Richard Zurawski

It’s no secret that as human rights to travel, live and work around the world have become strangled for one reason or another, the rights of capital have enjoyed an unprecedented and virtually unfettered right to travel, invest and exploit.

Under the banner of globalization, our corporatocracy has been able to close borders to people wishing to emigrate and immigrate and yet at the same time opened the floodgates to investment money to take advantage of third world countries with poverty issues, no environmental standards or worker rights. And in the name of cheaper consumer products we in the west have sold our industry, environment and standard of living down the proverbial river.

You can a get a cheaper coffee maker or toaster or BBQ, but chances are it is made and manufactured in China where workers have virtually no rights, the environment is an afterthought and profits for the companies investing abroad are enormous. Meanwhile smaller regional and locally based companies that have unions, pensions, adhere to stricter environmental codes and make products at higher costs, suffer the bottom line consequences. Yet it is these companies that are invested in their regions, they pay their taxes at home, they employ locals, contribute to the social infrastructure like charities, institutions and events.

It used to be that manufacturers produced most of their products for regional and local markets and by and large took their resources from the region as well. It was pretty much a closed loop and the environmental footprint was smaller, though the product more expensive.

Now with multinationals having conquered all with their ability to invade any market and flood it with cheap goods, subsidized by the exploitation of the environment and poverty stricken workers we find ourselves awash in cheap consumer items, but no environment to speak of, an economy that continues to insist that globalization and consuming is a way of life synonymous with Democracy.

We are now at a cusp, living in a world where the chickens are going to come home to roost. We have traded our limited fossil fuels for SUVs and toasters and when the dust settles we will have to find a way to do more with less. We will need to learn to manufacture what we need again at home and not just what planned obsolescence tells us we think we want. We will have to rebuild our rail lines, pay higher food prices, repair, recycle and reuse, give up the ubiquitous air travel to sunny climes, and above all, reinvent our antiquated economic model.

No more BBQs made in China. No more Walmart superstores and the like that cruise into a region and gut businesses and cities like a T-rex on steroids, riding a wave of fossil fueled consumer goods.

The cost of fossil fuels continues to rise. Whether you think it is because of price and market speculation or because of Hubbert’s peak or because of too much demand from the emerging economies in India and China, the fact remains that in North America, we have yet to wake up to the fact that prices for commodities based on fossil fuels are going to rise. That includes the cost of heat and air conditioning, the cost of transportation, the cost food and the cost plastics and consumer items. We have been dancing around the pink elephant in the middle of the room for so long now, it has a sort of normalcy about it. The elephant is this: because yesterday and today things were normal and we could do what we please with the non renewable resources, we can then expect that tomorrow things will also be the same, ie normal. Well folks, the beginning of the wake up call is finally here. We are at the peak or somewhere very close to the peak of cheap oil production and it is never going to be the same again. So when, do you think we are going to plan for the changes? When are we going to stop arguing about how to sidestep something that we have no control over and take control over that which we do?

Its not just about buying smaller cars. Its about a huge list of things and at the top of the agenda is when do we plan for the middle and the long term. Predicting the future is a mugs game and the country side is littered with would be Nostradamases. But on the other hand there are certain realities. Its not just going green, it’s also about thinking ahead and planning. As the cost of getting the oil increases and the wealth of the world shifts from us to the oil producing nations, what in blazes are we going to do. We now rely on the rest of the world for just about everything from toasters to food to cars to jobs.

Business needs to change, the incentives for development at home needs to change and certainly the attitude towards that which sustains us and is not renewable needs to change. Its not about whether we hunt seals or not or whether we drive SUVs versus driving an eco-box. Its about living within our means, taking control of our environment, effluent, markets and populations.

Things are going to get pricier and scarcer and there are only two options as I see it. Plan for it and soften the landing or blithely motor on kvetching about the injustice of it all and run into the wall. As Winston Churchill replied when told that he smelled and was fat, “I can lose weight and take a bath, but you can do nothing about being stupid!”

Lets take a bath, shed some excess and stop, please stop being stupid!

Andrew Krystal and I were chatting a week or so ago about the first sustainable fission nuclear reactor that French official tripped over in Gabon, West Africa in 1973. It is some two billion years old and it certainly points to the fact that there is nothing under the purview of humanity that nature hasn’t done first. This time it was the creatures that produced our oxidizing atmosphere and then poisoned themselves out of existence, the anaerobes that turned this amazing trick.

Here is how it worked. The anaerobes lived in the shallows waters in an area that was pretty heavy in U238, a radioactive isotope of uranium. It appears that uranium was pretty tasty for the little beasties. It turns out that in the process of munching they enriched the U238 with U235, pretty much the same way we do it with our industrial processes to make fissionable enriched uranium for our reactors and bombs. After a few millions of years of munching the uranium was enriched enough U235 from the bodies and excrement of the anaerobes that a natural chain reaction was set up that heated the water, which was the moderator and kept it from becoming a meltdown or even worse an explosion. This kept going for about 200 million years and then as plate tectonics worked its magic and moved the reactor away from the water the reaction ceased.

Two billion years later, enter the French officials who were scratching their heads trying to understand how in blazes a nuclear fission reactor could not only exist in a place like West Africa, but some two billion years before the brilliant advent of the modern nuclear age.

The upshot of this is to say that nuclear power has been around as long as the Earth and if we want to we can look at how nature has handled it. From what I have been able to divine, nuclear power itself is not the evil we make it out to be. It turns out that it can be handled safely and the waste disposed of safely as well. The major problems with nuclear fission, from the most recent articles I have read, is not from waste, storage or power generation, but comes from the threat of terrorism and theft of enriched isotopes. Again a fringe group of psychopaths who for whatever reasons wish destruction on the rest of the world.

It really is worthwhile to re-examine nuclear power, to take it out of the business milieu and put it under a cradle to grave mandate. Our short term and medium storage solutions are adequate, and if we are diligent and willing to pay the costs, so are the long term storage solutions. The only fly in the ointment is the extreme fringes. They will do what they always have done, which is add to the chaos and destruction and confusion….

The UN is saying we have a perfect storm brewing because of global food shortages and rising food prices. Much of the world, already burdened with huge populations and barely subsisting are now being hit with that double whammy and then being further crushed under the additional stupidity of methanol production to make up for the diminishing oil and higher crude prices. The western world and some second world countries have tried to have their cake and eat it too by growing high sugar producing crops to feed their travel/transportation addiction, which in turn is based on business greed and avarice.

Let me say up front that methanol additives to gasoline is one of the most stupid hair brained concoctions every to come out the collective brain trusts we have shilling for big business. Here’s why. A fourth grader could have worked this one out.

Let’s just keep driving and pretending that we are actually doing something constructive to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Let’s keep the same economic model in place that touts more growth and consumption.
Instead of growing food to eat let’s grow food to stick in our cars and trucks.
Let’s again disenfranchise the poorest of the poor so we can have conveniences that gobble up what we want when we want.

Brazil has done this for years. They have added methanol to their gasoline because until recently they didn’t have fossils fuels within their national boundaries. What this has meant is because it has sought industrialize and achieve parity with other global powers, the resources within its boundaries were up for grabs. That is why the rain forest has been disappearing at a huge, accelerating rate. Its not because the Brazilians need more food, they need more fuel. So the attitude has been why don’t we just chop down the forests, grow high yield ethanol crops and drive on the ecosystem. With the costs of crude going through the roof the dollar incentive is there and they can then afford to mulch the rain forest into methanol.

Scientists know that if you burn methanol you get CO2, just like gasoline produces. But business has justified the ethanol approach even though it does nothing to stop the CO2 increases, through something called CO2 credits. The argument goes like this. If you grow the plant, it absorbs carbon through its lifetime. They if it is a fuel it is just putting back what you took out in the first place. What the business folks don’t tell you is that to grow this crop you have to till it, fertilize it, process it and ship it. You also have to cut down natural ecosystems which worked full time to clean the filth we pump into it.

When will we stop tricking, lying and distorting things and really do something. Now, not only the ecosystem is expendable, the poor are being mulched to feed our cars!

This past week we have been hearing a lot about seals, seal hunters and protesters. I thought I might throw my two cents worth into the fray and hope that I don’t add further confusion to the already crowded rhetorical arena.

In general, we, people that is, have three problems. Too many of us, too much consumption and no viable economic models that work under contracting or even static market conditions. Add to that mix, unnecessary brutality, photo-ops, egos and a bit of psychopathic blood lust and you set the stage for some pretty intractable confrontations.

Let’s begin with the brutality. It is beyond me why we cannot consume less brutally. From abattoir to dinner plate we treat the creatures upon which we prey and their environment with distain and inflict awful suffering in the name of economy, livelihood, recreation and sport. Personally, I can no longer conscience what I see as our great failing as a species. From agribusiness monoculture to the rape of the sea, we strip, mulch, process and consume beyond the pale. And from that perspective sealing is no different, no better, no worse than any other industry on the face of the world.

We treat animals, plants and ecology no worse that we treat ourselves for that matter. We slaughter, mistreat, torture, maim and exterminate our own numbers with the same brutal dispatch we inflict upon the seal pups. So, I guess, all things considered, the sealing industry is in truth no better and no worse than any other industry. And at the same time, in truth, the sealers do themselves no favours in the public arena, by continuing to behave as brutes, or appearing to be so.

When all things are considered, the use of animal products to cloth ourselves is far more ecologically responsible than wearing faux fur. You just have to get past the killing method. With synthetic products the killing is less tangible, but in fact worse in magnitude and suffering. One oil spill, from which all our synthetics come from, devastates millions of individual creatures. And what winds up as waste, and everything that we use eventually winds up as garbage, will kill and maim for hundreds and even thousands of years.

So putting that into perspective, the killing of a few baby seals, is no great crime in comparison. But why we portray ourselves, and continue to, in the face of changing times and climes, to behave so poorly and be seen by the rest of the world as brutes of the worst order, is a matter that has me shaking my head. What is it about us that needs to confront, obfuscate, distort and then let situations and circumstances be hijacked by the worst of us, so that radicals and wingnuts determine our futures and are the faces of the issues.

We consume too much, we are too many and we only think of growth.

Physics has been in disarray for quite some time, since the 1970s actually. Looking back on the progress of science, it strikes me that the last time that science was at a threshold like this was about a century ago as we made the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. It was a heady and revolutionary time. And now we appear to be at another cusp, one that could either see the verification or the vilification of what is called the standard model of particle physics.

For about thirty years we have been trying to understand a number of apparently, so far, unresolvable conundrums. There are way too many particles and forces for anyone to be satisfied with how we explain the universe and how interacts. Broadly speaking, we have about 130 fundamental particles. This zoo includes protons, muons, neutrinos, etc. which in turn are made up of things called quarks, which have properties we call colour, charm and other confusing names. And we also have four fundamental forces. They are basically divided into two groups. The particle group is called the “Fermions” and the force group called the “Bosons”. Its pretty complicated and confusing. And there is the rub.

In general, the simpler the explanation, the more apt it is to be correct, or that has been the trend in Physics right from the beginning. Our problem today is that this veritable myriad of particles and forces seems to be too complicated by far. So what physicists have been trying to do is simplify the story a bit, unify things mathematically. But its not enough to just theorize and postulate. It is also must test out. The theories have to be verified and also predict accurately, behaviour and circumstances.

How physicists do that is with massive machines, the largest, most complicated machines in existence. And, by and large, these machines are so massive because they have to smash particles together at incredible, almost unimaginable energies. Then after the smashup the scientists collect the information from the wreckage, see what they have and how it all fits together. Its that simple. Big toys for modern boys. The new CERN accelerator in Geneva is pretty much the only machine that has the energy to take us to that next step, that is, finding the elusive Higgs Boson.

Now, according to theory that is almost forty years old, the last force particle, called the Higgs Boson, can only be created at the most extreme energies. This particle is the icing on the standard model of particles and interactions cake. If we find the Higgs Boson is created by the CERN accelerator then we verify even more strongly the current theory and according to some, gain further understanding into the mind of god (whoever he/she/it/they may be, assuming they exist…but we will leave that for another blog!), hence the name the god particle. If we don’t find the Higgs Boson, then it is back to the drawing board, a regiguing of basic theory and a lot of head scratching.

These are heady and nervous times in the world of physics.

Its close enough to April Fool’s Day for me to have considered this a joke….if it wasn’t for the fact that this stuff is so stupid and even dangerous. Let me elaborate.

Earth Day Darkness on Saturday night at 8 p.m. found me in, what my friend and colleague so aptly names, “The Great Satan”. I was there to tape an episode of “Test the Nation: Canadian Eh?” Seems on air meteorologists were the fodder for this part of the series at the CBC (also named by others as the Canadian Broadcorping Castration, but that’s for another blog). As it was, I happened to be dining out at Renaissance Hotel, part of what used to be called the Skydome, now the Rogers Centre, (the name should ring a bell) as 8 pm rolled around. The restaurant in the hotel looks out on to the field which was hosting a motocross competition, churning up hydrocarbons in the name of sport, entertainment and fun, while the oblivious rednecked, infantile, baseball capped throngs cheered and roared with each jump and circling of this modern colosseum. All  that was missing was a little more gore and an emperor or two.

As I was munching on my pizza and looking out into the massive covered ediface/playing field of the Centre, Nelly Furtado was twanging away for yet another celebrity concert, to bandwagon her star to the climate change, let’s do something public, which will have no impact whatsoever, make a statement, and at the same time make a bucket full ‘o’ cash, crowd. By the way, if you pick up any cynicism, you must be reading something between the lines. Gag me with a Pizza! As I sat there, the lights dimmed at 8 and the candles were fired up. I asked myself, how on Earth do lighting candles mitigate the use of energy? If anything they do a greater energy disservice to the planet than does electricity!

When I expressed my chagrin at the uselessness of all this western posturing, I was politely informed that it was a symbolic gesture. I replied perhaps a boycott of our consumer ways or a week of eating only foods that aren’t shipped across the globe and originate closer to home would have not only been more symbolic, but actually might have had a positive effect.

Spare me the symbolism. Its rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We are way past gestures on this planet. We must DO something. We need solutions not rhetoric and symbolism. Changing light bulbs, banning plastic bags for groceries or doing a concert by yet another celebrity will do nothing or worse, make people think they have actually done something. Its like confession on Sundays. Sin the whole week and absolve for a few minutes with your local God rep and all is right in the world and your soul. If only it was so easy…..and if I see another candle……..!

About six months ago as we were relaxing on our decks at the height of our northern summer, the Antarctic was in throes of its frigid winter. I wondered out loud what would happen, as we slid back into winter and the Antipodes drifted into summer, in that mostly ignored, ice enshrouded land mass, some two times greater in extent than Canada. I wondered what their summer would mean for the Western Ice Sheet, the third largest ice field in the world, the one where Scott, Amundsen and Shackelton landed a century ago?

You see, in 1993 a British group of scientists looked at the Western Sheet and pronounced to the world that within thirty years there would be major changes, all brought about because of human climate intervention. The Ross, Ronne, Larsen and Wilkens Ice Sheets all reside in the Western Antarctic, the Ross and Ronne each as big as Germany, a kilometre thick and containing hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometres of ice. Now they are melting and breaking apart. In 1998 the Wilkins Sheet calved a 1000 square kilometres of ice in a day, then in 2001 the Larsen broke off an even larger chunk of some 3000 square kilometres. This past week the Wilkins sheet broke off a piece some 80 miles long. And now it appears that then entire Wilkins sheet is due to collapse either in the next month or during next Antarctic Summer. Some 11,000 square kilometres of ice, 300 metres thick, almost the size of Cape Breton Island will disappear in one swell foop!

Now to most of us it will not have an impact, because firstly its too far away to really appear on our radar screens and secondly, this ice is already in the water and will not change the ocean levels one iota. But there is an impact. Firstly to the millions of creatures who live there and secondly because these ice sheets stopper the flow of the Western Antarctic’s glaciers. And this should really make you sit up. Once the stoppers erode, that is the ice sheets, the glaciers will flow faster than ever and all the projections about ocean level rise get thrown out the window. When, and not if the entire Western Sheet flows into the ocean you and I will feel it, to the tune of roughly five to six metres of extra water in the ocean basins.

Back in 1993 the British scientists said that it would take thirty years for the Wilkins Ice Sheet to give way. It happened is fifteen, half the time they thought it would.That should also tell you something. The IPCC has based its estimates and published its landmark reports with the same numbers, but everywhere we look we see that they are falling behind and climate change is under way twice as quickly as previously thought.

And here in Canada we dither, the Conservative government continues to play the US/Saudi/China/India obfuscation exercise. We water down the impacts of scientific reports and marginalize, ridicule and underfund/report the truth. What will it take before we act? A hundred deaths, a thousand, a million. To continue to ignore climate change and to facilitate inaction, makes me wonder what we will do when the shoe drops in our back yard and millions and tens of millions are threatened and die. What will the Climate Change Nuremberg trials look like and will we bring George Bush, Stephen Harper, John Baird and their ilk forward to accept responsibility?