bee rapture

Colony Collapse Disorder: Cause Discovered?

2010-05-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

A new study claims to have identified the cause (causes, really) of colony collapse disorder, the mysterious bee disease that is still killing honey bees.

May 25, 2010 at 4:43pm by Kim Flottum

The USDA announced on May 25th that preliminary evidence suggests two pathogens, that, when working in concert, can lead to the decline in a honey bee colony now called Colony Collapse Disorder.

This tandem attack has been suggested previously, both here and in other reports, but this is the first report to make it past scientific peer review. A Montana researcher has also been steering this research through what seems to be a desert of common sense in the traditional academic media, who seem to be hooked on the Israeli virus suspected some time ago as the leading cause of colony collapse disorder.

USDA Scientist Jay Evans, from the Beltsville Bee Lab presented his findings at the General Meeting Of Microbiology in San Diego, and was available for a live interview.

The two pathogens are not even closely related. One, a fungus, labeled Nosema cerena, enters the honey bee gut and damages the epithelial cells to complete its life cycle. These damaged cells provide an entryway for members of the RNA virus family Dicistroviridae to enter and wreak their havoc.

Jay suspects other stresses in the honey bee system are contributing to this, particularly poor nutrition. He suggested that colony collapse disorder tends to be a seasonal phenomena, occurring primarily in the spring, when a colony begins two very stressful activities. Old, overwintering bees must begin to both forage for additional food to feed their newly emerging brood, and at the same time convert that new found food into the royal and worker jelly needed by the new bees to grow correctly. (In a typical situation later in the season bees do one or the other activity, but not both, and never at the same time.) Both of these activities are incredibly taxing, and bees consume exceptional amounts of energy – often absorbing protein from their own bodies to compensate for this additional stress.

Nutritionally challenged bees require significant amounts of food to continue these activities, and Nosema cerena-damaged bees are unable to consume and utilize enough food to make this work. Starving to death because of this compromise, in a sense, is suspected, and the colony collapses.

Management to increase food stores in the fall for consumption in the spring, and controlling the Nosema fungus are recommendations to help beekeepers deal with colony collapse disorder. At least for now.

Heat Forms Potentially Harmful Substance In High-fructose Corn Syrup, Bee Study Finds

2009-09-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — Researchers have established the conditions that foster formation of potentially dangerous levels of a toxic substance in the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that is often fed to honey bees. Their study, which appears in the current issue of ACS' bi-weekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, may also have implications for soft drinks and dozens of other human foods that contain HFCS. The substance, hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), forms mainly from heating fructose.

In the new study, Blaise LeBlanc and Gillian Eggleston and colleagues note HFCS's ubiquitous usage as a sweetener in beverages and processed foods. Some commercial beekeepers also feed it to bees to increase reproduction and honey production. When exposed to warm temperatures, HFCS can form HMF and kill honeybees. Some researchers believe that HMF may be a factor in Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious disease that has killed at least one-third of the honeybee population in the United States.

The scientists measured levels of HMF in HFCS products from different manufacturers over a period of 35 days at different temperatures. As temperatures rose, levels of HMF increased steadily. Levels jumped dramatically at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The data are important for commercial beekeepers, for manufacturers of HFCS, and for purposes of food storage. Because HFCS is incorporated as a sweetener in many processed foods, the data from this study are important for human health as well," the report states. It adds that studies have linked HMF to DNA damage in humans. In addition, HMF breaks down in the body to other substances potentially more harmful than HMF.

Journal reference:

LeBlanc et al. Formation of Hydroxymethylfurfural in Domestic High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera). Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2009; 57 (16): 7369 DOI:10.1021/jf9014526

Adapted from materials provided by American Chemical Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090826110118.htm

A new study shows that heat can produce a potentially toxic substance in high-fructose corn syrup that may kill honeybees. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Beehive Fence Deters Elephant Raiders

2009-06-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

Science News

ScienceDaily (June 6, 2009)

A fence made out of beehives wired together has been shown to significantly reduce crop raids by elephants, Oxford University scientists report.

The fence is constructed of log beehives suspended on poles beneath tiny thatched roofs (to keep off the sun). The hives are connected by eight metre lengths of fencing wire. Elephants avoid the hives and will attempt to push through the wire but this causes the hives to swing violently causing the elephants to fear an attack of angry bees.

The results of a pilot study in Kenya, published in the African Journal of Ecology, show that a farm protected by the beehive fence had 86 per cent fewer successful crop raids by elephants and 150 per cent fewer raiding elephants than a control farm without the fence.

The reduction occurred despite the fact that none of the hives were occupied at the time suggesting that elephants remember painful past encounters with African honeybees and avoid the sights and smells associated with them.

‘Our previous research has shown that elephants are scared away by recordings of the buzzing of angry bees,’ said Lucy King of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology who led the project in collaboration with the charity Save the Elephants. ‘We designed the beehive fence as an affordable and practical way of applying this knowledge to create a barrier that the elephants would be afraid to cross.’

‘The reaction from the farmers involved in our pilot study has been very positive,’ said Lucy King. ‘Our beehive fence design has been shown to be robust enough to survive elephant raids and cheap enough for farmers to construct themselves – especially as it also gives protection against cattle rustlers and, when occupied by colonies of African honeybees, will give the farmers two or three honey harvests a year that they can sell to offset the cost of building the fence.’

During the six-week pilot study the team used GPS to track one particularly notorious elephant raider dubbed ‘Genghis Khan’. Genghis was spotted raiding by several farmers and was observed amongst a herd of eighteen bull elephants returning from crop raids and his GPS movements were shown to closely match the routes of the raiding groups.

Despite their thick hides adult elephants can be stung around their eyes or up their trunks, whilst calves could potentially be killed by a swarm of stinging bees as they have yet to develop this thick protective skin.

Lucy King said: ‘We hope that these results will encourage farmers in other areas losing crops to elephant raiders to build their own beehive fences and help to reduce the conflict between humans and elephants that can lead to the tragedy of animals being shot, as well as farmers suffering devastating losses to the crops that are their livelihood.’

Adapted from materials provided by University of Oxford.

contributed by Mary Ann

Found: a cause of Colony Collapse Disorder [UPDATE] Hotlist

2009-04-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

Go to link for updates and working tags

by Wee Mama

Fri Apr 17, 2009 at 11:23:35 AM PDT
Found: a cause of Colony Collapse Disorder Hotlist

News in recent years about Colony Collapse Disorder of bees raised concerns here over the past two years, reflected in part in Devilstower's diary. Good news! It appears that the cause has been identified, which is the first step to managing or avoiding the disease. A report today in Ars technica summarized research from Environmental Microbiology Reports. Spanish researchers found a parasitic fungus, Nosema ceranae, in two infected hives after eliminating other possible causes. More significantly, they were able to treat other hives with an antifungal, fumagillin, and completely cure the colonies.

Healthy on top, sick colony below

Here's the abstract (permitted by fair use, I believe):

Honeybee colony collapse is a sanitary and ecological worldwide problem. The features of this syndrome are an unexplained disappearance of adult bees, a lack of brood attention, reduced colony strength, and heavy winter mortality without any previous evident pathological disturbances. To date there has not been a consensus about its origins. This report describes the clinical features of two professional bee-keepers affecting by this syndrome. Anamnesis, clinical examination and analyses support that the depopulation in both cases was due to the infection by Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia), an emerging pathogen of Apis mellifera. No other significant pathogens or pesticides (neonicotinoids) were detected and the bees had not been foraging in corn or sunflower crops. The treatment with fumagillin avoided the loss of surviving weak colonies. This is the first case report of honeybee colony collapse due to N. ceranae in professional apiaries in field conditions reported worldwide.

Obviously treating every colony in the world with fumagillin would not be a good idea - too expensive, and certain to lead to resistance. But knowing the cause makes it much more likely that good practices can reduce the incidence, and the fumagillin makes a good back up if hygiene fails.

Thought you all would enjoy getting some good news on this lovely spring day! (Lovely here at least - hope most of you are also enjoying some true spring).

And some eye candy from UCSD:

Russians Saving U.S. from Colony Collapse Disorder

2009-04-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Russian bees are stationed at the White House. (That's a good thing.)

April 14, 2009 at 12:47PM by Kim Flottum

Buzz up!

Here's a thought on the current status of Colony Collapse Disorder. Long ago...well, just over 50 years ago or so, but not too far away from where I am now, a group of University and USDA Honey Bee Scientists gathered to study a problem that had been plaguing beekeepers in all parts of the country for a couple of years. Beekeepers were complaining that they were finding colonies devoid of bees, gone, empty and barren, and nothing was left behind to give a clue as to what had happened. Quick research showed that this wasn't a new problem, and indeed had occurred quite a few times over the years...well, over the years that people had been keeping records about such things.

By the time the scientists had been rallied to do something by concerned beekeepers the situation had already gone on for a couple of seasons and was heading into the third. They wanted to meet it head on for the third year to see what could be done. Of course by the time they got together it was plain that the problem was abating...and in fact it was difficult to find samples to study.

One of the scientists was heard to say that it was a real task to study what they were calling disappearing disease, because every time they got together to study it..."the damn thing disappeared."

This spring, the damn thing seems to have disappeared again. We've looked at why we think this is the case, and, indeed, beekeepers have gone a long way in improving how they keep bees healthy. Better nutrition management, cleaner homes for the bees to live in, safer mite controls being used by beekeepers and of course many of the bees and beekeepers that were susceptible to whatever it was are gone.

Late last week a press release was issued by the White House and the USDA about one more thing that seems to have shown CCD to the door this year: honey bees that have some resistance to one of the suspected precursors of CCD – the varroa mite.
white house garden

The White House and CCD? Yes, the White House, the USDA and CCD.

Down in Baton Rouge, La., there's a USDA Honey Bee Research Lab. There, they've imported and refined several strains of pretty much mongrel bees from eastern Russia that have been living with varroa for over a hundred years. In that time those varroa mites have taken a terrible toll on those bees. But not all of them died. In fact, some have thrived, and it was offspring from these varroa- and tracheal mite-tolerant bees that came to America. After vigorous inspections and extended isolation time to make certain they were disease and pest free, plus a few years of controlled breeding to increase even more this tolerance to mites, they have been released to the beekeepers here that need them. The result is that beekeepers using Russian bees use far fewer (and often no) mite control chemicals to keep their bees healthy. Because of this they spend less money and less time with this aspect of their business, and they have happier bees to boot. Plus, they lose fewer colonies so that cost, too, is reduced. All in all, keeping these bees saves time, money, environmental contamination and reduces or eliminates any threat of hive product problems. And now, there's even a Russian Bee Breeders Association in place to insure quality control. For beekeepers everywhere, the Russians are coming.

And now, apparently, Russians are coming to the White House. This July the White House hive is to get one of these USDA developed Russian Queens so that varroa tolerance will reside in DC, too. The White House and the Secretary of the Department Of Agriculture engineered this late last week, and come July, a Russian will be living at the White House. How sweet is that?

Honeybees in Danger

2009-04-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

Sunday 12 April 2009

by: Evaggelos Vallianatos, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Industrial, pesticide-dependent agricultural practices in the United States are creating a death trap for the honeybee and threatening the human-bee symbiotic relationship forged over millenia. (Photo: Getty Images)

When I was teaching at Humboldt State University in northern California 20 years ago, I invited a beekeeper to talk to my students. He said that each time he took his bees to southern California to pollinate other farmers' crops, he would lose a third of his bees to sprays. In 2009, the loss ranges all the way to 60 percent.

Honeybees have been in terrible straits.

A little history explains this tragedy.

For millennia, honeybees lived in symbiotic relationship with societies all over the world.

The Greeks loved them. In the eighth century BCE, the epic poet Hesiod considered them gifts of the gods to just farmers. And in the fourth century of our era, the Greek mathematician Pappos admired their hexagonal cells, crediting them with "geometrical forethought."

However, industrialized agriculture is not friendly to honeybees.

In 1974, the US Environmental Protection Agency licensed the nerve gas parathion trapped into nylon bubbles the size of pollen particles.

What makes this microencapsulated formulation more dangerous to bees than the technical material is the very technology of the "time release" microcapsule.

This acutely toxic insecticide, born of chemical warfare, would be on the surface of the flower for several days. The foraging bee, if alive after its visit to the beautiful white flowers of almonds, for example, laden with invisible spheres of asphyxiating gas, would be bringing back to its home pollen and nectar mixed with parathion.

It is possible that the nectar, which the bee makes into honey, and the pollen, might end up in some food store to be bought and eaten by human beings.

Beekeepers are well aware of what is happening to their bees, including the potential that their honey may not be fit for humans.

Moreover, many beekeepers do not throw away the honey, pollen and wax of colonies destroyed by encapsulated parathion or other poisons. They melt the wax for new combs: And they sell both honey and pollen to the public.

Government "regulators" know about this danger.

An academic expert, Carl Johansen, professor of entomology at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, called the microencapsulated methyl parathion "the most destructive bee poisoning insecticide ever developed."

In 1976, the US Department of Agriculture published a report by one of its former employees, S. E. McGregor, a honeybee expert who documented that about a third of what we eat benefits from honeybee pollination. This includes vegetables, oilseeds and domesticated animals eating bee-pollinated hay.

In 2007, the value of food dependent on honeybees was $15 billion in the United States.

McGregor also pointed out that insect-pollinated legumes collect nitrogen from the air, storing it in their roots and enriching the soil. In addition, insect pollination makes the crops more wholesome and abundant. He advised the farmer he should never forget that "no cultural practice will cause fruit or seed to set if its pollination is neglected."

In addition, McGregor blamed the chemical industry for seducing the farmers to its potent toxins. He said:

"Pesticides are like dope drugs. The more they are used the more powerful the next one must be to give satisfaction" and therein develops the spiraling effect, the pesticide treadmill. The chemical salesman, in pressuring the grower to use his product, practically assumes the role of the "dope pusher." Once the victim, the grower, is "hooked," he becomes a steady and an ever-increasing user.

No government agency listened to McGregor.

The result of America's pesticide treadmill is that now, in 2009, honeybees and other pollinators are moving towards extinction.

In October 2006, the US National Research Council warned of the" "demonstrably downward" trends in the populations of pollinators. For the first time since 1922, American farmers are renting imported bees for their crops. They are even buying bees from Australia.

Honeybees, the National Academies report said, pollinate more than 90 crops in America, but have declined by 30 percent in the last 20 years alone. The scientists who wrote the report expressed alarm at the precipitous decline of the pollinators.

Unfortunately, this made no difference to EPA, which failed to ban the microencapsulated parathion that is so deadly to honeybees.

Bee experts know that insecticides cause brain damage to the bees, disorienting them, making it often impossible for them to find their way home.

This is a consequence of decades of agribusiness warfare against nature and, in time, honeybees. In addition, beekeepers truck billions of bees all over the country for pollination, depriving them of good food, stressing them enormously, and, very possibly, injuring their health.

-------

Evaggelos Vallianatos, former EPA analyst, is the author of "This Land Is Their Land" and "The Passion of the Greeks.

SnagFilms Film Widget

2008-12-06T14:34:00.001-08:00

Bee Species Outnumber Mammals And Birds Combined

2008-06-17T20:35:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (Jun. 17, 2008) — Scientists have discovered that there are more bee species than previously thought. In the first global accounting of bee species in over a hundred years, John S. Ascher, a research scientist in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, compiled online species pages and distribution maps for more than 19,200 described bee species, showcasing the diversity of these essential pollinators. This new species inventory documents 2,000 more described, valid species than estimated by Charles Michener in the first edition of his definitive The Bees of the World published eight years ago.

"The bee taxonomic community came together and completed the first global checklist of bee names since 1896," says Ascher. "Most people know of honey bees and a few bumble bees, but we have documented that there are actually more species of bees than of birds and mammals put together."

The list of bee names finished by Ascher and colleagues was placed online by John Pickering of the University of Georgia through computer applications that linked all names to Discover Life species pages, a searchable taxonomic classification for all bees, and global maps for all genera and species. Ascher and colleagues recently reviewed all valid names from his checklist and from those of experts from all over the world for the World Bee Checklist project led by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and available online (http://www.itis.gov).

The bee checklists were developed as a key component of the Museum's Bee Database Project initiated in 2006 by Ascher and Jerome G. Rozen, Jr., Curator of bees at the Museum, and with technical support from Curator Randall Schuh. A primary goal of this project is to document floral and distributional records for all bees, including now obscure species that may someday become significant new pollinators for our crops. The vast majority of known bee species are solitary, primitively social, or parasitic.

These bees do not make honey or live in hives but are essential pollinators of crops and native plants. Honey is made by nearly 500 species of tropical stingless bees in addition to the well-known honey bee Apis mellifera. Honey bees are the most economically important pollinators and are currently in the news because of colony collapse disorder, an unexplained phenomenon that is wiping out colonies throughout the United States.

The crises facing traditionally managed pollinators like honey bees highlight the need for more information about bee species and their interactions with the plants they pollinate. The National Academy of Sciences identified improved taxonomic data on bees as a high priority, and the new online bee checklists, maps, and other databases have for the first time made comprehensive data readily accessible.

The checklists compiled by Ascher and colleagues facilitate ongoing databasing of the Museum's worldwide collections of more than 400,000 bee specimens. Funding was provided by Robert G. Goelet, Chairman Emeritus of the Museum's Board of Trustees.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080611135020.htm

So much that we are still discovering. How many species have disappeared that we never knew existed?

Bees Under Threat As Pollution Means Flowers Are Losing Their Natural Scent

2008-04-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

April 20, 2008
By Gwyneth Rees
UK Daily Mail

They are a quintessential sign of summer - the scent of blossom on the wind and the buzzing of bees. But scientists claim that both are now under threat - as flowers lose their natural scent due to pollution.
A new study suggests that gases from car emission are dulling floral aromas and disrupting insect life. Researchers claim pollution is dramatically cutting the distance travelled by the scent molecules of plants. This is preventing flowers from attracting bees and other insects needed to pollinate them. As a consequence, the numbers of insects are dramatically dwindling as they struggle to located the nectar off which they feed.

Professor Jose Fuentes, of the University of Virginia, which carried out the research, said: "Scent molecules produced by flowers in a less polluted environment could travel for roughly 1,000 to 1,2000 metres. "But today they may only travel 200 to 300 metres. "This makes it increasingly difficult for bees and other insects to locate the flowers."

The study, funded by the US National Science Foundation, examined the smell given off by snapdragons. They found that the scent molecules are volatile and quickly bond with pollutants, such as ozone and nitrate radicals - formed mainly from vehicle emissions. This chemically alters the molecules so that they no longer smell like flowers. As a result, bees and other insects - which rely on the scent of flowers to locate them - fail to do so and do not get enough food. The ability of the insects to attract mates and repel enemies is also impeded, scientists fear. While the flowers, which rely on insects to pollinate them, also suffer. Scientists have found that bees, which pollinate most of the world's crops, are in unprecedented decline in Britain and across much of the globe.

At least a quarter of America's 2.5million honey bee colonies have been wiped out by colony collapse disorder (CCD) where hives are found to be suddenly deserted. Although the mysterious phenomenon has yet to appear in the UK, insect numbers have been declining here too. Agricultural minister Lord Rooker has warned that "the honey bee population could be wiped out in 10 years". The scientists do not believe pollution is necessarily the cause of CCD but they claim it is making it harder for many insects to survive.

Research shows it is not just insects that are affected by the actions of humans. The number of birds visiting our gardens and parks has plunged by a fifth in four years, a survey has revealed. The decline follows a succession of mild winters and the growing popularity of paving and decking, which robs gardens of valuable plants and insects.

Changes in farming techniques, a decline in hedgerows and increased used of pesticides may also have hit bird numbers.

link

Honey Bee Collapse Now Worse on West Coast

2008-04-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

© 2008 by Linda Moulton Howe

link

“It's worse than last year, and last year was worse
than the year before. So, it's bad. And there are a lot of good,
big beekeepers that are having a lot of problems. I think we're coming
in for a big train wreck.” - Gilly Sherman, Beekeeper

34% of American honey bees in
commercial hives have disappeared this spring of 2008, in a
persistent mystery known as “colony collapse disorder.”

April 10, 2008 Gainesville, Florida - On April 5, 2008, England's BBC News carried a report entitled, “U. S. Fears Over Honey Bee Collapse.” A California beekeeper, Gilly Sherman, was interviewed and he said sobering words: “It's worse than last year, and last yar was worse than the year before. So, it's bad. And there are a lot of good, big beekeepers that are having a lot of problems. I think we're coming in for a big train wreck.”

I took that quote to Jerry Hayes, Chief, Apiary Section, Florida Department of Agriculture, and President of the Apiary Inspectors of America in Gainesville, Florida and asked for his comment.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Interview:

Jerry Hayes, Chief, Apiary Section, Florida Department of Agriculture, and President of the Apiary Inspectors of America in Gainesville, Florida:
“Certainly West Coast beekeepers were more dramatically affected this year than perhaps East Coast beekeepers. Last year, East Coast beekeepers had the first and dramatic events happening to their bee colonies. Sometimes, the West Coast beekeepers said, ‘Well, it’s not happening to us. You must just be bad beekeepers.’ So, now the shoe is on the other foot and they are suffering as badly as anybody has been. Everybody is on an even playing field right now.

Bees are not healthy. Bees have not been healthy for a few years and they are becoming more unhealthy. The beekeepers, the industry that uses them as a tool, is in a precarious situation.

SO WOULD YOU AGREE WITH THE BEEKEEPER QUOTED BY THE BBC NEWS, ‘I THINK WE’RE COMING IN FOR A BIG TRAIN WRECK’?

We’ll never know these things until after the train wreck. It certainly does not look good. I’ve been reading some reports about whole populations of bats dying and disappearing in the Northeast. The quail population in the southeast has virtually disappeared. I don’t know if any of these things have parallels and links, but it certainly is interesting that something in the environment is impacting these other animals.

WHAT IS THE CURRENT STATE OF COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA?

34% Bee Loss in U. S. by Spring 2008

The Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA), of which I am a part – we just completed a survey of 327 beekeepers and we came up with about a 34% loss rate over this past 2007 to 2008 winter season.

THAT’S EVEN MORE THAN LAST YEAR?

Yes, a little bit. [ 2007 estimated American loss was 25%.]

GOING INTO THIS SPRING OF 2008, WHAT ARE YOUR GREATEST WORRIES?

Beekeepers cannot continue to take these kinds of losses and rebound in any kind of way.

Cause of Colony Collapse Disorder?

“Unfortunately, we still don’t have a clear picture of why this is happening.”

THE LAST TIIME WE TALKED, IT WAS THE ISRAELI VIRUS UNDER SUSPICION OF COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES THROUGH AUSTRALIAN BEES THAT HAD BEEN BROUGHT IN BECAUSE THE NORTH AMERICAN BEE POPULATION HAD BEEN WEAKENED. IS THERE EVIDENCE THAT THE ISRAELI ACUTE PARALYSIS VIRUS IS STILL CAUSING THE MORTALITY? OR IS THERE STILL SOMETHING TO BE FOUND? WHAT IS CAUSING ONE-THIRD OF ALL THE BEES IN THE UNITED STATES TO DISAPPEAR IN THE WINTER OF 2007 TO SPRING OF 2008?

[ Editor’s Note: See 090707 Earthfiles: Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) September 2007 journal, Science.]

Boy, if I knew that, I’d probably have a statue some place, Linda. Obviously it’s all the issues that are still on the table right now. Viruses – whether it’s the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, or other viruses that are known and impact honeybees? There again, pesticides, poor nutrition, stress whatever that is from moving bees back and forth, a shallow genetic pool in our managed bee colonies. Some how, all these things are interacting. Basically, we need more funds in order to hire smart people and expensive equipment to figure what is going on. Research is never quick.

DID YOU EXPECT AN INCREASE IN THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES IN NORTH AMERICA?

I was personally interested to find out if it was going to continue and to find out what was going to happen to our West Coast beekeepers that seemed to have dodged a bit of the bullet last year. I was hoping that it would not, but I knew that something like this just generally does not go away on its own.

BUT ARE YOU SURPRISED THAT THE WEST COAST BEEKEEPERS ARE BEING HIT HARD NOW IN 2008?

No, not really. You know how things spread – if this is a pathogen or something in which all populations are not hit equally. So, it was unfortunately their turn.

HAS THE ISRAELI ACUTE PARALYSIS VIRUS BEEN FOUND IN THE WEST COAST HONEYBEES?

Yes, it’s there, but not at any dramatic levels. In fact, there’s kind of an East Coast variant and a West Coast variant of the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. There’s also the Kashmir bee virus that has shown up in quite large numbers. Then you add in all the other things we talked about that could cause the immune system collapse. All those things are interacting.

SO, IN APRIL 2008, YOU CAN’T SAY EVEN NOW THAT IT IS THE ISRAELI VIRUS THAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MOST OF COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER?

No, because in the CCD, the Israeli acute paralysis virus was found in most of the samples and at the moment is considered just a marker. It was not present in tremendously high numbers. And we can’t say it’s the varroa mite because in CCD, varroa and trachea mites are in very low levels. The Nosema protozoan was found in less than 50% of the colonies. Unfortunately, we still don’t have a clear picture of why this is happening.

Future Almond and Other American
Crop Pollinations in Jeopardy?

WITH A 33% DISAPPEARANCE RATE SO FAR IN 2008, WHAT HAPPENS TO ALMOND POLLINATION AND CROPS BECAUSE THEY WERE STRETCHED LAST YEAR TRYING TO IMPORT ENOUGH BEES FROM THE EAST COAST AND AUSTRALIA TO GET THE ALMOND GROVES POLLINATED. WHAT HAPPENS NOW WITH EVEN MORE BEES DISAPPEARING?

Well, almond pollination is over right now. And most of the bees fell apart during or towards the end of almond pollination. I think the almond guys got by in good shape, so they don’t care as long as they get pollination for next year because this year is over with. To them, honeybees are an input, just like fertilizer, pesticides and fungicides. So, until next year, the almond growers probably don’t care.

WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL THE OTHER CROPS THAT ARE DEPENDENT UPON HONEY BEES, IF THEY HAVE FALLEN APART IN SUCH GREAT NUMBERS TRYING TO POLLINATE THE ALMOND CROP?

That’s a great question. The bees are coming back to Florida now and we’re talking about watermelon pollination. And then the bees will be moving north for blueberries and apples and cranberries. But yours is a good question and I don’t have an answer for it at this moment in time.

U. S. Headed for Reliance On
International Food Imports

”The USDA projects that something like 40% of our vegetables
are going to be coming from China in 2012 or some date like that and the
U. S. is going to be a net food importer in fifty years.”

I’d like to see people at the federal level and others realize how important honeybees are! But if people don’t care where food comes from, if people are happy that food is at the grocery store and they don’t care how it gets to the grocery store, then maybe all this concern is a moot point. People have to care about this. The USDA projects that something like 40% of our vegetables are going to be coming from China in 2012 or some date like that and the U. S. is going to be a net food importer in fifty years.

We already have someone who has us by the nose for energy production, oil (Middle East). And so now, we’re going to turn our food production over to someone else? This all has larger strategic implications than just honey bees. This is talking about the food supply and how secure our food supply is in the United States?

So, I just hope that people realize how important honey bees are and somehow give support. We support sugar people. We have been throwing money at the corn people for years and everything else. Why not honey bees, if they are important?

Implications for Increasing Decline
of American Honey Bees?

“If the almond people come up short, my guess is that probably the Mexicans will petition to bring their Africanized bee colonies across the border to fill that gap. And that will probably destroy the U.S. commercial beekeeping industry.”

YOU AND I HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SO MANY HONEY BEES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA NOW FOR A YEAR. I THINK I THOUGHT, AS A REPORTER, THAT BY THE SPRING OF 2008 THAT WE WOULD BE SEEING A RESTORATION OF BETTER HEALTH TO THE BEES AND THAT EVERYTHING MIGHT BE GETTING BETTER. THE FACT THAT IT’S GONE DOWN HILL EVEN MORE, THE FACT THAT EVEN MORE BEES HAVE DISAPPEARED THROUGH THE WINTER OF 2007 TO 2008, THE FACT THAT AFTER THE ALMOND POLLINATION THAT, TO USE YOUR WORDS, ‘THE BEES ARE FALLING APART IN THE UNITED STATES.’ WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVERYTHING IS GOING DOWN HILL IN APRIL?

There might be crops that are potentially impacted and as the almond acreage grows, the almond growers will try to use every honeybee colony in the United States. If the almond people come up short, my guess is that probably the Mexicans will petition to bring their Africanized bee colonies across the border to fill that gap. And that will probably destroy the U.S. commercial beekeeping industry.

BUT WOULD YOU AND OTHERS IN AGRICULTURE ALLOW THAT TO OCCUR?

I’m just a mid-level civil servant. The almond people and value of the almond crop – money talks in our capitalistic society and the almond people will not be denied.

BUT DO YOU SERIOUSLY MEAN THERE COULD BE A DECISION THAT WOULD BE ONLY POLITICAL AND ECONOMICAL FOR THE ALMOND INDUSTRY THAT COULD END UP BRINGING IN AFRICANIZED BEES THAT WOULD DESTROY THE REST OF THE NORTH AMERICAN HONEYBEE?

It’s very possible.

THAT IS ACTUALLY BEING DISCUSSED NOW AS AN OPTION?

I didn’t make that up! (laughs)

I’M VERY DISTRESSED TO HEAR THIS.

Me, too.

A Year from Now in 2009?

“(Richard Adee, largest beekeeper in U. S.) is truthfully shell shocked and numb and doesn’t know what to do. You can’t replace 60,000 colonies overnight.”

GIVEN THE FACT THAT THE PERCENTAGE IN THE NUMBER OF BEES DISAPPEARING IN 2008 IS EVEN HIGHER THAN IT WAS IN 2007, AND THAT THE BEE HEALTH IS NOT GOOD, WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT TO BE THE STATUS A YEAR FROM NOW IN 2009?

I don’t know. I don’t know if this is Darwin in action and that this might go away as the weak are culled out and the strong survive – because if this continues on for another year or two, there won’t be many commercial beekeepers left. There will be some small beekeepers left, but not of the size that can load up colonies on semi-trucks and take them over the United States.

The largest beekeeper in the United States [ Richard Adee Honey Farms, Brookings, South Dakota], I think lost 60,000 colonies out of his 80,000 colonies this past late winter and spring. He had something like 100 loads of empty equipment that he had to bring back from California. You just can’t replace those kinds of numbers very quickly.

WHEN YOU TALK TO THAT LARGE HONEYBEE KEEPER, WHAT HIS IS ASSESSMENT, TALKING TO YOU, ABOUT THE NEXT FEW MONTHS INTO NEXT YEAR?

He is truthfully shell shocked and numb and doesn’t know what to do. You can’t replace 60,000 colonies overnight.

WOULDN’T THIS RISE TO A NATIONAL SECURITY LEVEL? WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE LOSS OF POLLINATORS THAT AFFECT SO MUCH OF OUR FOOD SUPPLY?

You would think so. Obviously, Senator Boxer is meeting tomorrow. So, certainly at high levels of the government, there is interest. And of course, we’re at war and spending a lot of money on the war, and money can be authorized, but is it appropriated? So, the whole political scene has to play out its course here in the way we handle things here in the United States.

ARE YOU OPTOMISTIC OR PESIMISTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE OF HONEYBEES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA?

I’m pessimistic. We have a tendency to wait until a crisis happens in western civilization. We might lose control of our food supply at some point.

IF ONE-THIRD OF THE HONEYBEE POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES DISAPPEARED IN THE 2007 TO 2008 WINTER-SPRING, AND IF NEXT YEAR, THE PERCENTAGE CLIMBS TO ABOUT A 50% LOSS, HAS THERE EVER BEEN A TIME IN THE HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY IN WHICH HALF OF THE HONEYBEE POPULATION DISAPPEARED AND WAS ABLE TO COME BACK?

Boy, not that I’m aware. We are in a precarious situation strategically for maintaining food supplies for our population. We need to have somebody at some level decide that honeybees are important. It’s like a lot of other agricultural industries in the U. S. – the Chinese have basically wiped out the American apple industry; the Brazilians have virtually wiped out the citrus juice industry; and these trends continue. Maybe this is the natural order of things.

DOSN’T IT SEEM THAT THIS WOULD BE ABSOLUTELY THE OPPOSITE OF THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS?

Yes, I would agree with you, but I’m a pragmatist and the low-cost producer gets the orders. It doesn’t make any difference where it’s produced or how it’s produced. Look at the Chinese goods that have come in over the last year and there are other scary things coming in, not only from them but other countries that don’t have quite the regulations and pesticides and chemical oversight that we do.

Genetically Modified Crops Could
Also Be Killing Honey Bees

IS THERE ANY MORE HARDER DATA LINKING THE GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS TO THE WEAKENING AND DISAPPEARANCE OF THE HONEY BEES?

Yes, that’s certainly being looked at. In fact, I read an article the other day talking about some genetically modified crops that had the BT toxin in it (genetically modified crops with built-in pesticide) and they found that with the BT toxin, there are a couple of different toxins involved, and one toxin they found was actually opening up the cell walls of insects and animals to allow this second toxin in to affect it. So, we don’t understand what we do - and places such as Monsanto.

So, we’re going down a precarious path and we don’t know everything. Unfortunately, we will make mistakes as human beings, but the repercussions as things grow and become more global and widespread is that the repercussions will be more severe and more dramatic.

SO, WHILE WE ARE PROMOTING A GM FOOD INTO THE FUTURE ON THE ONE HAND IN GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS, WE COULD BE KILLING THE VERY INSECT THAT KEEPS PLANTS ALIVE.

Yes, but there again, if the seed companies can develop plants that don’t need insect pollinators, and keep selling seed to the farmers, maybe that’s the goal.

WHAT I’M HEARING IN YOUR VOICE AND YOUR WORDS IS THAT YOU ARE FEELING AND SENSING THAT THIS IS A VERY DEPRESSING SITUATION WITH VERY LITTLE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.

Boy, is that coming through my voice? I’m sorry, but yeah, it is. I’m sure there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but I can’t tell if it is an answer, or a train coming down the track.

WHICH COMES BACK FULL CIRCLE TO THE BEEKEEPER WHO SAID TO THE BBC THIS WEEK, ‘I THINK WE’RE COMING IN FOR A BIG TRAIN WRECK.’

It’s possible. We’ll know in the future. But the take home message is: Honeybees are not healthy and we, at this moment in time, have no way to make them healthier.”

On March 29, 2007, Brent Halsall, President, Ontario
Beekeeper's Assoc., Greely, Ontario, Canada, opened his hives
and found about 40% of all his bees dead - some dried up;
others fresh as if not long dead. Image © 2007 by CBC.

ECO-TERRORISM: THERE'S NO SUCH THING

2008-03-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims

NEW YORK--The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock--more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over--are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?

Several "model houses" at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of "Quinn's Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities" at the edge of Seattle's creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.

Then I laughed. I wasn't alone. Time magazine bemoaned "a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes" among residents of Washington state.

Quinn's Crossing, says its website, was "dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first." In this case, putting Mother Earth "first" led the developers in "energy efficient" 4,500-square-feet McMansions. "The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn," reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. "The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area's Cross Valley Water District."

4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a nuclear family of four.

What galled ELF was the developers' attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as ecologically friendly. "The builders heavily promoted the 'built green' concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the 10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours," reported The Los Angeles Times.

Barnett's story asked: "Were the Terrorists Right?" She noted: "An energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large urban apartment."

Right or wrong, they're not terrorists.

The feds say they are. They call Earth Liberation Front, the loose-knit "group" that took responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly before the famous "Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday" memo, the FBI went so far as to list the ELF as a federally designated terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.

Terrorism--you can look it up--involves killing people. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property--property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place--is not.

ELF's goal of "inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment" has inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership, Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski project amounted to $12 million.

ELF members are vandals. They're arsonists. But they aren't terrorists.

ELF demands that its adherents "take all necessary precautions against harming any animal--human and non-human." Although it could happen someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society's grotesque overemphasis on the "right" of property owners to do whatever they want. The word "eco-terrorism" is an insult to the human victims of real terrorism, including those of 9/11.

The closest ELF's critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that fires send crud into the atmosphere. "This is releasing more carbon into the air than they ever would have by building the houses," the listing agent for one of the destroyed "rural cluster development" houses told The New York Times. Newsweek asked: "If their cause is to save the environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?"

Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are builders making houses out of toxins?

Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to 20 Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. "There's a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime," said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up: in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.

"Think of all the resources those fires wasted," moaned Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means--petitions, politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings--are the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the environment. "The development where this latest arson took place, situated atop the area's water supply, has been challenged by other groups, using negotiation and the law," he says approvingly. That's true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn's Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.

Challenged, yes. But not successfully.

link

Silent Spring

2008-03-02T20:49:00.000-08:00

"The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man." -- Rachel Carson

I read Rachel Carson’s book about ten years ago. A group of parents were trying to get it banned from use in an environmental science course. I thought at the time, it was one of the most ominous books I’d ever read. The arguments against using the book in the class were resurrections of the protests generated immediately after its publication in 1962, along with the added argument that Ms. Carson’s predictions never came to pass.

Birds, bats, bees, butterflies: all are in decline. Pesticide use, climate change, habitat destruction -- whatever the reason, I wonder how long before we see a Silent Spring.

Common Birds in Drastic Decline

217 U.S. Birds on New "Watch List"
25% of All U.S. Birds "Imperiled"

Butterflies disappear as habitat shrinks, temperatures rise

"The Gravest Threat to Bats Ever Seen"
White Nose Syndrome Could Quickly Lead to Extinction

Hard winter for honeybees: Local beekeepers attribute unusual loss of hives to strange disorder, many other factors

Another Pollinator Falls Victim to Climate Change - Australian Bats Dying from Heat

Czech bee population decimated by parasite

Solutions

2008-02-17T10:51:00.000-08:00

"When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of a problem, it is generally assumed that the corrective measures will solve the problem itself. They seldom do. Engineers cannot seem to get this through their heads. These countermeasures are all based on too narrow a definition of what is wrong. Human measures and countermeasures proceed from limited scientific truth and judgment. A true solution can never come about in this way." --- Masanobu Fukuoka

Climate change, peak oil, colony collapse disorder -- a lack of understanding, or we don’t want to give anything up?

Are the solutions really so complex?

Generation whY?

2008-01-06T16:53:00.000-08:00

Allright, this may be short and simple, but it's a start. Better to start small than to sit on the sidelines of the discussion.

With all of the talk of GenX and GenY, it has surprised me that nobody has picked up on the possibility of Generation whY... as in

Why did we spend the last 100 years acting as if the days of oil would last forever?
Why have we acted as if the test tube in which we live, planet Earth, has the ability to dilute our pollution indefinitely?
Why do our leaders and elders shuffle continue to ignore the fact that even if the inevitable catastrophes (environmental, economical and certainly social) will not hit until they are well on their way off this rock, they will hit their descendants?

My real aim isn't blame. That would be as pointless as finding the current world citizens responsible for US slavery, the genocide of the native American people or whatever other horrible crimes of the past you care to address.

My goal is to find a way off this slide to catastrophe. If not for everyone, at least for myself and those for whom I care the most. Some items I'm focused on currently include:

Becoming more food-independent, including use of local markets/supply and backyard gardening.
Converting our lifestyle, especially work, to be less dependent on cars. (But damn if we won't keep enjoying our travel-related hobbies... kayaking, ultimate, foreign travel, etc... -- enjoy 'em while ya can, eh?)
Building a community of family/friends upon whom we can depend, sharing the load of what will certainly include shortages that we couldn't foresee.
Shifting assets/investments into those less dependent on "global market" forces. (e.g. more local real estate, fewer Large Cap stock funds.)

What am I missing? What do you have planned when the stuff hits the fan?

Cheers,
shiv

Product Puts Beekeepers, Lawn Growers at Odds

2007-12-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

By Paul Tukey
SafeLawns.org

The onset of autumn always brings heightened advertising for grub control products for lawns. With the winter of 2007-2008 not far off, however, comes an urgent reminder from beekeepers about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which wiped out tens of thousands of hives of bees across North America last winter and spring.
That desire for a grub-free lawn has placed some homeowners and landscape contractors in direct conflict with the bee industry.
“The issue is that the primary product used to control grubs contains a chemical compound known as imidacloprid, which is most commonly marketed as Merit,” said Paul Tukey, founder and spokesman for SafeLawns.org, a national nonprofit organization. “Imidacloprid is known to be toxic to bees, and many beekeepers see a direct link to this chemical and the disappearance of bee hives. Many countries are employing the ‘precautionary principle’ and pulling imidacloprid from the shelves. In the U.S., homeowners and farms are using more and more of it, especially since many of the other products with diazinon that folks were using to kill grubs and other insects have already been banned due to their proven toxicity.”

A BEE MYSTERY SOLVED?

In addition to the production of honey, honeybees pollinate approximately one-third of the food consumed by Americans, according to a Cornell University study. Among the most common crops that require pollination by bees are apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. Numerous fruits also need bees, including, citrus, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, cantaloupe and other melons.
Colony Collapse Disorder was coined in 2006 as catch phrase for a disturbing, unexplained phenomenon that caused nearly a quarter of U.S. honeybee colonies to disappear within a few months. Though many thought the problem was limited to western North America, beekeepers across the United States, Canada and Europe also reported the problem that is posing a threat to the world’s food supply.
The cause of CCD is greatly disputed, but many have begun to focus their theories and research on imidacloprid, a recently registered nicotine-like synthetic pesticide that is commonly used in flea and tick products, as well as for termite and grub control. Other target insects include aphids, whiteflies, thrips, mealybugs and beetles. Products that contain imidacloprid include Admire, Confidor, Connect, Evidence, Leverage, Muralla, Provado, Trimax, Premise and Winne.
Though imidacloprid has been patented since 1988, its use on American crops escalated significantly in the past three years, just as Diazinon came off store shelves. In the case of bees, the imidacloprid apparently does not directly kill the colonies, but may disorient the bees and cause them to disband — at least according to beekeepers who are closely studying the issue.
“Before last November I knew very little about (imidacloprid),” said David Hackenberg, owner of Hackenberg Apiaries in Lewisburg, Pa., and past president of the American Beekeeping Association. “In the past few months I have come to know more than I want to know about this newer type of pesticide. From what I have learned so far, I am convinced that imidacloprid plays a role in CCD.”
Eric Lane agrees. The California beekeeper said he can trace the origin of Colony Collapse Disorder to 2003, the year imidacloprid was approved for use in his state. He estimates he lost 80 percent of his bees last winter and said he was not surprised, based on his prior research.
“When an adult bee goes out to forage for pollen (on plants affected by imidacloprid), by the fourth day the bee loses the ability to smell,” he said. “Young bees do their normal duties around the hive for five days. Then they go and fill up with nectar and realize they don’t know where home is. Old bees hang around the hive but eventually wander off and die. Young bees fly off and never come home.”

THE EVIDENCE GROWS

Hackenberg, Lane and many others are calling on farmers and homeowners to eliminate the use of Merit and other products containing imidacloprid, at least until someone can prove that the chemical is not the problem. Bayer AG, the aspirin and chemical manufacturer that originated the patent on imidacloprid, has reportedly paid for dozens of laboratory tests and sharply denounces any speculation that its product harms bees when it is applied according to directions. Research at Penn State and elsewhere, however, has suggested potential links to bee decline and the new pesticide.
“If bees are eating fresh or stored pollen contaminated with these chemicals at low levels, they may not cause mortality but may impact the bees’ ability to learn or make memories,” stated a Penn State report published in December 2006. “If this is the case, young bees leaving the hive to make orientation flights may not be able to learn the location of the hive and may not be returning, causing the colonies to dwindle and eventually die.”
Dr. Jerry J. Bromenshenk, a research scientist at the University of Montana is a member of the nationwide CCD working group of scientists that convened to study the phenomenon last year. Though he said he is still skeptical that imidacloprid is the entire cause of the bee decline, he has testified on behalf of beekeepers who have lost hives due to imidacloprid exposure.
“The problem is that imidacloprid and similar chemicals were supposed to have been used in controlled, specific situations,” he said. “Now we have people drenching it into the soil and applying in by air as a foliar application. In those situations, absolutely, you’re laying yourself open for a bee poisoning event.”
In a report published in June by the Congressional Research Service, imidacloprid was named as a likely cause of the bees’ demise.
“The scientists studying CCD note that the doses taken up by bees are not lethal, but they are concerned about possible chronic problems caused by long-term exposure,” according to the CRS report. As noted by the National Research Council, some studies report sublethal effects of pesticides that may impair the navigational and foraging abilities of honeybees.
Lawmakers in France and several other European countries have long restricted certain applications of imidacloprid based on evidence that the product harms bees. In Canada, the Sierra Club has taken a particularly strong stand against imidacloprid’s impact on species other than bees. “It has been shown to cause acute health effects, including spasms and thyroid lesions,” the Sierra Club stated. “No chronic toxicity tests have been made available to the public, but we do know that it has effects on mammalian reproduction. The reproductive health of birds is also affected, with reduced egg production and egg thinning. It affects a multitude of beneficial insects, as well as earthworms.”
According to registration papers filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, imidacloprid is moderately toxic to humans, and manufacturers are required to place a “Caution” or “Warning” designation on product labels. The EPA further classifies imidacloprid as highly toxic to bees and upland game birds.

AVOIDANCE MAY BE BEST OPTION

Given all of this information, many American farmers aren’t willing to take any chances and are forsaking all products containing imidacloprid.
“Pollination is so important to us, we agreed not to use these new materials,” said Darren Hammond, farm manager for Jasper Wyman & Sons of Maine, the nation’s largest producer of wild blueberries. “Our primary competitor and all of our outside growers have also agreed not to use these products. We’re not saying there’s definitely a link between bees and imidacloprid; that’s for the researchers to decide. We’re just not willing to take the risk.”
That also leaves many homeowners in a quandary this fall, just as many companies begin advertising promotions for grub control products such as Merit. Grubs, which are the larvae of flying and chewing insects including Japanese beetles and European chafers, cause lawn damage by eating grass roots. Skunks and moles also can make a mess of a lawn when they tunnel and claw in search of the grubs as a food source.
To combat grub infestations, Tukey suggests other approaches that don’t involve chemicals, including the use of naturally occurring beneficial nematodes, which are nontoxic, as well as organic soil management.
“In acute cases, application of the nematodes may be necessary to control many species of grubs in the lawn,” Tukey said. “The fact is, though, that lawns grown with organic methods are going to be far more resilient to grub damage. Naturally occurring soil organisms will most often keep grub populations in check as long as those organisms are not killed off by chemical fertilizers and pesticides.”
The issue of imidacloprid and bees, according to Tukey, is yet another reason why homeowners should always be careful when considering chemicals in their lawn care and landscaping.
“Time and time again these chemical products have proven to be questionable for either our health, our pets’ health or the environment in general,” said Tukey, author of The Organic Lawn Care Manual. “At SafeLawns.org, we’re committed to promoting organic alternatives that don’t present these same risks.”
Chemicals, nearly all chemicals, pose risks if used improperly; some are problems no matter what.
“For generations, every time a new classification of chemicals is introduced to the public, it comes with unexpected consequences,” said Dr. Bromenshenk. “In the case of imidacloprid, the recent widespread use is a major concern and I don’t think the warning labels go far enough to protect the American public.”
For the beekeeping brethren, no further warning is necessary.
“The last three years, people have just been pouring this chemical on crops and grass,” said Hackenburg, among the first American beekeepers to discover CCD in 2006. “Imidacloprid is approved for everything. All I’m saying is, you go buy this stuff at Wal-Mart to use on aphids or grubs or whatnot, and the little insert from the chemical company says straight out that it, one, makes bugs quit eating, and two, induces memory loss and confusion. Then, three, it gives them a nervous system disorder. And that’s exactly what’s happening to bees. I know many of the scientists refuse to go out on a limb and state emphatically that there’s a link here, but what about common sense? But then I’m just a dumb beekeeper who’s been beekeeping for 45 years. What do I know?”

http://www.safelawns.org/articles/Product_Puts_Beekeepers_Lawn_Growers_at_Odds.php

Safelawns.org is a national non-profit group whose mission is to create a broad based coalition of non and for-profit organizations committed to educating society about the benefits of organic lawn care and gardening, and effect a quantum change in consumer and industry behavior.
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Additional Notes and links regarding CCD and Imidacloprid::

According to the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS):

Case studies and questionnaires related to management practices and environmental factors have identified a few common factors shared by those beekeepers experiencing CCD, but no common environmental agents or chemicals stand out as causative. There are three major possibilities that are being looked into by researchers.

Pesticides may be having unexpected negative effects on honey bees.

A new parasite or pathogen may be attacking honey bees. One possible candidate being looked at is a pathogenic gut microbe called Nosema. Viruses are also suspected.

A perfect storm of existing stresses may have unexpectedly weakened colonies leading to collapse. Stress, in general, compromises the immune system of bees (and other social insects) and may disrupt their social system, making colonies more susceptible to disease.

These stresses could include high levels of infection by the varroa mite (a parasite that feeds on bee blood and transmits bee viruses); poor nutrition due to apiary overcrowding, pollination of crops with low nutritional value, or pollen or nectar scarcity; and exposure to limited or contaminated water supplies. Migratory stress brought about by increased needs for pollination might also be a contributing factor.

What can I as a member of the public do to help honey bees?

While not banning the neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, until research is complete, the USDA (ARS) gives this advice:

The best action you can take to benefit honey bees is to not use pesticides indiscriminately, especially not to use pesticides at mid-day when honey bees are most likely to be out foraging for nectar.

In addition, you can plant and encourage the planting of good nectar sources such as red clover, foxglove, bee balm, and joe-pye weed. For more information, see www.nappc.org

http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572

Link to fact sheet on imidacloprid: http://www.beekeeping.com/intoxications/imidacloprid.pdf

Imported Bees Not Source of Virus Associated with Colony Collapse Disorder

2007-12-17T19:22:00.000-08:00

By Kim Kaplan
November 19, 2007

BELTSVILLE, Md., Nov. 19—Scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have found that the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), a virus recently shown to be associated with Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) of honey bees, has been in the United States since at least 2002, according to a note published in the American Bee Journal.

Research entomologists Yanping (Judy) Chen and Jay D. Evans, both with the ARS Bee Research Laboratory here, conducted a detailed genetic screening of several hundred honey bees that had been collected between 2002 and 2007 from colonies in Maryland, Pennsylvania, California and Israel.

"Our study shows that, without question, IAPV has been in this country since at least 2002," said Chen. "This work challenges the idea that IAPV is a recent introduction from Australia."

Evans added, "Our study in no way rules IAPV out as a factor in CCD. We have always believed that CCD is a complex issue likely involving multiple elements. Research by several groups will now focus on understanding differences in virulence across strains of IAPV and on interactions with other stress factors."

IAPV showed a high degree of genetic diversity in the U.S., with distinct lineages in California, Maryland and Pennsylvania. The virus was found to be substantially different from the well-studied Kashmir Bee Virus.

IAPV, first described in Israel in 2002, came to national and international attention in September when university and ARS scientists showed a strong association between the presence of IAPV and CCD.

That first study also found IAPV in honey bees from Australia that had been imported into the United States, as well as in royal jelly imported from China. Australian bees began to be imported from Australia into the United States in 2005. Questions were raised about a connection between those imported bees and the appearance of IAPV in the United States. Beekeepers have sought out Australian imports of bees to replenish their hive populations.

ARS has begun several experiments to determine what factors may be most involved in CCD. Combinations of four areas are being examined: pathogens, parasites, environmental stresses, and bee management stresses such as poor nutrition.

CCD became a matter of concern in the winter of 2006-2007 when some beekeepers began reporting losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives. While colony losses are not unexpected during winter weather, the magnitude and rapidity of loss suffered by some beekeepers was highly unusual.

The defining trait of CCD is a low number of adult honey bees present with few signs of dead honey bees in the hive. Often there is still honey in the hive and immature bees (brood) are present, indicating recent brood rearing.

Pollination is a critical element in agriculture, since honey bees pollinate more than 130 crops in the United States and add $15 billion in crop value annually. There were enough honey bees to provide pollination for U.S. agriculture this year, but beekeepers could face a serious problem next year and beyond if CCD becomes more widespread and no treatment is developed.

More information about CCD can be found at www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/.

Alternative Energy And The Pollyanna Principle

2007-12-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

By Peter Goodchild
05 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org

The problem of explaining "peak oil" does not hinge on the issue of peak oil as such, but rather on that of "alternative energy." Most people now have some idea of the concept of peak oil, but it tends to be brushed aside in conversation because of the common incantation: "It doesn’t matter if oil runs out, because by then everything will be converted to [whatever] power." Humanity’s faith in what might be called the Pollyanna Principle — everything will work out right in the end — is eternal.

The critical missing information in such a dialogue, of course, is that "alternative energy" will do little to solve the peak-oil problem, although very few people are aware of the fact. The situation might be illustrated by a representative conversation I myself had a few months ago; the discourse might also illustrate the extent to which we are preparing the next generation for the coming decades:

P: There won’t be much gasoline left in a few years from now. Did your mother ever tell you that?

A (age 14): No, but I pretty well figured it out by myself. I guess we’ll be running cars with vegetable oil.

The Pollyanna Principle, after all, is what gets us through the day. Unfortunately, a quick glance through any standard textbook on world history would show that the principle does not apply to the many civilizations that lie buried beneath the sand. But to point at oil-production charts is to mistake a psychological problem for an engineering one: most people do not like to be pushed very far in the direction of the logical.

The main stumbling block, as noted above, is not the fact of the decline in world oil production, but the related fact of the impracticality of alternative energy. Alternative sources of energy do, of course, have certain uses, and they always have had, especially in pre-industrial societies. However, it is not possible to use non-hydrocarbon sources of energy to produce the required annual 400 to 500 quadrillion BTUs, and in a form that can be (1) stored conveniently, (2) pumped into cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes for the purpose of long-distance transportation of goods and people, (3) converted into a thousand everyday products, from asphalt to pharmaceuticals, and (4) used to run factories (which are places for machines that make machines [that make machines etc.]) — and which costs so little that it can be purchased in large quantities on a daily basis by billions of people.

There is also the question of time. The entire conversion of world industry would have to be done virtually overnight. The peak of world oil production was perhaps 2006. The more important date of peak oil production per capita was 1990. There are approximately 1 billion automobiles, and nearly 7 billion people. Throughout the 20th century, food production only barely met global needs, and in the last few years it has not even reached that level. In terms of the amount of time available, the switch from hydrocarbon energy to an alternative form of energy would stretch the bounds of even the most fanciful work of science fiction.

Contemplating the expense will also take us far into the realms of fantasy. At $10,000 per vehicle, replacing the vehicles that are now on the road would cost $10 trillion. The infrastructure — the ongoing manufacture, transportation, maintenance, and repair — would add much greater expense. The existing furnaces and air conditioning in all the world’s buildings would be obsolete. Every machine on the planet would have to be replaced, every factory redesigned. We would have to replace the asphalt on all the world’s motorways by a non-hydrocarbon substance. The money and resources simply do not exist.

It is already too late; the system has been collapsing for years. The concept of retrofitting an entire planet must have the Pharaohs (who built only pyramids) chuckling in their graves. It is perhaps fortunate that there is no politician or business leader who would be willing to initiate such a mad venture.

In actuality, the world of the future will not be crowded. Survival for a few will be possible; survival for a population of billions will not be possible. But very few people have asked the ugly question of exactly how that rapid and dramatic reduction of population is going to take place. Voluntarily?

There are two further problems with trying to educate people on these matters. The first is that any discussion of both peak oil or alternative energy requires a scientific frame of mind: an understanding of empirical research and an ability to follow statistics without being misled. A grasp of basic science is essential in order to get a balanced perspective on the data, and in order to judge between the practical and the impractical.

The second of these further problems is that the concepts of peak oil and alternative energy are extremely complicated. Although it is possible to reduce those two topics to an "ABC" form of 500 words or so, the problem with such a single-page explanation is that much of the vital information would be left out. If the document failed to mention every "and / but / or," the message would almost certainly be lost. If, on the other hand, the document were to be expanded to about 5,000 words, the writer probably lose track of the reader, since the text might exceed the latter’s attention span.

For those who are willing to make an effort to unravel the information, however, there are certainly several documents on alternative energy worth a close look. One of the best of the book-length documents is still John Gever et al., "Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 3rd ed., 1991). A few useful hyperlinks are:
Jay Hanson, "Energetic Limits to Growth"
Walter Youngquist, "Alternative Energy Sources"
Kevin Capp, "The End of Las Vegas"

The "alternative energy" problem can also be illuminated by an examination of similar dialogues on other topics, especially in cases where science clashes with its opposite. A discussion about astrology, for example, might entail hours of exhausting dialogue, to be terminated when the pro-astrology party raises his head, takes a deep breath, and says, "Well, I believe. . . ." A barrier has been reached, beyond which no travel is possible. When communication is in such a poor state, there is often little hope that a reader will go so far as to check citations, bibliographies, or "Further Reading," or even to do something requiring as little labor as clicking on a hyperlink on a Web page. But then the problem of being a teacher is that there is no such thing as retirement.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. He can be reached at petergoodchild@interhop.net.

Israeli Virus Linked to Devastating Bee Disease

2007-12-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

Honeybee on a peach blossom. Bees are essential for pollination of 90 fruit and vegetable crops worldwide. (Photo by Z. Huang courtesy Michigan State University)

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pennsylvania, September 7, 2007 (ENS) - Scientists are homing in on a possible cause of the new bee disease known as colony collapse disorder, linking it with a virus from Israel that may have arrived in the United States via shipments of live bees from Australia.

Since it was first reported in 2004, colony collapse disorder, CCD, has affected 23 percent of the commercial bee colonies in the United States, causing losses of from 50 to 90 percent of the bees in each colony.

A team of entomologists and infectious disease researchers are reporting a "strong correlation" between the colony collapse disorder and a virus, the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, IVAP, identified just three years ago.

This is the first report of IAPV in the United States, the scientists said, adding that this virus is transmitted by the varroa mite, found in many U.S. hives.

But the scientists are serving up the results of their study with a dose of caution.

"We have not proven a causal relationship between any infectious agent and CCD," they wrote in Thursday's issue of "Science Express" online.

They did find that the prevalence of IAPV genetic material in bees suffering from colony collapse disorder, the timing of the outbreaks and the geographical circumstances "indicate that IAPV is a significant marker for CCD."
On the hunt for the cause of colony collapse disorder, the researchers decided to sequence the genetic material in bees to try to find a potential pathogen…

more at link

The Tree Thing

2007-11-30T13:32:00.000-08:00

We don’t have a tree. That’s because last year we had kittens. On Thanksgiving Day weekend last year (the “year of the kittens”), I pulled out our fake tree (pre-lit no less), set it up, and trimmed it. The kittens figured it was a plaything created especially for them. At first they batted the balls hanging low. We’d pick them up off the floor and hang them back on the tree. Gary called me at work, “the kittens figured out how to climb the tree,” he informed me. “They’ve been climbing out on the branches and smacking the ornaments off the tree, then they jump down and bat them around the floor.”

When I got home, I headed to the tree. Branches were bent at unnatural angles, ornaments were scattered about the floor. I looked over at Gary. He gives me this defensive look. “I tried. It was useless.”

The routine of coming home and putting the tree back together lasted one more day, then I said to hell with it. About a week later a kitten snagged its foot in the light cord wrapped around one of the branches. Gary had to cut the cord to free the cat. – wish I’d been there to watch the show. So much for pre-lit. I tossed the tree after Christmas.

The first year we were married, Bruce and Gloria (Gary’s parents), drove up to the national forest land where you could cut your own Christmas tree. They cut one for us too. We were quite grateful for their thoughtfulness; I watched with great anticipation as Gary hauled the tree into the house. Gloria came after with some old ornaments she’d culled from her collection. The tree looked a little sparse, and it was small, but what matter -- It was our very first Christmas tree. We spent the good part of an hour trying to put it in the stand so that it stood straight. No matter what we did it was crooked. Gary finally said he was “fuckin’ finished.” Okay, I thought, so it’s not exactly straight, it’ll look alright once we get the ornaments on and then we’ll shove it in the corner in such a way as to disguise the fact that it’s in the damn stand crooked. The ornaments didn’t do much to fill in the gaps. When we tried to find the straight angle we discovered that the tree was so twisted that it didn’t’ matter what “angle” it was sitting at it was going to look crooked (because it was). We named it our Charlie Brown tree (went with the house which is a story in and of itself). The next year we went up to the mountain and cut our own tree.

I had this Currier and Ives image of going to the forest to get our tree. Wrong. In order to go to the woods you have to drive up steep, twisty-turny, gravel logging roads. I was sure we’d end up going over the bank, never to be found again. Gary was in his element --I think he went farther than we really needed to go. He just had to show me the spectacular view of some mountain – maybe he figured as soon as I saw the view I’d forget just how close we were to the edge of the road. Heck, for all I know we could’ve been poaching the tree. I had not a clue where in heaven’s name we were. Once you’ve found a tree the right size and shape that isn’t crooked (no easy task) you’ve got to cut it down and haul it back to the car. Hopefully, the car isn’t too far away. The ride down the mountain is only better in that you know you are heading for safe ground. The price of gas was my rationale why that wasn’t a good idea for future years.

Our landlord gave us a tree every year when we lived on Everson-Goshen Rd. He had a little Christmas tree lot that he maintained himself. The branches wrapped around and around the tree. You could hang two ornaments on one branch and they’d be on opposite sides of the tree. We lived there ten years, every single Christmas tree we had was like that, almost as if it had been in a perpetual whirlwind.

When we moved to Acme, I bought a fake tree, on the premise that it’d save us money. Brenda hated it; she wanted a real tree. Tough. It might’ve been cheaper, but having a fake tree isn’t any less hassle than a real tree. You’ve got to put it together, and shape the branches so they look kind of real. Then after the holiday you’ve got to disassemble it and straighten out the branches so they’ll fit into the box.

From a purely ecological standpoint, I’d say that a live tree is the only responsible choice. That’s assuming that after Christmas you manage to plant the thing -- and it lives. I wonder how many live trees ever see another Christmas?

For years I dreamed of having a “designer” tree after the kids were grown – something that looks like a professional put it together. My brother Pat and his partner Greg have such a tree, but then their entire house looks like it came out of House Beautiful. Every year they decorate for Christmas, and then host an open house with a wonderful spread of food and drink. I’ve given up on the idea of a perfect tree. I lost the inclination once I had the opportunity to make it a reality.

A few years ago my mother said she didn’t feel like having a tree. No tree? -- We all thought she was depressed. Someone (not me) bought her a tree and decorated her place. I don’t know if that same person cleaned up the decorations after Christmas or if that chore was left to someone else. I suspect the latter.

So what to do about a tree? Somehow I just can’t get motivated, especially considering the work involved. First you have to find a spot to put it. – Where the hell are those furniture movers when you need them? Then you have to set up the tree. If it’s real you have to go get it then haul it in the house, then put it in the tree stand (a project in and of itself). Digging out all those ornaments from the attic, garage, or wherever is next. At my house the ornaments are behind and/or under a bunch of other junk. I guess that’s as good a reason as any to simplify. Trimming the tree is supposed to be the fun part. My family lets me have all the fun. Just think of the fun after Christmas taking down the ornaments, packing them up (I always seem to have ornaments still floating around in July), taking down the tree, cleaning up and rearranging the furniture. I’ve got to ask myself, why the hell go through the hassle?

I keep thinking of all those millions of trees, and all that plastic tree like junk and wonder at the impact if we all just gave up one of the most inane of traditions. – And then wonder how much of my thought process is really just tinged with my own growing aversion to participating in that very tradition.

This year I think I’ll go “green” and forego the tree. That ought to fit in nicely with my plan to boycott corporate retail outlets (which worked swimmingly last year). So what if my ulterior motive is that I’m lazy and cheap?

The Algae Solution: maybe this would be a good investment?

2007-11-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

Guido Radaelli's rented house in the Berkeley Hills commands sweeping vistas of the San Francisco Bay. But the sparse furnishings inside hint at his status as a recent grad student. Last year, Radaelli made a peculiar addition to the décor. In a loft overlooking the living room, he installed four large fish tanks filled with a pale green liquid. Since then, Radaelli has tended to the tanks like a sick child, taking samples and checking temperature and pH levels several times a day.

"It's a challenging relationship," admits Radaelli. But, he hopes, a lucrative one as well.

The tanks contain modified algae strains which Radaelli claims could offer a solution to America's, and the world's, fossil fuel crisis. That's because the unicellular green goo produces up to half its weight in oil. Harvesting that oil has been the dream of alternative energy researchers for decades.

The make-shift laboratory is the brainchild of Radaelli and two grad school friends who founded Aurora Biofuels in 2006. Aurora CEO Matt Caspari has an M.B.A., chief scientist Burt Vick earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and Radaelli studied petroleum engineering in his native Italy and business at Berkeley.

Aurora is one of dozens of start-up companies rushing into northern California's booming clean-tech sector. Ten years ago, ambitious innovators like the Aurora guys were getting rich in the Internet or biotech sectors. But today, with oil prices soaring and global warming a looming reality, alternative energy is all the rage. And the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are at the epicenter of this new investors' frenzy. It's a green rush.

Aurora chief scientist Burt Vick and Noventi partner James Horn. Photo by Michael Montgomery
"Our business is about making money," says James Horn, a partner in the Silicon Valley venture firm Noventi, which is investing heavily in so-called clean tech. "And one of the drivers that we saw in Silicon Valley was that there was this migration of engineering talent and entrepreneurial talent moving into the clean tech space. California as a state has always been a leader in technology innovation. It's just that we're applying our skills and our talent in new areas."

Alternative energy, which is just one part of the clean tech sector, has seen a flood of new investors like Horn. Globally, more than $70 billion went into renewable energy in 2006, according to the United Nations.

"The energy business ... is a $6 trillion market," says Horn. "It is such a vast market that there really is sufficient potential to justify the investments that are going into the market right now. And again, we are very early on in this process."

What are BioFuels?

The two most common types of biofuels are ethanol and biodiesel. Ethanol is an alcohol, the same as in beer and wine (although ethanol used as a fuel is modified to make it undrinkable). It is made by fermenting any biomass high in carbohydrates through a process similar to beer brewing.

Today, ethanol is made from starches and sugars, but scientists are developing technology to allow it to be made from cellulose and hemicellulose, the fibrous material that makes up the bulk of most plant matter. Ethanol is mostly used as a blending agent with gasoline to increase octane and cut down carbon monoxide and other smog-causing emissions.

Biodiesel is made by combining alcohol (usually methanol) with vegetable oil, animal fat, or recycled cooking grease. It can be used as an additive (typically 20 percent) to reduce vehicle emissions or in its pure form as a renewable alternative fuel for diesel engines.
Helping fuel the world with humble algae oil is not as farfetched as it may sound. Some 100 years ago, Rudolf Diesel designed his first engines to run on peanut oil (as well as coal dust). Today, bio-fuels made from soy and corn are a booming business. But there's growing concern that tapping food stocks as a source for renewable energy could backfire. Corn and soy use valuable farmland and freshwater. Increasing demand for ethanol is driving up the price of corn. This in turn raises food prices.

However, algae doesn't need soil and thrives in wastewater. All it needs to grow are sunlight and carbon dioxide. Algal oil can be harvested and converted into bio-diesel; the algae's carbohydrate content can be fermented into ethanol. Both are much cleaner-burning fuels than conventional diesel or gasoline. What's more, bio-fuels derived from plants like algae are considered "carbon neutral." While burning fossil fuels releases CO2 that was trapped underground for millennia, the CO2 released from burning bio-fuels was just pulled out of the air as the plants grew. So, according to proponents, bio-fuels are simply recycling the same gases over and over.

That's not all. Aurora claims to have developed and patented (together with Berkeley plant biologist Anastasios Melis) a technology that dramatically boosts algae's photosynthetic power to 100 times that of soy and other crops. It's a very profitable calculation considering the amount of diesel burned in America's transportation sector.

"We consume 60 billion gallons of diesel fuel every year," says Aurora CEO Matt Caspari. "So if our technology does what we are claiming it can do, it's a major opportunity and it's attractive for venture capital investors."

But it's not just the lure of profits that pulled the Aurora team into alternative energy.

"This is the type of business that has a double bottom line," says Burt Vick. "Not only [is it] very healthy from a financial standpoint, but also from a social and environmental point of view as well."

A key ingredient for any successful startup is attracting the right investors. But in a booming market, competition for investment dollars is fierce.

"The odds aren't with you to get venture financing," Matt Caspari tells us. "Once you get venture financing, the odds aren't with you that it will be at all successful. And even the successful ones, you hear the company's sold for $100 million. Well, how much do the entrepreneurs really own?"

To get ahead of the competition, and get Aurora's name in lights, the company entered one of the world's premier business plan competitions, the Intel/Berkeley Challenge. The annual Intel Challenge, as most people call it, is a bracing three-day competition that pits young companies from America against teams from around the globe.

In recent years, clean tech proposals have dominated top business plan competitions. On the first day of the Intel Challenge, Matt Caspari mulls over Aurora's prospects as he surveys teams from Russia and China.

"A lot of people who have done well in their careers are saying, 'What do I want to do next?'" he says. "They see energy in the news and they don't like the reliance on fossil fuels in the Middle East; they don't like high prices; they don't like the environmental impacts. So, a lot of people with political clout and capital are trying to solve this problem. Fortunately for us and the other entrepreneurs here, they're looking to some of the top universities around the world to try to find people who are willing to do the hard work day in and day out to make it happen."

Marianne Wu, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures and a judge at the Intel/Berkeley Challenge.
Photo: Bruce Cook/Lester Center
A major attraction of business plan competitions is hob-nobbing with the judges. At the Intel Challenge, many judges are investors from Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms who pick the winners and scout out possible deals. One of the judges at this year's competition is Marianne Wu, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures. Wu has already been talking about a deal with Aurora.

"The area that they're focused on, which is algae as a feed stock for bio-fuel, is one that we have great interest in," Wu says. "Energy is the fundamental driver behind daily activity, behind industrial growth, behind our commercial infrastructure."

At the competition, teams make short pitches and are grilled by judges in small, wood-paneled meeting rooms. On day two, Aurora passes into the semi-finals where the team makes the pitch before four judges, including Marianne Wu.

Guido Radaelli opens in gravely accented English. "We are Aurora BioFuels. And we are doing something magic. We are turning wastewater into bio-diesel using our proprietary super-algae."

Company CEO Caspari sketches out the big picture.

"We're all aware of extremely high oil prices, geopolitical issues that are tied in with our dependence on fossil fuels that has resulted in subsidies and mandates on the federal and state level," he says. "Adding to that environmental concerns and it's really a perfect environment for alternative energy and bio diesel. The market itself is new and rapidly expanding. We had a production of 20 million gallons of bio-diesel in 2004. Last year, production was 75 million gallons."

But, he adds, "The problem with bio-diesel today is that it mostly comes from agricultural crops. Agricultural crops are expensive. They have better uses than being burned for fuel. Our method allows us to produce vast quantities of bio-fuel cheaply."

Aurora asked us not to reveal proprietary information discussed in private meetings with judges, but in an earlier public gathering at Berkeley, the Aurora team gave clues about their business plan.

"The heart of this business, we call it our secret sauce, is our biotechnology," Caspari told the audience. He explained that the "secret sauce" was derived from a strain of algae "whose bio-yields are three times higher than what occur naturally."

Back at the competition, Aurora's pitch ends smoothly. The judges give the team a round of applause. In the halls of Berkeley's Haas School of Business, home to the Intel Challenge, Aurora is generating buzz. Dan Lankford, a judge and partner at Wavepoint Ventures, tells us bio-fuel companies like Aurora could offer consumers, businesses and municipalities a simple way to reduce carbon emissions.

"There's no question," says Lankford, "that from a venture capital standpoint, the whole issue of global warming and [reducing] carbon emissions has become a very interesting space. This is real business, real money, with very draconian consequences for people who don't meet the standards."

Lankford tells us he's impressed with Aurora's business plan.

"In order to have any value at all, you have to have a big enough market," he says. "So you have to solve a need. You have to address, as we often say, somebody's pain. You have to make the pain go away. Two of the biggest problems we're trying to solve in society today, one is energy, the other's environmental. Aurora addresses both."

At the evening awards ceremony, each team gives a one-minute "elevator pitch," a rapid-fire monologue set in an imaginary elevator ride with an investor. When the first-place winner is announced, Aurora Biofuels name flashes across a large screen. Matt Caspari and his partners stroll to the stage in fashionable black suits to collect the $25,000 winning check.

Investors, including Noventi's James Horn, take notice of Aurora's success at Berkeley.

"Winning the competition clearly means a lot about the viability of their idea. So it kind of started the ball rolling for us," he says. Soon after, Horn's firm Noventi agrees to fund Aurora.
The idea of getting fuel from aquatic plants has existed for decades. But it seems to take an emergency to push America away from petroleum. A generation ago, the United States was facing another energy crisis brought on by the OPEC oil embargo. Oil prices quadrupled. The federal government sought to counter the OPEC cartel and solve wrenching energy shortages. The most ambitious effort to tackle the crisis was announced by Jimmy Carter in 1979.

"The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation," Carter said in a major televised address.

Carter outlined plans to cut oil imports and boost domestic production and energy conservation. He also charted a third path. Today we call it "green energy."

"To give us energy security," Carter said, "I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel."

President Carter invested millions in new government research centers like NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. As part of NREL's Aquatic Species Program, researchers spent 20 years studying micro-organisms like algae. They were startled by algae's capacity to produce oil.

Al Darzins, a senior manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
"It's amazing," says Al Darzins, a senior manager at NREL.

Given the right conditions, Darzins says algae could double its volume overnight. And unlike other sources, such as soy or corn, algae can be harvested day after day.

"If you could actually generate an algae strain that produces lots of oil, you could use this oil for a variety of bio-fuels," Darzins says. Including "fuel for ships and trains, jet fuel and even green gasoline."

"There is no other resource that comes even close in magnitude to the potential for making oil," says John Sheehan, an NREL energy analyst who worked in the aquatic species program. One of algae's great strengths, Sheehan recently told the journal Popular Mechanics, is its ability to grow robustly in brackish water. NREL's research initially focused on identifying natural algal strains that were then tested in outdoor pools in New Mexico, where much of the groundwater is saline and unsuitable for other forms of agriculture.

The government's alternative energy initiative was strong while oil prices stayed high. But in the early 1990s, the cost of crude oil plunged. So did interest in alternative fuels that were not cost-effective against petroleum. In 1996 the Department of Energy shut down the aquatic species program.

But just before work stopped, NREL researchers made an important breakthrough. Using new techniques, the scientists discovered it might be possible to boost algae's capacity to produce oil through genetic engineering. While NREL didn't actually produce oil from these strains, the work provided a road map for others to follow.

"Before then, people really had not been able to do any genetic transformation, that is the introduction of new genetic material into these organisms," Al Darzins says. "NREL at the time found methods of getting foreign genes into some of the strains they were working with. That serves as the basis for what a lot of people are going to be doing in the future."

Today, NREL is hoping to create new algae strains through genetic engineering, as part of an ambitious collaboration with private companies. Aurora's Matt Caspari will be watching closely. A lot of his company's work is based on the government's pioneering research.

The Heat of Competition

Flush with investment funding, Aurora moves its team and fish tanks into spacious, glass-enclosed offices in an industrial park perched on the east side of the San Francisco Bay.

But as the company prepares to hire more staff and step up operations, competition moves in on its home turf. A number of other small California start-ups announce plans to gear up algae-to-bio-fuel programs. Then oil giant British Petroleum announces it will invest $500 million in an alternative energy research center on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Elsewhere, Boeing, Virgin Atlantic and the Department of Defense also say they are studying ways to produce fuel from algae and other plants. It was daunting competition for three guys and their fish tanks.

As he reviews his company's successful launch, Matt Caspari spies storm clouds on the horizon.

"I'm not just worried about little start-ups," he tells us. "I'm worried about big companies too, because they can pour potentially as much or more money into an idea and put a lot of smart people to work on it. And the one advantage you have over a big company as a small entrepreneurial start-up is you can move really fast and make decisions really quickly. So, I feel a huge pressure to get results."

Aurora's chief investor James Horn says results may not be around the corner, but that's part of the adventure for early-stage venture capital firms.

"Aurora was a very raw company at the first conversation," he says. "It was effectively three guys with a plan on how to create a new energy supply for a growing world. But it was not a stretch to think that we could adapt algae to produce bio-diesel. So we made the investment. And it may take longer than we expect, but we're risk-takers by nature and we believe there is a chance to be successful here."

How do investors measure success in clean tech? It's clearly about making a profit. But for James Horn, saving the world from global warming is a welcome benefit.

"Using algae is effectively carbon neutral, it's not competing for food stocks, it's not competing for scarce water," Horn says. "In many ways, it is kind of the ultimate solution for powering our cars. You know, 18 months ago, I never thought I would be investing in an algae company."

Horn tells us Aurora's success depends on its secret, oil-boosting technology developed at Berkeley. Government scientist Al Darzins cautions that Aurora's claims seem impressive, at least on paper.

"But have they actually proven that?" he asks. "I suspect it's theoretical at this point and maybe [based on] some small-scale lab stuff that they've done and they extrapolate. But let's take that organism out of the lab and let's see what it does in the environment."

Scaling up lab experiments in large, outdoor settings is the biggest challenge facing Aurora and many other alternative energy pioneers.

"You're talking about hundreds or thousands of acres of algae growth," says CEO Matt Caspari. "So it's money and time to scale that up."

"They are trying to do something on a very large scale which hasn't been done before," says James Horn. "There are a number of hurdles that we haven't even addressed yet and that we won't be able to address until we can actually test it."

With more hurdles ahead, scientists are projecting it may take five years or more before fuel derived from algae is widely available. But one company in New Zealand is already marketing a new diesel blend. Five percent is from refined algae oil.

Alternative energy - whether from solar, wind or even algae - is no longer a tale of science fiction or distant dreams. That's obvious. Just look at the billions of dollars flowing into the market to back new, earth-friendly products such as green credits cards and bio-fuels. Investors insist intense competition in this green marketplace is no passing fad.

"Energy is the number one driver in the world," says James Horn. "And if we can migrate to alternative energy supplies, it can be an enormous industry both in California and worldwide."

Marianne Wu says, "It's a much more fundamental change that we're going through. So, it's not some little blip that it's hot today and tomorrow it's going to be some next hot thing."

The marketplace can deliver wealth of course, but it's hardly been eco-friendly up to now. More than 150 years ago, the California gold rush produced riches for some people, but environmental devastation and hardships for many others. And the gold rush wound down in just a few years. It will be up to contemporary consumers and eco-entrepreneurs and their shareholders to see that today's green rush evolves from an economic frenzy to a fundamental planet-saving change.
link

Peak tech?

2007-11-04T21:25:00.000-08:00

by James Howard Kunstler
Published on 23 Jul 2007

energy bulletin

Go anywhere in America, among any class of people -- from the Nascar morons to the Ivy League -- and one expectation is pretty universal: that technology will only bring us more wonders and miracles, and it will certainly save-the-day where our energy problems are concerned. This would seem natural for people living in an age when a simple cassette SONY Walkman is superceded by an 80-gigabyte iPod in one generation. But what if this assumption is off? What if peak technology occurs roughly in the same wave as peak energy?

Of course, another nearly universal expectation is that we will go through an orderly transition between the end of the oil fiesta and whatever comes next -- implying, naturally, that some new sovereign energy resource is out there in destiny's green room, getting prepped up, waiting to be sent on-stage. The confusion about this, induced by strenuous wishing, is such that most people expect the next energy resource to consist of technology itself.

This has been the heart of my beef with the rosy future crowd. Energy and technology are not the same thing, not interchangeable or substitutable. If you run out of one (energy), you can't just plug in the other (technology). I certainly believe other energy resources exist besides oil and methane gas, but I maintain that we will be grossly disappointed by what they can do for us, given what we are currently running in society. Nor am I categorically against the idea of using these other things: solar, wind, bio-fuels, what-have-you. I can even be persuaded on nuclear with its many hazards, if that's the only way to keep the lights on. But all of these things will not preclude the extreme necessity to make severe changes in our manner of daily living -- and to do so rather quickly.

Far from evolving triumphantly to yet-higher realms of technological nirvana, I'd expect a raw struggle to preserve much of the knowledge and applied technique that has already been acquired. I do happen to believe that the petroleum twilight will bring quite a bit of disorder to our society, which almost certainly means that the institutional context for research and development will suffer. Most particularly, I doubt that the big universities will be able to carry on in an energy-and-capital-starved future. Exactly how they might disintegrate is an open question. Last year, for example, I was shown the new bio-medical research "facility" at the University of Michigan, a building at least the size of a Cunard ocean liner, and wondered as I beheld it exactly how they were going to heat the goddam thing ten years down the line. But one might as well ask how the U might fund the paychecks of the building's occupants as Michigan's economy falls into an ever-larger crater. Such is the hubris-induced weakness of mind among those in charge of things that these mundane questions are not even asked.

The same pretty much goes for the big corporations. Their world is going to change pretty rudely, too. Far from expecting them to take over our lives even more comprehensively than is the current case, I expect them to wobble, fall to their knees, and expire as the tonic of globalism vanishes down the drain of economic history. Just as most people expect technology to save-the-day for energy, the same people expect the world to keep becoming an ever-smaller place of more intricately co-wired parts. Not me. I expect the world to become a larger place. I expect the wiring to unravel in a contest over the world's remaining oil. I expect that the nations of the world will eventually retreat back into their own continental regions (while that retreat may be violent and messy). I expect our energy problems to limit any organization's ability to project power and influence -- whether it is a government or a corporation. I expect that anything now running at the giant scale will either have to downsize real fast or go out of business.

Few of the rosy futurists foresee anything but ever-greater peaks of affluence among an ever-larger pool of players. I think they have been watching too many installments of "Richistan" on cable TV. My own notion is that capital will dry up quicker than rain on a Scottsdale patio as our energy predicament becomes apparent, since expectations of future growth (of economies and the capital representing them) are keyed to an assumption of unlimited energy resources. When the truth finally hits -- that there are real limits to the things of this world -- it will knock the capital markets on their asses. We will see large numbers of men wearing Rolex watches weep into crumpled certificates as the tranches of hallucinated wealth dissolve in the mists of their hopes and dreams. This means, at least, that investment in technology R & D on the grand scale will probably not meet our current expectations.

In any case, it is getting pretty late in the day for us to just kick back and nurture fantasies about the future of technology while the prospect of an oil export shock resolves more vividly before us -- the first symptom of an industry that will shortly fly to pieces. Of course the very last thing we should be doing -- which everyone from the Nascar morons to the Ivy League "greenies" is doing -- is focus all effort on how to keep the American automobile fleet running by some magic means other than gasoline. I say, just as a mental jump-start, let's put at least some of that effort into getting the choo-choo trains running again -- but this is too silly for the boys at MIT or even the Pentagon.

A few years ago, I went to the famous TED conference in Monterrey, where the mandarins of computer tech gather every year to hear talks about the neat things happening in the world beyond Silicon Valley. (I was part of the "entertainment.") By far the most popular presentation of the whole conference was the one on flying cars. Yeah, I know. It was straight out of a 1937 edition of Popular Science Magazine. But that's where their heads were at. All those twenty billion dollar heads, and that was what really lit their wicks. In case you wonder why I'm skeptical about where we're going in this country.

Former head of Saudi Aramco: oil has peaked

2007-10-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

31 Oct 2007 |

Sadad al-Huseini, the former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, says that global production has hit its maximum sustainable plateau and that output will start to fall within 15 years, by which time the world's oil resources will be "very severely depleted".

In an exclusive interview with David Strahan of lastoilshock.com, al-Huseini said that oil production had reached a structural ceiling determined by geology rather than geopolitics, and that as a result the technical floor for the oil price will rise by $12 annually for the next 4 to 5 years. The market price for crude could hit $125 by 2010.

Al-Huseini said that Saudi Arabia's plans to raise production capacity to 12 million barrels per day by 2012 represented "an achievable number", but disparaged Western expectations that the Kingdom would produce significantly more. It was unfair, he said, to expect Saudi to "pull everybody's chestnuts out of the fire".

David Strahan is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary film-maker who, since the early 1990s, has reported and produced extensively for the BBC's Money Programme and Horizon strands. Strahan is the author of The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man and is a trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre.

Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on April 18, 1977.

2007-10-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

Two days from now, I will present my energy proposals to the Congress. Its members will be my partners and they have already given me a great deal of valuable advice. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.

The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation.

Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" -- except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.

I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.

The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation's independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.

The world now uses about 60 million barrels of oil a day and demand increases each year about 5 percent. This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.

We must look back in history to understand our energy problem. Twice in the last several hundred years there has been a transition in the way people use energy.

The first was about 200 years ago, away from wood -- which had provided about 90 percent of all fuel -- to coal, which was more efficient. This change became the basis of the Industrial Revolution.

The second change took place in this century, with the growing use of oil and natural gas. They were more convenient and cheaper than coal, and the supply seemed to be almost without limit. They made possible the age of automobile and airplane travel. Nearly everyone who is alive today grew up during this age and we have never known anything different.

Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

The world has not prepared for the future. During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history.

World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s by 5 percent a year as it has in the past, we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.

I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.

All of us have heard about the large oil fields on Alaska's North Slope. In a few years when the North Slope is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years' increase in our nation's energy demand.

Each new inventory of world oil reserves has been more disturbing than the last. World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can't go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.

But we do have a choice about how we will spend the next few years. Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.

Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.

We can continue using scarce oil and natural to generate electricity, and continue wasting two-thirds of their fuel value in the process.

If we do not act, then by 1985 we will be using 33 percent more energy than we do today.

We can't substantially increase our domestic production, so we would need to import twice as much oil as we do now. Supplies will be uncertain. The cost will keep going up. Six years ago, we paid $3.7 billion for imported oil. Last year we spent $37 billion -- nearly ten times as much -- and this year we may spend over $45 billion.

Unless we act, we will spend more than $550 billion for imported oil by 1985 -- more than $2,500 a year for every man, woman, and child in America. Along with that money we will continue losing American jobs and becoming increasingly vulnerable to supply interruptions.

Now we have a choice. But if we wait, we will live in fear of embargoes. We could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs. Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil -- from any country, at any acceptable price.

If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source.

We will not be ready to keep our transportation system running with smaller, more efficient cars and a better network of buses, trains and public transportation.

We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.

If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.

But we still have another choice. We can begin to prepare right now. We can decide to act while there is time.

That is the concept of the energy policy we will present on Wednesday. Our national energy plan is based on ten fundamental principles.

The first principle is that we can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.

The second principle is that healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

The third principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.

The fourth principle is that we must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.

The fifth principle is that we must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.

The sixth principle, and the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.

The seventh principle is that prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.

The eighth principle is that government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.

The ninth principle is that we must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.

The tenth principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.

These ten principles have guided the development of the policy I would describe to you and the Congress on Wednesday.

Our energy plan will also include a number of specific goals, to measure our progress toward a stable energy system.

These are the goals we set for 1985:

--Reduce the annual growth rate in our energy demand to less than two percent.

--Reduce gasoline consumption by ten percent below its current level.

--Cut in half the portion of United States oil which is imported, from a potential level of 16 million barrels to six million barrels a day.

--Establish a strategic petroleum reserve of one billion barrels, more than six months' supply.

--Increase our coal production by about two thirds to more than 1 billion tons a year.

--Insulate 90 percent of American homes and all new buildings.

--Use solar energy in more than two and one-half million houses.

We will monitor our progress toward these goals year by year. Our plan will call for stricter conservation measures if we fall behind.

I cant tell you that these measures will be easy, nor will they be popular. But I think most of you realize that a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.

This plan is essential to protect our jobs, our environment, our standard of living, and our future.

Whether this plan truly makes a difference will be decided not here in Washington, but in every town and every factory, in every home an don every highway and every farm.

I believe this can be a positive challenge. There is something especially American in the kinds of changes we have to make. We have been proud, through our history of being efficient people.

We have been proud of our leadership in the world. Now we have a chance again to give the world a positive example.

And we have been proud of our vision of the future. We have always wanted to give our children and grandchildren a world richer in possibilities than we've had. They are the ones we must provide for now. They are the ones who will suffer most if we don't act.

I've given you some of the principles of the plan.

I am sure each of you will find something you don't like about the specifics of our proposal. It will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives. To some degree, the sacrifices will be painful -- but so is any meaningful sacrifice. It will lead to some higher costs, and to some greater inconveniences for everyone.

But the sacrifices will be gradual, realistic and necessary. Above all, they will be fair. No one will gain an unfair advantage through this plan. No one will be asked to bear an unfair burden. We will monitor the accuracy of data from the oil and natural gas companies, so that we will know their true production, supplies, reserves, and profits.

The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.

We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group, would be crushing.

There should be only one test for this program: whether it will help our country.

Other generation of Americans have faced and mastered great challenges. I have faith that meeting this challenge will make our own lives even richer. If you will join me so that we can work together with patriotism and courage, we will again prove that our great nation can lead the world into an age of peace, independence and freedom.

Jimmy Carter, "The President's Proposed Energy Policy." 18 April 1977. Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. XXXXIII, No. 14, May 1, 1977, pp. 418-420.

Briefing for the Descent - by John Michael Greer

2007-10-21T15:08:00.000-07:00

Published on 7 Sep 2006 by The Archdruid Report. Archived on 7 Sep 2006.

As evidence piles up for the reality of peak oil, and more and more people start to grapple with an issue that challenges almost every assumption our society makes about the future, the issue of what to do about it becomes harder to avoid.

Predictably, survivalists are popping up again with their one-size-fits-all answer. That answer first surfaced in the 1920s, when the Evangelical Christian belief in imminent apocalypse fused with traditional American rhetoric contrasting the rich, crowded, and wicked city with the poor, isolated, and allegedly more virtuous back country to create the first survivalist ideologies. Since then, survivalists have insisted that the only response to any crisis you care to imagine – epidemic disease, nuclear holocaust, race war, the advent of Antichrist, the meltdown of the world’s computer systems on January 1, 2000, and the list goes on – is to hole up in the woods with plenty of food and firearms, and live the frontier life while urban America crashes down in flames.

From a survivalist point of view, peak oil is simply one more reason to head for the hills. Still, it doesn’t fill the bill very well. True, the peaking of world oil production will usher in an age of rising energy costs and dwindling supplies, and that will bring plenty of economic, social, political, and demographic problems in its train, but I have yet to see anyone make a reasonable case that these problems will cause civilization to collapse all at once. We’re facing decline, not apocalypse, and in the face of a gradual decline unfolding over a century or more, a strategy relying on canned beans and M-16s in a cabin in the woods is a distraction at best. A more realistic view, and more useful strategies, can be found readily enough by turning from the macho fantasies of surivalists to the facts of the industrial world’s predicament. Though the future we face is not an apocalypse, four horsemen still define the most likely scenario.

First out of the starting gate is declining energy availability. Sometime between now and 2010, world petroleum production peaks, falters, and begins an uneven but irreversible descent. North American natural gas supplies start their terminal decline around the same time. Some of the slack can be taken up by coal, wind and other renewables, nuclear power, and conservation, but not all. As oil depletion accelerates, and other resources such as fissionable uranium and Eurasian natural gas hit their own production peaks, the shortfall widens, and many lifestyles and business models that depend on cheap energy become nonviable.

The second horseman, hard on the hooves of the first, is economic contraction. As petroleum production begins to decline, energy prices skyrocket as nations, regions and individuals engage in bidding wars driven to extremes by rampant speculation. The global economy, which made economic sense only in the context of the artificially low oil prices of the 1990s, comes apart at the seams, driving many import- and export-based industries onto the ropes, setting off a wave of bankruptcies and business failures, and causing shortages of many consumer products, all the way down to such essentials as food and clothing. Soaring energy prices have the same effect more directly in many areas of the domestic economy. Unemployment climbs to Great Depression levels and poverty becomes widespread.

The third horseman, following the second by a length or two, is collapsing public health. As poverty rates spiral upwards, shortages and energy costs impact the food supply chain, energy intensive health care becomes unaffordable for all but the obscenely rich, and global warming and ecosystem disruption drive the spread of tropical and emerging diseases, malnutrition and disease become major burdens. People begin to die of what were once minor, treatable conditions, and chronic illnesses such as diabetes become death sentences as medicines price themselves out of reach. Death rates soar as rates of live birth slump, launching the first wave of population contraction.

The fourth horseman, galloping along in the wake of the first three, is political turmoil. What political scientists call “liberal democracy” is a system in which competing elite groups buy the loyalty of sectors of the electorate by handing out economic largesse. That system depends on abundant fossil fuels and the industrial economy they make possible. Many of today’s political institutions will not survive the end of cheap energy, and the changeover to new political arrangements will likely involve violence. International affairs face similar realignments as nations whose power and influence depend on access to abundant, cheap energy fall from their present positions of strength, while “backward” nations find their less energy-dependent economies becoming a source of strength rather than weakness in world affairs. If history is any guide, these power shifts will work themselves out on the battlefield.

The most important thing to remember about all four of these factors is that they’re self-limiting in the middle term. As energy prices soar, economies contract, and the demand for energy decreases, bringing prices back down. As the global economy comes apart, human needs remain, and local economies take up the slack as best they can with the resources on hand, producing new opportunities and breathing new life into moribund sectors of the economy. As public health fails, populations decline, taking pressure off all other sectors of the economy. As existing political arrangements collapse, finally, new regimes take their place, and like all new regimes these can be counted on to put stability at the top of their agendas. Thus we’re facing a period of crisis perhaps a quarter century long, followed by a period of renewed stability, with another round of crises waiting in the wings. Historically speaking, this is how civilizations fall, in a stair-step process alternating periods of crisis with breathing spaces at progressively lower levels of economic and political integration.

This is the predicament we face. Fortunately for us, it’s a familiar one for our species. None of the four horsemen I’ve just described are new arrivals on the scene; our great-grandparents knew them well, and today they are familiar to the vast majority of our species. Only the inhabitants of the world’s industrialized societies have had the opportunity to forget about them, and then only during the second half of the 20th century. Before then, most people knew how to deal with their presence, and those strategies remain viable today. The one hitch is that we have to be ready to put them into practice. Since the world’s governments have by and large dropped the ball completely, it’s up to individuals to get ready for the future ahead of us. Each of the four horsemen requires a different response, and so different preparations will be needed for each.

To cope with the first horseman,reducing energy use is the core strategy. The less energy you need to keep yourself alive and comfortable, the easier you can cope when energy costs spin out of control. Minor tinkerings aren’t going to be enough, though; you need to pursue the sort of comprehensive changes in energy use pioneered so successfully in the 1970s. Plan on cutting your energy use by half, to start with, and be ready to cut it further as needed. That means significant changes in lifestyle for most people, of course. In particular, commuting by car has to become a bad memory, and if this requires you to move, get a new job, or change your lifestyle, that’s what it requires. Get rid of your car if you can; if you can’t, trade in your gas hog for a light, efficient compact, and keep it in the garage under a tarp except when you actually need it. While you’re at it, practice coping with blackouts, brownouts, and other forms of energy shortage; they’ll be frequent visitors in the future.

To cope with the second horseman, choosing a viable profession forms the essential step. Most of the jobs in America today don’t produce necessary goods and services, and most goods and many ervices used in America today aren’t produced here. This mismatch promises massive economic disruptions during the crisis period, as an economy and a work force geared to sales, retail, and information processing collides with a new economic reality that has little room for these but a desperate need to produce food, clothing, and basic technologies. Anyone prepared to step into a viable economic role in this new reality has a much better chance of surviving, or even thriving. You need to choose a craft that can be done with modest energy inputs, and makes something people need or want badly enough to buy even in hard times. Think of market gardening, garment sewing, home appliance repair, and beer brewing as examples. You’ll need to get your training and tools in advance, of course, and the sooner you hang out your shingle the better, even if it’s just a hobby-business patronized by your friends until the crises hit.

To cope with the third horseman, taking charge of your own health is the central task. Modern medicine is one of the most energy- and resource-intensive sectors of the economy, and it’s already priced itself out of reach of nearly half of all Americans. By the time the first wave of crises is well under way, you can assume that your only health care is what you can provide for yourself. Plan on learning about preventive medicine and sanitation, taking wilderness first aid classes, and arranging for do-it-yourself health care in any other way you can. Don’t neglect alternative health care methods, either; while there’s some quackery in the alternative field, there’s also much of value, and the denunciations of alternative health care issued by the medical establishment are simply attempts to protect market share. Finally, get used to the inevitability of death. you probably won’t live as long as you used to expect, and if you need high-tech medical help to stay alive, you’ll die as soon as that stops being available. Death is simply part of the human condition. The stark terror of death that haunts people in industrial societies is a luxury a deindustrializing world can’t afford.

To cope with the fourth horseman, community networking provides the necessary response. This doesn’t mean the sort of Utopian projects that were tried, and failed so dismally, during the Sixties; it means the proven and effective approaches that have been used for hundreds of years by people who learned that working together is an essential tool for survival. If you’ve participated in a block watch, shopped at a farmers market, or belonged to a community service organization, you’ve taken part in community networking activities. In the future, local citizens will need to maintain basic community services such as sanitation, dispute resolution, and public safety during times when government no longer functions. Getting to know your neighbors, and participating in local community organizations, helps build connections that will make the ad hoc arrangements needed in a crisis a viable possibility.

Each of these strategies deserves further discussion on its own, of course. I’ll go into much more detail here in the weeks to come.

link

Prominent CERA official – “Peak Oil theory is garbage”

2007-10-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

by Steve Andrews
Published on 11 Sep 2006 by ASPO-USA's Peak Oil Review / Energy Bulletin. Archived on 12 Sep 2006.

The Countdown for the Peak of Oil Production has Begun – but what are the Views of the Most Important International Energy Agencies...

Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) is a widely touted US-based energy advisor firm. They bill themselves as a source to “help decision makers anticipate the energy future and formulate timely, successful plans in the face of rapid changes and uncertainty.” One aspect of our energy future about which CERA appears certain is the concept of peak oil.

"Peak Oil theory is garbage as far as we’re concerned", said Robert W. Esser, a geologist by training and CERA’s senior consultant/director of global oil and gas resources, according to Business Week online national correspondent Mark Morrison (Sept 7).

A wide range of very serious organizations are looking at and/or have commented upon the concept of peak oil, including the National Academy of Sciences (10/05), the US GAO (11/06), and the National Petroleum Council (2/07), working at the request of US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. Apparently, CERA thinks that’s all a waste of time and, in some cases, tax-payer money. By inference, CERA completely discounts the considered opinions of dozens of sober individuals and firms looking into the peak oil issue. Consider just this partial list of informed (mostly US-based) commentators:

1. Fellow industry analysts like PFC Energy; Groppe Long & Littell; and Petrie Parkman & Co. Last fall, Tom Petrie said he expected peak oil by around 2010 and that he would be “shocked” if world oil production didn’t peak by 2015. In PFC Energy’s 2004 presentation on peak oil, they show world oil production peaking in the 2014 time frame; their 2006 study, to be presented at the ASPO-USA conference next month, likely points to a slightly earlier date. Henry Groppe sees world petroleum liquids production peaking by 2010.

2. T. Boone Pickens, oil industry entrepreneur with a background in geology, has stated several times that peak oil may have already arrived.

3. The Hirsch Report: with funding from the National Energy Technology Laboratory, Robert L. Hirsch and Roger Bezdek were lead authors of a 70+-page report entitled “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management.” The authors’ key concern: “Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort.” Esser’s statement trivializes their report.

4. U.S. Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Tom Udall (D-NM) sound seriously concerned about peak oil, have been speaking out and writing about the issue, and have enlisted over a dozen colleagues to join them in the House Peak Oil Caucus. CERA would seem to be saying they’re wasting their time.

5. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a former petroleum geologist, was recently quoted in a Bloomberg Markets article as saying, “I think the people most exuberant about peak oil underestimate how much unconventional sources of oil will help flatten the peak, but to say there is no peak is shortsighted.”

6. Former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore both recently referenced peak oil. First in June, Gore spent a minute talking it up on CNN’s Larry King Live. Then in early July, Clinton—in an interview with Atlantic Monthly—gave substantial credence to the peak oil concept. He also wondered why he had never received a peak oil briefing, given its strategic importance.

7. US cities large and small, from San Francisco and Portland (OR) to Willets and Sebastopol (CA), are leading the way in incorporating the eventual reality of peak oil in their long-term municipal planning processes.

8. Senior geologists like author Walter Youngquist (OR), Craig Hatfield (OH), Joe Riva (MD), and Jeffrey Brown (TX) have drawn attention to issues like long-term depletion, the limits to growth by unconventional oil sources, the problems with declining net-energy return, etc.

9. PhD academics like Dr. Al Bartlett (University of Colorado-Boulder) plus Robert Kaufmann and Cutler Cleveland (Boston University) have for at least two decades been pointing to upcoming problems associated with peak oil. By association, is their work “garbage?”

10. Financial analyst Jeffery Rubin—chief economist for the respected CIBC World Markets—foresees a peaking in world oil production between now and the end of the decade. Eric Sprott, Sprott Asset Management, has over $1 billion of his firm’s assets invested in areas that will benefit from peak oil.

11. Matt Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co Int’l and author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,” speaks more frequently about the peak oil story than any other respected executive in the country.

12. James Mckenzie, in his work for World Resources Institute, published a study in 1996 showing a peaking in world oil production in 2014 (plus or minus about five years, given three different scenarios).

13. Editorials and features in newspapers and major magazine cover the peak oil story. If, as CERA asserts, that story is “garbage,” why did a respected publication like Bloomberg Markets devote eight pages to this story in their September issue?

14. Richard Rainwater, a Texas-based billionaire investor, made piles of money by foreseeing, back in the mid-1990s, that oil prices were eventually headed strongly up due to long-term limited production vs. demand. Now he worries in the pages of Fortune magazine about the potential social costs and consequences that he believes peak oil could precipitate.

15. Sadad al Husseini, Saudi Aramco’s former head of exploration and production, wrote last fall that world oil production would peak and plateau by 2015, at between 90 to 95 million barrels a day.

16. French oil firm Total’s CEO Thierry Desmarest has broken ranks with other CEO’s of major oil companies by forecasting a 2020 peaking for world oil production. (From 1996 – 2000, several BP players forecast a 2010 peak; since 2000 they no longer mention a peak.)

17. Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, uses an analytical technique similar to that of CERA—following production trends and projections vs. following stated reserves. He sees a peaking in world oil production around 2010-2011.

18. Pang Xiongqi, professor at China’s University of Petroleum in Beijing, expects Chinese production to peak in 2009 and world oil production to top out in 2012.

19. The Oil Drum, perhaps the most rigorous website covering the peak oil story, includes a host of writers and researchers who research and write timely commentaries.

20. ASPO-USA foresees a peak between now and 2015. We believe there are too many variables, especially growing non-geologic factors, to forecast a date. However, given the Hirsh Report’s warning about lag time for mitigating actions, we’re close enough to peaking that trying to pick a precise date is irrelevant.

There is a bottom line here for people trying spot the signal vs. the noise here. Ask whether the risk is greater if decision-makers act earlier based on the views of peak oil “concernists,” or if those decision-makers accept the notion that “peak oil theory is garbage” and defer action beyond granting oil companies access to resources and simply letting markets work.

Steve Andrews is a co-founder of ASPO-USA. He has followed the building peak oil story since the early 1980s.

by Steve Andrews

Published on 11 Sep 2006 by ASPO-USA's Peak Oil Review / Energy Bulletin. Archived on 12 Sep 2006.

The Countdown for the Peak of Oil Production has Begun – but what are the Views of the Most Important International Energy Agencies...

Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) is a widely touted US-based energy advisor firm. They bill themselves as a source to “help decision makers anticipate the energy future and formulate timely, successful plans in the face of rapid changes and uncertainty.” One aspect of our energy future about which CERA appears certain is the concept of peak oil.

"Peak Oil theory is garbage as far as we’re concerned", said Robert W. Esser, a geologist by training and CERA’s senior consultant/director of global oil and gas resources, according to Business Week online national correspondent Mark Morrison (Sept 7).

A wide range of very serious organizations are looking at and/or have commented upon the concept of peak oil, including the National Academy of Sciences (10/05), the US GAO (11/06), and the National Petroleum Council (2/07), working at the request of US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. Apparently, CERA thinks that’s all a waste of time and, in some cases, tax-payer money. By inference, CERA completely discounts the considered opinions of dozens of sober individuals and firms looking into the peak oil issue. Consider just this partial list of informed (mostly US-based) commentators:

1. Fellow industry analysts like PFC Energy; Groppe Long & Littell; and Petrie Parkman & Co. Last fall, Tom Petrie said he expected peak oil by around 2010 and that he would be “shocked” if world oil production didn’t peak by 2015. In PFC Energy’s 2004 presentation on peak oil, they show world oil production peaking in the 2014 time frame; their 2006 study, to be presented at the ASPO-USA conference next month, likely points to a slightly earlier date. Henry Groppe sees world petroleum liquids production peaking by 2010.

2. T. Boone Pickens, oil industry entrepreneur with a background in geology, has stated several times that peak oil may have already arrived.

3. The Hirsch Report: with funding from the National Energy Technology Laboratory, Robert L. Hirsch and Roger Bezdek were lead authors of a 70+-page report entitled “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management.” The authors’ key concern: “Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort.” Esser’s statement trivializes their report.

4. U.S. Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Tom Udall (D-NM) sound seriously concerned about peak oil, have been speaking out and writing about the issue, and have enlisted over a dozen colleagues to join them in the House Peak Oil Caucus. CERA would seem to be saying they’re wasting their time.

5. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a former petroleum geologist, was recently quoted in a Bloomberg Markets article as saying, “I think the people most exuberant about peak oil underestimate how much unconventional sources of oil will help flatten the peak, but to say there is no peak is shortsighted.”

6. Former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore both recently referenced peak oil. First in June, Gore spent a minute talking it up on CNN’s Larry King Live. Then in early July, Clinton—in an interview with Atlantic Monthly—gave substantial credence to the peak oil concept. He also wondered why he had never received a peak oil briefing, given its strategic importance.

7. US cities large and small, from San Francisco and Portland (OR) to Willets and Sebastopol (CA), are leading the way in incorporating the eventual reality of peak oil in their long-term municipal planning processes.

8. Senior geologists like author Walter Youngquist (OR), Craig Hatfield (OH), Joe Riva (MD), and Jeffrey Brown (TX) have drawn attention to issues like long-term depletion, the limits to growth by unconventional oil sources, the problems with declining net-energy return, etc.

9. PhD academics like Dr. Al Bartlett (University of Colorado-Boulder) plus Robert Kaufmann and Cutler Cleveland (Boston University) have for at least two decades been pointing to upcoming problems associated with peak oil. By association, is their work “garbage?”

10. Financial analyst Jeffery Rubin—chief economist for the respected CIBC World Markets—foresees a peaking in world oil production between now and the end of the decade. Eric Sprott, Sprott Asset Management, has over $1 billion of his firm’s assets invested in areas that will benefit from peak oil.

11. Matt Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co Int’l and author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,” speaks more frequently about the peak oil story than any other respected executive in the country.

12. James Mckenzie, in his work for World Resources Institute, published a study in 1996 showing a peaking in world oil production in 2014 (plus or minus about five years, given three different scenarios).

13. Editorials and features in newspapers and major magazine cover the peak oil story. If, as CERA asserts, that story is “garbage,” why did a respected publication like Bloomberg Markets devote eight pages to this story in their September issue?

14. Richard Rainwater, a Texas-based billionaire investor, made piles of money by foreseeing, back in the mid-1990s, that oil prices were eventually headed strongly up due to long-term limited production vs. demand. Now he worries in the pages of Fortune magazine about the potential social costs and consequences that he believes peak oil could precipitate.

15. Sadad al Husseini, Saudi Aramco’s former head of exploration and production, wrote last fall that world oil production would peak and plateau by 2015, at between 90 to 95 million barrels a day.

16. French oil firm Total’s CEO Thierry Desmarest has broken ranks with other CEO’s of major oil companies by forecasting a 2020 peaking for world oil production. (From 1996 – 2000, several BP players forecast a 2010 peak; since 2000 they no longer mention a peak.)

17. Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, uses an analytical technique similar to that of CERA—following production trends and projections vs. following stated reserves. He sees a peaking in world oil production around 2010-2011.

18. Pang Xiongqi, professor at China’s University of Petroleum in Beijing, expects Chinese production to peak in 2009 and world oil production to top out in 2012.

19. The Oil Drum, perhaps the most rigorous website covering the peak oil story, includes a host of writers and researchers who research and write timely commentaries.

20. ASPO-USA foresees a peak between now and 2015. We believe there are too many variables, especially growing non-geologic factors, to forecast a date. However, given the Hirsh Report’s warning about lag time for mitigating actions, we’re close enough to peaking that trying to pick a precise date is irrelevant.

There is a bottom line here for people trying spot the signal vs. the noise here. Ask whether the risk is greater if decision-makers act earlier based on the views of peak oil “concernists,” or if those decision-makers accept the notion that “peak oil theory is garbage” and defer action beyond granting oil companies access to resources and simply letting markets work.

Steve Andrews is a co-founder of ASPO-USA. He has followed the building peak oil story since the early 1980s.

What Can we do?

2007-10-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

It is time to begin to plan.

Helping cities, towns and municipalities adapt to peak oil
by Randy White

Hubbert's Prescription for Survival, A Steady State Economy...

Bringing the Food Economy Home...

As a member of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force, I am excited to see the amazing progress our team is making. The twelve members of the Task Force come from various backgrounds, including land use planners, social workers, business executives, farmers, environmental experts, and more.
For readers who understand the dire consequences we face with fuel and food shortages in the not too far off future, rest assured this team has a deep understanding of complex eco and business systems.
Currently, the team is interviewing businesses and organizations to understand the impacts of peak oil from a systems level down to individual citizens.

While I am excited about the progress our group is making, the challenges ahead of us are staggering. The biggest issue facing the Task Force (in my opinion) is how to help businesses and citizens make changes for a reality many of them are unaware of and unprepared for. With such a complex system oil based system interdependencies, small changes will not be enough to offset the anticipated devastating impacts of peak oil.

At the end of the Task Force's mission, we will submit a report to the city council with a shortlist of recommendations. While the following list of recommendations are NOT the recommendations of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force, they are my own - available to any local governments with the intestinal fortitude to heed the advice.

For readers interested in what can be done on a local level, please consider taking the following suggestions and recommendations to your local government leaders. I truly believe there is no time to lose.

Change school curriculum for High schoolers in grades 9 - 12 to prepare for a fast changing world
Mandate classes for students in 9th - 12th grade that teach everything from basics of earth's ecosystems to Biointensive food growing practices.

Recommended texts for students: When Technology Fails, The Long Emergency, sustainable agriculture books
(We will need new textbooks for schoolteachers based on sound principles of earth's reality, complete with questions and tests for students. It would be based on both needed changes to adapt to the earth's changes.)

Create awareness campaigns and encourage homeowners to buy products and services from local companies that can help convert parts of or their entire lawn(s) to food gardens
(May need to lobby Homeowners Associations)

The city can create assistance and learning programs catered to biointensive food growing practices appropriate for geographical areas. For citizens without land access, create bond measures or taxes for land / home buy-back programs and fund the growth of community gardens in the city and surrounding suburbs.

Continue fostering growth of Farmers Markets and Community Supported Agriculture
This can also expand to work with local grocers / council national grocery chains to offer shelf space for local growers

Create "food preparation, storage and nutrition" classes for citizens
Based on seasonal growing patterns, what can be grown when, and how to keep your health and nutrition all year long.

Expand business and residential composting programs
Helps turn waste into useful, natural soil boosters to grow more food

Mandate energy efficiency inspections for homes and buildings
Create achievable standards. For businesses and citizens that can't afford to retrofit and upgrade to these standards - create neighborhood volunteer programs and create incentives to boost volunteer participation and assistance.

Offer consulting for businesses and citizens looking to prepare and make changes for Peak Oil
This can be paid for by citizens and businesses by passing a reasonable "Peak Oil Preparation" tax or diverting funds from other programs

Assess local food production abilities
Study and prepare plans to begin relying on food generated and transported within a 100 mile radius of the city. Adjust the radius depending on available farmland

Encourage neighborhood grown food swaps
Foster neighborhood food swaps based on produce grown within the city.

Create program for sustainable year round water usage for urban farming
Assuming increased usage due to increased urban farming. Create action plan including rainwater harvesting and efficiencies based on existing water system.

Create or expand neighborhood introduction programs
Foster programs that help neighbors get to know one another (like City Repair)

Continue to encourage use of public transportation, biking, walking, and carpooling
Cities can learn from other cities leading the charge with success (Portland, San Francisco, etc.)

Foster neighborhood co-op owned fueling stations
Pair farmers making alcohol in their own micro-refineries / distilleries with neighborhoods that purchase the fuel from their own alcohol fuel co-op. (Fact: Alcohol can be used as a fuel)

Offer "Earth Shift" support groups
Help people cope with change to help prevent a rise in crime, violence and drug use.

Create "Wisdom of the Elders" program
Like a "Big Brother / Big Sister" program, match eldery citizens that survived the Great Depression with today's youth leaders.

Create a re-use storage program
Instead of recycling, collect used plastic containers and glass from citizens and businesses normally setting them out on the curb. Clean out waste product from these containers and begin storing them in empty city owned wearhouses for future use and distribution to citizens.

Randy White is a member of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force. He works as an advertising executive for AM620 KPOJ, Portland's Progressive Talk Station

Peak Oil: let's think about it together

2007-10-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Exploring emotional reactions to peak oil

by Kathy McMahon

The first blog post is usually the toughest, especially when you are trying to write about something that has no existing ‘experts.’

I’m a psychologist, I’m not a geologist, financial expert, political analyst or economist.

Yet, my world was dramatically changed when I learned about Peak Oil and began to read about all the related issues. Before learning about PO, my specialization was sex and couples therapy. I saw the world through the eyes of a middle-class US citizen. Electricity came from light switches. Oil was brought by a truck or pumped from a service station. I bought my food at the supermarket, albeit an organic food market, and my water was from my tap or in bottles. The value of my house kept going up, as did the taxes. I felt secure with a middle-class income, a home, and a healthy daughter that just finished college and was happy in a new job.

Then I learned about PO.

After that, I could no longer see the world in the same way. I realized that psychotherapy, while helpful to people in a ‘normal’ world, could easily become destructive to those with a PO view of the world. I call it “psychological terrorism.”

I realized how electricity was intimately linked to (in my case) gas or other fuels. As the price of gasoline began to rise, I was well aware of why and what it meant. I could see how food in the supermarket required fossil fuels for fertilizers, farming equipment, trucks, cold storage, heat and utilities. I began to worry about chemical companies buying up seed companies and taking out patents on common food seed. I learned how agribusiness treats animals that enables us to eat so cheaply and at what cost. I learned about the water shortage and water itself became a more precious commodity to me. I saw debt, any debt including my mortgage, as a threat to my future financial independence. I saw my spending habits and lifestyle for what it was: wasteful, thoughtless, excessive and leaving a huge environmental ‘footprint.’

As I looked around, I began to see the world with a ‘before and after PO’ view. I would say to myself “We won’t have that around anymore after PO.” The more I looked around, the more things I realized would go, like plastics or kiwi fruit. The more I looked into becoming more self-sufficient, the more awe I had at how ‘easy I had it.’ I realized how insulated I was from skills that were commonplace in my grandmother’s era. At times I became overwhelmed (and still do) at the amount of information I don’t possess. I would get dizzy trying to figure out what I needed to know from what would continue to be available to me for a long time to come.

I watched myself go through a wide range of emotions. I went through periods of shifting denial, and an attempt to find believable critics. I would work diligently on a permaculture project, and watch my spending carefully, then “forget” and go out to dinner or another unnecessary expense. I’d feel hopeful and elated, depressed and worried, busy and determined, overwhelmed and frozen. All the while, the stock market continued to ’soar’ and everything looked ‘normal’ in the culture around me.

My actions seemed ‘irrational’ to those who couldn’t accept the concept of PO. I had to make decisions about how I could talk to them and based on their responses, whether I should keep up the conversation. Some friends instantly understood the concept. Others were willing to be supportive, but had no intention of doing anything differently themselves. Still others refused to even discuss the issue with me.

I searched the PO sites and the internet to find out more about the kind of feelings and reactions I was having. I found people talking about their own individual reactions to learning about PO. I’d hear people on sites say “Ya, I know, I went through the same thing when I first heard” and I’d think, “Yes, I did too,” but none of my colleagues were talking about it. In fact, as a psychologist, I know what my reaction might have been if a client began to describe ‘the end of the world as we know it’ and all the action they were taking, and I was ignorant of PO. Several diagnostic categories would fit neatly.

But reactions to PO aren’t ‘diagnostic indicators.’ I now believe that there is a way to begin to understand the emotional impact of PO and to share that knowledge with others to help them move forward. I believe that there are different reactions depending on your age and circumstances. A twenty year old in college in an urban area who just found out about peak oil is going to react differently than a 60 year old farmer in the Mid-West who has been expecting it for some time. Someone making minimum wage is going to react differently than the professional with a substancial 401k and a large house in the suburbs. I believe there are ‘fuzzy sets’ that aren’t rigid categories saying “If you are in this situation, you will react this way” but nevertheless, there are generalizations that can be made about people at different:

stages of Peak Oil awareness,

life stages,

economic circumstances,

gender,

professions,

living environments,

parental status

… to name a few.

I wrote a story for a contest about the future without fossil fuels that was published at www.beyondpeak.com, and won second place. You can read it here:

link

The point of my story was to suggest that there were constructive actions that could be taken today to put oneself in the best circumstances to weather the upcoming ’storm.’ These actions required community building and using the skills each of us have toward mutually beneficial action. This blog, and www.peakoilblues.com is my contribution.

I’ve tried to gather up people who I feel are eloquent speakers of their own experiences and invited them to share their own thoughts, opinions, reactions, and emotions as they live in these ‘interesting times.’ If you also have something to contribute, join us. Together, we can help each other move forward toward a future we want to live in.

Kathy McMahon

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kathy McMahon, Psy.D. is an adjunct professor, a clinical psychologist, certified sex therapist, trainer, and a newbie chicken farmer in Massachusetts.

Believing that the 'personal IS political,' she thinks a lot about the elements of emotionally preparing for a post-fossil fuel age. Despite being pessimistic about the future of cheap energy she's very hopeful about the power of small groups of people creating a simpler but more meaningful life together, while simultaneously annoying each other in the process. She has been quoted as saying "If I can't dance, I don't want the Armageddon." Read her at www.peakoilblues.com and reach her at peakshrink AT peakoilblues DOT com

from Paul

2007-10-08T06:36:00.000-07:00

A troubling turn in American history
By James Carroll | October 8, 2007

IF COLUMBUS is the beginning of the story, and, say, Lincoln is the middle, what is the end? Each episode of the American narrative surfaced a problem, which prompted attempts to resolve it, which led in turn to a new problem. This movement from problem to resolution to new problem and ever new efforts to fix things is what makes the American story great.

So Columbus arrived in 1492, but carried the European virus of ideological absolutism - what led Queen Isabella to expel Jews from Spain that same year. Such absolutism sparked Old World religious wars, and Puritan dissenters defied it by coming to America. But they brought their own version of that absolutism. John Winthrop's City on a Hill was a religiously gated community (no "pagans" or Quakers), with the magistrate empowered to coerce conformity. Therefore Roger Williams proposed the separation of church and state. By Jefferson's time, though, that distinction justified the separation of private morality from public ethics. Private morality meant he and others could keep the private property called slaves.
Abraham Lincoln presided at the altar on which the bloody sacrifice of civil war was justified by "freedom," but no sooner had redemptive violence (". . .as He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free") saved the nation's soul than it spawned the Indian genocide, and the Jim Crow betrayal of blacks. In the name of freedom, the United States conquered a continent, and claimed a hemisphere - a destiny whose virtue was manifest against corrupt European imperialism. In the American Century, the nation born in rejection of ideological absolutism called itself capital of "the free world," but redemptive violence went nuclear, and defense of that freedom required absolute readiness to destroy the world. The chill of Cold War "realism" froze the American conscience.
An unexpected thaw (warming Gorbachev and Reagan) ended the Cold War bloodlessly, and America had a chance to redefine national redemption, removing violence from its center. That brings us to today. If this nation followed the pattern of its own historic reckoning with the ever unfinished work of public morality, political discourse would be defined by the dual-project of eliminating nuclear weapons and building international structures of peace. Instead, we are paralyzed by a war that no one wants, unable to change what matters most.
Last week, this story reached a climax of sorts, with developments like these:
War Cost. With new budget requests, the Iraq war price tag jumped over the $600 billion mark - enough, extrapolating from figures of the National Priorities Project, to add 9 million teachers to public schools for a year. Where would American education be if that happened instead? And where Iraq?
Mercenaries. We learned that the United States government has surrendered to "private contractor" hit squads the primal function of protecting its own diplomats in Iraq. Such unaccountable and profit-driven forces betray the foundational American military ethic. Hessians at last.
Abolition. Barack Obama made a major speech calling for a return to the long-abandoned goal of nuclear elimination. "We need to change our nuclear policy and our posture, which is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union - a country that doesn't exist." The major news media ignored this important declaration, obsessing instead with horse-race polls and fund-raising totals. Nuclear reform (antidote to proliferation and terrorism both) is not a campaign issue.
Torture. The Bush administration was revealed to have again secretly approved "enhanced" interrogation methods at restored CIA "black sites," where prisoners are once more held without treaty protections - measures that Congress and the Supreme Court have already rejected. Despite scandals, US torture continues.
These developments would be disturbing enough, but what they point to is an interruption in this nation's most important public tradition - the movement from recognition of a problem to its attempted resolution. From ill treatment of native peoples, to enslavement of Africans, to temptations to empire, to a religious embrace of violence, to Red Scare paranoia, to an insane arms race - we Americans have had our failings. But we have faced them. The capacity for self-criticism and change has defined our history. But that is not happening today. We are in an arms race with ourselves, and will not stop. Our unjust war is just unending. Our politics and media, meanwhile, form a feedback loop of banality. "Freedom" has become our prison.
Does all of this reveal a deeper flaw in our moral narrative itself? After all, we say today that our story began with Columbus. But what about the ones who welcomed him?
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
link

A Brave and Startling Truth

2007-09-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

Maya Angelou
American Poet, Author and Actress

This poem was written and delivered in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

Give peace a chance

2007-09-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

from Mary Ann

2007-09-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

Bee Disease Study: Nothing New is Compelling and Anything Compelling Isn't New

The Beekeeper / Kim Flottum

This is a guest submission to The Beekeeper by James Fischer.

Fourth down, no yardage gained.

All summer, we patiently waited. Perhaps you've been waiting too. We've heard all the rumors, and we watched everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the Lancaster Farming Journal print quotes from researchers coyly hinting about having found "the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)" and the paper they were about to publish in the prestigious journal, Science.

We've been restrained — we did not want to jeopardize the paper's chances of being published, nor did we want to embarrass the authors. We are beekeepers, so we want quality work, and are willing to wait for it. Many of us engage in beekeeping for our livelihoods, so we are a deadly serious about CCD. So, beekeepers kept mum, and Bee Culture magazine printed only what had appeared elsewhere, not wanting to be the source of "leaks."

A fat lot of good that did us. The paper may turn out to be a much bigger embarrassment than anything that might have resulted from our actions. While the paper contains much that is new and compelling, what is compelling is not new, and what is new is not compelling.

The subject of all the hush-hush and anticipation turns out not to be an announcement of the "cause of CCD," but a tentative statement merely confirming the preliminary results announced back in April by representatives of the Army, BVS Inc, the University of Montana, and UC-San Francisco. The paper makes very similar observations that there is an apparent correlation between a specific set of bee pathogens and CCD. It also suggests that these pathogens can be linked to imported bees from Australia.

But the authors consistently failed to supply convincing evidence to support the claims they made.

Despite the serious defects in methodology, the assumptions made without sufficient basis, and the presentation of speculation as if it were fact, there is significant value among the defects. It is the first complete report on what pathogens have been found in all those samples contributed by so many beekeepers.

In short, the disease data is useful, even though it may not be as accurate or as relevant as we might have wanted.

But fall is here again. Fall was when CCD hit beekeepers hard last year. The paper offers no help at all to beekeepers. The researchers still don't have a clue about what to do to avoid CCD or how react to CCD. I'll say it yet again: "All we can do is watch hives die". How many times can beekeepers attempt to rebuild operations devastated by CCD before they go broke? How many beekeepers can suffer this kind of devastation before growers can't get pollination for their crops at any price? We might see the answers to both questions this fall. We'd rather not find out, thank you very much.

So, in terms of tangible results, the ball has not been moved a single yard from where it was in April. In summary, what we have is:

APRIL ……………………………………. SEPTEMBER
Nosema ceranae found all over ………… Nosema ceranae found all over
Of course Nosema apis is still around ........ Nosema apis found all over
New virus in CCD colonies ………………….. Virus is "Dicistroviridae", not "Iflavirus"
Deformed Wing Virus Found ……………...... Deformed Wing Virus Found
Sacbrood Virus Found ………………………... Sacbrood Virus Found
Kashmir Bee Virus Found …………………..... Kashmir Bee Virus Found
Found lots of other pathogens, too ……...... So did we.
Findings shared openly ……………………….. Findings not shared until published

So, maybe it is more accurate to say that it is fourth down, and we have lost yardage. We certainly have used up all our time outs. While the mainstream press is cheering the play, we beekeepers are much less enthusiastic.

This whole report is broken down into sections:

Practical Implications for Beekeepers
World Trade, Realpolitik, and Beekeeping
A Beekeeper Reads the Paper
What Happens AFTER What Comes Next
What You Don't Know About Beekeeping (A Rant)

Check back here periodically, I'm typing as fast as I can, and each section will appear just as soon as it can be formatted. But some will be here at thedailygreen.com, or on the CCD page of BeeCulture.com, or come to you as a CATCH THE BUZZ message (which you can sign up for at the BeeCulture web site).

James Fischer is a beekeeper who writes. Or maybe we should call him a writer who keeps bees. Regardless, he's one of the few people who knows beekeeping, is not snowed by the scientific jargon, and is willing to call 'em as he sees 'em.

Kim Flottum is the editor of BeeCulture magazine.

thedailygreen.com

Kucinich

2007-09-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

Prime Suspect Discovered in Bee Colony Collapse

2007-09-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

by FishOutofWater
Thu Sep 06, 2007 at 12:27:43 PM PDT

The mystery of the disappearing honey bees may have been solved, or at least a reliable clue has been found. In North America Fifty to ninety percent European honey bee colonies have vanished, threatening American agriculture. A prime suspect has now been identified.

Genetic research showed that Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) turned up regularly in hives affected by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Primary source article: A Metagenomic Survey of Microbes in Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

Modern beekeepers transport bees across the country to pollinate the crops of modern agribusiness. Bees are now transported globally, increasing the opportunity for spread of viruses and parasites. Evidence has now been uncovered that North American bees may have become infected by a shipment of infected bees from Australia.

Also open is the question of how the virus arrived in the US. One finger of suspicion points to Australia, from where the US began importing honeybees in 2004 - the very year that CCD appeared in US hives.

The researchers found IAPV in Australian bees, and they are now planning to go back through historical US samples to see if the Antipodean imports really were the first carriers.

If they were, the US might consider closing its borders to Australian bees.

But closing the borders after a virus has been allowed into America is like closing the barn door after the horse has run off.

Reports of unusual colony deaths have come from at least 22 states. Some affected commercial beekeepers who often keep thousands of colonies have reported losing more than 50 percent of their bees. A colony can have roughly 20,000 bees in the winter, and up to 60,000 in the summer.

Along with being producers of honey, commercial bee colonies are important to agriculture as pollinators, along with some birds, bats and other insects. A recent report by the National Research Council noted that in order to bear fruit, three-quarters of all flowering plants including most food crops and some that provide fiber, drugs and fuel rely on pollinators for fertilization.

This is why global shipment of agricultural products, live animals, and biologically active materials needs to be carefully regulated. It will likely be impossible to eliminate the bee virus now that it has been introduced to North America. The epidemic will run its course and we will have to live with whatever the long-term effects are. There is no putting the genie back into the bottle. link

From Patrimpas

2007-09-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

Published on Friday, August 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The Necessary Embrace of Conspiracy
by Robert Shetterly
Several years ago I gave a talk on Martha’s Vineyard about many of the people whose portraits I’ve painted in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series. I spent some time talking about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. When I talk about King, I like to focus on his last year — the period when, defying the advice of many of his advisors in the civil rights movement, he spoke against the Vietnam War, equating racism with imperialism. King felt bound to make the point that the forces of capitalism, materialism, and militarism that were driving segregation were also driving the war, and until we confronted the source of the problem, the abuses would continue. It was April 4, 1967, in Riverside Church in New York, that he made that declaration. A year to the day before his assassination.

It has always confounded me every year when we celebrate Dr. King’s life that no mention is made of that Riverside Church speech in the major media. We are always treated to sound bites of the 1963 I Have a Dream speech. That speech’s oratory is as powerful as it is non-confrontational. Which is why it is re-played for modern audiences. Dr. King was about confrontation. Non-violence and confrontation, each ennobling and making the other effective. In 1967 he said, “… my country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And he explained how our economic system thrived on exploitation and violence, or, as Emma Goldman put it, “The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.” This was probably the most important speech King ever gave and not playing it when we ostensibly honor him, is tantamount to castrating him morally and intellectually. Just as there is a long history of White America castrating black men, there is an equal legacy of Elite America cutting the most important truths of our social prophets out of the history books. We pay homage to King’s icon, the cardboard cutout, but not to his strongest beliefs and his most cogent analysis of our problems — to what vision called forth his courage. And, if we think that he spoke the truth, to censor that truth is to promote a curious kind of segregation. He is segregated, not for the color of his skin, but for the accuracy of his perception, how close to the bone his words cut. We can’t bear to hear the sound of truth’s knife scraping on hypocrisy’s bone. Only people who actually want to change the system dance to that music or want it to be heard.

Equally important, and part of the same neglect, is the intentional ignoring of the facts of his death. In my talk on Martha’s Vineyard I spoke about William Pepper’s book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pepper had been James Earl Ray’s lawyer. Ray was the man convicted of killing King. But both Pepper and the King family were convinced that Ray was innocent. The King family hired Pepper to represent them in a suit; they asked only $100.00 in damages to clear Ray’s name. Before the trial came to court in 1999, Ray had died in prison. The jury determined that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police, the Mafia, the FBI, and the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. Ray, the patsy, had left town before the shot was fired. Pepper had confessions from people involved from each of the organizations named. The verdict was barely mentioned in the U.S. media then and is not mentioned every year on the anniversary of his death. Why?

After my talk on Martha’s Vineyard a man came up to me and said, “I enjoyed your speech and was with you until you started that conspiracy stuff about MLK, Jr.” I said, “That’s not conspiracy. What I told you are facts.” End of conversation.

I think we’re confronted with two conspiracies here: one to commit the crime, the other to ignore it even when the facts are known. ( Two sides of the same coin.) The man who accused me of slipping into the neurotic, aliens-are-among-us land of conspiracy nuts was unable to hear the evidence, perhaps because he was so utterly convinced by our government and media that conspiracies don’t exist, people who espouse them are dangerous fruitcakes, and if you begin to think like that, your whole house of cards wobbles then topples. Who wants that? Better a standing tower of marked cards, than having to admit the game is rigged and the ground is shaking.

America is steeped in conspiracy, and even more steeped in propaganda that discredits those who try to expose the conspiracies. Whether we’re talking about MLK, Jr., JFK, RFK, Iran-Contra, 9/11, or, most importantly, the status quo, anyone who works to uncover the truth is branded a “conspiracy nut” and discredited before any evidence has a fair hearing. The government/corporate/media version is THE VERSION. Anything else is illusory.

In fact, the cultural success of labeling investigative reporters and forensic historians, and, simply, anyone who tries to name reality, “conspiracy nuts” is perhaps the most successful conspiracy of our time. Well, not the most successful. That prize goes to the conspiracy to give corporations all the rights of individual persons under our Constitution. That conspiracy has codified and consolidated corporate power so that it controls our lives in almost every meaningful way. It controls the election funds of our candidates, and them once they are in office. It controls our major media including public broadcasting. It controls the content of our television programming. It controls how are tax dollars are spent making sure that the richest get the most welfare. It controls the laws, the courts, the prison system and the mind numbing propaganda that we are the greatest democracy on earth. It controls the values with which we raise our children. It controls our ability to dispense justice. It controls how we treat nature, how we deface our land with strip malls, and blow the tops off our mountains — a form of corporate free speech. It dictates our modes of transportation. It controls our inability to respond to true crises like climate change. It attempts to create a spiritual deficiency in every person that can be filled and healed only with stuff — and no stuff is ever enough.

As Richard Grossman puts it, “Isn’t it an old story? People create what looks to be a nifty machine, a robot, called the corporation. Over time, the robots get together and overpower the people. … For a century, the robots propagandize and indoctrinate each generation of people so they grow up believing that robots are people too, gifts from God and Mother Nature; that they are inevitable and the source of all that is good. How odd that we have been so gullible, so docile, obedient.”

It is obvious to say that we have been engineered into a culture that values competitive consumption and consumers instead of community cooperation and citizenship. Capitalism with its obsessive and necessary appetite for consumption, expanding markets, resource depletion, and increasing profits has consumed democracy. Have you ever watched a small snake swallow a large frog? The snake’s hinged jaw stretches wider and wider, squeezing the frog millimeter by millimeter into its gullet until finally the snake looks like the Holland Tunnel might if it had devoured the Titanic. Then the acids and enzymes do their corrosive work. The frog becomes the snake. And the snake claims it is the frog. Capitalism has gulped down democracy and claimed it is democracy. When, immediately after 9/11, President Bush advised Americans to demonstrate their love of freedom and their resistance to terrorism by courageously, selflessly, hurrying to the mall to buy something, he was speaking as the snake that identifies itself as a frog. He was asking us to play a little game with our brains’ synapses, replace the snake icon with the frog’s. Sadly, he may also have been speaking about democracy in the only way that he can understand or recognize it. And, for him, Christianity has been another tidy meal for the snake.

Perhaps this switcheroo is nowhere more obvious than in the military /industrial complex. We are told that the vulnerable frog needs protecting. The threats are grave. So we fork over our money and children’s lives for war and weapons. We are told that we are building security and peace. More lives. More weapons. What we aren’t told is that the largest US export to the world is weapons. What we aren’t told is that enormous fortunes are being made from the arms trade. What we aren’t told is that the more precarious and unstable the world is, the better the business for the arms dealers — that the real promotion is not for security and peace but insecurity and war, that the lives of our children are the necessary collateral damage for this monster. What we aren’t told is that the only real security is in cooperation, conservation, and fairness, not imperialism. The frog, who is a snake, wrapped in a flag, pleads for patriotism and counts the cash. The snake’s forked tongue is a barbeque fork on which we’ve all been roasted.

I’d call that conspiracy.

The neocons have claimed, with some accuracy, that they can create reality faster than we can react: the deed is done, now deal with it. The troops have invaded, Halliburton, Blackwater, and Lockheed signed their contracts, the prisoners are tortured, your email is bugged, the resources for social programs are gone, the laws are changed, the Wal-Mart is built, the sludge dump has already polluted the aquifer, truth is hollowed out —- catch me if you can!
How is that not conspiracy?

The cooks & the crooks create a new status quo, legalize it, propagandize it, mythologize it, fundamentalize it, slather it with fear and patriotism, and force feed it to the complacent, sedated cow we call America.
How is that not conspiracy?

Of course, ever since the Constitution was signed and didn’t free the slaves or give the vote to women, poor folks, Native Americans and freed blacks so that people with power and money could continue to profit, America has been a conspiracy against itself. It’s been cowboy grilling his own heart over a smoke & mirrors campfire, a CEO with inherited wealth and three hundred years of patrician, affirmative action crooning “Only in America.”

The reason we can’t talk about conspiracy is because it is the modus operandi. It isn’t the elephant in the room, it is the room itself. We all live there. We can impeach a few elephants, and we should, but the architecture is in place. And they control it.

When I was in school, I was reminded - repeatedly — to avoid using an indefinite pronoun without identifying whom it refers to, as in, “They are coming to get us,” … or, “They control everything.” Who are They? It’s bad practice to think and write like that. Without reference it just sounds like paranoia. But the hell of it is that it’s damned hard to say who the They are that are in conspiracy to destroy democracy and, by exploitation, nature. Did They do it on purpose or merely discover by serendipity, like cavemen seeing copper ooze out of a rock by a fire, the wondrous possibility and power of what they had found. For instance, the invention of the TV was not a conspiracy. But once the realization of how TV could be used to submerge the public in a lobotomizing swamp of advertising, sound bites, inactivity, community destruction, titillation, false history, empty myth, consumption, and complicity in making fortunes for the sponsors, the program was clear. Conspiracy was the silent partner in the euphemism good business practice. And, once they saw the implications of giving corporations First Amendment rights, they were home free.

Time to re-think conspiracy.

We need to embrace conspiracy in two ways. One, admit that it’s real, its quotidian, it’s the fabric of our lives, the mercury in the air, the dioxin in the water, it’s filling the airwaves and the marketplace and the courts and the halls of Congress before we even get out of bed every morning. Two, counter it with a conspiracy of our own. On our side we have the fundamental fact that although the corporate They can alter many of our realities, they can’t alter Reality. They can’t change the behavior of Nature. They can sell off the rain forest, but they can’t leverage the effect of cutting it. They can keep the mileage of cars poor so we’ll buy more gas, but they can’t alter the amount of oil in the ground or the damage to the atmosphere. They can privatize every human interaction and every natural resource, but they can’t privatize the laws of nature. They have conspired to change reality. We must conspire to live in harmony with Reality.

In the same way, they can conspire to kill Martin Luther King, Jr., but they can’t totally eradicate the truth of who did it and why.

Con + spirare, from the Latin. To breathe together. Those are the roots of conspiracy. Breathing together doesn’t sound like an activity of the ideologically deracinated whispering seditiously in a dank cellar or a board room, foul breaths denting a weak flame flickering over a candle nub, gunpowder or greed blackened fingers setting a timer, the whites of creased eyes glinting like knives with treason, murder, power, and deceit.

Con + spirare sounds like healthy men and women standing in the sun figuring out how in the hell they are going to take care of each other and their aging mother Earth and love life while doing it. Breathing together, sharing the same air, plotting to make sure that what’s mine is yours, conspiring to save their self-respect, their ideals, the future for their children.

I want to be part of a conspiracy. Pervasive, populist, revolutionary, and totally transparent. Grassroots. Idealistic. Simplistic. Life-affirming. Community building

A conspiracy to make the common good and the love of nature the common denominator of every economic transaction.

And the simple truth is either we start breathing together, conspiring big time, right out in the open, nakedly, unashamedly, or we will have conspired in secret, by default, in our own demise.

We have let them breathe for us, and they have stolen our breath, our air, our spirit.

Secret con + spirare is death. Open con + spirare is life.

Conspiracy is dead. Long live conspiracy!

Robert Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine
www.americanswhotellthetruth.org

heat!

2007-09-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

George Monbiot Updates His Global Warming Book
Here is a portion of George Monbiot's speech
at the Camp for Climate Change in London Aug. 18, '07.
He has been studying and writing about global warming for over twenty years and is the Author of "Heat" which is about climate change and what needs to be done about it.
He explains that because of recent scientific discoveries the book needs an Extreme Update.

**************

I'm going to start with some bad news, and the bad news is this. Two degrees is no longer the target. And the news is contained in a recent paper written by James Hansen of NASA in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society(1). And what Hansen shows is that the profoundly pessimistic assumptions in the latest IPCC Report are insufficiently pessimistic.

And the reason for this is as follows. The IPCC assumes that the melting of the ice sheets at the poles will take place in a gradual and linear fashion. And Hansen's own work with the paleontological record shows that that is an "entirely implausible" (to use his term) scenario.

the last time we had two degrees of warming in the Pliocene 55 million years ago, the ice sheets at the poles did not melt - as the IPCC proposes - over a millennia, but within the course of one century. And they did not cause a maximum sea level rise within the course of one century - as predicted by the IPCC - of 59 centimeters, but of 25 meters.

And Hansen proposes that through a series of factors - the collapse of the buttresses that prevent the ice from sliding into the sea, the melt water trickling down through crevasses and lubricating the base of the ice sheets, and melt water on the surface of the ice sheets changing the albedo, making the ice darker and therefore absorbing more heat, will lead to the sudden and - certainly in geological terms - almost immediate collapse of both the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets within the course of one a century at somewhat less than two degrees of warming.

Not only does this lead to the immediate affect of inundation of most of the inhabited world - something like 60% of the people live within 50 Km of the coast - it also means that you get a severe and sudden change in global albedo change as white stuff at the poles gives way to dark stuff absorbing much more solar radiation.

And he proposes that we can't go beyond 1.5 to 1.7 degrees of warming above 1990 levels.

Combine this with what Richard was talking about and the stuff contained in the IPCC's 4th Assessment Report which shows that in order to have a maximum cap of two degrees of warming we need an 85% global reduction even before you take population growth into account. So when that's added to the fact that we're going to have something like a 50% increase in population, you can see that that pushes way over 90% even before you take the issue of global equity into account which means that the rich nationsmust cut the emissions much further than anybody else, you realize that we are talking at a minimum of a 100% cut, and it looks like it might have to go to 110% or 115%.

You laugh but we're talking about sequestration and we're talking about such things for example, as growing bio fuel and burying it, simply for growing as much bio mass as we can and sticking it back on the ground....something..... anything to stave off this catastrophe.

We're not talking anymore about measures which require a little bit of tweaking here and there, or a little bit of political tweaking here and there. We're talking about measures which require global revolutionary change.

And that is a much tougher message than any that I've put out before, and this is the first opportunity really that I've had since that paper came out, to express the fact that what I thought were rather bold and revolutionary proposals in my book "Heat", those proposals don't go nearly far enough. Those proposals have been superseded and we need to start thinking on a different scale altogether..........

And I'm afraid the second uncomfortable message I have to put out to you tonight is that when it comes to dealing with a problem of this scale, small is no longer beautiful. We have to start thinking on the biggest possible terms....

We have very very little time in which to act. We have very very little time in which to bring about the largest economical and political transformation the world has ever seen.

The entire speech along with other speakers can be listened to free online courtesy of the UK IMC. Mr. Monbiot is the second speaker at 15 minutes in.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378866.html

1) Dr. James Hansen's Paper, 7/15/07
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/l3h462k7p4068780/fulltext.html

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/379803.html

You have to see this

2007-07-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

Robert Newman's History of Oil

From Paul and me

2007-07-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

with regard to the Hydrocarbon Law

2007-07-28T21:06:00.001-07:00

Open Letter to the Members of the US Congress who Oppose the War on Iraq

To members of the European Parliaments who Oppose the War

Peace be upon you and greetings to you all,

We wish to clarify certain matters relating to events in Iraq for our friends among the members of the US Congress. It is common knowledge that the occupation spared neither the old nor the young, and that Iraq is passing through the most difficult of times because all and sundry are hounding it and covet a share of its riches. We see no good reason for linking the passing of the feeble Iraqi oil law to the withdrawal of the occupation troops from Iraq.

Everyone knows that the oil law does not serve the Iraqi people, and that it serves Bush, his supporters and the foreign companies at the expense of the Iraqi people who have been wronged and deprived of their right to their oil despite enduring all difficulties.

We ask our friends not to link withdrawal with the oil law, especially since the USA claimed that it came to Iraq as a liberator and not in order to control Iraq’s resources.

The general public in Iraq is totally convinced that Bush wants to rush the promulgation of the oil law so as to be leaving Iraq with a victory of sorts, because his project is failing every day and the occupation is collapsing in all parts of Iraq.

We wish to see you take a true stance for the children of Iraq, and we always say that history will remember those who advance peace over war.

With my regards,

Hassan Juma’a Awad
Head of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions

Bush Executive Order: Criminalizing the Antiwar Movement

2007-07-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, July 20, 2007

The Executive Order entitled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq" provides the President with the authority to confiscate the assets of whoever opposes the US led war.

A presidential Executive Order issued on July 17th, repeals with the stroke of a pen the right to dissent and to oppose the Pentagon's military agenda in Iraq.

The Executive Order entitled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq" provides the President with the authority to confiscate the assets of "certain persons" who oppose the US led war in Iraq:

"I have issued an Executive Order blocking property of persons determined to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people."

In substance, under this executive order, opposing the war becomes an illegal act.

The Executive Order criminalizes the antiwar movement. It is intended to "blocking property" of US citizens and organizations actively involved in the peace movement. It allows the Department of Defense to interfere in financial affairs and instruct the Treasury to "block the property" and/or confiscate/ freeze the assets of "Certain Persons" involved in antiwar activities. It targets those "Certain Persons" in America, including civil society organizatioins, who oppose the Bush Administration's "peace and stability" program in Iraq, characterized, in plain English, by an illegal occupation and the continued killing of innocent civilians.

The Executive Order also targets those "Certain Persons" who are "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction", or who, again in plain English, are opposed to the confiscation and privatization of Iraq's oil resources, on behalf of the Anglo-American oil giants.

The order is also intended for anybody who opposes Bush's program of "political reform in Iraq", in other words, who questions the legitimacy of an Iraqi "government" installed by the occupation forces.

Moreover, those persons or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who provide bona fide humanitarian aid to Iraqi civilians, and who are not approved by the US Military or its lackeys in the US sponsored Iraqi puppet government are also liable to have their financial assets confiscated.

The executive order violates the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution. It repeals one of the fundamental tenets of US democracy, which is the right to free expression and dissent. The order has not been the object of discussion in the US Congress. Sofar, it has not been addressed by the US antiwar movement, in terms of a formal statement.

Apart from a bland Associated Press wire report, which presents the executive order as "an authority to use financial sanctions", there has been no media coverage or commentary of a presidential decision which strikes at the heart of the US Constitution..

Broader implications

The criminalization of the State is when the sitting President and Vice President use and abuse their authority through executive orders, presidential directives or otherwise to define "who are the criminals" when in fact they they are the criminals.

This latest executive order criminalizes the peace movement. It must be viewed in relation to various pieces of "anti-terrorist" legislation, the gamut of presidential and national security directives, etc., which are ultimately geared towards repealing constitutional government and installing martial law in the event of a "national emergency".

The war criminals in high office are intent upon repressing all forms of dissent which question the legitimacy of the war in Iraq.

The executive order combined with the existing anti-terrorist legislation is eventually intended to be used against the anti-war and civil rights movements. It can be used to seize the assets of antiwar groups in America as well as block the property and activities of non-governmental humanitarian organizations providing relief in Iraq, seizing the assets of alternative media involved in reporting the truth regarding the US-led war, etc.

In May 2007, Bush issued a major presidential National Security Directive (National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/HSPD 20), which would suspend constitutional government and instate broad dictatorial powers under martial law in the case of a "Catastrophic Emergency" (e.g. Second 9/11 terrorist attack).

On July 11, 2007 the CIA published its "National Intelligence Estimate" which pointed to an imminent Al Qaeda attack on America, a second 9/11 which, according to the terms of NSPD 51, would immediately be followed by the suspension of constitutional government and the instatement of martial law under the authority of the president and the vice-president. (For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, Bush Directive for a "Catastrophic Emergency" in America: Building a Justification for Waging War on Iran? June 2007)

NSPD 51 grants unprecedented powers to the Presidency and the Department of Homeland Security, overriding the foundations of Constitutional government. It allows the sitting president to declare a “national emergency” without Congressional approval. The implementation of NSPD 51 would lead to the de facto closing down of the Legislature and the militarization of justice and law enforcement.

"The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government...."

Were NSPD 51 to be invoked, Vice President Dick Cheney, who constitutes the real power behind the Executive, would essentially assume de facto dictatorial powers, circumventing both the US Congress and the Judiciary, while continuing to use President George W. Bush as a proxy figurehead.

NSPD 51, while bypassing the Constitution, nonetheless, envisages very precise procedures which guarantee the powers of Vice President Dick Cheney in relation to "Continuity of Goverment" functions under Martial Law:

"This directive shall be implemented in a manner that is consistent with, and facilitates effective implementation of, provisions of the Constitution concerning succession to the Presidency or the exercise of its powers, and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 U.S.C. 19), with consultation of the Vice President and, as appropriate, others involved. Heads of executive departments and agencies shall ensure that appropriate support is available to the Vice President and others involved as necessary to be prepared at all times to implement those provisions." (NSPD 51, op cit.)

The executive order to confiscate the assets of antiwar/peace activists is broadly consistent with NSPD 51. It could be triggered even in the absence of a "Catastrophic emergency" as envisaged under NSPD 51. It repeals democracy. It goes one step further in "criminalizing" all forms of opposition and dissent. to the US led war and "Homeland Security" agenda.

link

The Amazon Basin

2007-07-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

A disaster to take everyone's breath away
12:00AM Monday July 24, 2006
By Geoffrey Lean

MANAUS - Deep in the heart of the world's greatest rainforest, a nine-day journey by boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft waters of the Amazon drain away.

Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an immense bathtub, threatening a worldwide catastrophe.

Standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river, he points out what is happening. A month ago, the island was under water. Now, it juts 5m above it.

It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second successive year. And that would be ominous. New research suggests that one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.

The day before, top scientists delivered much the same message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on the strange black waters beside which Manaus, the capital city of the Amazon, stands.

They told the meeting - convened on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, dubbed the "green Pope" for his environmental activism - that global warming and deforestation were pushing the entire enormous area towards a "tipping point", where it would start to die.

The consequences would be awesome. The wet Amazon Basin would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the world to become hotter and drier.

In the long term, it could send global warming out of control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.

Nowhere could seem further from the world's problems than the idyllic spot where Otavio Luz Castello lives. The young naturalist's home is a chain of floating thatched cottages making up a research station in the Mamiraua Reserve, halfway between Manaus and Brazil's border with Colombia.

Rare pink river dolphin play in the tranquil waters around the cottages, kingfishers dive into them, giant, bright butterflies zig-zag across them and squirrel monkeys romp in the trees on their banks.

There is little to suggest that it may be witnessing the first scenes of an apocalypse. The rivers of the Amazon Basin usually routinely fall 9m to 12m - greater than most of the tides of the world's seas - between the wet and dry seasons. But last year they just went on falling in the worst drought in recorded history.

At one point in the western Brazilian state of Acre, the world's biggest river shrank so far that it was possible to walk across it.

Millions of fish died, and thousands of communities whose only transport was by water were stranded.

And the drying forest caught fire; in September, satellite camera images showed 73,000 blazes in the basin.

This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is draining away even faster than last year - and there are still more than three months of the dry season to go.

It is much the same all over Amazonia. In the Jau National Park, 18 hours by boat up the Rio Negro from Manaus, local people who took me out by canoe at dawn found it impossible to get to places they had reached without trouble just the evening before.

Acre received no rain for 40 days recently, and sandbanks are beginning to surface in its rivers.

Flying over the forest - with trees in a thousand shades of green stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can see - it seems inconceivable that anything could endanger its verdant immensity.

Until recently, scientists took the same view, seeing it as one of the world's most stable environments.

Though they condemned the way that, on average, an area roughly the size of Wales is cut down each year, this did not seem to endanger the forest as a whole, much less the planet.

Now they are changing their minds in the face of increasing evidence that deforestation is pushing the Amazon and the world to the brink of disaster.

Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, told the floating symposium of unpublished research which suggests that the felling was drying up the entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been battering the United States and the Caribbean.

The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast amounts of water, which rise high into the air as if in an invisible chimney, drawing in wet northeast trade winds, which have picked up moisture from the Atlantic.

This, in turn, controls the temperature of the ocean - as the trade winds pick up the moisture, the warm water left gets saltier and sinks.

Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian evaporation which drives the whole process.

One result is that the hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes.

Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying the forest drought.

Marina Silva, a fiery former rubber-tapper who is now Brazil's Environment Minister, described how the Government was finally cracking down on the felling by seizing illegally cut logs, closing illicit enterprises and fining and imprisoning offenders.

As a result, she says, it dropped by 31 per cent last year.

But that takes it only back to the levels it was in 2001, still double what it was 10 years before. And it has reached far into the forest after the American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three years ago at Santarem.

This encouraged entrepreneurs to cut down trees to grow soya.

The symposium flew to inspect the damage this had caused - vast fields of beans destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe, where until recently there was lush forest.

Brazilian politicians say their country has so many other pressing problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought under control, unless the world helps.

Calculations by Hylton Philipson, a British merchant banker and rainforest campaigner, reckon that doing this would take US$60 billion ($80 billion) a year - less than a third of the cost of the Iraq war.

About a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor, drying it out.

Add these two figures together and the total is perilously close to 50 per cent, predicted as the "tipping point" that marks the death of the Amazon.

Nobody knows when that crucial threshold will be passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is coming ever closer.

One of Nobre's colleagues, Dr Philip Fearnside, says: "With every tree that falls, we increase the probability that the tipping point will arrive."

The science behind the scare

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.

Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences.

The research - carried out by the Massachusetts-based centre in Santarem on the Amazon River - has taken even the scientists conducting it by surprise.

When Dr Dan Nepstead started the experiment in 2002 - by covering a chunk of rainforest the size of a football pitch with plastic panels to see how it would cope without rain - he surrounded it with sophisticated sensors, expecting to record only minor changes.

The trees managed the first year of drought without difficulty. In the second year, they sunk their roots deeper to find moisture, but survived. But in year three, they started dying. Beginning with the tallest the trees started to come crashing down, exposing the forest floor to the drying sun.

By the end of the year the trees had released more than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide they have stored during their lives, helping to act as a break on global warming. Instead they began accelerating the climate change.

The Amazon now appears to be entering its second successive year of drought, raising the possibility it could start dying next year. The immense forest contains 90 billion tons of carbon, enough in itself to increase the rate of global warming by 50 per cent.

Nepstead expects "mega-fires" rapidly to sweep across the drying jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the sun and the rainforest could become desert.

Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world's top forest ecologists, says research shows "the lock has broken" on the Amazon ecosystem and the Amazon is "headed in a terrible direction".
link

Let's Do A Study

2007-07-15T20:48:00.000-07:00

There is now a plan to address CCD and legislation wending its way through Congress to protect pollinators and pollinator habitat.

From the Colony Collapse Disorder Action Plan just released by the USDA:

“Regarding pesticides, a new class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids is broadly and commonly used in most cropping systems and on turf and forest pests. One of the compounds in this class, imidacloprid, was banned in France, because it is acutely toxic to bees and since sub-lethal doses have been shown to impair honey bee short-term memory; short-term memory is critical to bee navigational abilities necessary for foraging flights and for returning to the hive. USDA-funded research in North Carolina suggested that widely used fungicides synergize the effect of neonicotinoids 1,000-fold. Imidacloprid, applied as a systemic, has been found in corn, sunflower, and rape pollen at levels high enough to harm bees. [Although bees do not pollinate corn, they do collect corn pollen.]”

The action plan calls for research on the effects of neonicotinoids (among other things) as a cause of CCD but stops short of prohibiting use of the insecticide until the research is complete.

The USDA Colony Collapse Disorder Action Plan can be downloaded from:
link
For info on Pollinator and Pollinator Habitat Legislation:
link

bees'n body bags sent by Fishmael

2007-06-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

I am sure they died and went to heaven

Buzz Kill

2007-06-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows why the bees are disappearing. Or do they?

By Franklin Schneider
Posted: June 14, 2007

Jay Jones lives in a moneyed subdivision in Centreville. The houses are set well back from the road, newish and rambling in a style best described as Late Century Upper Management. Like his neighbors, Jones has a pool in back and a selection of hulking, high-end vehicles in front. Unlike his neighbors, he also has half a million bees in his backyard. The 20 hives are set way back in the timber, surrounded by a tall wooden fence, which is in turn hidden by 7-foot-tall hedges. The hives don’t look like much, but Jones harvested well over a ton of honey from them last year. Though he’s had the bees for six years, none of his neighbors had any idea until this spring, when Jones’ “girls,” as he calls them, went inexplicably feral and swarmed a nearby house.

Jack Passante, the unlucky neighbor, says that back in early April he woke up one day to find his house, yard, and swimming pool covered with bees. “I couldn’t even go outside,” says Passante, still clearly irritated. He shows me several photos he took of his covered pool, dozens of bees clustered on the tarp. “You could see them all over the yard, hovering above the grass. One night we came around the bend in the road that leads to our house, and there was just a fog of bees in the middle of the road, you could barely see.”

Passante has a daughter who’s allergic to bees—a single sting could send her into anaphylactic shock, so she was essentially under house arrest until the bees decamped, which they did a few days later. But they didn’t return to their hive. They simply disappeared and are presumed dead. This troubles Jones, but it doesn’t surprise him. He’s lost more than half his bees since mid-March.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” says Jones, absent-mindedly brushing bees off his shirt. “Swarming Jack’s house is just weird. I opened my hives this spring and out of 20, 10 were just empty. No dead bees or anything; the bees had just left. I have no idea why. I bought five packages of bees to replace them [a package contains approximately 10,000 bees] and right away, half of those bees disappeared.”

He shows me an abandoned hive. A frenzy of bees erupts from the two adjacent hives, but this one is completely empty. Bees will usually plunder what’s left when other bees leave, but this honey is untouched, except for a few dozen ants swollen freakishly large from the rich diet. Jones also indicates a cone of wax mushrooming from the top of the hive, something he says he’s never seen before and is convinced is connected to the die-offs of his bees. When Jones removes the top of the box, a few bees, attracted by the scent of honey, land on the hive but are immediately repelled by some unseen force.

“Something’s wrong,” says Jones, rubbing his freckled pate.

You’ve probably heard that something—no one knows what—is killing bees. From D.C. to California, and as far away as Europe, beekeepers opened their hives this spring and collectively soiled their pristine white suits. It wasn’t that the hives were filled with dead bees; they were just empty. It seemed as if the bees had flown away and decided not to come back. Out of the 2.6 million hives in the United States, experts estimate that more than 600,000 disappeared during this past winter; at a conservative estimate of 50,000 bees per hive, that’s 30 billion bees that have vanished since last fall. This statistic might seem rather abstract. But a third of all the food we eat in this country is directly dependent on pollination by honeybees—the very same bees that are dropping faster than real-estate prices in Baghdad.

Experts have coined this spring’s mysterious bee plague Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Theories as to its cause have proliferated like cockroaches. You’ve got your GM-crop haters who blame artificial genes gone berserk. You’ve got your cell-phone conspiracy theorists citing a recently debunked German study that seemed to indicate emissions from certain types of phones interfere with bees’ ability to navigate their way back to the hive. Some people think CCD is caused by a new virus, a kind of honeybee AIDS. Still others point to high-voltage power lines—which, over the years, have been suspected of causing everything from cancer to autism. And finally, there are those who think that bees might be a “sentinel species” and that CCD is the opening note of a catastrophic environmental meltdown, Mother Nature’s final payback for centuries of bad behavior.

In the meantime, a group of scientists and apiarists have formed the CCD Working Group, devoted to discovering the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. The group testified to Congress about CCD in March. But in the rush to find a culprit, researchers and beekeepers alike have overlooked a rather obvious possibility: Perhaps the beekeepers themselves are killing the bees.

The summer meeting of the Virginia State Beekeepers Association was held the last weekend in April in Sandston, Va., in a recreational center across from a Little League baseball field. Most of the conversation centers around queen management, maximizing profits, “those darn mites,” and creative winter feeding solutions. (Did you know you can get a 50-pound block of Oreo filling for 35 bucks?) Surprisingly, very few of the beekeepers in attendance had seen the kind of drastic reduction in numbers associated with Colony Collapse Disorder. Brenda Kiessling of Vienna lost only two out of 16 hives this year, “a normal number,” and Billy Davis of Loudoun lost only 12 out of 100. In contrast to the near panic depicted by the news media, Colony Collapse was regarded with amused skepticism, the latest in a long line of big city/big government/big business/big media–manufactured hysterias, à la Y2K, mutually assured destruction, and color-coded terror alerts.

During the raffle—first prize is a queen bee, “shipping and handling not included”—I wander over to talk to Jerry Hayes, the Chief Apiary Inspector for the Florida Department of Agriculture (Florida is a major state in the bee industry, as large-scale apiarists often winter their hives in warmer Southern climes). He’s on the special CCD Working Group, and all of the people I talked to at the meeting referred me to Hayes as “the CCD expert.”

Hayes’ theory is that CCD is being caused by “a combination of chemical toxins—pesticides for example—and other pathogens. Immune system suppression is also probably a factor.” But what’s causing the immune system of bees to crap out? “Stress,” he says. When I share my observation that the vast majority of the smaller beekeepers in attendance haven’t had Jones’ experience of massive losses and haunted hives, Hayes nods, unsurprised. “It’s worst [with] big, commercial beekeepers.”

This is a common sentiment in the CCD debate. Compared to the bucolic trappings of small-scale beekeeping, with its stationary hives and natural feeding practices, commercial beekeeping operations are like entomological concentration camps. Large-scale apiarists maintain hundreds or thousands of hives, gorging the bees on high-fructose corn syrup in the winter, then dousing them in pesticides in the spring to kill mites (“They usually hire Mexicans to do that,” one beekeeper told me.) They then take them on the road in 18-wheelers, all the way across the country. Once the bees have reached their destination, they’re unleashed to pollinate fields and groves, then packed up and trucked back home. Transporting bees long distances is SOP for modern industrial beekeeping—but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the bees. A significant percentage of the increase in dead bees seems directly related to moving the hives.

Dean Burroughs is a bald, compact man with large, stony-looking hands, kind of a cross between Elmer Fudd and Jack Dempsey. Burroughs used to coach tennis at Salisbury University in Maryland, but nowadays he’s a full-time beekeeper. He keeps 200 hives secreted in glades and hidden clearings around Salisbury, close to the Delaware border. Every spring he takes 150 of his hives to area farms—none of them more than 10 miles away—to pollinate apples and strawberries. The other 50 hives he leaves in one place all year, for honey production.

“The hives I don’t move, they see losses of about 25 percent a year,” Burroughs says. “But the ones I move, even just a couple miles down the road, 60 percent of them die, easy.”

A lot of beekeepers will swear up and down that driving bees around is not bad for them at all. Burroughs’ setup is a small one in the commercial beekeeping world, but with its control group of stationary bees and an experimental group that travels, all other factors being identical, it provides near-unassailable proof that moving bees around kills them.

C.O. Smith of Boonesboro, a sleepy town between Frederick and Hagerstown, is also familiar with the perils of taking bees on the road. A 56-year veteran of the beekeeping business, he rents 1,000 to 1,500 hives a year to a middleman who drives them to California on the lucrative pollination circuit. Smith says that on the return trip at the end of the summer, the bees are particularly tired of the road. “Nowadays we use a rotation of several drivers who go straight through from the West Coast to Maryland.…When one guy gets tired, another one takes the wheel, so there’s never any stopping at all,” he says. “Before, we had just one driver, who had to stop to eat and sleep. The trip took five or six days then, but even just the couple additional days doubled or more the percentage of bees we’d lose.”

Anyone who’s ever taken a cat to the vet, much less cross-country, knows that most animals do not like car rides. Now imagine taking a flying insect across the country in the back of a truck, where it’s unable to fly and stays in complete darkness. Bees, which function almost entirely by smell, spend days on end inundated with car exhaust and diesel fumes. In this context, it’s surprising any survive. Even before CCD, these industrial beekeepers routinely saw losses of 30 to 40 percent, basically from working malnourished, stressed-out bees to death.

Even though large-scale beekeepers know that moving hives is bad for the bees, the pollination circuit is so profitable that many of them feel they have no choice, especially with cheap honey flooding in from overseas depressing what people will pay for the homegrown stuff. Many of these commercial pollinators make most, if not all, of their yearly income in the months between May and September. So if they have to choose between feeding their kids and working their bees to death, well, a package of new bees is only $50.

Once the bees get to where they’re going, they’re forced to subsist on a single pollen source—whatever crop they’ve been leased to pollinate. This unbalanced diet is as bad for them as it is for us: Imagine what would happen to your body if you ate nothing but, say, pancakes for a month.

One day in May, Burroughs takes me to a farm close to his home in Salisbury where his bees have been leased to pollinate a cantaloupe patch. From a distance, the fields look barren. When we get closer, we see the baby cantaloupe vines just sprouting from the ground, maybe 6 or 8 inches high with small blossoms here and there. Nearby a dozen hives sit against a windbreak, inactive in the midafternoon lull. (Like people in more civilized countries, bees nap in the afternoon.) Home base for Burroughs’ bees is in the middle of the forest, surrounded by thickets of deliriously blossoming trees, wildflowers, and clover, compared to which the cantaloupe field seems like a desert. When I remark on this, Burroughs is sheepish.

“Well, that’s why we have to feed them the corn syrup,” he says.

In the back of Burroughs’ truck is a huge tank filled with a viscous amber-colored liquid—high-fructose corn syrup 55. “The same thing they put in Coke and Pepsi!” says Burroughs. He dispenses the syrup into feeding buckets he’s rigged to emit a trickle and sets them on top of his hives. Many commercial crops—vine crops like watermelon and cantaloupe, for example—don’t yield enough nectar for bees to accumulate stores, so when winter or early spring rolls around, the bees are out of food. Normally they’d fall back on honey, but that’s long since been harvested by the beekeeper and shipped to grocery stores and farmers’ markets. So beekeepers cover this shortfall by feeding bees high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS—the same substance manufacturers add to everything from soda to ketchup and the stuff many nutritionists believe is turning Americans into obese, wheezing, diabetic, cancer-ridden couch manatees.

When CCD first broke last fall—before it was even called Colony Collapse—a lot of people pointed the finger at high-fructose corn syrup. Some suspected contamination from genetically modified corn; others just surmised that this shit was no better for bees than it is for us. A lot of beekeepers stopped using HFCS, joining a small number of purists who’d always shunned it, preferring instead to feed the bees honey. This costs the beekeepers money, since honey still fetches a decent price on the market, but it pays off in other ways. C.O. Smith scoffs at HFCS, using it only when he absolutely has to—and then only on his most disposable bees. He’s convinced that as a result, his bees are stronger; even on the bees he moves, he kept his losses this past year in single-digit percentages, while his colleagues lost more than half and sometimes up to 90 percent.

So is hauling bees around the countryside in the back of a truck and feeding them soda sweetener what is making them weak? As Jerry Hayes, the CCD top man, puts it, “What would happen to you if I made you run marathons, sleep every night in the back of a moving car, and only fed you chocolate bars?”

Laszlo Pentek is a beekeeper based in Arlington. His day job is as a government actuary, and his interest in population dynamics led him naturally to bees. Now he is a bona fide bee expert, with the obsessive, encyclopedic knowledge of the autodidact. When a swarm of bees invades a house or yard and the city refuses to do anything, Pentek is the go-to among area beekeepers. He often responds on his lunch hour, and during the spring he’ll check out two or three hives a week that have migrated to someone’s attic or tool shed.

On a Thursday afternoon in early May, I watched Pentek delight a small crowd of office workers at 16th and P Streets NW. After emerging from his Prius, he put on a full beekeeper suit and—using nothing but a broom, a box, and a cheese knife—proceeded to subdue a couple thousand bees that had covered a fire hydrant. As he worked, a steady stream of people took pictures on their cell phones and reporters from the Washington Post and NBC-4 circled the incident. One bystander took several hundred pictures, went home, downloaded the pictures from his camera, came back, and took more pictures. Although impressed with his skills, everyone seemed vaguely disappointed Pentek was not stung to death.

Pentek maintains hundreds of hives around D.C. (he keeps the locations and number secret) and, what’s more significant, experienced only a 5 percent loss this spring. Like most of the other smaller beekeepers I encountered, he was a CCD skeptic.

“I don’t think CCD is made up, per se,” Pentek says. “But I don’t think it’s anything new, either. It’s a matter of miscategorized facts. A PR campaign.”

Pentek also doesn’t buy claims that CCD is a new pathogen or the first wave of mass extinctions; it’s merely weakened bees falling prey to known pathogens and infections, a consequence of unsustainable commercial beekeeping practices. But if that’s the case, I ask, why not just admit it and devise new methods?

“Money,” says Pentek. “The beekeeping establishment thinks that if they declare a state of emergency, they’ll get all this publicity and then Congress will give them money for research—research that should have been done a long, long time ago.”

For most of the 20th century, the federal government maintained four laboratories dedicated to honeybee research. But in the last seven or eight years, funding has fluctuated and the feds have threatened to shutter some labs entirely, even as threats to bee health and demand for pollination have increased. Solutions to so many of the problems plaguing the bee industry seem tantalizingly close—the bee genome was just sequenced, for instance, and anecdotal evidence suggests that a hardier, more industrious bee could be produced by controlled cross-breeding domestic bees with Africanized “killer” bees—but the resources to produce these breakthroughs just aren’t there.

The last time the beekeeping industry was threatened was in the late ’80s, by the varroa mite. Back then, bees were raised primarily for their honey, profit margins were small, and bees traveling to the coast on pollination trips was basically unheard-of. Alarms were raised, but nothing much was done, and 20 years later, beekeepers are still battling varroa. But in the last 10 years, fees for pollination have increased by 600 percent—from $20 to $25 per hive in the late ’90s to more than $150 per hive now. Even taking into account the rising costs of maintaining bees, that’s staggering. This growth was stimulated by expansion of the almond market (among others), and the simultaneous winnowing of natural pollinators by mites and the destruction of their natural habitats. All this new money created a small elite of relatively wealthy, bottom-line über-beekeepers. These people already have significant capital invested in equipment; they’re unable or disinclined to reform their practices, they know how to use the system to their advantage, and they are determined not to let this become another chronic problem to be managed by more hang-ups in time and money, à la varroa. Enter: Colony Collapse Disorder?

One would be hard-pressed to come up with something more topical, more media-friendly, more sexy than CCD. Colony Collapse Disorder, with its undertones of apocalypse and extinction, is intensely appealing to our collective sense of guilt about shitting all over the environment and our expectation of (and perhaps even desire for) some kind of divine punishment. Almost all the beekeepers I talked to, even the obscure hobbyists, were already sick and tired of talking to reporters, such has been the blitz. “The bees are dying, and you could be next” is the new “we’ve got to take out Saddam or he’ll drop the A-bomb on us!” But in the end, perhaps Colony Collapse isn’t much of a mystery at all. Bees are dying because they eat too much sugar, work too much, spend too much time in a truck rather than outside, and are being poisoned by pollutants. The same things that are killing us are killing the bees.

But while it’s clear that commercial practices are weakening bees, rendering them susceptible to all kinds of opportunistic pathogens, there’s still a major missing piece of the puzzle. The sudden onset of CCD this past year leads one to suspect that there was something that set off the die-offs, some new pathogen or environmental pressure that tipped the scale. But what?

About to give up, I remember a major beekeeper in Maryland who’d mentioned he’d heard from some colleagues that high-fructose corn syrup tainted with genetically modified organisms could be the culprit. I get a number for a corn syrup dealer in Pennsylvania (he prefers to stay anonymous, for reasons which will soon become clear). I ask him right off the bat if he has any guesses as to what’s causing CCD.

“I don’t need to guess,” he says, chuckling. He sounds as if he’d been waiting for someone to call for quite a while. “I know what’s causing CCD.”

Yes, well?

“I don’t know if I should talk about this,” the source says. “I’m connected with a lot of people very close to this CCD investigation, and I know that there are researchers who are very careful about what they say—they’re almost afraid for their lives.”

After some coaxing, this guy tells me his fantastical story. CCD was triggered, he says, by a class of pesticides widely used to treat seeds. The plants that grow from these treated seeds incorporate the pesticide into their entire systems, from roots to leaves to stems to pollen and nectar. When pests (or bees) feed on treated plants, the chemical destroys their nervous system. The people in charge know that this particular type of pesticide is causing CCD, but he claims they’re keeping it quiet—and spending millions to make sure others keep it that way. At the end of his story—it takes an hour to tell and includes other nefarious and high-level government conspiracies—he instructs me to look up a list of pesticides, spelling the names out laboriously as I write them down.

When the phone call ends, it seems obvious that the guy is paranoid, if not outright delusional. Except a lot of his story checks out. The pesticides he cited, marketed under the names Poncho, Admire, and Calypso, belong to a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids, “systemic” pesticides which, when applied to seeds, manifest themselves throughout the mature plant. When an insect ingests any part of the plant—leaf, seed, stem, or, in the case of bees, pollen or nectar, it gets a dose of a neurotoxin that can cause a swift and lethal breakdown of an insect’s nervous and immune system. For growers, this pesticide is efficient and limits their own exposure to nasty chemicals sprayed directly on their crops. Introduced in the early ’90s, these pesticides were a true revolution in pest control.

But not all insects are pests. In fact, one of these chemicals, imidacloprid, is the very same pesticide—marketed here as Admire and overseas as Gaucho—that was banned in France in 1999 as a suspected culprit in drastic and mysterious die-offs in honeybees. Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and chemical company better known for aspirin, has a crop science division that manufactures and sells Gaucho and many other pesticides. The company protested the ban in France, citing studies that found no correlation between imidacloprid and bee die-offs; beekeepers countered with their own studies that found the opposite result. The French government sided with the beekeepers, and the ban stayed in place and was expanded in 2004. Imidacloprid/Gaucho/Admire is used on a wide selection of fruits and vegetables in the United States, including apples, strawberries, and melons—all crops routinely pollinated by bees—and countless others.

I thought back to Jay Jones’ bees in Centreville, which seemed like a textbook case of CCD. Could his bees have been exposed to this particular type of pesticide? I consulted a map of Centreville, which wasn’t encouraging; bees have a flight radius of only three miles in each direction from their hive, and there didn’t seem to be any cultivated farmland near Jones’ house. But when I call Jones and ask if he knows of any crops nearby, he says yes immediately. “There’s a huge farm less than a mile away!” Jones says. “They sell melons, cucumbers, everything.”

Cox Farms’ marketing director, Bob Richard, says that, yes, Cox does use pesticides. “We use about four different ones depending on which pests we have at [the] time,” he says, but he wouldn’t reveal the brand names or the specific chemicals the farms use to kill bugs. “We try not to use any [pesticides].…When we do need to, we use some of the generic ones that are out there and some targeted ones.”

Even if Cox Farms isn’t using imidacloprid, it’s entirely possible that there’s someone else in a three-mile radius who is. Imidacloprid is also approved for uses ranging from flea control on dogs and cats (for which it’s sold as Advantage, over the counter) to breaking up termite colonies, with little or no restrictions. If you find a termite mound in your backyard, you can simply go on eBay or down to the local hardware store, get a big ol’ vat of imidacloprid, and dump it on the ground. And so it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who’s using imidacloprid where, and for what purpose.

“You can buy it at Wal-Mart!” says Dave Hackenburg. Hackenburg, a beekeeper in Pennsylvania with decades of experience, was one of the first people, if not the first, to identify CCD. He has absolutely no doubt that imidacloprid is behind CCD. “And you know what Joe Consumer is like. He thinks a little is good so a lot is better. He’s not following the directions on the bottle!”

“The last three years,” he says, “They’ve just been pouring this chemical on crops. It’s approved for everything.…All I’m saying is, you go buy this stuff to use on aphids or whatnot, and the little insert from the chemical company says straight out that it, one, makes bugs quit eating, two, induces memory loss and confusion, and, three, gives them a nervous system disorder. And that’s exactly what’s happening to bees. But then I’m just a dumb beekeeper who’s been beekeeping for 45 years. What do I know?”

Well surely, knowing that bees are such an important part of the ecosystem, not to mention the economy, chemical companies and farmers alike wouldn’t just indiscriminately soak the countryside with a chemical that turns both bees and pests into convulsing, gibbering zombies, would they? There must be a fail-safe in there to prevent killing all the bees.

No, says Jerry Hayes, of the CCD Working Group. “Imidacloprid kills bad bugs and good bugs alike. It works on bees in the exact same way it works on all other insects.”

So did someone drop the ball?

Hayes pauses, weighing his words. He is too nice a guy to put it just so. “Someone didn’t look closely enough,” he says.

That’s not as surprising as it initially seems, considering the process by which a pesticide comes to market. The EPA often doesn’t even test a pesticide before it goes on the shelf; it entrusts the chemical companies themselves to oversee safety testing on their own products, almost always rubber-stamping the results without verifying them independently, says Laura Hepting of the D.C.-based nonprofit Beyond Pesticides, which monitors the pesticide industry. “The large majority of the data is provided by the companies themselves,” she says. “The EPA has a panel that reviews this information, but they only do their own tests if a red flag pops up. But this data can be—and often is—skewed. Not only results, but the procedures that produce those results, can be tweaked. There are loopholes.”

The studies the chemical industry had to submit to gain approval for imidacloprid merely required demonstration that the levels of the chemical found in the nectar and pollen of treated plants were “sublethal” to bees. Strictly speaking, this is true. For instance, imidacloprid can make bees stop grooming themselves, which allows lethal fungal infections to thrive in bee colonies—in this case one could truthfully, if disingenuously, say that the fungus killed the bees, not imidacloprid. You could say the same in cases when impaired bees can’t find their way home and die of exposure, that it was the elements that killed them, not the pesticide. We’re wasting our time picking on poor li’l chemical companies when we should be out there lobbying for a ban on fungi and weather!

So why not just ban imidacloprid? Because Big Chemical (due to corporate consolidation, six corporations—Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto, DuPont, BASF, and Dow—control almost the entire global market for crop protection) is, well, big. According to Bayer’s 2006 Annual Report, Bayer CropScience sales of imidacloprid pesticides topped â‚¬560 million (about $746 million). That’s about 10 percent of Bayer CropScience’s approximately $7.5 billion in total sales, making imidacloprid products, according to the company, the world’s No. 1 best-selling pesticide.

With so much money at stake, any ban on imidacloprid would be an uphill battle. Even after France’s government shut down use of the pesticide, Bayer insisted it was harmless to bees and went so far as to file a lawsuit against a French beekeeper for derogatory remarks he made in the media about Gaucho. (The suit was dismissed by a judge in 2003.)

Bayer’s position on imidacloprid had not changed when I contacted them last week for comment. “When used according to label instructions, imidacloprid does not kill bees,” Greg Coffey, a Bayer spokesperson tells me when I ask him flat out if his company’s product is causing CCD. Sounding somewhat hopeful, he adds, “in fact, current research indicates a number of nonchemical causes may be to blame.”

But respected experts in the bee industry I’ve talked to say that imidacloprid does kill bees, and the way it works—disrupting a neural receptor in the insect nervous system —suggests that it has the same effect on all insects, bees or otherwise.

Coffey sighs. “When used according to label instructions, imidacloprid does not kill bees,” he says again, slower this time.

That’s not how Henri Clement, the president of the National Union of French Apiculture who was instrumental in getting Gaucho outlawed, sees it. Although the ban went into place in 1999, he wrote in an e-mail, “we still saw effects in 2005 and 2006, as it remains in the ground for a very long time.” (Some studies have found that imidacloprid can have a half-life of up to three years in soil and can still be present a decade later.) He also reported that Bayer is trying to get other neonicotinoid pesticides, which work in the very same manner as Gaucho and would be equally as potentially lethal to bees, approved for use in France. At the same time, a recent Bayer presentation claims studies have found that imidacloprid “even in the absence of infestation with insects, exerts a supportive, stress-reducing, protective effect” on plants. A cynic might suspect the company is trying to position imidacloprid as less of a poison and more of a supplement or vitamin for crops—a subtle redefinition that would make it infinitely harder to ban.

When I contacted EPA for its response, a spokesperson forwarded me a copy of its standard statement on CCD:

EPA is coordinating with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, academia, professional organizations, and beekeepers to identify the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, a massive die-off of adult bees in established honeybee colonies. Though agricultural records indicate that sudden honeybee colony collapse is not a new phenomenon, it is imperative that we learn the cause and do what we can to prevent it. The current scientific consensus is that the cause of CCD is unknown. EPA and USDA have met with insect scientists and beekeeping professionals to discuss leading theories. A report of the results of that meeting is being prepared by USDA, and scientists around the nation and the globe are moving forward with research to test the various theories. EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment and will continue to work with USDA and others to assess this potential threat. If there are actions identified that EPA can take to prevent CCD, EPA stands ready to take the appropriate steps.

When I point out that this statement doesn’t specifically address any part of my source’s story, Enesta Jones, the EPA press officer, has no further response.

Whether or not my source’s conspiracy theories hold water, if imidacloprid really is killing bees, we’re left with at least two equally discomfiting possibilities. One: Big Chemical failed to adequately test imidacloprid and unknowingly released a pesticide that’s killing the only natural pollinators we have left. Or, two: Big Chemical knew imidacloprid would kill off our primary pollinators and released it anyway. If the latter seems puzzling, consider this question: If all the bees died out, how much would Big Chemical, the global leaders in genetically modified crops, stand to gain from a sudden demand for self-pollinating crops?

Don’t ask Laszlo Pentek. He’s still trying to figure out the bees in D.C. There’s a particular feral hive he’s been monitoring for years in Northeast, near Bladensburg Road and Neal Street. Residents have continuously complained about the hive, but the city is restrained by laws prohibiting the extermination of honeybees. I’m curious to see if these bees, completely unmanaged and wild, have been affected by CCD. Pentek agrees to take me there. The hive is located about 30 feet off the ground in a hollowed-out tree limb. June Bradshaw, who’s lived next to the hive since it appeared three or four years ago, shows me some digital pictures she took of the bees last summer. The photos show a manhole-size mass of bees covering the entire elbow of the limb; today there are only two or three bees desultorily flitting in and out of the hole.

“That’s normal,” says Pentek. “These kind of bees generally don’t peak until the summer.” Bradshaw looks skeptical.

“Last summer all of a sudden, the bees went crazy,” she says. “They started swarming all around in a huge cloud. I was afraid to even come out on the porch.”

Bees are sensitive creatures. They’re easily irritated, says Pentek, pointing to an apartment building across the street, where a boombox protrudes from an unscreened window, blasting Klymaxx. “They hate noise and vibration. And bananas—it smells like their alarm pheromone. I once ate a banana right before I went to check on my hives—never again.”

But it’s not bananas making bees crazy on a global scale. The heart of the question seems to be: Is CCD something correctable—if we stop trucking bees cross-country and feeding them Oreo filling and having them pollinate crops chocked full of pesticides, will they stop dying? Or have we set something larger in motion that doesn’t just affect the bees directly under human stewardship, but bees everywhere? And who’s next? Other insects, mammals, and eventually humans?

Keith Tignor, the state apiarist for Virginia, says research on whether there have been parallel die-offs in other insect populations has just now started. The early signs are not good. In the D.C. region alone, naturalists and researchers have observed an increasing number of fish die-offs within the past several years—tens of thousands of dead fish washing up onshore, some killed by dead water or pollution, but others with no discernible cause of death except a mysterious weakening of the immune system. The same symptoms have also been observed in snails, butterflies, birds, and trees across the nation. If these phenomena are related to CCD and continue to spread across other species, well, that’s quite probably all she wrote for the human race. Judging by the wild hive on Neal Street on this particular day, it’s hard to say one way or another.

As Pentek conjectures on where these bees’ main food source might be, a navy blue van screeches to a halt across the street, and seven or eight Kevlar-clad U.S. Marshals disembark. The music cuts out immediately and an unseen hand pulls the stereo inside. Two marshals drag a small battering ram out of the van, and the group trots to the front door of the building. As they’re arranging themselves into formation, the door opens and the tenant, apparently expecting them, shuffles out sheepishly, carrying several suitcases and the boombox.

“They’re evicting him,” says Bradshaw.

Pentek nods approvingly. “That’s good for the bees.”

2007-06-15T21:35:00.001-07:00

Posted from the blogger widget on the mac dashboard.
just another way of adding stuff on the fly.
hey! where is everyone?

Global Warming: within reason

2007-06-12T17:39:00.000-07:00

This may be a good way to approach the problem of: is it real?

broadband required for video in link.

Suddenly, the bees are simply vanishing

2007-06-10T10:57:00.000-07:00

Scientists are at a loss to pinpoint the cause. The die-off in 35 states has crippled beekeepers and threatened many crops.
By Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writers
June 10, 2007

Bees are going missing, yes, but the crops are just fine
The dead bees under Dennis vanEngelsdorp's microscope were like none he had ever seen.

He had expected to see mites or amoebas, perennial pests of bees. Instead, he found internal organs swollen with debris and strangely blackened. The bees' intestinal tracts were scarred, and their rectums were abnormally full of what appeared to be partly digested pollen. Dark marks on the sting glands were telltale signs of infection.

"The more you looked, the more you found," said VanEngelsdorp, the acting apiarist for the state of Pennsylvania. "Each thing was a surprise."

VanEngelsdorp's examination of the bees in November was one of the first scientific glimpses of a mysterious honeybee die-off that has launched an intense search for a cure.

The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.

Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.

"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."

Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.

So far, they are stumped.

According to the Apiary Inspectors of America, 24% of 384 beekeeping operations across the country lost more than 50% of their colonies from September to March. Some have lost 90%.

"I'm worried about the bees," said Dan Boyer, 52, owner of Ridgetop Orchards in Fishertown, Pa., which grows apples. "The more I learn about it, the more I think it is a national tragedy."

At Boyer's orchard, 400 acres of apple trees — McIntosh, Honey Crisp, Red Delicious and 11 other varieties — have just begun to bud white flowers.

Boyer's trees need to be pollinated. Incompletely pollinated blooms would still grow apples, he said, but the fruit would be small and misshapen, suitable only for low-profit juice.

This year, he will pay dearly for the precious bees — $13,000 for 200 hives, the same price that 300 hives cost him last year.

The scene is being repeated throughout the country, where honeybees, scientifically known as Apis mellifera, are required to pollinate a third of the nation's food crops, including almonds, cherries, blueberries, pears, strawberries and pumpkins.

Vanishing colonies

One of the earliest alarms was sounded by Hackenberg, who used to keep about 3,000 hives in dandelion-covered fields near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

In November, Hackenberg, 58, was at his winter base in Florida. He peeked in on a group of 400 beehives he had driven down from his home in West Milton, Pa., a month before. He went from empty box to empty box. Only about 40 had bees in them.

"It was just the most phenomenal thing I thought I'd ever seen," he said.

The next morning, Hackenberg called Jerry Hayes, the chief of apiary inspection at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and president of the Apiary Inspectors of America.
- Bees are going missing, yes, but the crops are just fine
Hayes mentioned some bee die-offs in Georgia that, until then, hadn't seemed significant.

Hackenberg drove back to West Milton with a couple of dead beehives and live colonies that had survived. He handed them over to researchers at Pennsylvania State University.

With amazing speed, the bees vanished from his other hives, more than 70% of which were abandoned by February.

Hackenberg, a talkative, wiry man with a deeply lined face, figured he lost more than $460,000 this winter for replacement bees, lost honey and missed pollination opportunities.

"If that happens again, we're out of business," he said.

It didn't take researchers long to figure out they were dealing with something new.

VanEngelsdorp, 37, quickly eliminated the most obvious suspects: Varroa and tracheal mites, which have occasionally wrought damage on hives since the 1980s.

At the state lab in Harrisburg, Pa., VanEngelsdorp checked bee samples from Pennsylvania and Georgia. He washed bees with soapy water to dislodge Varroa mites and cut the thorax of the bees to look for tracheal mites; he found that the number of mites was not unusually high.

His next guess was amoebic infection. He scanned the bees' kidneys for cysts and found a handful, but not enough to explain the population decline.

VanEngelsdorp dug through scientific literature looking for other mass disappearances.

He found the first reference in a 1869 federal report, detailing a mysterious bee disappearance. There was only speculation as to the cause — possibly poisonous honey or maybe a hot summer.

A 1923 handbook on bee culture noted that a "disappearing disease" went away in a short time without treatment. There was a reference to "fall dwindle" in a 1965 scientific article to describe sudden disappearances in Texas and Louisiana.

He found other references but no explanations.

VanEngelsdorp traveled to Florida and California at the beginning of the year to collect adult bees, brood, nectar, pollen and comb for a more systematic study. He went to 11 apiaries, both sick and healthy, and collected 102 colonies.

A number of the pollen samples went to Maryann Frazier, a honeybee specialist at Penn State who has been coordinating the pesticide investigation. Her group has been testing for 106 chemicals used to kill mites, funguses or other pests.

Scientists have focused on a new group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which have spiked in popularity because they are safe for people, Frazier said. Studies have shown that these pesticides can kill bees and throw off their ability to learn and navigate, she said.

Researchers have yet to collect enough data to come to any conclusions, but the experience of French beekeepers casts doubt on the theory. France banned the most commonly used neonicotinoid in 1999 after complaints from beekeepers that it was killing their colonies. French hives, however, are doing no better now, experts said.

Sniffing out the culprit

Entomologist Jerry J. Bromenshenk of the University of Montana launched his own search for poisons, relying on the enhanced odor sensitivity of bees — about 40 times better than that of humans.

When a colony is exposed to a new chemical odor, he said, its sound changes in volume and frequency, producing a unique audio signature.- Bees are going missing, yes, but the crops are just fine
Bromenshenk has been visiting beekeepers across the country, recording hive sounds and taking them back to his lab for analysis. To date, no good candidates have surfaced.

If the cause is not a poison, it is most likely a parasite.

UC San Francisco researchers announced in April that they had found a single-celled protozoan called Nosema ceranae in bees from colonies with the collapse disorder.

Unfortunately, Bromenshenk said, "we see equal levels of Nosema in CCD colonies and healthy colonies."

Infected swarms?

Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.

"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.

The idea that a pathogen is involved is supported by recent experiments conducted by VanEngelsdorp and USDA entomologist Jeffrey S. Pettis.

One of the unusual features of the disorder is that the predators of abandoned beehives, such as hive beetles and wax moths, refuse to venture into infected hives for weeks or longer.

"It's as if there is something repellent or toxic about the colony," said Hayes, the Florida inspector.

To test this idea, VanEngelsdorp and Pettis set up 200 beehive boxes with new, healthy bees from Australia and placed them in the care of Hackenberg.

Fifty of the hives were irradiated to kill potential pathogens. Fifty were fumigated with concentrated acetic acid, a hive cleanser commonly used in Canada. Fifty were filled with honey frames that had been taken from Hackenberg's colonies before the collapse, and the last 50 were hives that had been abandoned that winter.

When VanEngelsdorp visited the colonies at the beginning of May, bees in the untouched hive were clearly struggling, filling only about a quarter of a frame. Bees living on the reused honeycomb were alive but not thriving. A hive that had been fumigated with acetic acid was better.

When he popped open an irradiated hive, bees were crawling everywhere. "This does imply there is something biological," he said.

If it is a pathogen or a parasite, honeybees are poorly equipped to deal with it, said entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The honeybee genome has only half as many genes to detoxify poisons and to fight off infections as do other insects.

"There is something about the life of the honeybee that has led to the loss of a lot of genes associated with detoxification, associated with the immune system," she said.

In the absence of knowledge, theories have proliferated, including one that Osama bin Laden has engineered the die-off to disrupt American agriculture.

One of the most pervasive theories is that cellphone transmissions are causing the disappearances — an idea that originated with a recent German study. Berenbaum called the theory "a complete figment of the imagination."- Bees are going missing, yes, but the crops are just fine
The German physicist who conducted the tiny study "disclaimed the connection to cellphones," she said. "What they put in the colony was a cordless phone. Whoever translated the story didn't know the difference."

Another popular theory is that the bees have been harmed by corn genetically engineered to contain the pesticide B.t.

Berenbaum shot down the idea: "Here in Illinois, we're surrounded by an ocean of B.t. pollen, and the bees are not afflicted."

And so the search continues.

Many beekeepers have few options but to start rebuilding. Gene Brandi, a veteran beekeeper based in Los Banos, Calif., lost 40% of his 2,000 colonies this winter.

Brandi knows plenty of beekeepers who sold their equipment at bargain prices.

Scurrying around a blackberry farm near Watsonville, Brandi, 55, was restocking his bees. In a white jumpsuit and yellow bee veil, he pulled out a frame of honeycomb from a hive that had so many bees they were spilling out the front entrance.

"When it's going good like this, you forget CCD," he said.

Hackenberg, who has spent his whole life in the business, isn't giving up either. He borrowed money and restocked with bees from Australia.

In April, the normally hale Hackenberg started feeling short of breath. His doctor said he was suffering from stress and suggested he slow down.

Not now, Hackenberg thought. "I'm going to go down fighting."

jia-rui.chong@latimes.com

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

Just When You Thought

2007-05-24T19:09:00.000-07:00

our problems were only political, or global warming...
this is a longer article, but a must read.

link to article

By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal
Feb 20, 2007 - 12:03:05 PM
A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

“Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune. Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.

This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. “How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?” he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. “We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump,” he says with a shrug. “That’s what we wanted to see.”

Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables are scary. For instance, if you’re thinking that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) isn’t something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn, you’re right. Recently, the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upped its classification of PFOA to a likely carcinogen. Yet it’s a common ingredient in packaging that needs to be oil- and heat-resistant. So while there may be no PFOA in the popcorn itself, if PFOA is used to treat the bag, enough of it can leach into the popcorn oil when your butter deluxe meets your superheated microwave oven that a single serving spikes the amount of the chemical in your blood.

Other nasty chemical additives are the flame retardants known as poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss in preliminary animal studies. In vehicle interiors, PBDEs—used in moldings and floor coverings, among other things—combine with another group called phthalates to create that much-vaunted “new-car smell.” Leave your new wheels in the hot sun for a few hours, and these substances can “off-gas” at an accelerated rate, releasing noxious by-products.

It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.

As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.

This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.

“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material. It also doesn’t help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.

Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as though the person doing the burning realized partway through the process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the fumes). “That’s a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you’re producing some of the most toxic gases known,” he says. The color-coded bin system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.

“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.

Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.

The United States banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.

The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.
One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”

Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. That polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek, if it doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled a precursor to man-made plastic called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt set out to make a synthetic replacement for ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: Save the elephants! After some tinkering, he created celluloid. From then on, each year brought a miraculous recipe: rayon in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap, versatile—plastic seemed like a revelation. And in many ways, it was. Plastic has given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants. It has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. And who among us doesn’t own a Frisbee?
Plastic has its benefits; no one would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of its recent press releases, titled “Plastic Bags—A Family’s Trusted Companion,” reads: “Very few people remember what life was like before plastic bags became an icon of convenience and practicality—and now art. Remember the ‘beautiful’ [sic] swirling, floating bag in American Beauty?”

Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance gracefully across the big screen also lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa, and Australia, have banned, taxed, or restricted the use of plastic bags because they clog sewers and lodge in the throats of livestock. Like pernicious Kleenex, these flimsy sacks end up snagged in trees and snarled in fences, becoming eyesores and worse: They also trap rainwater, creating perfect little breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

In the face of public outrage over pictures of dolphins choking on “a family’s trusted companion,” the American Plastics Council takes a defensive stance, sounding not unlike the NRA: Plastics don’t pollute, people do.

It has a point. Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves."

Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. “What kind of people are we that we would design like this?” McDonough asks. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities using “the building materials of the future,” including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, nontoxic polystyrene.

Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media hits such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, awareness of just how hard we’ve bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing. After all, unless we’re planning to colonize Mars soon, this is where we live, and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our days getting pumped full of drugs to deal with our haywire endocrine systems and runaway cancer.

None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggressively using satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak about “marine debris and hormone disruption” at a meeting in Sicily convened by the science advisor to the Vatican. This annual gathering, called the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss mankind’s worst threats. Past topics have included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.

The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which lives in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it’s floating, a sturdy, eight-foot-long two-seater. Moore stands on Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.

“That’s probably a $600 kayak,” Moore says, adding, “I don’t even shop anymore. Anything I need will just float by.” (In his opinion, the movie Cast Away was a joke—Tom Hanks could’ve built a village with the crap that would’ve washed ashore during a storm.)

Watching the kayak bobbing disconsolately, it is hard not to wonder what will become of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than battleship gray. The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 50 pounds of nurdles extruded into an object that nobody wants, but that’ll be around for centuries longer than we will.

And as Moore stands on deck looking into the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the same thing 800 miles west, in the gyre. You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on earth. And then below, you can see the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and discarded things. As Moore looks over the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives low and then boomerangs over the horizon. Gone.

been there, done that...from Mary Ann

2007-05-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

From DailyKos

2007-04-23T16:58:00.000-07:00

It's Official: The HoneyBees are Gone [Congressional Testimony] Hotlist
by jhritz [Subscribe]
Mon Apr 23, 2007 at 03:09:39 AM PDT

Experts are gathering outside Washington, D.C. today for a two-day meeting to collectively scratch their heads about the Colony Collapse Disorder, aka 'Where have all the honeybees gone.'

The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees have also been reported in Europe and Brazil.

Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.

CNN Story

There's been a lot of speculation about this lately. Others have diaried extensively on their ideas as to the cause. I don't know the cause, so I thought I'd write a diary that addresses what we do know, what questions are being asked, what is being done, and what has been reported, so far, in Congressional testimony.

Much more here

fuel efficiency in automobiles

2007-04-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

does anyone have any good thoughts on automobile fuel efficiency?
I see that the "SMART" Mercedes is pretty good, albeit tiny car.
supposed to be selling for abour 25K, but 60-70 mpg.

I'm mis? remembering the Honda CVCC in the 70's that had a fuel efficiency of about 52 mpg
Honda

Then VW is working on even more fuel efficiency, though what will be given up remains to be seen.

I've got a sneaky suspicion that fuel prices will not be going down soon...

from What We Now Know

2007-04-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

The Codex Noose Tightens--Time to Act
By Shannara Johnson

We usually don't play the activist part here at WWNK--we inform our readers, but rarely call for action.

This, however, is different.

A few months ago, we alerted you to the potential dangers and pitfalls of the Codex Alimentarius, the planned WTO-enforced, strict regulations of foods, vitamins and dietary supplements.

As we go to print, we just learned about a new proposed FDA regulation that could render the DSHEA Act null and void--and this time, we urge you to do something about it.

Last December, the FDA secretly put a document on its website titled "Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration."

The new "guidance" declares that any and all foods or supplements which are claimed to alleviate or cure any kind of ailment might be (at the FDA's discretion) considered drugs and subject to appropriate regulation.

In other words, you might soon need a prescription for your 1,000 mg of Vitamin C. Heck, even chamomile tea could be a drug; after all, doesn't it help with your upset stomach?

The document is open to public comments until April 30--
so hurry up and send your comments via this link

forever connecting the dots. Kurt Vonnegut RIP

2007-04-12T20:39:00.000-07:00

It is beginning to seem to me that connecting dots is one of the most unproductive ways to spend my time.
not that it does not need to be done, but what to do once enough dots are connected.

standing on a street corner, raising a finger to the stone cold criminal powers that be, will not suffice.
working through the appropriate channels of electing new people to congress is almost as unsatisfying as it is dicey.
there always seems to be a need for compromise of this or that, can't get there from here, and so on.

Now I hear that Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

I hate to even begin to think what a force he was. to me, to my thinking and to my worldview.

In honor of his memory, i will now reread his books. to see if they stand up to time and experience, to see if they still carry the humor, the tragedy, the farce of our human existence. so it goes.
so he goes.
a comet in the cosmos.

Vidalia, Georgia – Onions that is

2007-03-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

Vidalia, Georgia – Onions that is

By Only Me

When I lived in Washington State the Walla Walla Sweet Onions were top dog and very good onions. Occasionally, we could get Vidalia Onion sets in the early spring and these were even better.

Since moving to Florida, it has been onion paradise as the center of onion heaven is a short distance north of us in Vidalia, Georgia. The last week in April is the annual Vidalia festival celebrating the greatest onion in the lower 48. See: www.vidaliaonionfestival.com/ On April 26^th they are having an Onion Cook-off and Tasting. They have links to recipes like Vidalia Onion Pie, French Fried Vidalia Onion Rings and so forth.

Amid all the misanthropy, greed, selfishness, and discontent in this tired old world today, things like this can remind us of simple pleasures and social intercourse that make community possible. Just thought I would share some local color.

Refreshing Discovery

2007-03-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Refreshing Discovery

By Only Me

I was in one of my introspective moods today, withdrawn into my self and content to wander aimlessly and somehow ended up in the bookstore. While browsing, I stumbled upon a magazine that I had never seen before, Adbusters; Blueprint for a New Left. Published in Vancouver, British Columbia.

While the slogan “Blueprint for a new left” was a bit much for this Libertarian, the commentary, in most of the articles was refreshing, provocative, and interesting. Advertising in not part of their game so the price is a bit high at $8.00 but worth it.

Billions for Halliburton and Bush’s’ other Friends but Very Little for Injured Veterans

2007-03-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

Billions for Halliburton and Bush’s’ other Friends but Very Little for Injured Veterans

By Only Me

Although the problem is presented in the media as if it were just uncovered, under funding of the Department of Veteran Affairs has always been standard practice. Veterans organizations like the DAV, http://www.dav.org/ , The Military Order of the Purple Heart, http://www.purpleheart.org/ and others were formed largely because no one else would speak up for veterans.

But just like nature, people sometimes do the unexpected. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), served as Vice Chairman of The United States House of Representatives Standing Committee on Veterans’ Affairs from 1999 to 2001 and Chairman from 2001 to 2004 when he was fired by Speaker Hastert for doing his job.

He fought President Clintons’ FY 2000 veterans budget, which he claimed was $1.1 billion short of what it would cost just to maintain the services currently being provided.

From: http://www.house.gov/chrissmith/news/old_releases/pr031199_vet.htm

Still, short-fall continued although Chairman Smith fought the political power elite trying to properly fund Veterans needs. The budget deficits were publicly announced but conveniently ignored.

“The recent announcement by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that the department was suffering from a financial shortfall of over $1 billion for fiscal year 2005 came as no surprise to me, many of my colleagues in Congress and numerous Veterans Service Organizations. Former VA Secretary Anthony Principi testified before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee on February 4, 2004 that the Office of Management and Budget at the White House denied him an additional $1.2 billion in the fiscal year 2005 VA budget, funding that the Secretary deemed essential to provide necessary health care services for our veterans. “
”Throughout the year, in the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and on the floor of the House of Representatives, my colleagues and I made numerous attempts to provide the VA with the funding Secretary Principi said it needed in the fiscal year 2005 budget and the additional needs recognized by the House Veterans’ Committee. Every last attempt failed on a party-line vote. In fact, when former Veterans’ Committee Chairman Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) spoke out about the funding shortfall and pushed for increased funding, his leadership not only removed him from his Chairman post, but from the Veterans’ Committee altogether.”

From: http://wwwc.house.gov/reyes/news_detail.asp?id=826

Representative Smith told it like it is, in Washington, when you go against the grain when he said:

"As a result of that vote, my Republican colleagues who joined me lost funding for their district projects, I lost my chairmanship and - worst of all - veterans lost much-needed resources to provide essential medical care."

From: http://www.vawatchdog.org/07/nf07/nfMAR07/nf031107-11.htm

The publicly acknowledged fraud and theft of billions, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, would have provided much needed essential care for the steady stream of injured being denied the care they deserve.

Caveat: This was not an unbiased Blog.

I am a disabled veteran, who visits a VA Hospital periodically. I see and talk with veterans from WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War I, Afghanistan, and increasingly Iraq.

When I first became a VA patient seeing people my age or older in various stages of disrepair was unsettling but not unduly traumatic. Just about when you think you have seen everything some old vet will come wheeling down the hall or into a waiting room and takes your breath away and rips your guts out.

About 3 years ago the younger ones began showing up, men and women. For some reason, a missing leg or arm doesn’t look as bad on an old person as it does a young person. Now they are flooding in and it is becoming more difficult for me to go to the hospital, even though I know that I must.

So a few generals will get sacrificed on the public alter, The guilty bastards hold their hearings, news commentators get to run their mouth in that know-it-all holier than thou arrogant supremacy they cultivate. Then there will be another Anna Nicole in the spotlight while tormented and twisted veterans are left to cope with their broken or missing limbs, destroyed immune systems, cancers, and demons, mostly alone.

Your House, My House, What happened to Investment portfolio?

2007-03-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

Your House, My House, What happened to Investment portfolio?

By Only Me

Like a summer thunderstorm the news has been gushing out the last few days, Sub Prime mortgage industry in chaos. Stocks are falling like brick from the twin towers and The NY Stock Exchange has even suspended trading for some.

Big banks that hold tons of worthless paper are worried and bankruptcy looms on the horizon for the mortgage companies in the Sub Prime Market. I read that many are blaming Greenspan for this because of his easy money policy subsequent to the September 11, 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center. In fact he was speaking in Boca Raton, Florida today and said he suspects this housing slowdown will last awhile. He did say the problems were based more on too high prices rather than bad lending practices.

Whatever the cause, the effects have been noted word-wide. The Asia Times has a very interesting article posted today about this subject. So is this the sequel to the 70’s & 80’s Savings and Loan bust that cost taxpayers a bundle? I smell a government bail-Out hold on to your pocketbook ladies & gentlemen. Any bets on who brings up the subject first?

My money is on one of the Presidential wanabes. It will be clothed in the mantle of National Security I’m thinking. Remember the Little Abner musical long time ago? Wasn’t there a song went something like “What’s good for General Bullmose is good for the USA”.

Some links:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0313biz-talton0313.html

http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini/178576

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2007/03/trouble-for-big-finance-subprime-bank.html

The Urge for Control, or the last frontier of freedom

2007-03-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

The Urge for Control, or the last frontier of freedom:

by Only Me

“The upper house of the Russian parliament is working on a bill that would regulate Internet content. The Communication Ministry and major Russian dotcoms are cooperating with the parliament in writing the bill, RIA Novosti reported.”

From: http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/06/03/internet.shtml

“Radical Islamists are using the Internet to recruit homegrown terrorists in the U.S., Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate panel yesterday.”

From: http://washingtontimes.com/national/20070314-110450-2830r.htm

“Internet censorship is spreading rapidly, being practiced by about two dozen countries and applied to a far wider range of online information and applications”

From: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1dbb5faa-d268-11db-a7c0-000b5df10621.html

The last few days has produced a flood of news stories about government actions to police the Internet, and limit this last source of free exchange. Naturally this has been going on for several years, but as time progresses they are getting braver and bolder in their control.

The above quotes and links are just a very brief sampling of what is now going on world-wide. Its as if government bodies can’t stand the possibility of people being free of their tax, regulation, or control. I think they are all paranoid.

With the revelation about Google cooperating with China by blocking certain sites, we have learned that other ISP’s have also aided and abetted governments around the world achieve their aims. In fact if you bother to read the privacy rights to just about any site they tell you that they respect your privacy (not necessarily true) except if big brother wants you history, activity log, name, rank, and serial number.

Not much that can be done, and I don’t think it will get better or slow down. There are too many uptight people who are all too egger to give government agencies reason to keep at it. This of course leads to self censorship out of fear. If this interests or concerns here are a few links you might pursue:

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/07/con05238.html

http://www.i-freedom.org/

http://www.eff.org/

http://www.savetheinternet.com/=threat

http://www.maineinternetfreedom.com/

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/17/2143249&from=rss

But, this only me, the worlds greatest individualist – I mean traffic lights pxxx me off. Have you ever though of the control wielded by those monstrosities. Next time your setting at an intersection with absolutely no traffic in sight, go for it.

the real question

2007-03-12T06:46:00.000-07:00

The Boston Globe

60 years of faulty logic
By James Carroll | March 12, 2007

"SIXTY YEARS AGO today, Harry Truman went before a joint session of Congress to announce what became known as the Truman Doctrine. "At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life." With that, an era of bipolarity was inaugurated, dividing the world between forces of good and evil.

The speech amounted, as one of Truman's advisers characterized it, to a declaration of religious war. In the transcendent struggle between Moscow and Washington, "nonalignment" was not an option. Truman declared that the United States would actively support "free" people anywhere who were resisting either internal or external threats to that freedom. The "free world" was born, but so, eventually, were disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam..."

Link to original article

SINOROVING By Pepe Escobar (Asia Times)

2007-03-11T14:39:00.000-07:00

SINOROVING
PART 4: The peasant Tiananmen time bomb
By Pepe Escobar

PART 1: The Great Wall of shopping
PART 2: Selling China to the world
PART 3: The hottest label: China chic

"There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better." - Mao Zedong

"The biggest danger to the Party since taking over has been losing touch with the masses." - Hu Jintao

SHANGHAI - Everywhere in developed, urban China - Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou - the message was the same. The next "counterrevolutionary rebellion" - as the Communist Party defined the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 - if it happens, will be a peasant revolution. Foreign diplomats and Chinese scholars in Beijing or young, urban, 'Net-connected professionals in Guangzhou have told Asia Times Online in unmistakable terms: nobody from the party's "fourth generation" leadership wants to go back to the Maoist model of economic autarky and foreign-policy isolation.

Most of all, however, nobody in the leadership - as well as most influential intellectuals - wants the toppling of the Communist Party by pluralist forces advocating a multi-party democracy: that would amount to, in the words of a Beijing scholar, "an unpredictable, very dangerous destabilization". There's only a slight detail: what 1 billion Chinese peasants will make of all this. Enter Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao...

Complete article and links at Asia Times. If you are not familiar with this news source, you may want to read more there.

Comments on Michael Specter's Article: Why are Vladimir Putin’s opponents dying?

2007-03-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

Credits to the author of the original Post follow:

Letter form Moscow

KREMLIN, INC.

Why are Vladimir Putin’s opponents dying?

by MICHAEL SPECTER

Issue of 2007-01-29
Posted 2007-01-22

My comments begin here:

After reading this article twice I began to put together a few comments of my own, which was not easy. Without writing a book, here is a brief reply:

I do not begin to understand the Russian people. However, the article, I believe, has a common theme. One, which has been increasingly popular for nearly a century and has undergone continual refinement and testing.

That theme is the move toward totalitarian governments, Nazism, if you will. And the basis of Nazism is corporate control of government in the name of power and profit.

To simplify my thoughts, I am using quotes from the article itself, my notes, comments and remarks are in blue. I apologize for wandering, but this subject matter can be complex and wide-spread.

Basis of Russian government:

Lukyanov said, “But through much of the nineties economic decisions in Russia could be taken only after consultation with the I.M.F. and sometimes after the approval of the American Embassy in Moscow. Russia was weak. Russia didn’t know what to do. And today’s greed is a reaction to all of that. To poverty and humiliation. Our official ideology is to make more money.”

This is fairly straight forward and I believe honest as far as it goes. All Russians desire more money, but the few in the power structure define more money much differently than the man on the street as can be seen from other statements in the article.

Are Other Governments All That Different?

And, even if we did not see why, the authorities understood at once: mass media could very easily be manipulated to achieve any goal.

Networks soon became wholly owned by the state or by companies—like Gazprom,

The goal today is simpler: to support the Kremlin and its corporate interests

I had a great Political Science Professor who talked at length about the first necessity of a totalitarian government being control of the mass media. In fact it is impossible without that control. I note with much sadness the unrelenting attack on the Internet by many governments including yours. Do you understand why?

Just look at the effectiveness of American media attacks on individuals over the last few years. Regardless of how you feel about the people destroyed, it was swift, precise, and effective on more than one level. They sacrificed the lamb, deflected the people’s attention, and gave them entertainment at the same time, while leaving the government and its corporate partners to proceed unencumbered and mostly un-noticed.

Television is the only reality in which we exist.’’

Need I say more? However, I would add sports to that statement, our modern gladiators who amuse the masses.

In 1999, after the explosions that terrorized Moscow and provided the rationale for instigating the Second Chechen War, the Kremlin quickly assumed control of essentially all television in Russia and responded harshly to those who tried to resist.

Gee, I hate to sound like a pessimist here but that one has been used by everyone over the years. The battleship Maine, the ocean liner Lusitania, the Sudetenland land, Poland, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, Weapons of mass bullshit. All these events and many many more allowed government the opportunity to manipulate the media for their (and their corporate partners) needs. Footnote: The Spanish American war was largely pushed by Hurst newspapers at first, not American in general or the government. Footnote #2: America has perfected this strategy.

“…self-censorship is worse than any other kind. Journalists know—they can feel—what is allowed and what is not.’’

It is also the most effective, spawned by both indifference and fear. After all look at the examples made of those who exceed the written and unwritten limits established by corporate government: Nazi Germany simply shot or hung them in public, In America they usually just destroy their lives, in Chile it was mass torture and murder. People get the point quickly. Today, we are warned with taunts of being unpatriotic, cut and run liberals, quitters, and of course the big one, sympathetic to the enemy. Its sort of like wife beaters, if this works they move on to step two, isolation and physical brutality, step three, elimination. Russia simply has done away with steps 1 and 2. Then, their people have been conditioned more thoroughly than we have, to date.

In the corporatist, semi-authoritarian structure that Putin has created—

Pravda, asked readers if the country needed its own Pinochet. The overwhelming response was yes

Again, manipulation by the media and corporate marketing interests (America is by far the most sophisticated) people goals and desires are diverted toward consumption at all costs. Forgive me but: I remember when dad worked, mom was there for the kids (to feed, care for and support) and dad got home at a decent time to work in the garden, yard, or go to the kids ball games. We lived in 1000 sq ft homes and required only one car. I don’t mean to belittle women in that statement. What I am trying to show is a result of mass marketing to the extent that it has changed a society, here and in other countries. Things are all important and we will do whatever it takes to get them, even sacrifice our freedom, our family, and our voice, or view Pinochet as acceptable or even desirable. That is everyone except Americans, they wouldn’t know who Pinochet was if he bit them on the ass.

Sick of the lines, the empty shops, and the false promises of Soviet life, Russians looked first to the West—and particularly to the United States—to provide an economic model. What followed was an epic disaster: the sell-off of the state’s most valuable assets made a few dozen people obscenely rich, but the lives of millions of others became far worse. The health-care system fell apart, and so did many of the social-service networks. Russia became the first industrial country ever to experience a sustained fall in life expectancy. Russian males born today can, on average, expect to live to the age of fifty-nine, dying younger than if they were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is not surprising, then, that by the time Putin became President most Russians were only too happy to exchange the metaphysical ideas of free speech and intellectual freedom for the concrete desires of owning a home and a car and possessing a bank account. They also wanted to feel that somebody was in control of their country.

See my rant above. I also believe we are going through the same process right here in America. Bush has nearly bankrupted our country. There will be nothing left of social programs in 10 years, probably sooner. Corporations have already eliminated pensions, are hard at work on health care and taxes.

The Russian government has become bolder and more assertive throughout Putin’s tenure. On New Year’s Day of 2006, Russia abruptly cut gas exports to Ukraine after the government there objected to a sharp rise in the prices charged by Gazprom

Just another tool of Nazi’s to control dissent. Part and parcel to economic sanctions, invasion, and favored nation status. It just takes a different track when aimed at countries rather than individuals or groups. The intent is to humble and eliminate dissent in any form. Dissent doesn’t really bother them but, it’s a pain in the ass.

With thirty per cent of the world’s gas exports, Russia can impose its will for one simple reason. “The entire world is obsessed with energy security and resources

I hate to digress, but why do you think we are in Iraq and Afghanistan and heading towards Syria, and Iran? I have to side track on this one simply because it’s related. Adding some brief quotes from other sources:

By Dana Milbank and Justin Blum

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 16, 2005; Page A01

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

Published in the January 2004 edition of Foreign Policy In Focus

Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World’s Oil

by Michael Klare

When first assuming office in early 2001, President George W. Bush’s top foreign policy priority was not to prevent terrorism or to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction—or any of the other goals he espoused later that year following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rather, it was to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to U.S. markets. In the months before he became president, the United States had experienced severe oil and natural gas shortages in many parts of the country, along with periodic electrical power blackouts in California. In addition, oil imports rose to more than 50% of total consumption for the first time in history, provoking great anxiety about the security of the country’s long-term energy supply. Bush asserted that addressing the nation’s “energy crisis” was his most important task as president.

This has become THE international game, sort of mine’s bigger than yours, but much more serious and with potentially very dire consequences. Interestingly, it isn’t just multinational corporations who desire this power and wealth through control of natural resources. The public has acquiesced to their goals. See next.

“The majority of the population, they are absolutely happy,” Alexei Volin, who served for three years as deputy chief of staff in Putin’s government and now runs a highly successful publishing house, said when we met in Moscow. “They get more money. Consumption has increased two and a half times in the last six years. People are buying cars, country houses, they are going to big shopping malls—as big as those in the United States.’’ Volin, a trim, clean-cut, forty-three-year-old man dressed in a white button-down shirt and khaki Dockers, smiled. “They are just as happy as they can be,’’ he said. “They don’t have a headache because of some political problem or the concentration of power. They don’t watch TV news. They don’t care.

This remind you of anyone you know, I ask whilst looking in the mirror?

“There is another group,’’ he went on. “They are unhappy, because political life has been frozen. They don’t like the situation with Russian television or the press. Several months ago, I talked to one important Kremlin person and I asked him why is our TV news so awful and dull. And his answer was ‘Why are you watching TV? People like you should go read the Internet if you want information. TV is not for you. It’s for the people. ’ ’’

And so it is, by design, by intent, and in practice.

Polonium 210 is not easy to acquire—at least, not the amount necessary to kill a man. Nearly all of it is produced in Russia. Most people in London, and many in Moscow as well, believe that that organization was the F.S.B. Its members reserve special hatred for those who turn on it, and Litvinenko was a very high-profile traitor. He had accused the Russian President—a member of their secret fraternity—of killing his own citizens to start a war, and he had joined with the forces of Berezovsky. The F.S.B. had the motive, the skills, and the money.

Gee who would dare think that a politician would kill off some of his/her own people just as an excuse to grab unlimited power, implement an invasion of the middle east (it isn’t just Iraq) thereby placing his backers policies into action? Thus the perpetual war draining society of all economic resources save those for the war machine, and of course the rulers.

Since Alexander Litvinenko’s death, there has been much public discussion of what Putin will do next year, when his term concludes. He has promised to step down, but he has also said that he intends to “retain influence,” and people have speculated on the many ways he could do that: as Prime Minister, for example, or as chairman of Gazprom. Nobody knows, perhaps not even Putin. Russia today, and not for the first time, has wagered its well-being on the price of oil, and, as long as salaries continue to rise, people seem untroubled by the future and unwilling to dwell on even the most compelling warnings from the past.

With this last excerpt from the Times, I can finally get to my real thesis. I don’t see all that much difference between governments except the degree that the governed accept their porridge. To one degree or another all governments are marching toward the complete merger of corporate and government interests, which is to say corporate interests. Think about it; the British have embraced Orwellian surveillance in the name of security. Americans meekly surrendered their beloved Constitution, and are now marching toward the national digital ID card demanded by the HSS (that’s Homeland Security Service as opposed to the SS). I know about New Hampshire’s meek but brief protest and that of 5 or 6 other states. They were bought out and rendered irrelevant buy “The Government”. Don’t think that Cheney and Bush will surrender power and influence just because their terms end in 680 days.

The next presidential circus starting a full two years early grantees complete diversion of the media and the sedated, while the lame duck finishes his work.

So how could this happen; especially in America? Well how about this.

Once upon a time there lived a people who had it pretty good. That is until they began to turn over their personal responsibility to “THE GOVERNMENT”. Once they got used to the first big step, giving control of their schools to the government, the rest was easy. Slowly, methodically, unrelentingly the corporate behemoths pushed their employees in government to take bolder and bolder steps to bring their dream into reality.

No way you say. Well, lets look at education as just one example. Do we teach our little children to think critically, to reason, to form their own opinions based upon their own observations? If I am correct in my information, we teach them what to think, to be conformists, and above all not to criticize. Here in Florida, teachers have given up all pretense of teaching except for the FCAT tests that occur yearly. Talk to any student or teacher and all they care about is the FCAT. Jeb’s legacy to his big brother and the No Child Left Behind – which is about as truthful as I have ever seen a federal government decree in years. They want the little kids to grow up in lock step without opinions, or the ability to form one. How did this happen so easily? Here in Florida they used the big stick, FEAR. If a school performs badly, teachers get punished, schools loose money. If a school does well – they are rewarded with more money. That’s a tried and proven carrot anywhere you use it. Employment has been reduced to my way or the highway.

Take a look at any legislative body, a close look. They get elected and there is this big push to pass ever more laws. Its like telling a lie, you have to keep telling lies to cover up the original lie. Do we really need all these laws, laws which do what? By and large, they give the people what they ask for, actually beg for, even pay for, more government control, more government assumption of personal responsibility. I am amazed, that each year as the legislature goes into session every one begins scrambling for more, more, more, like they can’t get enough. Is it any wonder that government ends up with all the power? We begged for them to take it.

So the end result of all my ramblings is that governments everywhere are consolidating power in partnership with corporations who let them stay in power as a reward for their service. Methods may vary, but it’s all just a means to the end, Power and wealth.

gorillasguides.com

2007-03-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

What will we talk about today you and I?

Posted on February 10th, 2007 in Iraq, Baghdad, Site News, Team Members.

"When I heard the bomb explode last Saturday the first thing I did was telephone my father. But there was no reply. Again and again and again I tried to phone him. My fingers hurt I stabbed them onto the buttons on my phone so hard. I fell onto the floor and prayed please let him not be dead. Please let it be that he died quick if he is dead.

And my heart was sick inside me.

What will we talk about today you and I? I do not want to talk about last Saturday. Shall we talk about peace? I would like to talk about peace. I love the word. No, perhaps we are not ready to talk of peace yet you and I, we are not at peace, we are not even at truce.

My father is one of the organisers for the men who protect the people in our neighbourhood who have fled here from the death squads. When they go to get food we go to the market with them my father, my brother, myself, some of the men in our neighbourhood.

They do the same for us.

What will we talk about today you and I? I do not want to talk about last Saturday. Shall we talk about peace? I would like to talk about peace. I love the word. No, perhaps we are not ready to talk of peace yet you and I, we are not at peace, we are not even at truce."

voices from another wilderness.

follow this link to gorillasguides.com.

clever that I thought I was

2007-03-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

did a google search on bees, then added rapture for a laugh.
looks like my cleverness is cutting edge, but hardly funny.

the bee rapture looks to me like a metaphor for our times...

Bill Martin

2007-03-10T06:44:00.000-08:00

Bill Martin's Concerto for Headphones and Contrabuffoon in Asia Minor

does anyone know if this was ever reissued as a cd?
Artist: Bill Martin
Album: Concerto for Headphones and Contra (Buffoon in Asia Minor)
Year: 1970

Tracks
1. Introduction
2. Flash Flood, Chapter 1
3. In Which Senator Phoghorne Repudiates the Charges Against Him
4. Flash Flood, Chapter 2
5. In a Fox Hole
6. Flash Flood, Chapter 3
7. One Man's Cosmos
8. Whole Enchilada Marches On
9. Sand, Blasted, Chapter 1
10. El Repugno
11. Sand, Blasted, Chapter 2
12. Oh, Lord, I Rest My Weary Staff
13. Sand, Blasted, Chapter 3
14. Whole Enchilada Marches Off

bee rapture

2007-03-09T23:09:00.000-08:00

what is the bee rapture?
where have all the bees gone?
the rapture was never about xians.
only the bad bees remain. and they will probably no longer work for us.

c'est moi!

2007-03-09T23:06:00.000-08:00