The Wheel Turns, the Boat Rocks, the Sea Rises: Change in a Time of Climate Change

Guest post by Rebecca Solnit

There have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one, and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to have. Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly -- from the role of women to the nature of agriculture. For the past couple of hundred years, change has been accelerating in both magnificent and nightmarish ways.

Yet when we argue for change, notably changing our ways in response to climate change, we’re arguing against people who claim we’re disrupting a stable system. They insist that we’re rocking the boat unnecessarily.

I say: rock that boat. It’s a lifeboat; maybe the people in it will wake up and start rowing. Those who think they’re hanging onto a stable order are actually clinging to the wreckage of the old order, a ship already sinking, that we need to leave behind.

As you probably know, the actual oceans are rising -- almost eight inches since 1880, and that’s only going to accelerate. They’re also acidifying, because they’re absorbing significant amounts of the carbon we continue to pump into the atmosphere at record levels. The ice that covers the polar seas is shrinking, while the ice shields that cover Antarctica and Greenland are melting. The water locked up in all the polar ice, as it’s unlocked by heat, is going to raise sea levels staggeringly, possibly by as much as 200 feet at some point in the future, how distant we do not know. In the temperate latitudes, warming seas breed fiercer hurricanes.

The oceans are changing fast, and for the worse. Fish stocks are dying off, as are shellfish. In many acidified oceanic regions, their shells are actually dissolving or failing to form, which is one of the scariest, most nightmarish things I’ve ever heard. So don’t tell me that we’re rocking a stable boat on calm seas. The glorious 10,000-year period of stable climate in which humanity flourished and then exploded to overrun the Earth and all its ecosystems is over.

But responding to these current cataclysmic changes means taking on people who believe, or at least assert, that those of us who want to react and act are gratuitously disrupting a stable system that’s working fine. It isn’t stable. It is working fine -- in the short term and the most limited sense -- for oil companies and the people who profit from them and for some of us in the particularly cushy parts of the world who haven’t been impacted yet by weather events like, say, the recent torrential floods in Japan or southern Nevada and Arizona, or the monsoon versions of the same that have devastated parts of India and Pakistan, or the drought that has mummified my beloved California, or the wildfires of Australia.

The problem, of course, is that the people who most benefit from the current arrangements have effectively purchased a lot of politicians, and that a great many of the rest of them are either hopelessly dim or amazingly timid. Most of the Democrats recognize the reality of climate change but not the urgency of doing something about it. Many of the Republicans used to -- John McCain has done an amazing about-face from being a sane voice on climate to a shrill denier -- and they present a horrific obstacle to any international treaties.

Put it this way: in one country, one party holding 45 out of 100 seats in one legislative house, while serving a minority of the very rich, can basically block what quite a lot of the other seven billion people on Earth want and need, because a two-thirds majority in the Senate must consent to any international treaty the U.S. signs. Which is not to say much for the president, whose drill-baby-drill administration only looks good compared to the petroleum servants he faces, when he bothers to face them and isn’t just one of them. History will despise them all and much of the world does now, but as my mother would have said, they know which side their bread is buttered on.

As it happens, the butter is melting and the bread is getting more expensive. Global grain production is already down several percent thanks to climate change, says a terrifying new United Nations report. Declining crops cause food shortages and rising food prices, creating hunger and even famine for the poorest on Earth, and also sometimes cause massive unrest. Rising bread prices were one factor that helped spark the Arab Spring in 2011. Anyone who argues that doing something about global warming will be too expensive is dodging just how expensive unmitigated climate change is already proving to be.

It’s only a question of whether the very wealthy or the very poor will pay. Putting it that way, however, devalues all the nonmonetary things at stake, from the survival of myriad species to our confidence in the future. And yeah, climate change is here, now. We’ve already lost a lot and we’re going to lose more, but there’s a difference between terrible and apocalyptic. We still have some control over how extreme it gets. That’s not a great choice, but it’s the choice we have. There’s still a window open for action, but it’s closing. As the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Society, Michel Jarraud, bluntly put it recently, "We are running out of time."
 New and Renewable Energies

The future is not yet written. Look at the world we’re in at this very moment. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline was supposed to be built years ago, but activists catalyzed by the rural and indigenous communities across whose land it would go have stopped it so far, and made what was supposed to be a done deal a contentious issue. Activists changed the outcome.

Fracking has been challenged on the state level, and banned in townships and counties from upstate New York to central California. (It has also been banned in two Canadian provinces, France, and Bulgaria.) The fossil-fuel divestment movement has achieved a number of remarkable victories in its few bare years of existence and more are on the way. The actual divestments and commitments to divest fossil fuel stocks by various institutions ranging from the city of Seattle to the British Medical Association are striking. But the real power of the movement lies in the way it has called into question the wisdom of investing in fossil fuel corporations. Even mainstream voices like the British Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee and publications like Forbes are now beginning to question whether they are safe places to put money. That’s a sea change.

Occupy Rio+20

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Governments are gathering in Brazil, twenty years after the historic 1992 Earth Summit where nations around the world pledged to devote themselves to ending hunger and conserving the planet’s resources for future generations.

This week, governments gather once again, and food and agriculture are high on the agenda of “Rio+20.” Global leaders will be discussing which way forward to feed the world amidst growing food, climate and water crises. Monsanto & Co. have geared up with slick websites and sound bytes — to the point where some have dubbed the official meeting “Greenwash +20.” But the good news is that people around the world are mobilizing like never before for a new food system.

What, GE won’t feed the world?! 

The first Rio gathering in 1992 marked an important historical moment when nations came together with inspiring goals and commitments to keep our planet from going off the rails and to save and replenish the ecosystems that are required for life to continue. But 20 years on, the report card on progress is bleak, and tragically, this meeting (like Copenhagen and too many others) promises more hot air and no progress.

Of profound concern is the undue influence exerted by multinational corporations who have entered the “sustainability” and “green” debate with predictable zeal. The recently released report Greenwash +20 documents how multinational corporate interests thwart government action toward real sustainable development. In food and agriculture, the report exposes the Big 6 player Syngenta, in particular, for its role in suppressing science, influencing the public conversation to bolster profits, and shadow-writing public policy.

Despite the best attempts of the Big 6 pesticide/biotech companies to persuade us that their toxic chemicals and expensive patented seeds are needed, here’s the real deal: GE crops haven’t delivered on 20 years of empty promises. No yield gains, no drought-tolerance, no nutritional improvement.

Rather, farmers signing contracts with Big 6 players have lost their land and their right to save and exchange seed, have fallen deeper into debt, seen their communities wither, stores shuttered, schools closed...The greatest benefits from the sale of GE seeds and the pesticides that go with them have consistently accrued to their manufacturers, companies like Monsanto which more than doubled its profits at the height of the global food price crisis of 2008. We know this to be true from the words of farmers — whether in Iowa or India — and from the hard facts presented to us by independent scientists.

People Power

The heartening news is that farmers and scientists around the world know better than to believe the Biotech Brigade. From Berkeley to Brazil, there is incredible momentum gathering like never before to democratize our food system. This momentum is manifested in the thousands of people gathering at the People’s Summit in Rio. Here peasant farmers, community and social movement leaders, policy advocates, researchers and academics are sharing their knowledge and stories of how communities and entire nations are building strong and vibrant local and regional food systems without buying into corporate dependency.

This “unofficial” meeting, already going on, is where the smarts and solutions lie. Two full days will be dedicated to agroecology and the science and organizing required to build an ecologically sane and democratic food and farming system. While official meetings miles away in walled-off rooms promise entrenchment and false hope, the agroecology meeting has sparked the analysis and relationship-building needed to fuel our movement for change.

Here are some exciting products already coming out of Rio:

• Agroecology in the U.S., a new brief from PANNA showcasing the success of ecological farming at home and laying out policy recommendations for the U.S. government (also in Spanish);
• Scaling up Agroecology: Spreading the Hope for Food Sovereignty and Resiliency by the Latin American Scientific Society for Agroecology;
• The Global Common Statement for a Toxics-Free Future, co-produced by PAN International and partners in the International POPs Elimination Network;
• The collectively produced Ag Transitions website that demonstrates the ability of small-scale family farming to meet 21^st century challenges;
• Time To Act Rio+20, a powerful civil society statement endorsed by PAN and the Global Agriculture website, both of which take up the call of the pathbreaking IAASTD report.

The global people’s gathering in Rio shows that there’s more movement than ever for Food Democracy. It’s up to us to create this change. Here are three ways to engage today:

• Sign the statement from Occupy Rio+20.
• Join PAN’s alert list, where you’ll get updates on how to take action for food democracy and a healthy planet. Right now, we’re supporting the brave Mothers of Argentina vs. Monsanto in our online action with the White House.
• Play “Game Change Rio,” a game that raises awareness of the issues we’ll need to address if future generations are to enjoy life on this planet. (Demo video here).

As the leader of PAN’s Food Democracy campaign team, I’m thrilled by the public conversations taking place in Rio and the momentum powering social movements around the world. Join us.

The Planet Wreckers

Climate-Change Deniers Are On the Ropes -- But So Is the Planet

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from TomDispatch

It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich -- after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards -- but also a little pathetic.  A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them -- and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That -- have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with.  Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp.  That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot.  Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

The Biggest Climate Victory You Never Heard Of

The fight against coal in the U.S. has achieved great success due to activists' passion and commitment. 

By Mark Hertsgaard, originally published at Al Jazeera

Coal is going down in the United States, and that's good news for the Earth's climate. The US Energy Information Administration has announced that coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel, generated only 36 per cent of US electricity in the first quarter of 2012. That amounts to a staggering 20 per cent decline from one year earlier. And the EIA anticipates additional decline by year's end, suggesting a historic setback for coal, which has provided the majority of the US' electricity for many decades.

Even more encouraging, however, is the largely unknown story behind coal's retreat. Mainstream media coverage has credited low prices for natural gas - coal's chief competitor - and the Obama administration's March 27 announcement of stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. And certainly both of those developments played a role.

But a third factor - a persistent grassroots citizens' rebellion that has blocked the construction of 166 (and counting) proposed coal-fired power plants - has been at least as important. At the very time when President Obama's "cap-and-trade" climate legislation was going down in flames in Washington, local activists across the United States were helping to impose "a de facto moratorium on new coal", in the words of Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, one of the first analysts to note the trend.

Another surprise: most of these coal plants were defeated in the politically red states of the South and Midwest. Victories were coming "in places like Oklahoma and South Dakota, not the usual liberal bastions where you'd expect environmental victories", recalls Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, which provided national coordination for the local efforts. The victories in Oklahoma were particularly sweet, coming in the home state of Capitol Hill's leading climate denier, Senator James Inhofe.

Of course the activists had help: the falling cost of natural gas and a decline in electricity demand following the 2008 financial collapse made coal vulnerable. But it was grassroots activism that turned this vulnerability into outright defeat, argues Thomas Sanzillo, a former deputy comptroller for the New York state government who has collaborated with Beyond Coal. "If the activists hadn't been there talking to government regulators and newspaper editorial boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet," Sanzillo explains, "the plants would have gone forward, because the utility companies would say, ‘We can handle the costs,' and those [government] boards are often good ol' boy boards."

Corporate-Resistant Weed Scientists Needed To Oppose Approval Of Dow's 2,4-D-Resistant Corn

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

I’ve been hearing through the grapevine that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was startled by the public uproar over Dow AgroScience’s application for approval of its controversial new GE corn, designed to be used with the infamous and highly hazardous weedkiller, 2,4-D.

By quietly opening the public comment period on December 21, 2011, the agency had apparently hoped to slide this one by without attracting public attention. Instead, a vocal and growing movement of people from all walks of life has emerged to challenge the Big 6 pesticide/biotech companies’ introduction of this new generation of toxic pesticide-seed combinations.

Well over ¼ million people signed various petitions this spring, urging USDA to reject Dow’s application for approval of its 2,4-D corn. Medical doctors and health professionals oppose the new crop, as do over 150 farm, labor, environmental, business and consumer groups. And over 2,000 farmers and farm businesses have organized a farmers’ coalition to protest 2,4-D corn and other similar products, sending in their own letter to the agency.

In an OpEd published in St. Louis Today, Iowa corn and soy farmer George Naylor and Missouri organic farmer Margot McMillen said:

Our nation's farmland and countryside already are sprayed with too many toxins. If the USDA gives Dow permission to market this high-tech seed, even more hazardous chemicals will cover our countryside, pollute our air and water and destroy neighboring crops. It's time to stop this cycle of production of GE seeds and herbicides before everything and everyone is drenched in toxins.

The alternative to being "drenched in toxins?" A decisive shift towards sustainable, ecological farming. 

Ecological weed management. It can be done....

This week, weed scientists gathered in Washington D.C. for the National Academy of Science’s “National Summit on Strategies to Manage Herbicide-Resistant Weeds.” The major focus of the forum was the development of a “coordinated strategy” to handle the epidemic of superweeds resistant to RoundUp (glyphosate) and other weedkillers that now infest over 14 million acres of American cropland.

Weed ecologists have long been demonstrating the efficacy and profitability of non-chemical or ecological weed management. This cutting edge approach to weed management includes an array of techniques and practices that are grounded in ecological sciences and principles, reduce weed populations and prevent the evolution of herbicide resistance. Established tactics include crop rotation, planting cover crops, selection of competitive crop cultivars, mulching and minimal tillage (i.e. occasional inter-row cultivation over a multi-year rotation), advanced fertilization techniques that favor crop over weed, and conservation of weed seed predators.

Long-term cropping systems research at The Rodale Institute has demonstrated the efficacy and productivity of organic systems that have eliminated chemical herbicide use entirely, while regenerating the ecological health of soil, water, farm and landscape. Iowa State University scientists have demonstrated the ability of integrated weed management (IWM) in corn to reduce herbicide inputs by up to 94%, while obtaining profits comparable to conventional chemical-based systems. 

....but will we?

Unfortunately, many weed scientists — including the Summit’s chair and others — have long and close associations with the Big 6 pesticide companies, which makes it very difficult for them to think independently of their corporate sponsors and/or former employers. It remains to be seen whether the academic community and  regulators who attended the Summit will confine themselves to the same herbicide-resistant crop paradigm that got us into this predicament, or whether they will dare to embark on a path of sustainable, ecological weed management.

In the coming months, USDA will decide whether or not to approve Dow’s 2,4-D corn. Meanwhile, Congress will decide whether or not to fund crucial conservation programs in the Farm Bill. These two decisions will demonstrate whether our elected officials and policymakers will commit to the path of sustainable agriculture that so many people so clearly want, or deepen American agriculture’s crippling chemical dependence.

Organic or Conventional? There Is No Comparison

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Media are all atwitter about a new Nature study by researchers at McGill University and the University of Minnesota that compares organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and over 300 trials. In extrapolating the study's findings to the charged question of how to feed the world, more than a few got it all wrong.

The core finding of the study is that “yield differences [between organic and conventional] are highly contextual, depending on system and site characteristics.” In other words, sometimes organic does better, sometimes conventional does. In fact, the sheer variety of comparisons led Mother Jones columnist Tom Philpott to observe that the study “like a good buffet… offered something for every taste.”

For example, yields of fruit and oilseed crops showed no significant difference between organic and conventional, while conventional cereal crops and some vegetables produced higher yields than organic counterparts under certain conditions. With irrigation, conventional averaged 35% higher yields than organic (with the authors acknowledging that organic systems were mostly compared to high-input commercial systems), but this difference dropped dramatically under rain-fed conditions (the reality for most small-scale farmers around the world)—confirming other studies that have demonstrated the superior water-holding capacity and water infiltration characteristics of organic systems.

Seufert et al.'s intense scrutiny of a relatively small number of studies (66) is intriguing, but—media hype aside—the study doesn't really tell us which systems are better suited to providing healthy nutritious food for all in the 21st century. And to the authors' credit, they acknowledge that. 

Yields don’t tell us how to feed the world

But let's cut to the chase. The animating question behind these "organic vs. industrial ag" debates is how to feed the world. Never mind that every study worth its salt points to poverty and inequity as root causes of hunger.

We know that agroecological farming can double global food production, and that investing in ecological farming is one of the best ways to improve rural communities’ food and livelihood security in developing countries. We also know that it’s not just how we cultivate our food that matters. The drivers of global hunger have everything to do with global trade, investment and ownership rules. Rewriting these rules, reining in corporate power and restoring democratic control over our food and farming systems are three of the most important ways we can fight hunger. Several of my colleagues have written an excellent piece addressing these points, carried yesterday by Huffington Post.
While any farmer will tell you that getting good yields is always desirable, a narrow fixation on yield measurements tends to blind policymakers to the bigger picture. Seufert et al. get this. They write:

Yields are only part of a range of economic, social and environmental factors that should be considered when gauging the benefits of different farming systems.

So Scientific American’s headline to its coverage of the Nature piece, “Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World?” was a disappointing mischaracterization of a paper that led to no such conclusion.

In fact, Seufert et al. make an excellent case for increasing funding for organic farming research, to better understand how these systems already work so well and to identify "improvements in management techniques" that "may be able to close the gap between organic and conventional yields." What always amazes me is how close organic systems are to conventional in yield, in the absence of meaningful federal research, development and extension support for organic. (Philpott reports that less than 1% of USDA research funds go towards organic systems, with the other 99% going towards industrialized agriculture—a tiny improvement on the 0.1% of federal research monies designated for organic previously documented by the Organic Farming Research Foundation.) 

Real-world relevance

I asked University of Michigan Professor Ivette Perfecto (a co-author on the seminal 2007 Badgley et al. paper examining organic farming's contributions to the global food supply) what she thought of the piece in Nature. Her reply:

Although it is useful for understanding what are the factors that may limit productivity of organic and conventional systems, the restricted selection of the studies limits its applicability to the real world.  There are very few studies from developing countries and none that compares organic agriculture with the conventional systems practiced by small-scale farmers.

What our study demonstrated was the potential of organic agriculture in developing countries for achieving yields similar to the so-called "best conventional practices" but without the negative environmental impacts of conventional agriculture.

Having recognized that conventional agriculture is simply not an option for the 21^st century, loaded as it is with intolerable costs to our children’s health, our soil, water, biodiversity and even ecosystem function — shouldn't we be focusing instead on what investments are needed to bring organic systems to scale?

Connecting The Dots On Climate Change

Too Hot Not To Notice?

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.  Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011.  As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it.  There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day.  If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

Welcome To The 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into The Arena

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from TomDispatch

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital 

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1%, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things -- including reality TV, of course.  The US Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.

Hope And Climate Change

"Celebrated every April 22 for the past forty-two years, Earth Day is showing its (middle) age. Instead of rallying public pressure for far-reaching reforms, Earth Day is becoming, at least in the United States, a bland, tired ritual that polluters and politicians have learned to ignore or co-opt. . . . Frustrated by such cynicism, some environmentalists have called for abolishing Earth Day. But that would be throwing the baby out with the polluted bathwater. Instead, why not recall the real history of Earth Day and revive its original—and much more demanding—vision?"-- Mark Hertsgaard, "Save Earth Day," The Nation

 Mark Hertsgaard has covered politics, the media and the environment for 20 years for leading publications around the world.   He is The Nation's environment correspondent and the author of six books, including most recently, “HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth."  Hertsgaard is one of the leading voices on climate change and environmental justice, and he needs to be heard and his advice needs to be heeded.

Wen Stephenson at The Roost, a blog for The Thoreau Farm, interviewed Hertsgaard at length about the politics of hope, how parents can get active in the climate fight and why giving up is not an option.  (The interview is worth reading in its entirety, as are those Stephenson does with David Roberts, Bill McKibben, and others.) 

Hertsgaard talks about parents as "probably the single most under-organized constituency on climate change."  He and some colleagues are working on “Climate Parents,” to give a voice to parents who understand that climate is frightening but don't know what to do about it and so they practice "soft denial"

It’s a different kind of denial than the nonsensical, economically or ideologically based denial that we’re so familiar with. Soft denial is when people know perfectly well what’s going on — and are scared about what it means, both for them and especially for their children or grandchildren — and yet they continue to carry on with their lives as if it’s not this five-alarm fire that is about to burn down their kids’ house.

A National Day of Action will be coming soon:

The news hook is the new national science education standards for K-12 that are being promoted this year by the National Research Council, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, and the pushback from the Heartland Institute types, who want their nonscientific curricula put forward. And we are going to try to get parents to support the national science standards, as a first step to get them moving on this issue.

Hertsgaard contends that the reality that we are already locked into a significant amount of climate change, does not mean we shouldn't be looking for ways to slow it down, particularly on the food side of the climate dilemma:

We have an enormous opportunity to extract carbon, and store it in plants, and especially the soil. That is one of the few, few tricks we still have up our sleeves, with things like bio char and ecological agriculture. And the irony is, there’s all this talk about carbon capture and sequestration in the coal and energy field, billions of dollars being promised or even invested in it, and we don’t know whether it will work. Compare that to the fact that in agriculture, we know perfectly well that it will work: it’s called photosynthesis. And we know it works, but we have to figure out ways to bring it to scale.

Clearly, this is not enough, and even under an optimistic scenario, there does not appear to be any way to avoid "at least three feet of sea-level rise."

But how soon that comes is going to be very, very important. If that doesn’t come for a hundred years, that’s something we can prepare for. If it comes in fifty years, which is a kind of, not worst-case but very plausible scenario, that’s a lot harder. 

While Hertsgaard understands the despair of those who believe it is too late to do anything, he fervently believes in the "politics of hope," which he learned from Vaclav Havel:  "Hope is not some silly, light-hearted feeling that you maintain just to keep going.  Hope is an active verb."

Hertsgaard has long understood that environmentalists need to "stop being a special-interest group and to start connecting with other people, and realize that their struggle is other peoples’ struggle."

I’ve said that environmentalists needed a jobs program, or I would go even further and say an antipoverty program. Because that’s the main thing I’ve learned from traveling around the world — most people want to save the environment. They understand, at an intuitive human level, that we can’t survive without the world around us. But because of the way that the world economy is structured, and other reasons, they’re faced with the more immediate task of putting food on the table that night for their kids.So if environmentalists wanted to make progress, they needed to have a jobs and antipoverty message, that could attract more supporters, because the people who are opposed to progress are the big corporations who make their money from the way things are.  

This is a lesson that environmentalists are beginning to learn as reflected in the recent victories of the Beyond Coal campaign and over the Keystone XL Pipeline.

In Hertsgaard's piece for The Nation, he  reminds us of real history of Earth Day -- that after 20 million people took to the streets, President Nixon, hardly a tree-hugger, felt politically compelled to pass what remains the most ambitious environmental legislation in the world.  And this is the key:  "America’s first and biggest environmental victories were won after mass grassroots activism persuaded an otherwise indifferent president that he had to deliver or risk losing his job."

So, let's get to work.

Paper Or Plastic? How About Neither?

Mel Brooks had a great bit as the 2013-Year-Old Man in which he declared that Liquid Prell Shampoo was the greatest invention of mankind (comparing it and its unbreakable tube favorably to the heart-lung machine which, of course, could break if it fell out of your medicine cabinet). 

In honor of Earth Day, I'm going to nominate Neato's, a reusable, machine-washable storage bag that comes in various sizes and easily replaces plastic bags and baggies.  We use them for sandwiches, snacks, veggies in the fridge, cosmetics on the plane, art supplies for the kids.  To paraphrase Brooks, I love this product.  (Disclaimer:  the creator of Neato's, Rachel Ostroy, is a dear friend).

Neat-os are made of FDA certified food-safe materials.  All materials have been certified as bisphenol-A (BPA) free, phthalate free, PVC free, lead free and non-toxic.  The fabric is a cotton canvas that was designed for chefs and is coated in food safe plastic, that can withstand high temperatures and is non-abrasive, making it easy to clean lots of different ways.

Reusing this durable product instead of disposable plastic bags is such an easy way to go a little greener.  One bag can replace hundreds of plastic baggies, not only from being thrown away, but from being produced.  Neat-os are also made in the USA eliminating the CO2 emitted by shipping baggies across the seas. And from your purchases they give to 1% for the Planet.  (Click here to check them out.)

Rachel reluctantly applied for the Sustainable Business Council of Los Angeles Achievement Award, and ended up being one of twenty-one finalists.  Although she didn't win, here is part of what she would have said in her acceptance speech:

This award is cool, not because I won, but because it exists. We are all working towards the same cause and the achievement is the collective effort and the impact of the collective effort. We have to work on all fronts, not only to switch from our disposable habit, but to change our building design, create new energy sources, change our farming practices, change our eating habits, change our dependency on oil, the list goes on and on. But it’s not the parts, but the whole that make this fight attainable.

Indeed.  

2,4-D Corn: Another Bad Creation

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Spring has sprung, and farmers across the country are preparing for planting season. One of their biggest headaches will be dealing with the millions of acres of cropland that have been infested with superweeds and new generations of superbugs.

These superpests have evolved as the direct — and inevitable — consequence of Monsanto’s aggressive promotion of its genetically engineered “RoundUp-Ready” and insecticidal seed packages over the past 15 years.

I’d like to be able to say that help is on the horizon, and that USDA is preparing to launch a full-scale effort to enable farmers to transition off the failing pesticide-GE treadmill once and for all — onto cleaner, greener methods of farming more suited to the 21^st century. But alas, the reverse is true.

At this moment, USDA is on the verge of approving Dow Chemical's new 2,4-D resistant corn, the first in a pipeline of “next generation” herbicide-tolerant crops that the Big 6 pesticide/biotech companies — including Dow, Monsanto and BASF — are planning to bring to market over the next couple of years. This is industry’s response: more of the same. Except that the next generation is even worse: crops designed to be used with higher volumes of older and deadlier weedkillers.

Weed scientists are calling this chemical arms race a losing battle with evolution. And farmers too are up in arms; already 2,000 outraged farmers and food companies have joined the burgeoning new Save Our Crops Coalition to protest these unwanted products. 

Growth engine of the pesticide industry

Simply put, 2,4-D resistant corn is a bad idea. It will drive a massive increase in pesticide use, placing the burden of increased costs and health risks on farmers and local communities. The big winners will be the pesticide/biotech companies. They stand to benefit from the sustained increase in herbicide sales that will coincide with the widespread adoption of these new herbicide-tolerant GE crops.

Imagine if we could have stopped Roundup Ready in its tracks 15 years ago. American agriculture now stands at another, equally important crossroads. Do we speed up the GE-powered pesticide treadmill, or do we transition off of it?

Take Action » We have just one more week to tell USDA that we want off the GE-pesticide treadmill. The dangerous and antiquated herbicide 2,4-D shouldn’t be on the market, and we certainly should not be giving Dow license to profit from driving up its use by introducing 2,4-D resistant corn.

This was originally posted on Rodale Voices

Climate Change Disappears From Keystone XL Pipeline Debate

Mining and using tar sands oil creates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. But that's rarely mentioned anymore. 




By Lisa Song, originally published at InsideClimate News

When President Obama traveled to Cushing, Okla. last week to declare his support for building the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, he stressed that the pipeline and other oil infrastructure projects would be done "in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people."

But missing from the speech—and from most recent discussions of the controversial project—was any mention of climate change or the greenhouse gas emissions associated with mining Canadian tar sands.
Climate change was once front and center in the pipeline debate, with federal agencies as well as environmentalists weighing in with their concerns.

In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency noted in its analysis of the State Department's draft environmental review of the Keystone XL that a comprehensive evaluation would have to consider the tar sands industry's greenhouse gas emissions, which the EPA calculated on a well-to-tank basis to be 82 percent greater than conventional crude oil.

"Alongside the national security benefits of importing crude oil from a stable trading partner, we believe the national security implications of expanding the nation's long-term commitment to a relatively high carbon source of oil should also be considered," the EPA wrote.

A year later, the EPA wrote in comments on the State Department's second draft that it was "concerned about levels of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with the proposed project, and whether appropriate mitigation measures to reduce these emissions are being considered."

The EPA asked the State Department "to identify practicable mitigation measures" for the "entire suite" of greenhouse gases associated with operation of the Keystone XL.

In a statement issued in November, the State Department said that any decision on whether the pipeline is in the national interest should consider "all of the relevant issues," such as "environmental concerns (including climate change), energy security, economic impacts, and foreign policy."

Over the past year, the pipeline's opponents have focused their campaign on protecting the fragile Nebraska Sandhills, and climate change has taken a back seat in the debate. But environmentalists have long warned that the pipeline would lock in the United States to a particularly dirty form of oil that would further exacerbate global warming.

One of the most-quoted lines has come from climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who calls the tar sands a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet."
Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, said the Keystone protest has always been driven by "the fear that the tar sands will help destabilize the climate."

"Our colleagues in Nebraska did a great job of highlighting their concerns about the Ogallala aquifer and the Sandhills, but for those of us in the other 49 states, global warming was the single biggest reason for this fight," McKibben told InsideClimate News in an email on Friday. "Which is why it would have been nice for the president to say something about it [in Cushing], considering he was standing in the state that just went through the warmest summer any American state has ever recorded."

President Obama gave his speech against a backdrop of steel pipes at the Stillwater Pipe Yard, which is owned by TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build the pipeline. The president's stop in Cushing was part of a nationwide tour to publicize his administration's "all of the above" energy strategy.

Republished with permission of InsideClimate News, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers energy and climate change—plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped.

Monsanto's Endless Pipeline Of Bad Ideas

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

As if the disaster of RoundUp resistant superweeds sweeping our farmland weren’t enough, Monsanto is now preparing to launch an even greater disaster: a new soybean engineered to be resistant to the older, more toxic weedkiller, dicamba. The seed — which Monsanto plans to market in 2014 if approved — will also come stacked with the company’s RoundUp Ready gene, and is designed to be used with Monsanto’s proprietary herbicide “premix” of dicamba and glyphosate.

More dicamba-tolerant crops (corn, cotton, canola) are all waiting in the wings. If this new generation of GE crops is approved, then dicamba use will surge, just as it did with RoundUp. And we all know how well that didn't work out. To the giant pesticide company, this chemical arms race is all part of the plan.

If you’re thinking that pouring more chemicals onto already devastated farmland sounds a bit like pouring gasoline on a fire, I’d have to agree with you. So do some hefty farm businesses, as it turns out.

Farm business rejects Monsanto’s answer

 The Big 6 pesticide companies' pipeline of new herbicide-tolerant crops poses a serious risk to farmers’ livelihood and rural economies. Weedkillers like dicamba and 2,4-D drift far and can easily destroy other farmers’ crops of tomatoes, grapes, beans, cotton, non-GE soy — just about any broadleaf plant. That’s why farmers and some large ag companies are getting worried. As Steve Smith, Director of Agriculture for Red Gold, the largest canned tomato processor in the United States, testified before Congress in 2010:

I am convinced that in all of my years serving the agriculture industry, the widespread use of dicamba herbicide [poses] the single most serious threat to the future of the specialty crop industry in the Midwest.

Smith warns of the damaging surge in dicamba use that would accompany introduction of dicamba-tolerant GE crops — both over more acreage and throughout the season. He predicts widespread crop damage, harm to non-target plants that would result from spray and volatilization drift, and financial loss — not only to growers but also to processing companies like his that would suffer major supply disruption, even conflicts erupting between neighbors eroding the social fabric of rural community life. His testimony concluded:

The introduction of dicamba tolerant soybeans is a classic case of short-sighted enthusiasm over a new technology, blinding us to the reality that is sure to come. Increased dicamba usage, made possible through the introduction of dicamba tolerant soybeans, is poor public policy and should not be allowed.

We can choose to get off the pesticide treadmill

We’ve just witnessed an incredible victory with the removal of the infamous cancer-causing pesticide methyl iodide from the entire U.S. marketplace. So we know that we can win. And we know that the threat that pesticides pose to farm sustainability, our water and air quality, our communities’ and our children’s health can be blocked. But we have to be dedicated and smart.

Right now, companies like Monsanto, BASF and Dow are planning to drive up their pesticide sales by introducing a new generation of herbicide-tolerant crops, designed to be used with their proprietary weedkillers. The test case before us —the first of this new generation up for review and currently awaiting USDA approval — is Dow’s 2,4-D GE corn (“a very bad idea” as my colleague Margaret Reeves explains). The most effective thing we can do to protect farmers and consumers from dicamba-tolerant crops is to shut down the pipeline of herbicide-tolerant crops — beginning with 2,4-D-resistant corn.

Take Action » Tell USDA that we want off the GE-pesticide treadmill! This dangerous and antiquated herbicide shouldn’t be on the market, and we certainly should not be giving Dow license to profit from driving up use. Sign our petition to USDA.

China Puts The Breaks On GE Rice

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

A raging public controversy over genetically engineered (GE) rice in China captured media attention in recent months, and has culminated in a surprising win. A few weeks ago, the country’s State Council released a new Draft Food Law¹ that, if passed, would protect the genetic resources of China’s food crops and restrict the application of GE technology in its main food crops.

This is significant progress in the effort by farmers and campaigners in China and indeed across Asia to protect the genetic integrity, diversity and heritage of their rice.

The Pesticide Eco-Alternatives Centre (PEAC), a PAN partner based in Kunming, welcomed the draft law, and lauded the democratic process symbolized by China opening a public comment period through the end of March. But PEAC would like to see the law go further. In a statement to China’s State Council, PEAC argued that the law should protect biodiversity — not just germplasm — in food crops; disallow transgenic technology in all — not just “main” — food crops; and better reflect farmers and rural communities' priorities and concerns.

PEAC's Deputy Director Sun Jing expressed her hope that the proposed Draft Food Law would ultimately prevent rice from being genetically engineered. “Rice is life, it represents the livelihood of millions of farmers, feeds billions of people, and it is the basis of our food security,” she said. PEAC has been working for years with rural communities to advance ecological agriculture free of synthetic chemicals and GMOs.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace has produced a fascinating narrative on its website of its own seven-year campaign in China to block GE rice. The dramatic story is filled with exposés of corporate scientists influencing policy, government suppression of information, revelations of illegal GE contamination of rice noodles and baby food, consumer outrage, celebrity support (Mao Zedong’s daughter), a “media frenzy” and finally, in September 2011 a victory: the Ministry of Agriculture’s decision to suspend the commercialization of GE rice for the next 5-10 years. Greenpeace China has embraced the new Draft Food Law as a “world-first initiative.” 

Wanted: Scientific Integrity On GMOs

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

As reported in this week's UK Guardian, Nina Federoff spoke about threats to science at a meeting of 8,000 professional scientists. The former Bush Administration official and GMO proponent described her "profound depression" at how difficult it is to “get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.” I too have agonized over our inability to talk seriously about climate change.

However — and this is no small matter — by conflating fringe climate-deniers with established scientists raising valid concerns about the effects of GMOs, Federoff undermines the scientific integrity that she purports to uphold. The hypocrisy is astonishing.

The reason we cannot get a reality-based conversation started on GMOs is because we have precious little independent science on their effectiveness or safety. We know so little about GMOs' safety or efficacy because global ag biotech firms like Monsanto, Dow and DuPont actively suppress science under the heading of protecting “confidential business information.” Companies routinely deny scientists’ research requests and suppress publication of research by threatening legal action, a practice one scientist describes as “chilling.”

In February 2009, 26 corn-pest scientists anonymously submitted a statement to U.S. EPA decrying industry’s prohibitive restrictions on independent research, especially as concerns ag biotech. They submitted the following statement anonymously for fear of being blacklisted:

Technology/stewardship agreements required for the purchase of genetically modified seed explicitly prohibit research. These agreements inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good unless the research is approved by industry. As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology, its performance, its management implications, IRM, and its interactions with insect biology. Consequently, data flowing to an EPA Scientific Advisory Panel from the public sector is unduly limited.

The same year, the editors of Scientific American warned of the debilitating effects of the ag biotech industry’s attacks on science:

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

When the world’s top scientists have been allowed to examine freely the available evidence, unfettered by corporate restrictions, the results stand in startling contrast to industry claims. Four years ago, the agricultural equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was completed, the World Bank and UN-led International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). I participated as a lead author in that rigorous 4-year process, in which over 400 scientist and development experts from more than 80 countries conducted the most comprehensive assessment of international agricultural technology to date. The IAASTD’s findings were clear:

1. Genetically engineered crops have failed to deliver on industry promises of increased yields, nutritional value, salt or drought-tolerance.
   
2. The unprecedented pace of corporate concentration in the pesticide and seed industry has enabled the ag biotech industry to exert undue influence over public policy and research institutions, funneling public resources towards products that have benefited their manufacturers without generating benefits for the world’s poor.
   
3. The developing world’s best hopes for feeding itself, especially under conditions of climate change, lie not in GMOs, but rather in approaches such as agroecology—the integration of cutting-edge agroecological sciences with farmer innovation and locally appropriate, productive and profitable, ecological farming practices. The ability of agroecology to double food production within 10 years was recently re-affirmed by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
   

So yes, let’s beat back the “anti-science lobby” and restore scientific integrity to public policy and independence and transparency to our research institutions. The future of our planet depends on it.

Republican Gasbags

Rising gasoline prices are being viewed with glee by Republicans who see it as a vehicle to undermine the President's economic agenda, energy policies and political prospects.

Laura Clawson lays out the Republican perspective:   

First off, prices should be rock bottom at all times, because it is the God-given right of Americans to use the maximum possible quantity of fossil fuels, the retail cost of which should therefore not reflect their true costs. Second, the way to keep prices at rock bottom is through the aforementioned "drill, baby, drill" strategy. Third, President Obama is a wild-eyed environmentalist-socialist who is coming between Americans and their God-given right to more oil, and therefore everything is his fault.

Accordingly, Republicans plan to use the fear of rising gas and oil prices to support for their push for increased domestic production and to challenge Obama's blocking of construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

 Clawson points out that Republicans are conveniently ignoring that we have been "drilling, baby, drilling," with domestic crude production on the rise since 2009.  Indeed, "the number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years."

And, as Robert Reich helpfully explains, rising gas prices have nothing to do with offshore drilling or the Keystone XL.  There are three causes of the increase.  First, "on the supply side, is Iran’s decision to cut oil exports to Britain and France in retaliation for sanctions put in place by the EU and United States." Second, "on the demand side, is rising hopes for a global economic recovery – which would mean increased oil consumption."

But, as Reich explains, neither of these would matter much if it weren't for the third cause:  "overwhelming bets of hedge funds and other money managers that oil prices will rise on the basis of the first two reasons."  

How come Republicans aren't railing against speculators.  Reich suggests it might have something to do with the fact that "hedge funds and money managers are bankrolling the GOP as never before."  

Could be.

Unity Matters: Senate Flooded With Petitions Opposing Keystone XL

As Senate Republicans tried to revive the Keystone XL pipeline by adding it to the transportation bill, a petition drive was launched on Monday by every major environmental group, with the expressed goal of sending a half-million messages to the Senate within 24 hours which stated:  " Don't allow 'game over' for the climate.  Block any efforts to revive the dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline."

The 500,000th signature opposing the pipeline was obtained within 7 hours, and a total of 800,000 flooded the Senate by day's end.  As 350.org founder Bill McKibben said:

The last 24 hours were the most concentrated blitz of environmental organizing since the start of the digital age. Over 800,000 Americans made it clear that Keystone XL is the environmental litmus test for Senators and every other politician in the country. It's the one issue where people have come out in large numbers to put their bodies on the line, and online too: the largest civil disobedience action on any issue in 30 years, and now the most concentrated burst of environmental advocacy perhaps since the battles over flooding the Grand Canyon back in the glory days.

In an article for Huffington Post, McKibben noted that this was the third event to raise the Keystone XL controversy to the central environmental issue in the country.  The first was last August, "when the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years saw 1,253 people arrested outside the White House."  The second action took place in November, with "over 12,000 surrounded the president's house five deep, leading the president to slow down the permitting process."  And now this.

McKibben relates the essential lesson from this latest experience:

Unity matters -- how wonderful to see the leaders of every environmental group on the same page, and progressive communities like MoveOn.org Political Action and CREDO Mobile joining in to help. And more important, a big swath of the American people remain deeply committed to a world that works. Right now Keystone is the battle that defines that hope -- we'll do our best to see that our "leaders" don't quash it.