2478. Bill McKibben: Recalculating the Climate Math

By Bill McKibben, New Republic, September 22, 2016

The future of humanity depends on math. And the numbers in a new study released Thursday are the most ominous yet.

Those numbers spell out, in simple arithmetic, how much of the fossil fuel in the world’s existing coal mines and oil wells we can burn if we want to prevent global warming from cooking the planet. In other words, if our goal is to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do?

Here’s the answer: zero.

That’s right: If we’re serious about preventing catastrophic warming, the new study shows, we can’t dig any new coal mines, drill any new fields, build any more pipelines. Not a single one. We’re done expanding the fossil fuel frontier. Our only hope is a swift, managed decline in the production of all carbon-based energy from the fields we’ve already put in production.

The new numbers are startling. Only four years ago, I wrote an essay called “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” In the piece, I drew on research from a London-based think tank, the Carbon Tracker Initiative. The research showed that the untapped reserves of coal, oil, and gas identified by the world’s fossil fuel industry contained five times more carbon than we can burn if we want to keep from raising the planet’s temperature by more than two degrees Celsius. That is, if energy companies eventually dug up and burned everything they’d laid claim to, the planet would cook five times over. That math kicked off a widespread campaign of divestment from fossil fuel stocks by universities, churches, and foundations. And it’s since become the conventional wisdom: Many central bankers and world leaders now agree that we need to keep the bulk of fossil fuel reserves underground.

But the new new math is even more explosive. It draws on a report by Oil Change International, a Washington-based think tank, using data from the Norwegian energy consultants Rystad. For a fee—$54,000 in this case—Rystad will sell anyone its numbers on the world’s existing fossil fuel sources. Most of the customers are oil companies, investment banks, and government agencies. But OCI wanted the numbers for a different reason: to figure out how close to the edge of catastrophe we’ve already come.

Scientists say that to have even a two-thirds chance of staying below a global increase of two degrees Celsius, we can release 800 gigatons more CO2 into the atmosphere. But the Rystad data shows coal mines and oil and gas wells currently in operation worldwide contain 942 gigatons worth of CO2. So the math problem is simple, and it goes like this:

942 > 800

“What we found is that if you burn up all the carbon that’s in the currently operating fields and mines, you’re already above two degrees,” says Stephen Kretzmann, OCI’s executive director. It’s not that if we keep eating like this for a few more decades we’ll be morbidly obese. It’s that if we eat what’s already in the refrigerator we’ll be morbidly obese.

What’s worse, the definition of “morbid” has changed in the past four years. Two degrees Celsius used to be the red line. But scientists now believe the upper limit is much lower. We’ve already raised the world’s temperature by one degree—enough to melt almost half the ice in the Arctic, kill off huge swaths of the world’s coral, and unleash lethal floods and drought. July and August tied for the hottest months ever recorded on our planet, and scientists think they were almost certainly the hottest in the history of human civilization. Places like Basra, Iraq—on the edge of what scholars think was the Biblical Garden of Eden—hit 129 degrees Fahrenheit this year, approaching the point where humans can’t survive outdoors. So last year, when the world’s leaders met in Paris, they set a new number: Every effort, they said, would be made to keep the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees. And to have even a 50–50 chance of meeting that goal, we can only release about 353 gigatons more CO2. So let’s do the math again:

942 > 353

A lot greater. To have just a break-even chance of meeting that 1.5 degree goal we solemnly set in Paris, we’ll need to close all of the coal mines and some of the oil and gas fields we’re currently operating long before they’re exhausted.

“Absent some incredible breakthrough in mythical carbon-sucking unicorns, the numbers say we’re done with the expansion of the fossil fuel industry,” says Kretzmann. “Living up to the Paris Agreement means we must start a managed decline in the fossil fuel industry immediately—and manage that decline as quickly as possible.”

“Managed decline” means we don’t have to grind everything to a halt tomorrow; we can keep extracting fuel from existing oil wells and gas fields and coal mines. But we can’t go explore for new ones. We can’t even develop the ones we already know about, the ones right next to our current projects.

In the United States alone, the existing mines and oil wells and gas fields contain 86 billion tons of carbon emissions—enough to take us 25 percent of the way to a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature. But if the U.S. energy industry gets its way and develops all the oil wells and fracking sites that are currently planned, that would add another 51 billion tons in carbon emissions. And if we let that happen, America would single-handedly blow almost 40 percent of the world’s carbon budget.

This new math is bad news for lots of powerful players. The fossil fuel industry has based its entire business model on the idea that it can endlessly “replenish” the oil and gas it pumps each year; its teams of geologists are constantly searching for new fields to drill. In September, Apache Corporation announced that it has identified fields in West Texas that hold three billion barrels of oil. Leaving that oil underground—which the new math shows we must do if we want to meet the climate targets set in Paris—would cost the industry tens of billions of dollars.

For understandable reasons, the unions whose workers build pipelines and drill wells also resist attempts to change. Consider the current drama over the Dakota Access oil pipeline. In September, even after pipeline security guards armed with pepper spray and guard dogs attacked Native Americans who were nonviolently defending grave sites from bulldozers, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called on the Obama administration to allow construction to proceed. “Pipeline construction and maintenance,” Trumka said, “provides quality jobs to tens of thousands of skilled workers.” The head of the Building Trades Unions agreed: “Members have been relying on these excellent, family-supporting, middle-class jobs with family health care, pensions, and good wages.” Another union official put it most eloquently: “Let’s not turn away and overregulate or just say, ‘No, keep it in the ground.’ It shouldn’t be that simple.”

She’s right—it would be easier for everyone if it weren’t that simple. Union workers have truly relied on those jobs to build middle-class lives, and all of us burn the damned stuff, all day, every day. But the problem is, it is that simple. We have to “turn away.” We have to “keep it in the ground.” The numbers are the numbers. We literally cannot keep doing what we’re doing if we want to have a planet.

“Keeping it in the ground” does not mean stopping all production of fossil fuels instantly. “If you let current fields begin their natural decline,” says Kretzmann, “you’ll be using 50 percent less oil by 2033.” That gives us 17 years, as the wells we’ve already drilled slowly run dry, to replace all that oil with renewable energy. That’s enough time—maybe—to replace gas guzzlers with electric cars. To retrain pipeline workers and coal miners to build solar panels and wind turbines. To follow the lead of cities like Portland that have barred any new fossil fuel infrastructure, and countries like China that have banned new coal mines. Those are small steps, but they’re important ones.

Even some big unions are starting to realize that switching to renewable energy would add a million new good-paying jobs by 2030. Everyone from nurses to transport workers is opposing the Dakota pipeline; other unions have come out against coal exports and fracking. “This is virtually unprecedented,” says Sean Sweeney, a veteran labor and climate organizer. “The rise of ‘climate unionism’ offers a new direction for the labor movement.” And if it spreads, it will give Democratic politicians more room to maneuver against global warming.

But to convince the world’s leaders to obey the math—to stop any new mines or wells or pipelines from being built—we will need a movement like the one that blocked the Keystone pipeline and fracking in New York and Arctic drilling. And we will need to pass the “Keep It in the Ground Act,” legislation that would end new mining and drilling for fossil fuels on public land. It’s been called “unrealistic” or “naïve” by everyone from ExxonMobil to the interior secretary. But as the new math makes clear, keeping fossil fuels in the ground is the only realistic approach. What’s unrealistic is to imagine that we can somehow escape the inexorable calculus of climate change. As the OCI report puts it, “One of the most powerful climate policy levers is also the simplest: stop digging.” That is, after all, the first rule of holes, and we’re in the biggest one ever.

This is literally a math test, and it’s not being graded on a curve. It only has one correct answer. And if we don’t get it right, then all of us—along with our 10,000-year-old experiment in human civilization—will fail.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of the climate group 350.org. @billmckibben

2477. For These Americans, Clean Water Is a Luxury

By George McGrow, The New York Times, October 20, 2016

LOS ANGELES — Most Americans take safe water for granted: Turn the tap, and there it is. But recent protests against the Dakota Access pipeline on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota are a reminder that some Americans still worry every day about having enough clean water to survive.

As events in Standing Rock and Flint, Mich., capture national attention, long-running water emergencies fester in near-total obscurity elsewhere across the country, many of them on native reservations.

Nearly 24,000 Native American and Alaska Native households somehow manage without access to running water or basic sanitation, according to 2015 figures from the Indian Health Service, living in what my organization calls “water poverty.” About 188,000 such households were in need of some form of water and sanitation facilities improvement.

Perhaps the worst case is on the sprawling Navajo reservation in the Southwest, home to about 170,000 people.

I found this out only inadvertently, though I run Digdeep, a nonprofit group focused on improving access to clean water in some of the places you might expect: South Sudan and Cameroon. But not in the United States.

In 2013, a woman called our office to make a sizable donation, with the stipulation that we spend it in the United States. I told her that her gift would be better spent in the developing world, but she was adamant that we use it on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

So I drove the 10 hours from my Los Angeles home to Thoreau, N.M., part of the Navajo Nation. The reservation is the country’s largest, covering parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

There, I was greeted by Darlene Arviso, a Navajo known as “the water lady.” I rode with her in a 3,500-gallon tank truck, and we delivered water free to 10 households across the arid high-desert plateau.

The first home we visited belonged to Lindsay Johnson. The house had no running water or electricity; a car battery powered the TV. Ms. Arviso took out a hose and everyone grabbed cups, bowls, buckets and barrels to store the water.

There’s not much water in the high desert — and much of what’s there is bad. Large parts of the reservation lack any water-supply equipment. The low population density makes building a water distribution system economically unfeasible. Tribal members rely on surface water and shallow aquifers, many of which have been poisoned by uranium mining.

Ms. Arviso explained that because of high demand for her service and the remoteness of the Johnson home, she is able to deliver only 400 gallons of water to the family each month. That amounts to less than three gallons of water per person, per day. (The typical American uses about 100.) The Johnsons use the same water to wash dishes and their hair, and finally pour what’s left into the toilet tank. They invariably run out of water before Ms. Arviso’s next visit.

Benjamin Lewis, a retired miner, lives 30 miles from the Johnsons. Before Ms. Arviso began delivering water, Mr. Lewis relied on a water trough meant for sheep that is supplied by a well pumped by a windmill. That water tested positive for uranium in 1976. More recent tests have been positive for nitrites. Some neighbors still use the sheep tank in emergencies.

While about 6 percent of American Indian and Alaska Natives live in water poverty, the problem is not confined to the reservations. About a half a million American households lack basic plumbing amenities like hot water, a tap or toilet, according to the Census Bureau. As in Flint, they are disproportionately poor and minority.

In the Coachella Valley, southeast of Los Angeles, for instance, low-income and undocumented farm workers living in trailer parks endure open sewage ditches and contaminated drinking water.

I visited one of the worst of these parks, Duroville, before a federal court closed it in 2013. More than 4,000 people lived in a park built for 500. Tenants complained that they were forced to pay their landlord up to 30 percent of their income for delivery of drinking water that made them sick. While most of these families have been resettled, similar conditions persist in the nearby localities of Thermal and Mecca.

Pockets of water poverty exist in nearly every state, particularly in rural Appalachia and New England, and in the “colonias” along the border with Mexico.

These conditions shouldn’t persist. Even relatively inexpensive and simple solutions can have a profound impact.

In Thoreau, we optimized Ms. Arviso’s delivery route, outfitted a second water truck and hired a new driver, doubling the delivery capacity for only $64,000. Last winter, we began installing cisterns and electric pumps for 204 homes; when the project is finished, hot water will flow from taps and showers at a cost of less than $4,000 per household. This spring, we will break ground on a 1,500-foot-deep well close to the Johnsons’ house, expanding water delivery to more homes.

Ending water poverty in the United States will require a concerted effort. Nonprofits can play an important role by working with communities to develop low-tech, low-cost solutions. These programs should be managed with the communities to ensure they are sustainable. Federal and state government should focus on water-supply and sanitation projects with the goal of making these local programs unnecessary someday.

With dedication and money, water poverty on the Navajo Nation could be eradicated within a decade. That would be a powerful start.

George McGraw is the founder and executive director of Digdeep.

2476. New Insight into First Farmers

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, October 17, 2016

A fossilized skeleton of a human who was buried beneath a floor in a family home in Ain Ghazal, a 10,000-year-old farming village in Jordan. Credit C. Blair/The Ain Ghazal Archaeological Project.

Beneath a rocky slope in central Jordan lie the remains of a 10,000-year-old village called Ain Ghazal, whose inhabitants lived in stone houses with timber roof beams, the walls and floors gleaming with white plaster.

Hundreds of people living there worshiped in circular shrines and made haunting, wide-eyed sculptures that stood three feet high. They buried their cherished dead under the floors of their houses, decapitating the bodies in order to decorate the skulls.

But as fascinating as this culture was, something else about Ain Ghazal intrigues archaeologists more: It was one of the first farming villages to have emerged after the dawn of agriculture.

Around the settlement, Ain Ghazal farmers raised barley, wheat, chickpeas and lentils. Other villagers would leave for months at a time to herd sheep and goats in the surrounding hills.

Sites like Ain Ghazal provide a glimpse of one of the most important transitions in human history: the moment that people domesticated plants and animals, settled down, and began to produce the kind of society in which most of us live today.

But for all that sites like Ain Ghazal have taught archaeologists, they are still grappling with enormous questions. Who exactly were the first farmers? How did agriculture, a cornerstone of civilization itself, spread to other parts of the world?

Some answers are now emerging from a surprising source: DNA extracted from skeletons at Ain Ghazal and other early settlements in the Near East. These findings have already challenged long-held ideas about how agriculture and domestication arose.

What’s more, the new data are showing that early farmers would leave a tremendous mark. People from Ireland to India trace some of their ancestry to people who began growing barley and wheat in the Near East thousands of years ago.

“It’s a part of the story of civilization that we’re just beginning to understand,” said Iosif Lazaridis, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School.

Altering False Impressions

The agricultural revolution changed our species and our planet. As bands of hunter-gatherers began domesticating plants and animals, they quit the nomadic life, building villages and towns that endured for thousands of years.

A stable food supply enabled their populations to explode, and small egalitarian groups turned into kingdoms sprawling across hundreds of miles.

Agriculture originated in a few small hubs around the world, but probably first in the Fertile Crescent, a region of the Near East including parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. The evidence for full-blown agriculture there — crops, livestock, tools for food preparation, and villages — dates back about 11,000 years.

In the 1990s, archaeologists largely concluded that farming in the Fertile Crescent began in Jordan and Israel, a region known as the southern Levant. “The model was that everything started there, and then everything spread out from there, including maybe the people,” said Melinda A. Zeder, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

But in recent years, Dr. Zeder and other archaeologists have overturned that consensus. Their research suggests that people were inventing farming at several sites in the Fertile Crescent at roughly the same time. In the Zagros Mountains of Iran, for example, Dr. Zeder and her colleagues have found evidence of the gradual domestication of wild goats over many centuries around 10,000 years ago.

People may have been cultivating plants earlier than believed, too.

In the 1980s, Dani Nadel, then at Hebrew University, and his colleagues excavated a 23,000-year-old site on the shores of the Sea of Galilee known as Ohalo II. It consisted of half a dozen brush huts. Last year, Dr. Nadel co-authored a study showing that one of the huts contained 150,000 charred seeds and fruits, including many types, such as almonds, grapes and olives, that would later become crops. . A stone blade found at Ohalo II seemed to have been used as a sickle to harvest cereals. A stone slab was used to grind the seeds. It seems clear the inhabitants were cultivating wild plants long before farming was thought to have begun.

“We got fixated on the very few things we just happened to see preserved in the archaeological record, and we got this false impression that this was an abrupt change,” Dr. Zeder said. “Now we really understand there was this long period where they’re playing around with resources.”

Many scientists have suggested that humans turned to agriculture under duress. Perhaps the climate of the Near East grew harsh, or perhaps the hunter-gatherer population outstripped the supply of wild foods.

But “playing around with resources” is not the sort of thing people do in times of desperation. Instead, Dr. Zeder argues, agriculture came about as climatic changes shifted the ranges of some wild species of plants and animals into the Near East.

Many different groups began experimenting with ways of producing extra food, which eventually enabled them to start a new way of life: settling down in more stable social groups.

DNA Breakthroughs

Enter the geneticists, who have long wondered if they could help solve the riddle of agriculture’s origins with DNA from human remains discovered in places like Ain Ghazal.

Ancient genetic material can survive in skeletons for thousands of years, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of years. Scientists have been able to reconstruct entire genomes of ancient humans and extinct relatives like Neanderthals.

But a number of attempts to get DNA out of skeletons in the Near East failed. It looked as if the conditions in the region were too harsh for ancient DNA to survive.

“Genetically, the Near East was terra incognita,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School.

It isn’t any longer. In two recent studies, geneticists including Dr. Reich used new methods to fish out enough DNA from the bones of the first farmers to figure out their relationship to other people. A team of researchers based at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, reconstructed the genomes of four early farmers from the Zagros Mountains whose bones date back as much as 10,000 years.

Dr. Reich and his colleagues — including Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Dublin, and Dr. Lazaridis of Harvard — recovered genetic material from 44 sets of remains around the Near East. Their haul included DNA from early farmers in Iran, as well as from bones from another site in the Southern Levant like Ain Ghazal. Dr. Reich’s group discovered even older genetic material from hunter-gatherers in the region, from as far back as 14,000 years ago.

The new results all point to the same overall conclusion: The first farmers in each region were the descendants of the earlier hunter-gatherers. What’s more, each population had its own distinct ancestry, going back tens of thousands of years.

They were as different from one another genetically as the Europeans and Chinese. And these groups remained distinct through the agricultural revolution as they changed from hunter-gatherers to full-blown farmers. “It was quite surprising to see how different these groups were from each other,” Dr. Lazaridis said. “It was more extreme than anything you could have imagined was going on.”

Dr. Reich and others argue that the findings show that people around the fertile crescent became farmers independently. “It’s not like you had one Near Eastern population that developed farming that expands and overruns all the others,” he said.

One Birthplace, or Many?

Archaeologists have welcomed the new results from the geneticists. But for now, they are interpreting the data in different ways.

Dr. Zeder said that ancient DNA supports a scenario where farmers across the Fertile Crescent independently invented agriculture, perhaps repeatedly. But Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard, argues that full-blown agriculture evolved only once, and then quickly spread from one group to another.

He points to the increasingly precise dating of archaeological sites in the Fertile Crescent. Instead of the southern Levant, the oldest sites with evidence of full-blown agriculture are in northern Syria and southern Turkey. That’s where Dr. Bar-Yosef thinks agriculture began.

In other parts of the Fertile Crescent, he argues, people were just toying with farming. Only when they came in contact with the combination of crops and livestock, and the technology to manage them — what scientists call the Neolithic package — did they permanently adopt the practices.

“You just map the dates” of the sites at which the evidence for farming is found, he said, “and you see it’s always later as you get away from the core area.” The new genetic results simply show that this farming technology spread through the Fertile Crescent, but that the populations sharing it did not interbreed.

The new research also shows that even after agriculture was established across the Fertile Crescent, people remained genetically isolated for thousands of years.

“If they were talking to each other, they weren’t intermarrying,” said Garrett Hellenthal, a geneticist at University College London who collaborated with the Gutenberg University researchers.

But the DNA research also shows that this long period of isolation came to a sudden and spectacular end.

About 8,000 years ago, the barriers between peoples in the Fertile Crescent fell away, and genes began to flow across the entire region. The Near East became one homogeneous mix of people.

Why? Dr. Reich speculated that growing populations of farmers began linking to one another via trade networks. People moved along those routes and began to intermarry and have children together. Genes did not just flow across the Fertile Crescent — they also rippled outward. The scientists have detected DNA from the first farmers in living people on three continents.

“There seem to be expansions out in all directions,” Dr. Lazaridis said.

Early farmers in Turkey moved across the western part of the country, crossed the Bosporus and traveled into Europe about 8,000 years ago. They encountered no farmers there. Europe had been home to groups of hunter-gatherers for more than 30,000 years. The farmers seized much of their territory and converted it to farmland, without interbreeding with them.

The hunter-gatherers clung to existence for centuries, and were eventually absorbed by bigger farming communities. Europeans today can trace much of their ancestry to both groups.

The early farmers in what is now Iran expanded eastward. Eventually, their descendants ended up in present-day India, and their DNA makes up a substantial portion of the genomes of Indians.

And the people of Ain Ghazal? Their population expanded into East Africa, bringing crops and animals with them. East Africans retain ancestry from the first farmers of the southern Levant — in Somalia, a third of people’s DNA comes from there.

Dr. Reich hopes to learn more about the early farmers by obtaining samples more systematically from across the Fertile Crescent. “It’s not easy to come by these unique and special specimens,” he said.

But he is pessimistic about filling in some of the most glaring gaps in the genetic map of the Fertile Crescent. No one has yet recovered DNA from the people who lived in the oldest known farming settlements. And it’s unlikely they’ll be trying again anytime soon. To do so, they would have to venture into the heart of Syria’s civil war.

2475. A Majority of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, U.S. Poll Shows

By Ehrendfreund, The Washington Post, April 26, 2016

In an apparent rejection of the basic principles of the U.S. economy, a new poll shows that most young people do not support capitalism.

The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it.

It isn't clear that the young people in the poll would prefer some alternative system, though. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. The survey had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

The results of the survey are difficult to interpret, pollsters noted. Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking.

All the same, that a majority of respondents in Harvard University's survey of young adults said they do not support capitalism suggests that today's youngest voters are more focused on the flaws of free markets.

"The word 'capitalism' doesn't mean what it used to," said Zach Lustbader, a senior at Harvard involved in conducting the poll, which was published Monday. For those who grew up during the Cold War, capitalism meant freedom from the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. For those who grew up more recently, capitalism has meant a financial crisis from which the global economy still hasn't completely recovered.

A subsequent survey that included people of all ages found that somewhat older Americans also are skeptical of capitalism. Only among respondents at least 50 years old was the majority in support of capitalism.

Although the results are startling, Harvard's questions accord with other recent research on how Americans think about capitalism and socialism. In 2011, for example, the Pew Research Center found that people ages 18 to 29 were frustrated with the free-market system.

In that survey, 46 percent had positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent had negative views — a broader question than what Harvard's pollsters asked, which was whether the respondent supported the system. With regard to socialism, by contrast, 49 percent of the young people in Pew's poll had positive views, and just 43 percent had negative views.

Lustbader, 22, said the darkening mood on capitalism is evident in the way politicians talk about the economy. When Republicans — long the champions of free enterprise — use the word "capitalism" these days, it's often to complain about "crony capitalism," he said.

"You don't hear people on the right defending their economic policies using that word anymore," Lustbader added.

It is an open question whether young people's attitudes on socialism and capitalism show that they are rejecting free markets as a matter of principle or whether those views are simply an expression of broader frustrations with an economy in which household incomes have been declining for 15 years.

On specific questions about how best to organize the economy, for example, young people's views seem conflicted. Just 27 percent believe government should play a large role in regulating the economy, the Harvard poll found, and just 30 percent think the government should play a large role in reducing income inequality. Only 26 percent said government spending is an effective way to increase economic growth.

Yet 48 percent agreed that "basic health insurance is a right for all people." And 47 percent agreed with the statement that "Basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that the government should provide to those unable to afford them.”

"Young people could be saying that there are problems with capitalism, contradictions," Frank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup, said when asked about the new data. "I certainly don't know what’s going through their heads.”

John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard, went on to personally interview a small group of young people about their attitudes toward capitalism to try to learn more. They told him that capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.

"They're not rejecting the concept," Della Volpe said. "The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that's what they're rejecting."

2474. U.S. Embargo of Cuba Continues

By Salim Lamrani, Granma, October 12, 2016

Despite the establishment of a historic dialogue with Havana on December 17, 2014, and regardless of the official visit of President Barack Obama to the island in March 2016, Washington continues to apply economic sanctions against the Cuban population, sparking the incomprehension of the international community. Established in 1960, during the Cold War, the sanctions (an economic, commercial and financial blockade of the country) persist more than half a century later, cause major difficulties for the Cuban economy and inflict unnecessary suffering on the most vulnerable sectors of the population. Their high cost and extraterritorial reach prompt unanimous rejection by the international community.

However, the resolution of this asymmetrical conflict depends on the executive branch of the U.S. government, which has the necessary prerogatives to dismantle much of the framework of the sanctions imposed on the island.

THE COST OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS

On September 13, 2016, Barack Obama again renewed for another year the Trading with the Enemy Act, a law dating from 1917 used for the first time by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, to impose full economic sanctions on Cuba, extending the state of siege against the island. This law, extended each year by the nine U.S. presidents in power since, only applies against Havana.

Once again the impact of the sanctions has been dramatic for the Cuban economy and society. In one year, from April 2015 to March 2016, they cost the island 4.68 billion dollars according to Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez. In the annual report on the economic sanctions, Cuban authorities estimated the damages caused nationwide. Three sectors were particularly affected. Firstly exports, as Cuba can not sell goods or services to the United States. Next, the increased costs of seeking alternative markets that are geographically distant from the island. And finally the financial impact, as Cuba is still unable to use the dollar in its international transactions, despite statements by President Obama on the removal of this restriction. “There is no element of our lives where the impact is not felt,” Bruno Rodríguez concluded. In total, at current prices the economic sanctions have cost Cuba more than 125 billion dollars since their implementation in the 1960s.

Other vital sectors such as health are affected by the economic sanctions. To cite just one example, Cuba can not acquire deep brain stimulation systems, produced exclusively by U.S. firm Medtronic, used to treat neurological diseases.

Hundreds of Cuban patients with Parkinson’s disease, who could enjoy a better quality of life with this treatment, are deprived of it because of a political dispute that has seen Washington opposed to Havana for over half a century.

THE EXTRATERRITORIAL REACH OF SANCTIONS

Despite the historic rapprochement from December 2014, several international organizations have been heavily sanctioned since then for undertaking financial transactions with Cuba, perfectly legal according to international law. Thus, in May 2015, the French bank BNP Paribas was sentenced to a record fine of 8.9 billion dollars for maintaining, among others, financial relations with Cuba. In October 2015 another French bank, CréditAgricole, had to pay a fine of 1.116 billion dollars for the same reason. We should remember that BNP Paribas and CréditAgricole did not violate any French law and scrupulously respected European and international law.

Washington imposed its sanctions against Cuba on an extraterritorial basis, that is, illegally. Other financial institutions were also heavily sanctioned. German bank Commerzbank had to pay a fine of 1.710 billion dollars and put an end to all relations with Cuba. The U.S. executive took all these decisions.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S ROOM FOR MANEUVER

However, President Obama has launched several calls on Congress to put an end to the anachronistic, cruel and inefficient economic, commercial and financial blockade. He has repeatedly expressed his opposition to the continuation of retaliatory economic measures which, as well as seriously affecting the welfare of Cubans, have isolated the United States on the international stage.

During his visit to Cuba he admitted that: “What the United States was doing was not working. We have to have the courage to acknowledge that truth. A policy of isolation designed for the Cold War made little sense in the 21st century. The embargo was only hurting the Cuban people instead of helping them (…) It is an outdated burden on the Cuban people.” The international community, in favor of the peaceful resolution of this conflict, applauded these words.

However, the constructive rhetoric of Barack Obama has not been supported by tangible facts, despite his prerogatives as head of the executive branch. It is true that the U.S. president reestablished political dialogue with Cuba in December 2014, expanded the number of categories under which U.S. citizens are authorized to travel to the island in January 2015, withdrew Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in May 2015, reestablished diplomatic ties with the reopening of embassies in Washington and Havana in July 2015, authorized the export of goods and services in the field of telecommunications in March 2016 (only to the non-state sector) and facilitated the resumption of maritime passenger transport between the two countries in May 2016 and commercial flights in August 2016.

Nevertheless, beyond these positive, but very limited steps, the U.S. president has all the necessary room for maneuver to dismantle almost the entire framework of the sanctions imposed since 1960, without requiring authorization from Congress.

Barack Obama could authorize Cuban companies to open bank accounts in the U.S. to facilitate trade and financial transactions. He could also end the financial persecution of Cuba, which many international banks have suffered. In total, the Obama administration has inflicted fines worth 14 billion dollars on various banks across the world for their relations with the Caribbean island. Similarly, the White House could allow bilateral trade between Cuban and U.S. companies (import/export). U.S. capital could also be permitted the possibility of investing in Cuba.

Finally, Obama could, for example, eliminate the restriction that prevents any ship, regardless of origin, which transports goods to Cuba, from entering a U.S. port within the following six months.

There are only four sectors that the executive branch of the U.S. government can not touch without the consent of Congress. President Obama can not authorize trade between subsidiaries of U.S. companies located abroad and Cuba (1992 Torricelli Act). Instead, he can allow trade between the parent company established in the U.S. and Cuban companies, which would in effect make irrelevant any transaction with a subsidiary established in a third country.

Likewise Barack Obama can not allow ordinary tourism by U.S. citizens to Cuba (Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000). Instead, he can multiply the number of categories of citizens allowed to travel to the island and expand their definition. Thus, the White House could redefine the notion of a “cultural trip” and integrate for example a simple museum visit. Thus every U.S. citizen who committed to visit a museum during their stay in Cuba could benefit from this travel category.

Without the consent of Congress, President Obama can not authorize the credit sale of food commodities (Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000). Instead, he can agree to the sale on credit of all non-food products, thereby significantly limiting the impact of the sanctions.

Finally, the White House can not allow transactions with former U.S. properties nationalized in 1960 (Helms-Burton Act, 1996). Nevertheless, Obama can open the way for any business involving other properties on the island.

UNANIMOUS REJECTION OF SANCTIONS

All sectors of U.S. society are in favor of lifting the economic sanctions. The business community, through the United States Chamber of Commerce, strongly desires an end to the policy in view of the market of 11 million people just 150 kilometers from U.S. shores, which is welcoming other international investors.

Public opinion favors by more than 70% full normalization of bilateral relations between both nations, as citizens can not understand why their government forbids them from traveling to Cuba for ordinary tourism purposes. Religious authorities, through the National Council of Churches, have condemned the sanctions for the suffering inflicted on the population of the island. According to a poll from September 2016, 63% of Cuban-Americans are also in favor of lifting sanctions as they know that the hostile economic measures affect their relatives on the island. Finally, it should be recalled that in 2015, for the twenty-fourth consecutive occasion, 191 of a total of 193 countries called for an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade against the island during the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly.

AN ASYMMETRICAL CONFLICT

Some observers believe that Cuba should respond to the gestures made by President Obama with changes of an internal order. They forget the asymmetrical nature of the conflict. Indeed, in the dispute that opposes Washington to Havana, the hostility is unilateral. Cuba does not impose economic sanctions on the United States, nor does it illegally occupy a part of its sovereign territory (Guantánamo), or openly finance internal opposition with the aim of achieving “regime change”, it does not steal human capital as does the Cuban Adjustment Act, and does not broadcast illegal transmissions to promote internal subversion, as is the case with Radio and TV Martí. Moreover, Cuba is an independent nation and under international law and since the Congress of Westphalia in 1648, which recognizes the sovereign equality of states, changes on the island are the exclusive competence of the Cuban people, the only body who can decide the island’s political system and social model.

CONCLUSION

The sanctions against Cuba are anachronistic, cruel and inefficient. They have a disastrous impact on the Cuban economy and strongly affect the wellbeing of the island’s population. Despite the constructive statements from the White House in favor of a lifting of this state of siege, no major new measures have been taken to alleviate Cubans of the economic strangulation that has lasted for over half a century and been massively condemned by the international community. Of course, no complete normalization of relations will be possible as long as this hostile policy remains in force.

*Doctor of Iberian and Latin American Studies of the Paris Sorbonne Paris IV University, Salim Lamrani is an associate professor at the University of La Réunion and journalist specializing in Cuba – U.S. relations. His latest book is titled Cuba, ¡palabra a la defensa! published by Hondarribia, Editorial Hiru, 2016.

2473.The Anthropocene Mindset: Geoenginerring the Climate

By Christine Frank, Socialist Action, October 13, 2016

As a last-ditch effort to curb runaway global warming, while avoiding a definitive halt to fossil-fuel combustion, scientists, governments, entrepreneurs, and even right-wing think tanks are advocating various highly dangerous technologies to block solar radiation or draw down atmospheric carbon to cool the planet. Touted as Plan B, these risky methods come under the label of either Solar Radiation Management (SRM) or Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

SRM techniques under consideration include placing space-based solar deflectors in orbit, spewing sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, and seeding clouds to increase their brightness. CDR techniques include Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) of CO2 from power-plant flue gases, the iron fertilization of the oceans to stimulate phytoplankton blooms, and burning acres of trees for biochar burial in soils.

For any of these ruinously expensive, energy-intensive techno-fixes to work, they must be applied on a planetary-wide, mega-scale, at great risk to Earth’s natural systems and human societies. Their implementation could result in an array of disastrous unintended consequences due to reckless human interference.

A case in point would be the initial Grand Experiment of employing fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution, which got us into this mess in the first place. Over the two-and-a-half centuries of hydrocarbon burning and steadily rising carbon dioxide emissions, the growing evidence that greenhouse gases were warming the planet was either ignored, denied, or deliberately suppressed by those who profited from the coal, gas, and oil industries.

With that in mind, any child worried about his or her future could easily grasp the folly of using Mother Earth as a laboratory for geoengineering experiments, yet scientists as well as some so-called environmentalists, who both should know better, are ready to push the panic button in order to “buy time.”

To buy time for whom, we may ask? It is clear that quick-fixing the climate will allow the capitalist class to conduct business as usual by never having to give up fossil fuels. That is why Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson declared back in 2007 that adapting to extreme weather and rising sea levels is an “engineering problem” that has “engineering solutions.”

That’s right, Rex, with the help of Yankee ingenuity and American know-how, we can engineer our way out of ecological collapse so you and your ilk will be free to pillage, plunder, and pollute for profit until the natural world descends into chaos. There may be a Plan B, but there is no Planet B! A growing number of climate crisis activists are realizing that and demanding a ban on geoengineering experiments, funding, and implementation.

We now know from paleoclimatic evidence that dramatic changes on a planetary scale are difficult to reverse and can lead to irreparable harm, even mass extinctions. Earth’s climate system is a complexity of natural variables and feedback loops. All of the planet’s matrices—atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere—interact in non-linear and subtle ways to create a self-regulatory whole. Therefore, a change in the solar flux could cause an imbalance in the global heat budget and alter atmospheric circulation, precipitation patterns, and ocean currents to the detriment of life in the affected regions. Needless to say, the economic costs of launching an array of sun shields or mirrors into orbit would be astronomical.

The release of sulfate aerosols mixed with polluting jet aircraft exhaust into the stratosphere would also have detrimental side effects. Historically, tropical volcanic eruptions that release sulfur particles can cause warmer winters over land masses in the Northern Hemisphere, whereas, eruptions at high latitudes weaken the Asian and African monsoons, causing droughts. Adding aerosols to the stratosphere could exacerbate ozone depletion by providing more surfaces on which harmful chemical reactions take place. Also, blocking sunlight would mean less for renewable solar power. Acid rain that kills forests and aquatic life could be another ill effect.

A flotilla of ships spraying seawater into the air in order to increase Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) and brighten marine stratocumulus clouds may not be the “Silver Lining” that is promised. It could backfire with a counterproductive reduction in cloud cover because of all the industrial pollutants present over the ocean adding to the mix.

For years, carbon capture and sequestration have been used to foster the myth of Clean Coal. With a handful of exceptions, most coal-fired power plants have not deployed CCS because of the enormous expense and energy required to create the solvents to absorb the CO2 from the smokestacks and to pressurize and pipe the supercritical gas underground into a secure geologic formation. Critics have pointed out the dangers of the highly pressurized carbon dioxide migrating through the rock fissures and belching out at the surface where it would smother anything breathing at ground level.

Supposedly, the CarbFix project in Iceland has succeeded in mineralizing carbon pollution from a geothermal power station by pumping it into subterranean volcanic basalt formations. The in situ process took only two years rather than millions, greatly improving on geologic time scales. The major drawbacks to applying this technique on a world scale are the availability of basalt formations, the energy required to transport the carbon dioxide from its source, and the amount of water—25 tons per each ton of CO2—necessary to pipe it into permanent geologic storage. It would require a massive infrastructure.

Then there are always the problems of pipeline ruptures and wellhead blowouts plus the hazards of deep-sea drilling. The more complex the mechanical means, the more things that can go wrong.

Dumping a slurry of iron sulfate into the ocean to increase marine phytoplankton populations has had limited results in drawing down carbon. What has happened in actual trials is that iron fertilization encourages a feeding frenzy among the zooplankton grazers, resulting in very little carbon actually being sequestered as dead plankton or fecal matter—marine snow—in the deep ocean.

Also, there is the danger of undermining the integrity of the food web. Neurotoxic algal blooms can poison fish, shellfish, and marine mammals, and nutrient overloading can deplete oxygen and create dead zones in the world’s seas. Also, methanophilic bacteria could take advantage of the situation and release massive amounts of dimethylsulfide (DMS) into the atmosphere, blocking the sunlight needed for photosynthesis.

Because no government is forcing the Big Polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, panicked scientists and politicians say that conventional means of mitigating global warming are not working. Therefore, we need to resort to more drastic measures, and they are receiving encouragement from wealthy entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Mark Lynas, who are eager to patent every wild, hair-brained scheme coming down the pike. The result is the privatization of global warming mitigation strategies to satisfy their greed. It raises the question of who ultimately controls the thermostat and whether they have the right to imperil the lives of everyone else.

Another reason why we are not winning the struggle to save the climate is the cowardice of the weak, reformist environmental groups, who are afraid to challenge the Carbon Barons head on, so they compromise by promoting electric cars instead of clean mass transit.

Fearing the wrath of Big Auto, the Union of Concerned Scientists has harped endlessly on improved fuel-efficiency standards because it too cannot give up its worship of the internal combustion engine. For years, the Sierra Club falsely advocated natural gas as a “bridge or transitional fuel” until it was revealed that its leadership had been taking millions in donations from the industry. Even climatologist James Hansen believes in “green nukes” by advocating thorium reactors.

The delusional sci-fi fantasy that human beings can control powerful natural forces is based on the mechanistic view that the Universe is a giant clockwork that can tolerate endless tinkering without consequence. Only the democratic control of science for the benefit of society will allow us to work with Mother Nature instead of against her.

We already have renewable wind and solar technologies at our disposal, which will enable us to leave the fossil fuels in the ground. Instead, of torching trees for biochar, we should be saving the world’s forests from the logger’s chainsaw. To increase the carbon-storage capacity of Earth’s badly depleted, lifeless soils, organic matter must be recycled to regenerate their health and fertility instead of flushed into the ocean. Organic food production, not genetic monsters and toxic chemicals, will feed the world.

To implement these sustainable measures, we must first get rid of the economic system and the class that puts profits before human and ecological needs.