossil fuel supplies. Oil has become far more expensive in the past decade; production costs are rising at over 10 percent per year. The major petroleum companies are investing much more in exploration today, but their production rates are declining. For oil, the low-hanging fruit is gone. Does Krugman believe there is still excess production capacity for oil to use in building out renewable infrastructure, while still meeting the needs of the rest of the economy? If not, how will society maintain economic growth during the energy transition? If so, what part of the economy would need to contract in order to shift oil consumption to the renewables build-out, so as not to lead to increased overall use of climate-altering fossil fuels during the transition? 

3. He omits mention of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI. It takes energy to get energy, but historically fossil fuels delivered an immense profit on the meager investments of energy required to drill or mine for them. The EROEI figures for renewables are generally lower than current ones for fossil fuels. And energy returns for fossil fuels are declining as companies are forced to dig deeper and deploy more sophisticated (read: expensive) technology to get at lower-grade resources. The overall EROEI of society is falling, and the transition to renewables will not halt that process (though it will lead to an eventual leveling-off). If you think long and hard about what declining EROEI actually means for our civilization, it’s difficult to imagine an outcome that could be characterized as economic growth—at least, growth as we’ve known it for the past century.

To be clear, we at Post Carbon Institute advocate massively deploying renewable energy and putting a price on carbon. If humanity has any hope for the future, there is simply no other option. But we just don’t see how this can be achieved without: 1) raising the cost of energy and 2) leading to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions during the renewables build-out, unless other parts of the economy are allowed to contract. When it comes to energy, there is no free lunch.

Ultimately, climate change is not the only reason perpetual economic growth is incompatible with a finite planet. The world faces a suite of ecological problems related to water, soil, and biodiversity, all stemming from past growth, and all seemingly requiring reduction in human consumption levels for their solution.

We believe that humanity can enjoy an improved quality of life and build a more sustainable future even as we reduce overall resource throughput. There is ample waste to be cut in the excessively consumption-oriented western way of life, and there’s still plenty of opportunity for less-wealthy countries to develop their economic and social systems in ways that are truly equitable and sustainable (and not fossil fuel-reliant). But that means changing priorities. Like fossil fuels, the growth fetish is something we must leave behind if we are going to have any chance of living sustainably on this planet.

1552. We Can Save the Caribbean’s Coral Reefs

By Jeremy Jackson and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, The New York Times, September 18, 2014 

PARROTFISH eat algae and seaweed. These brightly colored fish with beaklike mouths inhabit coral reefs, the wellsprings of ocean life. Without them and other herbivores, algae and seaweed would overgrow the reefs, suppress coral growth and threaten the incredible array of life that depends on these reefs for shelter and food.

This was happening in Bermuda, until the government in 1990 banned fish traps that were decimating the parrotfish population. Today, Bermuda’s coral reefs are relatively healthy, a bright spot in the wider Caribbean, where total coral cover has declined by half since 1970.

Last month, in a reminder of just how dire the situation facing the world’s coral reefs is, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was listing 20 species of coral as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, including all of what were once the most abundant Caribbean corals. The action focused primarily on the projected impacts of global warming and ocean acidification. Carbon dioxide emissions are increasing ocean temperatures and making them more acidic — and less hospitable for corals.

But climate change is only half the story. Up to now, the impacts of climate change on reefs have been much less destructive than the localized effects of overfishing, runoff pollution from the land and the destruction of habitats from coastal development. Those problems have exploded in intensity over the past century and will continue to increase sharply with population growth.

Proof of the destructive power of those impacts is evident in the central Pacific where, in spite of rising temperatures, coral cover is many times higher around islands unaffected by fishing and pollution, compared with heavily fished and polluted reefs of nearby islands.

A recent detailed assessment of the changing status of Caribbean reefs over the past 40 years by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network and the International Union for Conservation of Nature provides a similarly important finding that offers hope. Across the Caribbean, reefs near islands with effective local protections and governance, like the ones around Bermuda, have double the amount of living coral compared with those

But in Florida, banning fish traps — which should result in more parrotfish, less algae and more coral — has not stemmed coral decline. That’s because of extreme local pressures from millions of residents and tourists and insufficient controls on development. Similar problems plague the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, which is being damaged by agricultural runoff and the development of huge ports for exporting coal. Fishing is carefully regulated there, but those other threats must be equally well managed.

The few remaining places in the wider Caribbean with relatively healthy reefs have one thing in common: a greater abundance of parrotfish and other herbivores. They also benefit by being adjacent to islands with comparatively small populations, more modest development and less pollution. You find this in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, on reefs around Curaçao and Bonaire and in protected marine areas in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands.

Stories about coral reefs commonly focus on doom and gloom. But these new findings indicate that there is actually something we can do right now to help reefs recover: prevent overfishing, overdevelopment and pollution from the land.

None of this lessens our concerns about climate change as humanity burns more coal and oil instead of less. But there is increasing evidence that protection from local stresses promotes the resilience of reef corals to climate change.

Several Caribbean islands are moving to control overfishing and pollution. Barbuda just enacted legislation to protect parrotfish, stop overfishing and establish marine sanctuaries. And the Bahamas, Belize, Bonaire, Cuba and Curaçao are working to enhance protections.

In contrast, the condition of the coral reefs of the Florida Keys, the United States Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico is among the worst in the wider Caribbean, despite vast sums invested in the monitoring of reefs and research on the effects of climate change. This monitoring and research are vitally important, but collecting information without strong corrective action is like a doctor analyzing a patient’s decline without doing everything possible to save her life.

We need to move immediately beyond listings of species as threatened and research about climate change and take rigorous action against the local and global stresses killing corals.

Coral reefs are vital to the economies of the 38 Caribbean countries and territories and their millions of people. These reefs generate roughly $3 billion annually in tourism and fishing and provide protection from storms.

To save coral reefs, we need to follow the lead of Barbuda and our other proactive neighbors. We need to stop all forms of overfishing, establish large and effectively enforced marine protected areas and impose strict regulations on coastal development and pollution while at the same time working to reduce fossil fuel emissions driving climate change. It’s not either/or. It’s all of the above.

1551. Climate Change: Errors and Emissions

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, September 18, 2014

This just in: Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. But will anyone believe the good news?

I’ve just been reading two new reports on the economics of fighting climate change: a big study by a blue-ribbon international group, the New Climate Economy Project, and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund. Both claim that strong measures to limit carbon emissions would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth. This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. These are serious, careful analyses.

But you know that such assessments will be met with claims that it’s impossible to break the link between economic growth and ever-rising emissions of greenhouse gases, a position I think of as “climate despair.” The most dangerous proponents of climate despair are on the anti-environmentalist right. But they receive aid and comfort from other groups, including some on the left, who have their own reasons for getting it wrong.

Where is the new optimism about climate change and growth coming from? It has long been clear that a well-thought-out strategy of emissions control, in particular one that puts a price on carbon via either an emissions tax or a cap-and-trade scheme, would cost much less than the usual suspects want you to think. But the economics of climate protection look even better now than they did a few years ago.

On one side, there has been dramatic progress in renewable energy technology, with the costs of solar power, in particular, plunging, down by half just since 2010. Renewables have their limitations — basically, the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow — but if you think that an economy getting a lot of its power from wind farms and solar panels is a hippie fantasy, you’re the one out of touch with reality.

On the other side, it turns out that putting a price on carbon would have large “co-benefits” — positive effects over and above the reduction in climate risks — and that these benefits would come fairly quickly. The most important of these co-benefits, according to the I.M.F. paper, would involve public health: burning coal causes many respiratory ailments, which drive up medical costs and reduce productivity.

And thanks to these co-benefits, the paper argues, one argument often made against carbon pricing — that it’s not worth doing unless we can get a global agreement — is wrong. Even without an international agreement, there are ample reasons to take action against the climate threat.

But back to the main point: It’s easier to slash emissions than seemed possible even a few years ago, and reduced emissions would produce large benefits in the short-to-medium run. So saving the planet would be cheap and maybe even come free.

Enter the prophets of climate despair, who wave away all this analysis and declare that the only way to limit carbon emissions is to bring an end to economic growth.

You mostly hear this from people on the right, who normally say that free-market economies are endlessly flexible and creative. But when you propose putting a price on carbon, suddenly they insist that industry will be completely incapable of adapting to changed incentives. Why, it’s almost as if they’re looking for excuses to avoid confronting climate change, and, in particular, to avoid anything that hurts fossil-fuel interests, no matter how beneficial to everyone else.

But climate despair produces some odd bedfellows: Koch-fueled insistence that emission limits would kill economic growth is echoed by some who see this as an argument not against climate action, but against growth. You can find this attitude in the mostly European “degrowth” movement, or in American groups like the Post Carbon Institute; I’ve encountered claims that saving the planet requires an end to growth at left-leaning meetings on “rethinking economics.” To be fair, anti-growth environmentalism is a marginal position even on the left, but it’s widespread enough to call out nonetheless.

And you sometimes see hard scientists making arguments along the same lines, largely (I think) because they don’t understand what economic growth means. They think of it as a crude, physical thing, a matter simply of producing more stuff, and don’t take into account the many choices — about what to consume, about which technologies to use — that go into producing a dollar’s worth of G.D.P.

So here’s what you need to know: Climate despair is all wrong. The idea that economic growth and climate action are incompatible may sound hardheaded and realistic, but it’s actually a fuzzy-minded misconception. If we ever get past the special interests and ideology that have blocked action to save the planet, we’ll find that it’s cheaper and easier than almost anyone imagines.

1550. 34 Cuban-Trained Belizean Doctors Return Home

By 7NewsBelize.com, September 12, 2014 

Some of the recently graduated medical doctors

Tonight, we have some positive news coming out of the Ministry of health after the bad publicity of multiple vehicle thefts. 34 Belizean doctors have returned from Cuba after 6 years of study. It was a challenging course, but these 34 aspiring medical professionals pushed through - and made it back home with their diplomas. Now, they are getting ready for an internship at the KHMH. Courtney Weatherburne spoke to them today:..

Mr. John Waight, Coordinator, Medical Internship Program
"It is design primarily to help reestablish and relocate Belizeans who have been trained in Cuba through the good offices of the Cubs/Belize agreement to relocate and train these young doctors for work in our settings given that there are differences in practice between practices in Cuba and practice here in Belize. It consist of year of in hospital practice and supervision. There are 4 rotations through the 4 major specialties and there are clinical skills that have to be acquired during that time and a fairly robust and intensive continuing medical education which is what I supervise."

Rahleel Elijio, Practicing Medical Doctor
"My experience being in Cuba for the past six and a half years ago was really a fruitful one. I give thanks for everything that I have learnt in Cuba. Cuba is unlike many other countries, we have been through a lot like the medical system in Cuba is very well organize and it's different in comparison to our system here in Belize. There are two different programs. I was based in the ILAM project which is located in Havana, Cuba and we were actually there for 2 years 4 months where we did our pre-med course where we had to learn Spanish for a period of 4 months and we had courses like basic biochemistry, physiology, histology, embryology and of course Cuban history."

Uldine Wright, Practicing Medical Doctor
"I must say that it was a great experience. I don't think I could have gotten what I got in Cuba anywhere else. The experience that I got is remarkable. I had a lot of clinical experiences. We were given a lot of responsibilities. Ever since the third year we were dealing with patients, we were responsible for patients conduct, management and everything and we were under supervise training, but it was really good. Whatever you put into it that's what you get out of it. I am for the development for the medical services here in Belize because we came from Cuba in which there is a medical office in almost every block and so we are used to having the doctors available for every patient and that's something that Belize needs because there are lots of remote areas that don't have access to medical healthcare as easy as is in Cuba."

Irbin Segura, Practicing Medical Doctor
"On a whole I think that the whole experience has change me s lot. I think it has change all my peers because for one instance Cuba is a very different country to live in and we had to learn to adapt and we had to learn how to cope, how to work as a group and one of the most important things we learnt to me was we learn how to treat patients and not their disease. We learnt to see a person as a whole and to try to help that person to instill in the community and to help the community. That's why I like Cuba, it was a social way at looking at medicine."

They will now fulfill 1 year internship at the KHMH.

1549. Veterans of Elite Israeli Unit Refuse Reserve Duty, Citing Mistreatment of Palestinians

By Judi Rudoren, The New York Times, September 12, 2014

Israeli soldiers abusing Palestinian girl

JERUSALEM — Denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians under occupation, a group of veterans from an elite, secretive military intelligence unit have declared they will no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians” in required reserve duty because of what they called “our moral duty to act.”

In a letter sent Thursday night to their commanders as well as Israel’s prime minister and army chief, 43 veterans of the clandestine Unit 8200 complained that Israel made “no distinction between Palestinians who are and are not involved in violence” and that information collected “harms innocent people.” Intelligence “is used for political persecution,” they wrote, which “does not allow for people to lead normal lives, and fuels more violence, further distancing us from the end of the conflict.”

The letter, revealed Friday in Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper as well as The Guardian in Britain, echoes similar periodic protests by reservists over the years, including a group of 27 pilots who refused to participate in what Israel calls targeted assassinations, and 13 members of the vaunted commando unit known as Sayeret Matkal, both in 2003. But it is the first public collective refusal by intelligence officers rather that combat troops. Unit 8200 has a special role in Israeli society as a coveted pipeline to its high-technology industry.

“After our service we started seeing a more complex picture of a nondemocratic, oppressive regime that controls the lives of millions of people,” said one of the group’s organizers, a 32-year-old sergeant major who was on active duty from 2001 to 2005. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because the military prohibits Unit 8200 members from being publicly identified.

“There are certain things that we were asked to do that we feel do not deserve the title of self-defense,” he added in a telephone interview. “Some of the things that we did are immoral, and are against the things we believe in, and we’re not willing to do these things anymore.”

The new refuseniks said their group began a year ago and was not motivated by Israel’s battle with Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip this summer, which a member said was “just another chapter in this cycle of violence.”

The timing is nonetheless powerful, coming after many longtime Israeli critics of the occupation complained that their voices were stifled during a unified rallying around the war effort.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said specific incidents mentioned in officers’ testimonies presented with the group’s letter would be examined, and that “ramifications” for refusing to serve — including possible criminal prosecution — would be handled individually. He disputed the general thrust of the letter, saying of Unit 8200, “there is special emphasis placed on the morality and ethics and proper procedures and what we expect.”

“We are facing a ruthless enemy that will carry out devastating attacks,” Colonel Lerner said. “As such, our intelligence needs to be, I would say, top of its professional capabilities in order to intercept that suicide bomber, in order to forewarn Israel when there is an attack that’s going to happen, to be able to get to them before they perform their bad deeds.”