Saturday, June 28, 2008

Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist

· Testimony to US Congress will also criticise lobbyists
· 'Revolutionary' policies needed to tackle crisis

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

The current concentration is 385 parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement.

He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."

His sharpest words
are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."

A group seeking to increase pressure on international leaders is launching a campaign today called 350.org. It is taking out full-page adverts in papers such as the New York Times and the Swedish Falukuriren calling for the target level of CO2 to be lowered to 350ppm. The advert has been backed by 150 signatories, including Hansen.

Wildfires' smoke, ash chokes Northern Californians

SACRAMENTO, California (AP) -- Hundreds of lightning-sparked wildfires have turned the air of Northern California into an unhealthy stew of smoke and ash, forcing the cancellation of athletic events and other outdoor activities.

A satellite image taken Thursday shows most of Northern California obscured by wildfire smoke and ash.

A satellite image taken Thursday shows most of Northern California obscured by wildfire smoke and ash.

Health advisories urging residents to stay indoors to limit exposure to the smokey air were issued Saturday from Bakersfield north to Redding, a distance of nearly 450 miles.

Air pollution readings in the region are two to 10 times the federal standard for clean air, Dimitri Stanich, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, said Saturday.

Some areas are experiencing the worst air quality on record, with the smoke hanging down to the ground like a fog.

Air quality agencies are especially concerned about high readings of small-particle pollution. The tiniest particles can penetrate past the body's immune defenses, traveling deep into the lungs and the bloodstream.

"When you have it on the scale we are seeing now, it is very dangerous to the general public health," Stanich said. "This is a very serious problem."

Changing weather brought smoke-clearing breezes and brief relief to some areas Saturday, but it could also bring lightning storms similar to the ones that ignited fires across Northern California a week ago.

Thunderstorms could strike anywhere in the northern Sierra Nevada or the northern Central Valley on Saturday night, said National Weather Service forecaster Johnnie Powell in Sacramento.

The thunderstorms could also bring a small amount of much-needed rain, he said. The front was expected to pass by Sunday, setting up a second week of abysmal air quality.

The renewed threat of dry lightning and stiffer breezes that could stir the wildfires led fire officials to declare a "red-flag warning" -- meaning the most extreme fire danger -- for Northern California until 5 a.m. Monday.

On Saturday, President Bush issued an emergency declaration for California and ordered federal agencies to assist in firefighting efforts in many areas. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made the request Friday.

More than 15,000 firefighters, 1,000 fire engines and more than 80 helicopters and aircraft were fighting more than 1,000 fires Saturday, said Ruben Grijalva, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

"The summer has just begun, and fire conditions will only get tougher," Grijalva warned in a weekly radio address on behalf of the governor.

Areas hardest hit include Butte County, where 31 fires have burned 19 square miles and threatened 1,200 homes; Mendocino County, where 121 fires have burned 45 square miles and threatened 900 homes; and Shasta and Trinity counties, where about 160 fires have burned 58 square miles and threatened 230 homes.

South of the tourist town of Big Sur in Los Padres National Forest, a wildfire that started three weeks ago had burned 92 square miles and destroyed 16 structures including two homes. It was 80 percent contained Saturday. Video Watch a wildfire burn through Los Padres National Forest »

Stanich, of the Air Resources Board, advised people to stay inside and keep activity to a minimum. Children, the elderly and people with heart and lung problems are particularly vulnerable, but pollution levels are high enough to affect healthy adults.

Health officials have reported an increase in people complaining of eye and throat irritation and coughing. The poor air quality can also trigger asthma attacks and bronchitis.

They said surgical masks, wet cloths and bandanas are not enough to filter the smoke. Only N95- and P100-rated masks filter out the smallest and most dangerous particles.

Some veterinary offices said pet owners were bringing in dogs and cats with symptoms ranging from weepy eyes and irritated skin to difficulty breathing or unusual lethargy. Vets were advising that pets remain inside until the smoke clears.

Smoky air canceled this weekend's 100-mile Western States Endurance Run for the first time in its 31-year history. The decision disappointed 370 runners who had traveled from as far away as Africa for the annual race from Squaw Valley at Lake Tahoe to Auburn in the Sierra foothills.

In Sonoma County, the limited visibility kept the Energizer Bunny and dozens of other colorful hot air balloons from lifting off during Saturday's Hot Air Balloon Classic in Windsor.

Cities also closed public pools, canceled softball games and called off July Fourth fireworks displays. Schwarzenegger urged residents not to buy fireworks this year and said local governments should consider an outright ban, though he would not impose one statewide.

In central New Mexico, a blaze caused by lightning that forced the evacuation of 400 people was 35 percent contained. Thunderstorms were forecast, and firefighters welcomed the possibility of rain but feared that winds could change the fire's direction.

Living on the Ice Shelf

Humanity's Meltdown
By Mike Davis

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.

The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.

As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.

To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?

The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.

The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different "storylines" about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel's major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC's confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the "business as usual" variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.

The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.

Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.

Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume.

The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.

Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of "energy independence") is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance "humankind's ability to accelerate global warming" and slow the urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles."

3. Fin-du-Monde Boom

What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.

As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise "clean coal," despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as "being decades away from commercial viability."

Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration's "marquee demonstration project," FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of the public-private "partnership"; similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world's largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken.

On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak -- that peak oil moment -- whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.

An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the moment, approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will "reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020." As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, "more and more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]."

Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC's surplus was recycled through military purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to become the "subprime" loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using "sovereign wealth funds" to achieve a more active ownership in foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue to transform Arabia's sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters.

Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world.

This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.

4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?

Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use.

In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees -- each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism.

And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?

Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seems highly likely.

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.

Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously throttle growth.

5. The North's Ecological Debt

The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean?

To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?

Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of industrialization.

In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.

The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World Bank's "structural adjustment" agreements.

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one -- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

[Note for TomDispatch readers: Those of you who are environmentally minded and interested in pursuing such matters further might consider spending some time at the superb website of Grist Magazine and visiting, as well, an interesting and provocative new online magazine/website, Environment 360. Tom]

Monday, June 23, 2008

Fighting fires on multiple fronts

Hundreds evaculate as firefighters save threatened homes near Fairfield

More than 100 fires were burning today throughout Northern California, straining firefighting resources and fouling the air throughout the Bay Area.

There are about 90 fires in Mendocino County alone, caused by lightning strikes, that have overwhelmed Cal Fire’s ability to fight them. Sixty of the fires are burning without Cal Fire response.

The major North Bay fires are:

In Napa County: Wild Fire, northeast Napa and northwest of Fairfield, 3,750 acres, 40 percent contained, started at 4 p.m. Saturday, being fought by 438 firefighters with 41 engines. Several residential areas under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders.

In Lake County: Walker Fire, near Indian Valley Reservoir, 2,000 acres, not contained, being fought by 54 firefighters with 12 engines, voluntary evacuations at Double Eagle Ranch and Bear Valley Ranchland.

In Mendocino County: Ninety fires were burning 7,625 acres. The largest are the Orr Fire at Orr Springs Resort, 200 acres, no containment; Navarro Fire, 1,400 acres, 5 percent contained; Cherry fire, 50 acres, 50 percent contained; Foster Fire, 50 acres, 50 percent contained; Table Mountain Fire, 1,000 acres, 5 percent contained; Mallo Pass Fire, 800 acres; and Juan Creek fires, 100 acres.

On Sunday, hundreds of people fled their homes as the wildfire that started in a sparsely populated area of Napa County roared across dry grasslands to within a few hundred yards of a subdivision west of Fairfield.

About 250 homes were threatened in the fire that was 35 percent contained by Monday morning, Cal Fire officials said.

Firefighters caught a break when a marine layer raised the moisture level in the air overnight.

Sunday, the fire appeared to have narrowly missed the high-end development known as Green Valley, about 10 miles outside of Fairfield.

As firefighters from across Sonoma County were dispatched to help, another fire began in Clearlake Oaks, north of Highway 20 near Walker Ridge Road.

Early Sunday, the fire in Napa County destroyed one home, a few barns and caused one minor injury when it moved into a remote area of Solano County, according to Cal Fire.

As it advanced to a more populated part of the county, residents feared the worst.

"It's kind of tense right now," said Mary Kolbert, 74, watching as the fire burned to within 1,000 feet of her home in the northernmost part of Green Valley at 5 p.m.

Flames 7 feet high moved through the brush, crackling louder than a campfire. A helicopter flew overhead, and dropped hundreds of gallons of water on the hillside.

Close to 100 firefighters formed a line where undeveloped ranchland met the subdivision. Another 250 firefighters were placed in other strategic areas around the blaze.

Helicopters, prop planes and a converted DC-10 jetliner peppered the line with water and flame retardant.

The strategy appeared to have worked. The fire's southerly progression kicked east late Sunday.

Kolbert's home and more than 200 others in the area appeared safe, but firefighters planned to spend the night in the area in case strong winds kicked up the flames.

Earlier, the fire skirted expensive ranch homes in the hills between Napa and Fairfield.

"The dramatic thing was watching the fire come down the road toward our home," said Marilyn Roscoe, who lives near the Napa-Solano county line, where the fire was sparked by lightning.

She and her husband sat in their living room as "a wall of flames" roared past their ridgetop home at 11 p.m. Saturday.

Firefighters blasted the fire with hoses, and by 1 a.m. it had moved on, leaving a wide swath of blackened earth that continued to smolder Sunday. The Roscoes lost two barns and an old, unoccupied house on their property.

Firefighters from Penn-grove's Rancho Adobe fire district were stationed in the area, and it was a long night for them.

"There hasn't been much sleep," said Capt. Bill Adams.

Adams and his three-man crew were posted along Twin Sisters Road on the west side of Suisun Valley, where they managed to keep flames away from a house.

Up the street a mile, fire burned through the base of a power pole. A wooden stump dangled from the lines, and as strong winds blew, the end of the pole smoldered orange like an enormous, suspended cigar.

Adams wonders what the rest of the fire season holds, noting he hasn't seen fires of this caliber start so early in the year.

"It's crazy. This is stuff you wouldn't expect to see until September or October," said the 20-year veteran. "There are going to be a lot of tired people by the end of this season."

As airplanes dropped massive amounts of flame retardant near Green Valley, residents fled.

"I loaded up the car with everything that was valuable," said Ed Levin. "It's nerve-wracking. You never know what is going to happen."

Up the street, Chris Dowling and his wife, Cecilia, loaded trailers with old cars and antique furniture.

"Everything we're taking, I'm hoping we can bring back," said Cecilia Dowling.

At the Kolbert home, tensions ran high as the family stood by. The flames moved closer. Three Fairfield firefighters stood by with hoses, their fire engines parked in the driveway.

"It's wait and see," said Capt. Robert Bartoli.

At 6 p.m., it seemed inevitable the flames would reach the home. The family paced around their deck, ready to retreat, if necessary.

Helicopters and planes passed overhead, dumping load after load of retardant.

"We're the biggest fans of these helicopters," Mary Kolbert said. "They're doing a good job too."

Within an hour, the fire that once seemed inevitable turned east toward ranch land.

"I think we got it under control here," Bartoli said. "They were lucky."

Natural disasters contribute to rise in population displacement

From: United Nations Environment Programme

/lifestyle/article/37473

There are now more than 11 million refugees worldwide, the United Nations refugee agency has warned as the world celebrates World Refugee Day.

A new report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees(UNHCR)says conflicts, climate change and rising food prices are some of the factors leading to the rise in global displacement to 11.4 million refugees worldwide-up from 9.9 million last year.

World Refugee Day will be marked by a whole range of events taking place around the globe today, with a focus on the fundamental need for protection. Meanwhile UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres is on mission in Kenya, where he visited a refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border and a camp for internally displaced Kenyans in the town of Naivasha.

The International Federation of Red Cross says climate change disasters are currently a bigger cause of population displacement than war and persecution.

The global impact of the environment on human livelihoods is creating a new kind of casualty-the environmental refugee. Rising sea levels, increasing desertification, weather-induced flooding, and more frequent natural disasters have, and will increasingly become a major cause of population displacement in several parts of the world.

According to a report published by the United Nations University, there are now about 19.2 million people officially recognized as "persons of concern"-that is, people likely to be displaced because of environmental disasters. This figure is predicted to grow to about 50 million by the end of the year 2010.

These forecasts are not inevitable and will hinge on whether the international community can pull together and deliver a decisive and meaningful agreement on climate change at the UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, alongside more intelligent management of the planet's nature-based assets.

Obama Camp Closely Linked With Ethanol



By LARRY ROHTER, NY Times

When VeraSun Energy inaugurated a new ethanol processing plant last
summer in Charles City, Iowa, some of that industry's most prominent
boosters showed up. Leaders of the National Corn Growers Association
and the Renewable Fuels Association, for instance, came to help cut
the ribbon — and so did Senator Barack Obama.

Then running far behind Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in name
recognition and in the polls, Mr. Obama was in the midst of a campaign
swing through the state where he would eventually register his first
caucus victory. And as befits a senator from Illinois, the country's
second largest corn-producing state, he delivered a ringing
endorsement of ethanol as an alternative fuel.

Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the
influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has
powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes
to domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also
has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry
at a time when energy policy is a point of sharp contrast between the
parties and their presidential candidates.

In the heart of the Corn Belt that August day, Mr. Obama argued that
embracing ethanol "ultimately helps our national security, because
right now we're sending billions of dollars to some of the most
hostile nations on earth." America's oil dependence, he added, "makes
it more difficult for us to shape a foreign policy that is intelligent
and is creating security for the long term."

Nowadays, when Mr. Obama travels in farm country, he is sometimes
accompanied by his friend Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority
leader from South Dakota. Mr. Daschle now serves on the boards of
three ethanol companies and works at a Washington law firm where,
according to his online job description, "he spends a substantial
amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in
renewable energy."

Mr. Obama's lead advisor on energy and environmental issues, Jason
Grumet, came to the campaign from the National Commission on Energy
Policy, a bipartisan initiative associated with Mr. Daschle and Bob
Dole, the Kansas Republican who is also a former Senate majority
leader and a big ethanol backer who had close ties to the agribusiness
giant Archer Daniels Midland.

Not long after arriving in the Senate, Mr. Obama himself briefly
provoked a controversy by flying at subsidized rates on corporate
airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midland,
which is the nation's largest ethanol producer and is based in his
home state.

Jason Furman, the Obama campaign's economic policy director, said Mr.
Obama's stance on ethanol was based on its merits. "That is what has
always motivated him on this issue, and will continue to determine his
policy going forward," Mr. Furman said.

Asked if Mr. Obama brought any predisposition or bias to the ethanol
debate because he represents a corn-growing state that stands to
benefit from a boom, Mr. Furman said, "He wants to represent the
United States of America, and his policies are based on what's best
for the country."

Mr. Daschle, a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, said in a
telephone interview on Friday that his role advising the Obama
campaign on energy matters was limited. He said he was not a lobbyist
for ethanol companies, but did speak publicly about renewable energy
options and worked "with a number of associations and groups to
orchestrate and coordinate their activities," including the Governors'
Ethanol Coalition.

Of Mr. Obama, Mr. Daschle said, "He has a terrific policy staff and
relies primarily on those key people to advise him on key issues,
whether energy or climate change or other things."

Ethanol is one area in which Mr. Obama strongly disagrees with his
Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. While both
presidential candidates emphasize the need for the United States to
achieve "energy security" while also slowing down the carbon emissions
that are believed to contribute to global warming, they offer sharply
different visions of the role that ethanol, which can be made from a
variety of organic materials, should play in those efforts.

Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual
government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free
trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the
United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which
packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper
to produce.

"We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy
policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned
in Iowa were going to destroy the market" and contribute to inflation,
Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper,
O Estado de São Paulo. "Besides, it is wrong," he added, to tax
Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, "which is much more efficient than
corn ethanol."

Mr. Obama, in contrast, favors the subsidies, some of which end up in
the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a
windfall profits tax. In the name of helping the United States build
"energy independence," he also supports the tariff, which some
economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade
Organization's rules but which his advisers say is not.

Many economists, consumer advocates, environmental experts and tax
groups have been critical of corn ethanol programs as a boondoggle
that benefits agribusiness conglomerates more than small farmers.
Those complaints have intensified recently as corn prices have risen
sharply in tandem with oil prices and corn normally used for food
stock has been diverted to ethanol production.

"If you want to take some of the pressure off this market, the obvious
thing to do is lower that tariff and let some Brazilian ethanol come
in," said C. Ford Runge, an economist specializing in commodities and
trade policy at the Center for International Food and Agricultural
Policy at the University of Minnesota. "But one of the fundamental
reasons biofuels policy is so out of whack with markets and reality is
that interest group politics have been so dominant in the construction
of the subsidies that support it."

Corn ethanol generates less than two units of energy for every unit of
energy used to produce it, while the energy ratio for sugar cane is
more than 8 to 1. With lower production costs and cheaper land prices
in the tropical countries where it is grown, sugar cane is a more
efficient source.

Mr. Furman said the campaign continued to examine the issue. "We want
to evaluate all our energy subsidies to make sure that taxpayers are
getting their money's worth," he said.

He added that Mr. Obama favored "a range of initiatives" that were
aimed at "diversification across countries and sources of energy,"
including cellulosic ethanol, and which, unlike Mr. McCain's
proposals, were specifically meant to "reduce overall demand through
conservation, new technology and improved efficiency."

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama has not explained his opposition to
imported sugar cane ethanol. But in remarks last year, made as
President Bush was about to sign an ethanol cooperation agreement with
his Brazilian counterpart, Mr. Obama argued that "our country's drive
toward energy independence" could suffer if Mr. Bush relaxed
restrictions, as Mr. McCain now proposes.

"It does not serve our national and economic security to replace
imported oil with Brazilian ethanol," he argued.

Mr. Obama does talk regularly about developing switchgrass, which
flourishes in the Midwest and Great Plains, as a source for ethanol.
While the energy ratio for switchgrass and other types of cellulosic
ethanol is much greater than corn, economists say that time-consuming
investments in infrastructure would be required to make it viable, and
with corn nearing $8 a bushel, farmers have little incentive to shift.

Ethanol industry executives and advocates have not made large
donations to either candidate for president, an examination of
campaign contribution records shows. But they have noted the
difference between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain.

Brian Jennings, a vice president of the American Coalition for
Ethanol, said he hoped that Mr. McCain, as a presidential candidate,
"would take a broader view of energy security and recognize the
important role that ethanol plays."

The candidates' views were tested recently in the Farm Bill approved
by Congress that extended the subsidies for corn ethanol, though
reducing them slightly, and the tariffs on imported sugar cane
ethanol. Because Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama were campaigning, neither
voted. But Mr. McCain said that as president he would veto the bill,
while Mr. Obama praised it.

Analysis Shows Drastic Climate Change Near End Of Last Ice Age

From: University of Colorado at Boulder

/ecosystems/article/37471

Information gleaned from a Greenland ice core by an international science team shows that two huge Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes prior to the close of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago were tied to fundamental shifts in atmospheric circulation.

The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years, then plunged back into icy conditions before abruptly warming again about 11,700 years ago. Startlingly, the Greenland ice core evidence showed that a massive "reorganization" of atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere coincided with each temperature spurt, with each reorganization taking just one or two years, said the study authors.

The new findings are expected to help scientists improve existing computer models for predicting future climate change as increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere drive up Earth's temperatures globally.

The team used changes in dust levels and stable water isotopes in the annual ice layers of the two-mile-long Greenland ice core, which was hauled from the massive ice sheet between 1998 to 2004, to chart past temperature and precipitation swings. Their paper was published in the June 19 issue of Science Express, the online version of Science.

The ice cores -- analyzed with powerful microscopes -- were drilled as part of the North Greenland Ice Core Project led by project leader Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Neils Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen. The study included 17 co-investigators from Europe, one from Japan and two from the United States -- Jim White and Trevor Popp from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"We have analyzed the transition from the last glacial period until our present warm interglacial period, and the climate shifts are happening suddenly, as if someone had pushed a button," said Dahl-Jenson.

According to the researchers, the first abrupt warming period beginning at 14,700 years ago lasted until about 12,900 years ago, when deep-freeze conditions returned for about 1,200 years before the onset of the second sharp warming event. The two events indicate a speed in the natural climate change process never before seen in ice cores, said White, director of CU-Boulder's Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research.

"We are beginning to tease apart the sequence of abrupt climate change," said White, whose work was funded by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs. "Since such rapid climate change would challenge even the most modern societies to successfully adapt, knowing how these massive events start and evolve is one of the most pressing climate questions we need to answer."

Both dramatic warming events were preceded by decreasing Greenland dust deposition, indicating higher tropical temperatures and significantly more rain falling on the deserts of Asia at the time, said White. The team believes the ancient tropical warming caused large, rapid atmospheric changes at the equator, the intensification of the Pacific monsoon, sea-ice loss in the north Atlantic Ocean and more atmospheric heat and moisture over Greenland and much of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.

"Here we propose a series of events beginning in the lower latitudes and leading to changes in the ocean and atmosphere that reveal for the first time the anatomy of abrupt climate change," the authors wrote. White likened the abrupt shift in the Northern Hemisphere circulation pattern to shifts in the North American jet stream as it steers storms around the continent.

"We know such events are in Earth's future, but we don't know when," said White. "One question is whether we can see the symptoms before big problems occur. Until we answer these questions, we are speeding blindly down a narrow road, hoping there are no curves ahead."

Each yearly record of ice can reveal past temperatures and precipitation levels, the content of ancient atmospheres and even evidence for the timing and magnitude of distant storms, fires and volcanic eruptions, said White. The cores from the site -- located roughly in the middle of Greenland at an elevation of about 9,850 feet -- are four-inch-diameter cylinders brought to the surface in 11.5-foot lengths, said White.

Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist

· Testimony to US Congress will also criticise lobbyists
· 'Revolutionary' policies needed to tackle crisis

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

The current concentration is 385 parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement.

He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."

His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."

A group seeking to increase pressure on international leaders is launching a campaign today called 350.org. It is taking out full-page adverts in papers such as the New York Times and the Swedish Falukuriren calling for the target level of CO2 to be lowered to 350ppm. The advert has been backed by 150 signatories, including Hansen.

Video

"Manufactured Landscapes" SEE THIS BRILLIANT MOVIE! You'll never have the same shopping experience again.