"Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence" By Christian Parenti

Interview: Christian Parenti traces the 'force-multiplier' effect of climate change   in growing civil conflict all over the global south.

Read the first chapter of "Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence" at DemocracyNow.

The Sky Really is Falling

Wild weather of late- is there a pattern here? Or rather, are we losing the pattern we once knew?
Here is Paul Loeb, in "Glued to The Weather Channel":

"Following the weather is beginning to feel like revisiting the Biblical plagues. Tornadoes rip through Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma - even Massachusetts. A million acres burn in Texas wildfires. The Army Corps of Engineers floods 135,000 acres of farmland and three million acres of bayou country to save Memphis and New Orleans. Earlier in the past year, a 2,000-mile storm dumped near-record snow from Texas to Maine, a fifth of Pakistan flooded, fires made Moscow's air nearly unbreathable, and drought devastated China's wheat crop. You'd think we'd suspect something's grievously wrong. . . But media coverage rarely connects the unfolding cataclysms with the global climate change that fuels them. . . " 

And here, Chris Hedges, "The Sky Really is Falling":

"The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry- is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools."

Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

June 16: Dahr Jamail interviewed nuclear industry expert Arnold Gundersen on the truth of Fukushima. See the whole article at Common Dreams.

Some excerpts:

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind"

"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl, new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."

According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes, known as "hot particles".
"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."
Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.

In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

"The units are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid. It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids."

In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this Monday, 95 per cent of Italians voted in favor of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly three-quarters of respondents favor a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

The New-Economy Movement

Gar Alperovitz, The Nation, 6/13/11:
"The idea that we need a “new economy”—that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if critical social and environmental goals are to be met—runs directly counter to the American creed that capitalism as we know it is the best, and only possible, option. Over the past few decades, however, a deepening sense of the profound ecological challenges facing the planet and growing despair at the inability of traditional politics to address economic failings have fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders. Most of the projects, ideas and research efforts have gained traction slowly and with little notice. But in the wake of the financial crisis, they have proliferated and earned a surprising amount of support—and not only among the usual suspects on the left. As the threat of a global climate crisis grows increasingly dire and the nation sinks deeper into an economic slump for which conventional wisdom offers no adequate remedies, more and more Americans are coming to realize that it is time to begin defining, demanding and organizing to build a new-economy movement..."
An  excellent and thorough survey of the various groups and organizations, and philosophies- in  the "New Economy" movement,  by Gar Alperovitz - read the full report at TheNation.com