text:
Reprinted with permission by TomDispatch.
Here's a Jeopardy!-style question for you: "Eight different species of whales can be seen in these two American seas." Unless you're an Iñupiaq, a marine biologist, or an Arctic enthusiast like me, it's a pretty good guess that you can't tell me what those seas are or what those whales are either. The answer: the Chukchi Sea and the adjacent Beaufort Sea, off Arctic Alaska, and you can commonly spot bowhead, beluga, and grey whales there, while fin whales, minkes, humpbacks, killer whales, and narwhals are all venturing into these seas ever more often as the Arctic and its waters continue to warm rapidly.
The problem, however, is that the major oil company Royal Dutch Shell wants to drill in the Chukchi Sea this summer and that could, in the long term, spell doom for one of the last great, relatively untouched oceanic environments on the planet. Let me explain why Shell's drilling ambitions are so dangerous. Just think of the way the blowout of one drilling platform, BP's Deepwater Horizon, devastated the Gulf of Mexico. Now, imagine the same thing happening without any clean-up help in sight.
You might have heard about "the sixth extinction," the way at this moment species are blinking off at a historically unprecedented rate. The Arctic seas of Alaska, however, still are sanctuaries not only for tens of thousands of whales, but also hundreds of thousands of walruses and seals, millions of birds, thousands of polar bears, and innumerable fish from more than one hundred species, not to mention all the uncharismatic sub-sea life that eludes our eyes but makes up the food web — phytoplankton, sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers, to name only a few. Think of the Arctic Ocean as among the last remaining marine ecological paradises on the planet.
Now for that oil. Looking for it in Arctic waters happens to be the most dangerous form of drilling imaginable, because no proven technology exists that could clean up a major oil spill in distant ice-choked seas in the cold and dark, under one of the harshest environments on Earth. Even during the brief "summer" open-water season, ice floes remain a constant threat as Shell found out in 2012 when one of its drill ships encountered a floe the size of Manhattan and was forced to disconnect from its seafloor anchor and temporarily halt its operations. Deep fog severely restricts visibility. Storms are not exceptions but the norm, and are becoming more frequent and violent in a rapidly warming region.
Beluga Whales with calves near Kasegaluk Lagoon along the Chukchi Sea coast, July 2006. About 4,000 beluga whales are known to calve along that lagoon. On this day in early July, we saw nearly 1,000 whales with newborn calves within a one-mile stretch. Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee.
I've spent much time in the Arctic and, believe me, it's a forbidding environment for outsiders. In late September, as summer gives way to autumn, ice begins to form in the seas and darkness descends. Any spill that occurs late in the brief potential drilling season would remain untouched and unattended to until the ice melted the following summer. But even if such a blowout occurred in summer, there is no infrastructure in place to respond to a disaster. The nearest Coast Guard station is more than 1,000 miles away. And keep in mind that a disaster of this sort would not remain conveniently contained in the Arctic. As a recent U.S. National Research Council study on responding to an Arctic offshore oil spill puts it, "The risk of an oil spill in the Arctic presents hazards for the Arctic nations and their neighbors."
Add to this potential nightmare scenario another little fact: Shell has garnered a well-deserved reputation as "the company with the spottiest Arctic record." In September 2012, it initiated exploration drilling in U.S. Arctic waters with a conditional permit from the Obama administration, only to end a disastrous year in which one of its two drill rigs, the Kulluk, was grounded in the Gulf of Alaska on New Year's Eve. The other ship, Noble Discoverer, suffered damage after catching fire, while both were fined by the Environmental Protection Agency for violating the Clean Air Act, and the contractor Noble Drilling pleaded guilty in 2014 to all eight felony charges leveled against it for environmental violations and agreed to ante up $12.2 million in fines and community service payments. Because of the damage to its rigs, Shell was forced to give up its 2013 drilling plans. A court ruling in January 2014 in favor of local Iñupiat tribes and environmentalists forced the company not to drill that summer either.
Since then, the price of oil has plunged, sending a shock wave across the oil industry and deep-sixing all sorts of prospective plans planet-wide to drill in Arctic waters: Norway's Statoil shelved its 2015 drilling plan in the Barents Sea off that country's northern coast and handed back the three leases it had purchased in the Baffin Bay off the west coast of Greenland. Chevron put its plan to drill in Canada's Beaufort Sea on indefinite hold. Following the Ukraine crisis and American sanctions on Russia, ExxonMobil was prohibited from working with the oil company Rosneft on a joint plan to drill in the Kara Sea in the Russian Arctic. Even had those sanctions not been in place, the low price of oil would have made such exploration a far less appetizing prospect for the moment.
"It is up to Shell then to keep the oil industry's Arctic dreams alive," one journalist suggested and indeed, on January 29th, that company announced that, after a two-year hiatus, it would drill this summer in the Chukchi Sea. Two weeks later, the Obama administration issued its final supplemental environmental impact statement on the site where the drilling would take place, the controversial Chukchi Lease Sale 193, bringing Shell's plan one step closer to reality.
But before considering the politics of oil drilling there, let's take a little dive into the Arctic Ocean and the history of its exploitation.
For more than four centuries, western nations have regarded the Arctic Ocean as an economic treasure chest. The oil harvested from Arctic whales helped fuel the economies of countries in Europe and North America and drove the magnificent bowhead whale to near extinction.
Prayer after a whale hunt. Iñupiat Elder Isaac Akootchook and whaling captain James Lampe offer a prayer to thank the Creator and the whale for offering food for the community, Kaktovik, along the Beaufort Sea coast, September 2001. Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee.
In February 1880, the future creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, then a 20-year-old medical student, interrupted his studies for a six-month voyage on the Arctic whaler, Hope, as the ship's surgeon. From his diary we learn that the drive to profit trumped any concern about the possible extinction of the bowhead, or Greenland, whale. "Price tends to rise steadily for the number of the creatures is diminishing," he wrote, "probably not more than 300 of them left alive in the whole expanse of the Greenland seas." On another day, he added that, "[T]he creatures…own those unsailed seas." Of course, those seas were anything but "unsailed" as commercial ships were plying them to harvest whales, so consider that instead Doyle's euphoric expression of how it felt to him to see the life in that ocean.
Today, to the extent that seas can be "owned," governments own them and are selling pieces off to the highest bidders — oil companies. Ownership or territorial control for commercial exploitation is, however, only one side of the story of the Arctic Ocean. The magnificent and complex ecology of the northern seas is now being altered by three human-caused phenomena: climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution.
Arctic sea ice is vanishing at an astonishing rate thanks to climate change, which is having devastating impacts on the region's polar bears and walruses. In the southern Beaufort Sea of Alaska and Arctic Canada, the polar bear population declined by 40% between 2001 and 2010. Meanwhile, in six of the last eight years, tens of thousands of Pacific walruses have hauled themselves out onto barrier islands and tundra along the Chukchi Sea because there was no sea ice left for them to rest on. Onshore, walruses are far from their food sources and young walruses are particularly susceptible to being trampled to death by the adults in the colony.
Sea ice along the Beaufort Sea coast, July 2002. Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee.
Commercial whaling in the region, which started in 1848, ended by about 1921, when petroleum supplanted whale oil as the fuel of choice. With no industrial activity in those waters for more than half a century, the bowhead population slowly began to recover. Whales don't depend on sea ice the way polar bears and walruses do, so in 2011 the bowhead population in the U.S. Arctic was estimated at almost 17,000 and is increasing by 3.7% per year.
The half-century of commercial calm in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas ended, however, in the late 1970s, when oil exploration began. By the early 1990s, the expensive hunt for oil in Arctic seas had largely failed and almost all leases were relinquished. The second wave of U.S. Arctic offshore oil and gas exploration only started when George W. Bush took office. Between 2003 and 2008 leases were sold on more than three million acres in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, while generating substantial controversy and court challenges from the tribal Iñupiat peoples and environmental groups. The persistence of this resistance to drilling, along with the recent price collapse, has marked the second boom-and-bust cycle in Arctic exploration. The French company Total, for instance, simply walked away from the U.S. Arctic in 2012 pointing out that offshore drilling there could lead to a "disaster," and other companies have put exploration on indefinite hold — but not Shell.
Historically, government-sponsored research on the U.S. Arctic has been driven not by that hallmark of science, curiosity, but by the desire to drill for oil and gas — by, that is, two impulses that are quite unscientific in nature. The first is an oil-company-inculcated urge to transform the decision to drill into a sense of inevitability and the second is an oil-company-sponsored urge to rush the process.
In fact, according to the National Research Council oil spill response study, systematic data collection in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas only began in the late 1970s — in other words, just as the first wave of Arctic offshore oil exploration was revving up. Onshore, the situation was the same: the initial comprehensive study of the flora and fauna of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge only took place in the mid-1980s, after the Reagan administration made a push to open it up to development — and (irony of ironies) the disastrous 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill was what saved the refuge from industrial exploitation.
While there have only been sporadic studies of the marine environments in question since then, no comprehensive benchmark study for the Beaufort and Chukchi seas has ever been done; nor is there any thorough understanding of how the marine food web works in those seas, or of the population sizes and distribution of any but the sentinel species (whales, polar bears, walruses, and seals). Even the data on them is considered "not reliable or precise enough to examine trends, evaluate influences from climate change, or estimate population-level damage in the event of an oil spill," according to the National Research Council study.
The first benchmark study of the Hanna Shoal, one of the most biologically productive spots in the Chukchi Sea, only began in early August 2012. At the end of that month, the Obama administration gave Shell a conditional permit to begin drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. In other words, Arctic science hasn't been guiding public policy, but rushing to catch up with the extractivist agenda of Big Oil.
Under the circumstances and given the perils of such extreme drilling in such an environment, what's curious is the rush to inevitability exhibited by two successive administrations. And despite the recent collapse of oil prices, which makes such Arctic drilling prohibitively expensive and unprofitable, it hasn't ended yet. On January 27th, the White House noted a conservation decision it had made with this reassuring headline at its website: "President Obama Protects Untouched Marine Wilderness in Alaska." The president had indeed withdrawn 9.8 million acres of U.S. Arctic waters, including Hanna Shoal, from future oil and gas lease sales. Just over two weeks later, however, the administration also issued the final supplemental environmental impact statement for Chukchi Lease Sale 193, which includes blocks of Arctic waters adjacent to and upstream from Hanna Shoal. In such waters generally, "protection" is an exaggeration in any case because, as one senior scientist from the Hanna Shoal study team put it in 2012, "anything that goes in the water at the drill sites may end up in this very productive region."
The leases the Bush administration sold in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, Lease Sale 193 among them, generated substantial controversy and met with legal challenges. A coalition of native Alaskan and environmental organizations filed a lawsuit challenging the leases, the government's inadequate gathering of baseline scientific data, and its unwillingness to appropriately assess what a potential blowout would mean to the ecology of the regions and the life of indigenous cultures there.
As it turned out, the plaintiffs won twice, first in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska in 2010, and then in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in January 2014. Following that ruling, the Department of Interior finally went back to the drawing board and, on October 31, 2014, released a new draft supplemental environmental impact statement that acknowledged some of the ecological realities of drilling in Arctic seas. It suggested that there would be a 75% chance of one or more large oil spills (more than 1,000 barrels) if serious drilling began there and that any such spill could have catastrophic ecological consequences. The public comment period on the draft ended on December 22nd.
Nonetheless, this February, the Obama administration issued the final impact statement for Lease Sale 193 and sent the process forward. The Interior Department had by then taken less than two months, including the Christmas holiday season, to consider the more than 400,000 public comments it had received. "The analysis was rushed to cater to Shell's desire to drill this summer," Leah Donahey, Arctic Ocean senior campaign director with the Alaska Wilderness League, told me over the phone. Iñupiaq elder and conservationist Rosemary Ahtuangaruak emailed me this: "We are faced with a plan to drill in the Arctic Ocean — Our Ocean, Our Garden, Our Future. With a clean ocean we have our traditions and culture, and our life, health, and safety. We risk all of it with this decision."
The question, of course, should be: in a country that has, in recent years, opened so many new drilling vistas from the Bakken Oil Fields of North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, creating what energy experts now call "Saudi America," why is there still such a rush to industrialize the Arctic Ocean? Shell has a long history of trying to establish itself as a leader in Arctic exploration and drilling, and despite the inauspicious global situation for expensive forms of drilling, continues to push the process as fast as it can.
This, too, has long been the case. In the fall of 2010, for instance, the company launched a "We have the technology, let's go" multi-million-dollar ad campaign to pressure the Obama administration to green-light the necessary permits for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. In 2012, having gotten the necessary permits, it had a thoroughly disastrous drilling season, proving beyond a doubt that it did not "have the technology" to deal with the far North. Knowing that, and knowing as well that there is no proven technology for cleaning up a major oil spill in the ice-choked, forbidding, mostly dark environment of the Arctic seas, Shell is nonetheless back again.
Storm over Kasegaluk Lagoon, July 2006. Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee.
As part of an ongoing competition among the major oil companies, Shell is clearly trying to establish itself as quickly as possible as the dominant player in Arctic offshore drilling, just as BP did in the Gulf of Mexico — with results that we remember well from the Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010. Nonetheless, the Gulf looks like Club Med compared to the Arctic. To let Shell drill in the Chukchi Sea when the price of oil is low and its profits slumping would be a rash act indeed, given that a company under pressure elsewhere has a tendency to cut costs and compromise safety. Shell has already set a precedent. In 2012, the company's decision to avoid Alaskan taxes resulted in moving its drill ship Kulluk from Alaska to Washington, only to see it grounded along the way.
Some things can be counted on like the sun setting in the West. In the extreme environment of the Arctic seas, a devastating oil spill is one of them if exploration is allowed to continue. The Obama administration, having just opened the southeastern Atlantic Coast to large-scale future oil exploration and drilling, is now poised to let Shell turn America's Arctic waters into a disaster area. That it will happen sooner or later is a given should the company proceed. That Washington is still considering letting Shell do it anyway should amaze us all.
The final decision about whether to "end or affirm" the Chukchi Sea oil leases will be made on March 20th. Shell still needs approval on several permits before it can head north. The Obama administration cannot approve these permits until Lease Sale 193 is finalized. This may have contributed to the administration's rushed analysis of that impact statement.
In January, the prestigious science journal Nature published a study adding one more obvious factor to an already grim equation. The development of oil and gas resources in the Arctic would, it wrote, be "incommensurate with efforts to limit average global warming to 2 degrees centigrade." In other words, at a moment when the planet is experiencing an oil glut, it's possible that the Obama administration will add yet another potential source of extreme oil to the list of future sources of the greenhouse warming of this planet.
Think of drilling in the Arctic as a future catastrophe in a single enticing package. In April, the United States takes over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council. If it decides to let Shell proceed, how will it present itself to the rest of the Arctic nation states, the indigenous Arctic nations and organizations, and the rest of us? Will it be as the Arctic driller-in-chief, the planet's warmer-in-chief, or a country committed to climate change mitigation and the conservation of biotic life and indigenous cultures in the midst of the sixth great extinction event in the Earth's history?
Subhankar Banerjee's most recent book is Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. His Arctic photographs are currently on display in two exhibitions at the Nottingham Contemporary in the United Kingdom and at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario, Canada. He has been deeply involved with the native tribes of the Arctic in trying to prevent the destruction of Arctic lands and seas.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Subhankar Banerjee
From an environmental standpoint, plastic is a huge problem. In America we use 2.5 million plastic bottles each hour and recycle only 27 percent of them. Discarded packaging and other plastic products are huge contributors to things like oceanic trash islands, garbage patches, plastic eating microbes and other dystopian-sounding environmental phenomena. Though there have been continued efforts to estimate just how much plastic ends up in places outside of our disposal infrastructure, like the ocean, we still don't really know how it is breaking down or where the pieces are all ending up. Even when plastic is recycled (and it often isn't) it can't be completely re-purposed like other materials, so the process is more accurately called down-cycling. The outlook seems bleak, yet production of plastic is actually on the rise, further evidence that we are acting as though plastics aren't suffocating our earth or infiltrating the global food chain.
The quest for a durable, biodegradable, easily-molded, environmentally-friendly bioplastic seems like a quixotic one, but a team at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University has developed a bioplastic fabrication process that uses a form of chitin, an abundant and underutilized material found in shrimp shells.
"Most bioplastics are made from cellulose, a plant-based polysaccharide material. The Wyss Institute team developed its bioplastic from chitosan, a form of chitin, which is a powerful player in the world of natural polymers and the second most abundant organic material on Earth. Chitin is a long-chain polysaccharide that is responsible for the hardy shells of shrimps and other crustaceans, armor-like insect cuticles, tough fungal cell walls — and flexible butterfly wings. The majority of available chitin in the world comes from discarded shrimp shells, and is either thrown away or used in fertilizers, cosmetics, or dietary supplements, for example." -The Wyss Institute
Chitin itself is not a new discovery. What the team at the Wyss Institute accomplished was developing a process for the production of what they call "Shrilk" (shrimp chitin combined with a protein from silk) that can be molded into complex 3d shapes without breaking or shrinking. The resulting bioplastic degrades in about two weeks, actually adding nutrients to soil and allowing plant life to grow, like the black-eyed pea grown by the Wyss team in chitosan-enriched soil.
Laboratory development of bioplastics like Shrilk is encouraging, but the product still faces the daunting transition to large-scale manufacturing. So, although burying discarded yogurt containers in our gardens might not be an immediate possibility, it's nice to know someone is working on it.
Images provided by The Wyss Institute at Harvard University.
Big Energy presents a glowing dreamscape of a glorious future with carbon-based fuels, but it would be more like a nightmare with flooded coastlines and a devastatingly hot planet.
Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.
Around the world, carbon-based fuels are under attack. Increasingly grim economic pressures, growing popular resistance, and the efforts of government regulators have all shocked the energy industry. Oil prices are falling, colleges and universities are divesting from their carbon stocks, voters are instituting curbs on hydro-fracking, and delegates at the U.N. climate conference in Peru have agreed to impose substantial restrictions on global carbon emissions at a conference in Paris later in the year. All this has been accompanied by what might be viewed as a moral assault on the very act of extracting carbon-based fuels from the earth, in which the major oil, gas, and coal companies find themselves portrayed as the enemies of humankind.
Under such pressures, you might assume that Big Energy would react defensively, perhaps apologizing for its role in spurring climate change while assuming a leadership position in planning for the transition to a post-carbon economy. But you would be wrong: instead of retreating, the major companies have gone on the offensive, extolling their contributions to human progress and minimizing the potential for renewables to replace fossil fuels in just about any imaginable future.
That the big carbon outfits would seek to perpetuate their privileged market position in the global economy is, of course, hardly surprising. After all, oil is the most valuable commodity in international commerce and major producing firms like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell regularly top lists of the world's most profitable enterprises. Still, these companies are not just employing conventional legal and corporate tactics to protect their position, they're mounting a moral assault of their own, claiming that fossil fuels are an essential factor in eradicating poverty and achieving a decent life on this planet.
Improbable as such claims may seem, they are being echoed by powerful officials around the world — typically, the leaders of carbon-producing nations like Russia and Saudi Arabia or the representatives of American energy-producing states like Texas and Kentucky. Count on one thing: this crew of fossil fuel enthusiasts is intent on ensuring that any path to a carbon-free future will, at best, be long and arduous. While you're at it, add top Congressional leaders to this crew, since many of the Republican victors in the 2014 midterm election are from oil and coal-producing states and regularly laud carbon production for its contribution to local prosperity, while pocketing contributions by Big Oil and other energy firms.
Unless directly challenged, this pro-carbon offensive — backed by copious Big Energy advertising — is likely to attract at least as much favor as the claims of anti-carbon activists. At this point, of course, the moral arguments against carbon consumption are — or at least should be — well known. The oil, gas, and coal companies, it is claimed, are selfishly pursuing mega-profits at the expense of the climate, the environment, our children and grandchildren, and even possibly a future of any reasonable sort for humanity as a whole. "Basically [the big energy companies have] said, we're going to wreck the planet, we don't care what you say, we think we can, and we dare you to stop us," observed climate activist and 350.org cofounder Bill McKibben in a recent interview. This outlook was reflected in many of the signs carried by the estimated 400,000 demonstrators who participated in the People's Climate March in New York City last September.
The fossil fuel industry is often also portrayed as the nucleus of a global system of wealth and power that drags down democracy and perpetuates grotesque planetary inequalities. "Fossil fuels really do create a hyper-stratified economy," explained Naomi Klein, author of the bestselling book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. "It's the nature of the resources that they are concentrated, and you need a huge amount of infrastructure to get them out and to transport them. And that lends itself to huge profits and they're big enough that you can buy off politicians."
Views like these animate the struggles against "fracking" in the United States, against the transport of tar-sands oil via the Keystone XL pipeline, and against the shipment of coal to ports in the Pacific Northwest. They also undergird the drive to rid college and university endowments and other institutions of their fossil fuel stocks, which gained momentum in recent months, thanks to the decisions of both the Stanford University board of trustees to divest from coal company stocks and of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to eventually rid itself of its fossil fuel stocks and invest in alternative energy.
Once upon a time, the giant carbon companies like Exxon sought to deflect these attacks by denying the very existence of climate change or the role of humans in causing it — or at least by raising the banner of "uncertainty" about the science behind it. They also financed the efforts of rogue scientists to throw doubt on global warming. While denialism still figures in the propaganda of some carbon companies, they have now largely chosen to embrace another strategy: extolling the benefits of fossil fuels and highlighting their contributions to human wellbeing and progress.
At the moment, this carbon counterattack is most clearly and fully articulated in the speeches of top industry officials and in various corporate publications. Of these, the most recent and authoritative, ExxonMobil's The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040, was released in December. Described as a planning guide for future corporate investment and decision-making, the Outlook combines an analysis of global energy trends with a summary of the company's pro-carbon ethos — and so offers us a vivid look at where Big Energy is heading in its counterattack on the climate movement.
If a climate movement is going to challenge the energy powers of this planet effectively, it's crucial to grasp the vision into which Big Energy is undoubtedly planning to sink incredible resources and which, across much of the planet, will become a living, breathing argument for ignoring the catastrophic warming of the planet. They present it, of course, as a glowing dreamscape of a glorious future — though a nightmare is what should come to mind.
Here, then, in a nutshell is the argument that Big Energy is going to seed into the planet for the foreseeable future. Prepare yourself.
The cornerstone of the Exxon report is its claims that ever-increasing supplies of energy are needed to sustain economic growth and ensure human betterment, and that fossil fuels alone exist in sufficient quantity (and at affordable enough prices) to satisfy rising international demand. "Forecasting long-term energy trends begins with a simple fact: people need energy," the report asserts. "Over the next few decades, population and income growth — and an unprecedented expansion of the global middle class — are expected to create new demands for energy."
Some of this added energy, Exxon acknowledges, will come from nuclear and renewable energy. Most, however, will have to come from fossil fuels. All told, the Outlook estimates, the world will need 35 percent more energy in 2040 than it does today. That would mean adding an additional 191 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) to global supplies over and above the 526 quadrillion BTUs consumed in 2010. A small percentage of those added BTUs, about 12 percent, will come from renewables, but the vast majority — estimated by Exxon at 67 percent — will be provided by fossil fuels.
Without fossil fuels, this argument holds, there can be no economic growth. Here's how Exxon CEO and Chairman Rex Tillerson puts it: "Energy is fundamental to economic growth, and oil is fundamental because to this point in time, we have not found, through technology or other means, another fuel that can substitute for the role that oil plays in transportation, not just passenger, individual transportation, but commercial transportation, jet fuel, marine, all the ways in which we use oil as a fuel to move people and things about this planet."
Natural gas is equally essential, Tillerson argues, because it is the world's fastest-growing source of energy and a key ingredient in electric power generation. Nor will coal be left out of the mix. It, too, will play an important role in promoting economic growth, largely by facilitating a rapid increase in global electricity supplies. Despite all the concern over coal's contributions to both urban pollution and climate change, Exxon predicts that it will remain "the No. 1 fuel for power generation" in 2040.
Yes, other sources of energy will play a role in helping to satisfying global needs, but without carbon-based fuels, Exxon insists, economic growth will screech to a halt and the world's poor and disadvantaged will stay immersed in poverty.
ExxonMobil argues in its Outlook for Energy report that without fossil fuels, including natural gas and coal, there will be no economic growth.
If there is one overarching theme to the new Exxon ethos, it is that we are witnessing the emergence of a new global middle class with glittering possibilities and that this expanding multitude, constituting perhaps one-half of the world's population by 2040, will require ever greater quantities of oil, coal, and natural gas if it is to have any hope of achieving its true potential.
Citing data from the Brookings Institution, the company notes that the number of people who earn enough to be considered members of that global middle class will jump from approximately 1.9 billion in 2010 to 4.7 billion in 2030 — representing what it calls "the largest collective increase in living standards in history." China and India will be the two countries adding most substantially to the global middle class, with each acquiring hundreds of millions of newly affluent citizens, but substantial gains will also be achieved by such "key growth" countries as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia.
The emergence of a middle-class bulge on a planetary scale, representing a kind of consumerism gone wild, is something to be celebrated the company insists in its new report, echoing the words of the U.N. Development Programme: "When dozens of countries and billions of people move up the development ladder, as they are doing today, it has a direct impact on wealth creation and broader human progress in all countries and regions of the world."
For all this to occur, however, that rising middle class will need staggering amounts of added energy — of course, we're talking about new supplies of the same old carbon-based energy forms here — to build and power all the cars, homes, businesses, appliances, and resorts that such consumers would undoubtedly crave and demand. More income, Exxon explains, "means new demand for food, for travel, for electricity, for housing, schools, and hospitals" — and all of these benefits "depend on energy."
By itself, an increase in world energy supplies could indeed be widely beneficial, if supplied largely by climate-friendly fuels. But such genuinely "alternative" sources of energy (into which, by the way, the giant energy companies have invested next to none of their profits) generally cost more than fossil fuels to produce, at least initially, and that, says Exxon, creates a problem once you consider where demand will be coming from in 2040.
According to the Outlook, virtually none of the expected increase in global energy demand will come from the older industrialized countries, which can afford more costly alternatives; rather, its source will be developing countries, which generally seek cheap energy quickly — that is, coal and natural gas for electricity generation and oil for transportation. Of the 201 quadrillion BTUs in added energy required by the developing world between now and 2040, predicts Exxon, 148 quadrillion, or 74%, will be provided by fossil fuels — a statistic that, if accurate, should chill us to the bone in climate change terms.
The role of fossil fuels in satisfying the aspirations of the world's growing middle class is especially evident in the field of transportation. "Rising prosperity will drive increased demand for transportation," the Outlook notes. "An expanding global middle class means millions of people will buy a car for the first time." Between 2010 and 2040, the human population is expected to grow by 29%, from approximately seven billion to nine billion people; the global population of cars, SUVs, and other light-duty vehicles, however, is projected to grow by more than 100%, from 825 million to 1.7 billion. And while an increasing number of these vehicles will be powered by gas-electric hybrid engines, the majority will still be fueled by petroleum, pushing up the demand for petroleum and pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
A rising middle class seeking more consumer products, urban amenities, and travel opportunities will also require a commensurate fleet of trucks, buses, trains, ships, and planes. Reliance on trucks and container ships for moving goods around the world will, in turn, generate a huge demand for diesel and heavy oil, while all those low-cost air carriers (like ill-fated Air Asia) will only up the requirement for aviation fuel.
Finally, the new global middle class will want more computers, flat-screen TVs, air-conditioners, and other appliances, stoking a soaring demand for electricity. Among the advanced nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a growing share of the energy used in generating electricity will indeed come from renewables and natural gas, while coal use will decline sharply. In non-OECD countries, however, the drive for electrification will be accompanied by a significant increase in the consumption of coal — from 54 quadrillion BTUs in 2010 to 82 quadrillion in 2040. This means that the non-OECD's contribution to global warming will continue to soar, although that's not a point that Exxon is likely to emphasize.
Nor does the Exxon blueprint neglect the needs of the world's poorer citizens. "The progress enabled by modern energy has not reached everyone," the Outlook notes. "One out of every five people in the world still has no access to electricity. Even more lack modern cooking fuels."
This is the basis for what can only be termed "carbon humanitarianism" — the claim that cheap carbon-based fuels are the best possible response to the energy-poor of the planet (despite everything we know about the devastation climate change will cause, above all in the lives of the poor). This vision of Big Energy as the Good Samaritan of our world was articulated by Rex Tillerson in a June 2013 address to the Asia Society Global Forum. "Approximately 1.3 billion people on our planet," he said, "still do not have access to electricity for basic needs like clean water, cooking, sanitation, light, or for the safe storage of food and medicine... [which means that] the need to expand energy supplies has a humanitarian dimension that should inform and should guide our energy policy."
Asked whether climate change didn't pose a greater challenge to the world's poor, Tillerson chose to demur. "I think here are much more pressing priorities that we... need to deal with," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2012. "There are still hundreds of millions, billions of people living in abject poverty around the world. They need electricity... They need fuel to cook their food on that's not animal dung... They'd love to burn fossil fuels because their quality of life would rise immeasurably, and their quality of health and the health of their children and their future would rise immeasurably. You'd save millions upon millions of lives by making fossil fuels more available to a lot of the part of the world that doesn't have it."
In fact, Exxon predicts that reliance on fossil fuels will grow fastest in the poorest parts of the world — precisely the areas that are expected to suffer the most from climate change. Africa, for example, is expected to witness a 103 percent increase in net energy consumption between now and 2040, with 83 percent of that increase supplied by fossil fuels.
The final part of the industry's counterattack is the claim that, for all their purported benefits, renewable sources of energy like wind and solar power are just not up to the task of providing the necessary extra energy needed to sustain economic growth and propel billions of people into the middle class.
The problem, Exxon claims, is that wind and solar are more costly than the fossil fuel alternatives and so are not growing fast enough to meet rising world demand. Even though the energy provided by these renewables will expand by 315 percent between now and 2040, it still represents such a small share of the total global energy mix that, by the end of this period, it will only reach the 4 percent mark in its share of total world energy consumption (compared to 77 percent for carbon fuels). Renewables are also said to be problematic as they provide only intermittent sources of energy — failing at night and on windless days — and must be bolstered by other fuels to ensure uninterrupted energy output.
Big Oil's counterattack claims that fossil fuel alternatives aren't growing quickly enough to meet rising world demand even though renewable energy is projected to grow by 315 percent by 2040.
Put together, this represents a dazzling vision of a future in which growing numbers of people enjoy the benefits of abundant energy and unlimited growth. You can already imagine the heartwarming TV commercials that will be generated on a massive scale to propagate such a message: pictures of hard-working individuals of all genders and hues enjoying the American Dream globally thanks to Exxon and its cohorts. Needless to say, in such imagery there will be nothing to mar the promise of unbridled prosperity for all — no horrific droughts, colossal superstorms, or mass migrations of desperate people seeking to flee devastated areas.
But this vision, like so much contemporary advertising, is based on a lie: in this case, on the increasingly bizarre idea that, in the 21st century, humanity can burn its way through significant parts of the planet's reserves of fossil fuels to achieve a world in which everything is essentially the same — there's just more of it for everyone. In the world portrayed by Exxon, it's possible for a reassuring version of business-as-usual to proceed without environmental consequences. In that world, the unimpeded and accelerated release of carbon into the atmosphere has no significant impact on people's lives. This is, of course, a modern fairy tale that, if believed, will have the most disastrous of results.
Someday, it will also be seen as one of the more striking lies on whatever's left of the historical record. In fact, follow this vision to 2040, burning through whatever fossil fuels the energy companies and energy states can pull out of the earth and the ballooning carbon emissions produced will ensure planetary warming far beyond the two degrees Celsius deemed by scientists to be the maximum that the planet can safely absorb without catastrophic climate effects.
In fact, those dreamy landscapes in the new pro-carbon version of the planetary future will, in reality, be replaced by burning forests, flooded coastlines, and ever-expanding deserts. Forget the global rise of the middle class, forget all those cars and trucks and planes and resorts, forget the good life entirely. As climate conditions deteriorate, croplands will wither, coastal cities and farmlands will be eradicated, infrastructure will be devastated, the existing middle class will shrink, and the poor will face ever-increasing deprivation.
Preventing these catastrophes will involve sustained and dedicated effort by all those who truly care about the future of humanity. This will certainly require better educating people about the risks of climate change and the role played by fossil fuel combustion in producing it. But it will also require deconstructing and exposing the futuristic fantasies deployed by the fossil fuel companies to perpetuate their dominance. However fraudulent their arguments may be, they have the potential to blunt significant progress on climate change and so must be vigorously repudiated. Unless we do so, the apostles of carbon will continue to dominate the debate and bring us ever closer to a planetary inferno. This is the only way to thwart and discredit those who seek to perpetuate the Reign of Carbon.
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What's Left. A documentary film version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. Links to his work can be found at michaelklare.com.
Copyright 2015 Michael T. Klare
Top photo by Fotolia/claffra
Middle photo by Fotolia/eyeidea
Bottom photo by Fotolia/hallucion_7
The Earth's changing climate is forcing us to find ways to leave behind the age of fossil fuels.
It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I've ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award she noted, "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It's popular to say that the experiment failed, but that's too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).
Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet's changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).
To use Le Guin's language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given. Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it and so this town of 107,000 mostly poor nonwhites pushed back.
In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and the mayor's seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron's toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies, sometimes requiring everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors), sometimes said — by Chevron — to be harmless, as with last Thursday's flames that lit up the sky, visible as far away as Oakland.
As McLaughin put it of her era as mayor:
"We've accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. We're a sanctuary city. And we're defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114 million extra dollars in taxes."
For this November's election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who's long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that.
Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.
If a small coalition like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of $228.9 billion in 2013, imagine what a large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn't easy in Richmond and it won't be easy on the largest scale either, but it's not impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to dent that inevitability. The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up, and exercise our power to counter theirs.
That power operated on a larger scale last week, when local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation banning fracking statewide. Until the news broke on December 17th, the outcome had seemed uncertain. It's a landmark, a watershed decision: a state has decided that its considerable reserves of fossil fuel will not be extracted for the foreseeable future, that other things — the health of its people, the purity of its water — matter more. And once again, the power of citizens turned out to be greater than that of industry.
Just a few days before the huge victory in New York, the nations of the world ended their most recent talks in Lima, Peru, about a global climate treaty — and they actually reached a tentative deal, one that for the first time asks all nations, not just the developed ones, to reduce emissions. The agreement has to get better — to do more, demand more of every nation — by the global climate summit in Paris in December of 2015.
It's hard to see how we'll get there from here, but easy to see that activists and citizens will have to push their nations hard. We need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy. As New York State and the town of Richmond just demonstrated, what is possible has been changing rapidly.
If you look at innovations in renewable energy technologies — and this may be an era in which engineers are our unsung heroes — the future seems tremendously exciting. Not long ago, the climate movement was only hoping against hope that technology could help save us from the depredations of climate change. Now, as one of the six great banners carried in the 400,000-strong September 21st climate march in New York City proclaimed, "We have the solutions." Wind, solar, and other technologies are spreading rapidly with better designs, lower costs, and many extraordinary improvements that are undoubtedly but a taste of what's still to come.
Clean energy technologies, such as solar panels, are solutions only if carbon-emitting energy sources are phased out or shut down.
In parts of the United States and the world, clean energy is actually becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. The price of oil has suddenly plunged, scrambling the situation for a while, but with one positive side benefit: it's pushed some of the filthier carbon-intensive, cutting-edge energy extraction schemes below the cost-effective point for now.
The costs of clean energy technology have themselves been dropping significantly enough that sober financial advisers like the head of the Bank of England are beginning to suggest that fossil fuels and centralized conventional power plants may prove to be bad investments. They are also talking about "the carbon bubble" (a sign that the divestment movement has worked in calling attention to the practical as well as the moral problems of the industry). So the technology front is encouraging.
That's the carrot for action; there's also a stick.
If you look at the climate reports by the scientists — and scientists are another set of heroes for our time — the news only keeps getting scarier. You probably already know the highlights: chaotic weather, regular records set for warmth on land and at sea (and 2014 heading for an all-time heat high), 355 months in a row of above-average temperatures, more ice melting faster, more ocean acidification, the "sixth extinction," the spread of tropical diseases, drops in food productivity with consequent famines.
So many people don't understand what we're up against, because they don't think about the Earth and its systems much or they don't grasp the delicate, intricate reciprocities and counterbalances that keep it all running as well as it has since the last ice age ended and an abundant, calm planet emerged. For most of us, none of that is real or vivid or visceral or even visible.
For a great many scientists whose fields have something to do with climate, it is. In many cases they're scared, as well as sad and unnerved, and they're clear about the urgency of taking action to limit how disastrously climate change impacts our species and the systems we depend upon.
Some non-scientists already assume that it's too late to do anything, which — as premature despair always does — excuses us for doing nothing. Insiders, however, are generally convinced that what we do now matters tremendously, because the difference between the best- and worst-case scenarios is vast, and the future is not yet written.
After that huge climate march, I asked Jamie Henn, a cofounder of and communications director for 350.org, how he viewed this moment and he replied, "Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart," a perfect summary of the way heartening news about alternative energy and the growth of climate activism exists in the shadow of those terrible scientific reports. This brings us to our third group of heroes, who fall into the one climate category that doesn't require special qualifications: activists.
New technologies are only solutions if they're implemented and the old carbon-emitting ones are phased out or shut down. It's clear enough that the great majority of fossil fuel reserves must be kept just where they are — in the ground — as we move away from the Age of Petroleum. That became all too obvious thanks to a relatively recent calculation made by scientists and publicized and pushed by activists (and maybe made conceivable by engineers designing replacement systems). The goal of all this: to keep the warming of the planet to 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit), a target established years ago that alarmed scientists are now questioning, given the harm that nearly 1 degree Celsius of warming is already doing.
Dismantling the fossil-fuel economy would undoubtedly have the side effect of breaking some of the warping power that oil has had in global and national politics. Of course, those wielding that power will not yield it without a ferocious battle — the very battle the climate movement is already engaged in on many fronts, from the divestment movement to the fight against fracking to the endeavor to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and others like it from delivering the products of the Alberta tar sands to the successful movement to shut down coal-fired power plants in the U.S. and prevent others from being built.
If everyone who's passionate about climate change, who gets that we're living in a moment in which the fate of the Earth and of humanity is actually being decided, found their place in the movement, amazing things could happen. What's happening now is already remarkable enough, just not yet adequate to the crisis.
The divestment movement that arose a couple of years ago to get institutions to unload their stocks in fossil fuel corporations started modestly. It is now active on hundreds of college campuses and at other institutions around the world. While the intransigence or love of inertia of bureaucracies is a remarkable force, there have been notable victories. In late September, for instance, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — made fat upon the wealth of John D. Rockefeller's founding role in the rise of the petroleum industry — pledged to divest its $860 million in assets from fossil fuels. It is just one of more than 800 institutions, including church denominations, universities, cities, pension funds, and foundations from Scotland to New Zealand to Seattle, that have already committed to doing so.
The Keystone pipeline could have been up and running years ago, delivering the dirtiest energy from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast with little fanfare, had activists not taken it on. It has become a profoundly public, hotly debated issue, the subject of demonstrations at dozens of presidential appearances in recent years — and in the course of this ruckus, a great many people (including me) were clued in to the existence of the giant suppurating sore of sludge, bitumen, and poison lakes that is the Alberta tar sands.
Canadian activists have done a similarly effective job of blocking other pipelines to keep this landlocked stuff from reaching any coast for export. One upshot of this: quite a lot of the stuff is now being put on trains (with disastrous results when they crash and, in the longer term, no less disastrous outcomes when they don't). This exceptionally dirty crude oil leaves behind extremely high levels of toxins in the mining as well as the refining process.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported:
"The Keystone XL pipeline was touted as a model for energy independence and a source of jobs when TransCanada Corp. announced plans to build the 1,700-mile pipeline six years ago. But the crude-oil pipeline's political and regulatory snarls since then have emboldened resistance to at least 10 other pipeline projects across North America. As a result, six oil and natural-gas pipeline projects in North America costing a proposed $15 billion or more and stretching more than 3,400 miles have been delayed, a tally by the Wall Street Journal shows. At least four other projects with a total investment of $25 billion and more than 5,100 miles in length are facing opposition but haven't been delayed yet."
The climate movement has proved to be bigger and more effective than it looks, because most people don't see a single movement. If they look hard, what they usually see is a wildly diverse mix of groups facing global issues on the one hand and a host of local ones on the other. Domestically, that can mean Denton, Texas, banning fracking in the November election or the shutting down of coal-powered plants across the country, or the movement gearing up in California for an immense anti-fracking demonstration on February 7, 2015.
It can mean people working on college divestment campaigns or rewriting state laws to address climate change by implementing efficiency and clean energy. It can mean the British Columbian activists who, for now, have prevented a tunnel from being drilled for a tar-sands pipeline to the Pacific Coast thanks to a months-long encampment, civil disobedience, and many arrests at Burnaby Mountain near Vancouver. One of the arrested wrote in the Vancouver Observer:
"[S]itting in that jail cell, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. One that I was only partially aware that I have been carrying for years now. I am ashamed by Canada's withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty and our increasingly contemptible position on climate change. If these are the values of our society then I want to be an outlaw in that society."
Six crude-oil pipeline and natural-gas pipeline projects across North America have been delayed, thanks to climate activists.
Just before that September climate march in New York, I began to contemplate how human beings a century from now will view those of us who lived in the era when climate change was recognized, and yet there was so much more that we could have done. They may feel utter contempt for us. They may regard us as the crew who squandered their inheritance, like drunkards gambling away a family fortune that, in this case, is everyone's everywhere and everything. I'm talking, of course, about the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will see us as people who fiddled while everything burned.
They will think we were insane to worry about celebrities and fleeting political scandals and whether we had nice bodies. They will think the newspapers should have had a gigantic black box above the fold of the front page every day saying "Here are some stories about other things, BUT CLIMATE IS STILL THE BIGGEST STORY OF ALL."
They will think that we should have thrown our bodies in front of the engines of destruction everywhere, raised our voices to the heavens, halted everything until the devastation stopped. They will bless and praise the few and curse the many.
There have been heroic climate activists in nearly every country on the planet, and some remarkable things have already been achieved. The movement has grown in size, power, and sophistication, but it's still nowhere near commensurate with what needs to be done. In the lead-up to the U.N.-sponsored conference to create a global climate treaty in Paris next December, this coming year will likely be decisive.
So this is the time to find your place in a growing movement, if you haven't yet — as it is for climate organizers to do better at reaching out and offering everyone a part in the transformation, whether it's the housebound person who writes letters or the 20-year-old who's ready for direct action in remote places. This is the biggest of pictures, so there's a role for everyone, and it should be everyone's most important work right now, even though so many other important matters press on all of us. (As the Philippines's charismatic former climate negotiator Yeb Sano notes, "Climate change impinges on almost all human rights. Human rights are at the core of this issue.")
Many people believe that personal acts in private life are what matters in this crisis. They are good things, but not the key thing. It's great to bicycle rather than drive, eat plants instead of animals, and put solar panels on your roof, but such gestures can also offer a false sense that you're not part of the problem.
You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social. If you are a resident of a country that is a major carbon emitter, as is nearly everyone in the English-speaking world, you are part of the system, and nothing less than systemic change will save us.
The race is on. From an ecological standpoint, the scientists advise us that we still have a little bit of time in which it might be possible, by a swift, decisive move away from fossil fuels, to limit the damage we're setting up for those who live in the future. From a political standpoint, we have a year until the Paris climate summit, at which, after endless foot-shuffling and evading and blocking and stalling and sighing, we could finally, decades in, get a meaningful climate deal between the world's nations.
We actually have a chance, a friend who was at the Lima preliminary round earlier this month told me, if we all continue to push our governments ferociously. The real pressure for change globally comes more from within nations than from nations pressuring one another. Here in the United States, long the world's biggest carbon-emitter (until China outstripped us, partly by becoming the manufacturer of a significant percentage of our products), we have a particular responsibility to push hard. Pressure works. The president is clearly feeling it, and it's reflected in the recent U.S.-China agreement on curtailing emissions — far from perfect or adequate, but a huge step forward.
How will we get to where we need to be? No one knows, but we do know that we must keep moving in the direction of reduced carbon emissions, a transformed energy economy, an escape from the tyranny of fossil fuel, and a vision of a world in which everything is connected. The story of this coming year is ours to write and it could be a story of Year One in the climate revolution, of the watershed when popular resistance changed the fundamentals as much as the people of France changed their world (and ours) more than 200 ago.
Two hundred years hence, may someone somewhere hold in their hands a document from 2021, in wonder, because it was written during Year Six of the climate revolution, when all the old inevitabilities were finally being swept aside, when we seized hold of possibility and made it ours. "Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings," says Ursula K. Le Guin. And she's right, even if it's the hardest work we could ever do. Now, everything depends on it.
Rebecca Solnit, who has ended TomDispatch's year for years now, grew up reading Ursula K. Le Guin's books. Her own most recent book is The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (Trinity University Press), and her 2014 indie bestseller, Men Explain Things to Me (Dispatch Books), released in May, is ending up on best of the year lists everywhere.
Copyright 2014 Rebecca Solnit
Top photo by Fotolia/artitcom
Middle photo by Fotolia/il-fede
Bottom photo by Fotolia/ALCE
Censorship in China has long posed a substantial obstacle for its documentarians, unable to depict the country's controversial subjects without backlash from the government or societal harassment. But now that combating pollution has become a recent priority for China, which pledged to cap its carbon emissions by 2030, environmental issues have been freed from the film industry's long list of taboos.
Due to lack of approval through the censorship process, independent films are typically not shown in theaters, leaving filmmakers to sell their work to TV stations and garnering a very narrow audience of students and film buffs. And when authorities closed down the Beijing Independent Film Festival in August due to President Xi Jinping's crackdown on freedom of expression, distributors had an even harder time discovering new films.
"If you want to make a film about Tiananmen 1989, it will be impossible," said La Frances Hui, film curator at the New York-based Asia Society, to the Associated Press. "If you want to make a film about the legal justice system, you will get into trouble. But for now I think the environment is relatively safe, but not too many people have dealt with this subject matter."
One independent Chinese filmmaker has: Wang Jiuliang exposed the country's shocking landfills in his first film Beijing Besieged by Waste after uploading it to online streaming sites for free. He began as a photographer, when in 2008 he followed a motorcycle that collected and transported waste around his neighborhood to illegal landfill sites. Jiuliang would capture these areas with his camera, and, over the course of three years, plot hundreds of these locations around the capitol on Google Earth. "My aim was to reveal the problem and then to solve the problem through making a film," Jiuliang told AP.
In 2010, a few of his photos were displayed at an exhibit in Southern China before his film was even finished; once the official Xinhua news agency caught wind and asked Jiuliang to write an internal report, it wasn't long before local officials started paying attention, too. "It got a lot of attention by mainstream media and the authorities, so it created an impact that is kind of unheard of," Hui said.
Already discussing with main state-run broadcasters and media reporters about his upcoming film Plastic China, Jiuliang is making a notable breakthrough for the country's industry, where independent filmmakers have trouble overcoming hierarchical criticism and persecution. He still deals with local harassment—being chased by dogs, threatened and punched—but, now that it aligns with the Communist Party's mission, his work is generally welcomed by a national tolerance for his efforts against pollution.
Though he is still working with CCTV to "weed out sensitive content" from his new film, such as a scene where villagers are criticizing the government, he hopes Plastic China will air this month.
Watch the trailer for Beijing Besieged by Waste here:
A staggering 1 million animals are killed by traffic every day. But one woman found a way to turn these unsightly accidents into ethical accessories, revolutionizing the fur industry.
Pamela Paquin founded Petite Mort (French for "little death"), a business that recycles road kill and turns it into fashion with principles, an idea she's had for years. "It's so much a part of everyday life to see these animals," she told Modern Farmer. The case for eating road kill has gained ground, but little has been said of utilizing its furs—an industry that claims 50 million animals a year. "You can't possibly wrap your head around the suffering that went into those numbers."
Paquin, a resident of Wayland, Mass., located a taxidermist in Vermont who taught her how to skin and scrape an animal pelt ahead of the tanning process; she then ships the fur to a tannery in Idaho (one of few in the country that works with partial pelts). With the remains of the bodies, she goes into the woods and places the animal in fetal position, giving a prayer of thanks—a call to her Native American heritage. Paquin's customers have been steady, and all by word-of-mouth. From neck muffs to leg warmers to trapper hats, her products (made to measure) start at $1,000 and contain a sterling silver badge indicating it's a one-of-a-kind, ethical item.
She recovers most of the animals herself, but collaborates with hunters, wildlife officers, highway patrolmen, and various contacts who spot salvageable animals. Last year her stock included bears, foxes, beavers, raccoons, otters, minks, fisher cats, baby fawns, and a coyote. All animals are registered with Massachusetts' Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, and Paquin sends her customers details about the animal's recovery and clues as to the life it might have lived. "Each animal has a story," she said.
Currently, Paquin is looking for investors to expand this enterprise, hoping that one day fur will be wearable material for those with ethical reservations.
"Fur is a very sensual and luxurious product that has been shamed and shameful for a very, very long time," she said. "This is a shameless fur. This is champagne all night and no hangover."
In his Transportationist blog, David Levinson asks which kills more: Deaths by vehicles from crashes (both cars and trucks) or deaths by vehicles from air pollution.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration counted approximately 43,500 fatalities caused by car crashes in 2005 in the United States. MIT research, led by Fabio Caiazzo, found that same year had roughly 52,800 deaths attributable to particle matter from road transportation (which accounts for a quarter of emission-related deaths)—a 19.7 percent increase from crashes nationwide. An additional 5,250 deaths are caused by road-related ozone concentrations.
Death, however, is only one form of measurement regarding the health impacts of both auto emissions and crashes. Levinson tries to adjust for age through the Global Burden of Disease database, which includes a measurement accounting for "Years of Life Lost." In 2010, about 1.87 million years were lost to road injuries, whereas 1.65 million years were lost to breathing particle matter. (While this may not seem like a mind-blowing difference, the gap is actually wider, as the latter includes all forms of air pollution. If a quarter of pollution-related deaths come from cars, then a more accurate number would be about 410,000 years.) Auto emissions, overall, cut lives 12 years short; crashes, which mainly affect younger people, cut about 35 years.
In short, while Americans appear more likely to die from auto emissions, car crashes pose a bigger danger when considering wasted life potential.
Image by Honou, licensed under Creative Commons.
Want to gain a fresh perspective? Read stories that matter? Feel optimistic about the future? It's all here! Utne Reader offers provocative writing from diverse perspectives, insightful analysis of art and media, down-to-earth news and in-depth coverage of eye-opening issues that affect your life.
Save Even More Money By Paying NOW!
Pay now with a credit card and take advantage of our earth-friendly automatic renewal savings plan. You save an additional $5 and get 4 issues of Utne Reader for only $31.00 (USA only).
Or Bill Me Later and pay just $36 for 4 issues of Utne Reader!


text:
Product Description
Available while supplies last.
Rotary Cheese Grater
Hand-crank cheese grater for fine grinding of hard cheese, nuts, and chocolate. Drum is open on side opposite crank to sprinkle gratings over food. Stainless-steel grating drum locks into place and can be removed for easy washing.
- 18/10 Stainless steel
- Locking mechanism
- Dishwasher safe
Materials: | 18/10 Stainless Steel | |
Weight: | 2 Pounds |
Coordinating Items
Related Items
Questions & Answers
There are no questions from the community yet
Customer Reviews
This product has no customer reviews yet
Write an online review and be the first to share your thoughts with other customers
Write an online review and be the first to share your thoughts with other customers
Tag This Product
A tag is a keyword assigned to a product which helps describe the item and allows it to be found by other customers
Add a new tag:
Separate multiple tags with commas
What's this?Additional Details
Mfr Part # | |
Sku | |
Group # | 764463 |
Category | Peelers, Graters & Zesters - 3214 |
Style | - 0 |
Sales Rank | 12 |
Your Recently Viewed Items
You have no recently viewed items. After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to products you are interested in.
Your Recommended Items
You currently have no recommended items. Browse a few more items to give us an idea of what you like.
©1999 - 2015
Copyright notice | Site Map | By using this site you agree to our Terms & Conditions of Use and Privacy Statement

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Two of a Trade never agreeThe French say, Fin contre fin n'est bon à faire doublure - i.e. Two materials of the same nature never unite well together. Een a beggar sees with woe A beggar to the house-door go. Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894 More on Two of a Trade never agree from Infoplease:
24 X 7Private Tutor
Explore 11th Grade Math , Statistics Symbols


text:
AgreedSubmitted by SusanK6461 (not verified) on Mon, 06/25/2012 - 2:24pm.
And the perpetuation of the stereotyping perpetuates the failures: there are a lot of comments suggesting that just because a person is black that they must be a thug. You get what you expect. And of course, who's going to hire someone they've predetermined a thug? WAKE UP!!! »
Reply |


text:
Enter your Email address:
Wolters Kluwer Health may email you for journal alerts and information, but is committed to maintaining your privacy and will not share your personal information without your express consent. For more information, please refer to our Privacy Policy.
You currently have no recent searches
Hopper, Richard A. M.D., M.S.; Kapadia, Hitesh D.D.S., Ph.D.; Morton, Trent B.S.
Background: Le Fort III distraction advances the Apert midface but leaves the central concavity and vertical compression untreated. The authors propose that Le Fort II distraction and simultaneous zygomatic repositioning as a combined procedure can move the central midface and lateral orbits in independent vectors in order to improve the facial deformity. The purpose of this study was to determine whether this segmental movement results in more normal facial proportions than Le Fort III distraction.
Methods: Computed tomographic scan analyses were performed before and after distraction in patients undergoing Le Fort III distraction (n = 5) and Le Fort II distraction with simultaneous zygomatic repositioning (n = 4). The calculated axial facial ratios and vertical facial ratios relative to the skull base were compared to those of unoperated Crouzon (n = 5) and normal (n = 6) controls.
Results: With Le Fort III distraction, facial ratios did not change with surgery and remained lower (p < 0.01; paired t test comparison) than normal and Crouzon controls. Although the face was advanced, its shape remained abnormal. With the Le Fort II segmental movement procedure, the central face advanced and lengthened more than the lateral orbit. This differential movement changed the abnormal facial ratios that were present before surgery into ratios that were not significantly different from normal controls (p > 0.05).
Conclusion: Compared with Le Fort III distraction, Le Fort II distraction with simultaneous zygomatic repositioning normalizes the position and the shape of the Apert face.
CLINICAL QUESTION/LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Therapeutic, III.
©2013American Society of Plastic Surgeons
Colleague's E-mail is Invalid
Your Name: (optional)
Your Email:
Colleague's Email: Separate multiple e-mails with a (;).
Message: Thought you might appreciate this item(s) I saw at Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
Send a copy to your email
Your message has been successfully sent to your colleague.
Some error has occurred while processing your request. Please try after some time.
An Existing Folder
A New Folder
Folder Name:
The item(s) has been successfully added to "".
Login with your LWW Journals username and password.
Username or Email:
Forgot Password?
Enter and submit the email address you registered with. An email with instructions to reset your password will be sent to that address.
Link to reset your password has been sent to specified email address.
What does "Remember me" mean? By checking this box, you'll stay logged in until you logout. You'll get easier access to your articles, collections, media, and all your other content, even if you close your browser or shut down your computer.
To protect your most sensitive data and activities (like changing your password), we'll ask you to re-enter your password when you access these services.
What if I'm on a computer that I share with others? If you're using a public computer or you share this computer with others, we recommend that you uncheck the "Remember me" box.
Save my selection
View All
The Clinical Masters of PRS – Breast eBooks 4 Essential eBooks for Plastic Surgeons


text:
This is a press release submitted to the Las Vegas Sun. It has not been verified or edited by the Sun.
Press Release
Attack Poker Announces New Team Pro Signing
Published on Wed, Feb 13, 2013 (5:45 p.m.)
Las Vegas, Nevada, January 21, 2013: With the start of NBC's Heads Up Poker Championship, Attack Poker announces signing World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner and legendary high stakes cash player Eli Elezra.Mr. Vegas
"Attack Poker has done it right. They've got all the elements of real poker play, and I like that its poker for poker players by poker players" said Elezra upon signing. Eli Elezra, is an Israeli born professional poker player and businessman now living in Las Vegas, Nevada. In Israel, Elezra served as a member of the elite commando unit, the Golani Brigade. He took up poker while recovering from an injury sustained during his military service. He made America his home in 1988 bringing his poker skills and business savvy with him. Since moving to America, Elezra has made numerous WSOP money finishes in Omaha, Texas Hold'em, and Draw Events.
Elezra, was awarded $1,024,574 in prize money when he won the World Poker Tour (WPT) $10,000 no limit hold'em event at the 2004 Mirage Poker Showdown.
In 2007, Elezra won his first WSOP bracelet by winning the World Championship Seven Card Stud Hi- Low Event.
To date, his total live tournament winnings exceed $2,000,000. Elezra has appeared in the second and third seasons of the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament, seasons 1-6 of GSN series High Stakes Poker, and several episodes of Poker After Dark.
Legend and Rising Stars
Eli Elezra joins fellow WSOP bracelet winner Lisa Hamilton and Rising Star Luke Schwartz, as ambassadors for Attack Poker as they get ready to apply for a real money gaming license in Europe.
About Attack Poker
AttackPoker.com is a free to play interactive poker site which launched on November 11, 2012 boasting over 20,000 signups since launch and adding 500+ members a day. Attack Poker will be introducing virtual chip purchase play, and a new iPhone App, which for the first time in the U.S., allows players to win real prizes while playing on an iPhone.
Most Popular
- Viewed
- Discussed
- E-mailed
- Bitcoin bust: Poker site prompts raid, investigation by Nevada gaming authorities
- Vexing question: When is a casino a big casino?
- Jon Taffer of 'Bar Rescue': I see owner confidence, growth, new concepts, investments
- Artist Izaac Zevalking: 'My designs can have five different meanings'
- Photos: Rascal Flatts bring their 'Vegas Riot!' to the Joint at Hard Rock Hotel


text:
No results found
Please try another search.
Please try another search.
Gadget round-ups
Google's internet-beaming Titan drones ready for 2015 takeoff
FlexCharger charges five devices at once
HTC VIVE: Valve and HTC team up to create virtual reality headset
Amazon's 3D printing vans could slash delivery times
Apple Watch release date, price, features, apps and battery life
Hyperloop could open to the public as soon as 2018
Meet Ringo, the palm-sized light-up robot
Mercedes-Benz boss 'not losing sleep' over Apple Car rumours
iTraq tracking device uses cellular tech for greater distance and better battery
London Formula E track unveiled ahead of season finale
About us


text: Dictionaries change: This is literally the end of the English languageBy Ed Payne and Dorrine Mendoza, CNNUpdated 2:57 PM ET, Thu August 15, 2013Just Watched'Literally' literally means what now?replayMore Videos ...'Literally' literally means what now? 00:46Story highlightsDictionaries now include a definition of literally that isn't literalLiterally can be used to express a strong feeling, dictionaries sayMerriam-Webster, Cambridge and Google agreeDictionary.com notes the exceptionThis is going to give grammarians a headache, literalists a migraine and language nerds a nervous breakdown.The definition of literally is no longer the literal definition of literally. Alas, poor literally . . .Gizmodo has discovered Google's definition for literally includes this: "Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling."But it doesn't end with Google.Merriam-Wesbter and Cambridge dictionaries have also added the informal, non-literal definition. So what's the deal?Funky words make it into the dictionaryNext thing they'll be telling us that there's no ham in hamburger, no egg in eggplant, a boxing ring isn't round and tennis shoes aren't just for tennis.We're literally over it. Hooray for Dictionary.com, which has bucked the trend but includes the info in an editor's note below the definition.Dictionary finally acknowledges humans can tweet, too"The use is often criticized; nevertheless, it appears in all but the most carefully edited writing."(Reader: insert your own joke here)More from livingInspiring words transformed into imagesSalvation Army uses #thedress to raise domestic violence awarenessRaising RylandPowered by Livefyre


text:
Phelps takes record 19th Olympic medal
August 1, 2012 3:15 AMLONDON -- Michael Phelps broke the Olympic medals record Tuesday with his 19th as the United States romped to a dominating win in 4x200-meter freestyle relay at the London Games.
With 19 career medals spanning three Olympics, Phelps moved one ahead of Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, who got her haul in 1956, 1960 and 1964. And he finally got his first gold of these games, bouncing back from the disappointment of settling for silver when he glided at the end of the 200 butterfly earlier Tuesday.
The United States team of Ryan Lochte, Conor Dwyer, Ricky Berens and Phelps on the anchor leg won in 6 minutes, 59.70 seconds. France took the silver in 7:02.77, while China was third in 7:06.30.
Phelps now has 15 golds, two silvers and two bronzes.
Earlier Tuesday, Phelps won his record-tying 18th Olympic medal, taking silver in the 200-meter butterfly.
He was out-touched at the wall by South Africa's Chad le Clos. Phelps flipped away his cap in disgust when he saw a "2" beside his name, knowing he had blown it at the end by trying to glide to the wall instead of taking one more stroke.
Le Clos won in a time of 1 minute, 52.96 seconds. Phelps finished in 1:53.01, while Japan's Takeshi Matsuda took the bronze in 1:53.21.
First Published July 31, 2012 7:15 PM


text:
Tori Spelling is not happy with her husband Dean after a woman came forward claiming she had slept with him in early December. A new report states that she's working hard to keep the home normal for the kids but is so angry because she believes that he cheated.
Poor Tori Spelling! When Emily Goodhand, 28, came forward claiming she had sex with Dean McDermott, it couldn't have been easy. Tori is putting on a happy face, but is reportedly "making Dean's life hell!"
Tori Spelling Believes Dean McDermott Cheated
"She is refusing to comment on the cheating rumors publicly, even though she believes Dean did cheat on her," sources told RadarOnline. "Tori is obsessed with having a picture perfect family, and thinks it's a big part of her image. Commenting or addressing the cheating would taint that image. Things are very tense in the house right now, and Tori is making Dean's life hell."
We can see she's not going public with her feelings toward Dean, 47. On Dec. 25, she shared a sweet Christmas photo of her five kids! However, that happy photo may have been all an act.
"Even though she is trying not to fight in front of the kids, it's impossible," the source added. "She has been crying and screaming at Dean, and saying he has ruined everything, including Christmas."
Tori 'Has Never Completely Trusted' Dean
Tori, 40 has always been insecure with their relationship as they met when they were married to other people in 2006 and had an affair — they split from their significant others and got married less than a month later.
"If the phone rings and it's a girl's voice, I have to ask if he's having an affair. Dean tells me over and over again that he would never do that," she wrote in Uncharted TerriTORI, her book that came out in 2010.
However, the source also said she's been "telling friends she always had a deep, dark feeling that Dean would cheat on her."
It couldn't have been easy when Tori saw the cover of Us magazine, with Emily Goodhand, a blond who claimed that not only did Dean sleep with her during a publicity trip in Toronto, he also told her he was in a sexless marriage!
"She has never completely trusted him and has always kept very close tabs on Dean. But despite all that, Dean still cheated," the source added.
So HollywoodLifers, what do you think of the report? Do you think that Dean cheated?
– Emily Longeretta
More Tori Spelling News:
- Tori Spelling's Weight Loss — How She Dropped 45 Pounds After Baby
- Tori Spelling Shares First Videos Of Baby Finn's Miraculous Birth
- Tori Spelling Reveals She Showered With Dean McDermott & Four Kids
View Comment
Posted at 8:13 AM on December 28, 2013
It is kinda hard to feel sorry for her and see her as the victim especially when both her and Dean cheated on their previous spouses to be together. And on top of that, she had absolutely no remorse about cheating and leaving her ex-husband for Dean. So the way I see it, karma is just coming back to visit her for a little bit. And it's even more interesting that in other articles it is said that she has been "insecure" all these years and worried about Dean wandering….that's because she KNEW what she did was wrong. But she was living in the moment I guess. But it is coming back to bite her in the behind. Hmmm getting cheated on….doesn't feel good does it Tor?
Posted at 8:07 PM on December 27, 2013
Posted at 7:31 PM on December 27, 2013
Rose W.
Posted at 5:38 PM on December 27, 2013
QUESTION: When you marry a man that cheats on his wife, what do you get?
ANSWER: A husband that cheats on his wife.
What WAS she thinking? He left his wife for her. She say's she has always had a deep dark feeling he would cheat. HELLO!!! You both cheated on your spouses with each other, and by all accounts Charlie Shanian and Mary Jo Eustace are good people who did not deserve the treatment they got from Dean and Tori. I am sure that they both are feeling just a bit of satisfaction knowing that Dean and Tori are getting what they gave and are well deserving of it.
Here's is a bit of advice for you Tori – there is no such thing as a picture perfect family. A family is made up of humans, and guess what sugar, all humans are flawed. I think you may have gotten that ideal from your mother. Let it go sweetie, you aren't perfect and neither are your kids, and as a matter of fact, neither is your mother
If Tori is smart,she will cut her losses, ditch Dean to the slut he cheated with, and go back to her mother's with her children and start her life over.
Now with all that said, Emily Goodhand is sleazy slut for releasing the statement right before Christmas. There are 4 young children involved here who deserved a happy Christmas, and while their father should have thought about that before he was "slippin' it in" she clearly took no one but herself and her 15 minutes of fame into consideration.
Time to "phone home" Tori!
Posted at 4:54 PM on December 27, 2013
a leopard can't change its spots duh!! Once a cheater always a cheater. They were each married to others when they "Fell in love and became soul mates." Too bad about the other "poor souls" they hurt along the way, you reap what you sow!! Its the law of the universe and Karma. So make it right for the four little souls you brought into this world!!
Posted at 4:25 PM on December 27, 2013
Posted at 3:41 PM on December 27, 2013
Posted at 2:32 PM on December 27, 2013


text:
What does HMR mean in Occupation & Positions?
This page is about the meanings of the acronym/abbreviation/shorthand HMR in the Business field in general and in the Occupation & Positions terminology in particular.
Hospitality Management Recruiter
Hotel & Resort Management position.
Find a translation for HMR in other languages:
Select another language:
Discuss this HMR abbreviation with the community:
Use the citation below to add this abbreviation to your bibliography:
"HMR." Abbreviations.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2015. Web. 2 Mar. 2015. <http://www.abbreviations.com/term/545923>.
HMR also stands for:
- Hamar, Norway
- Hardwood Market Report
- Hazardous Materials Regulations
- Health and Medical Research Charities of America
- Health Management Resources
... and 23 more »
Nearby & related abbreviations:
Alternative search:
- Search Hospitality Management Recruiter on Amazon
- Search Hospitality Management Recruiter on Google


text:
Start learning with our library of video tutorials taught by experts. Get started
Explores virtually every new feature of Tiger, as well as many advanced features.
A guided tour of Tiger that teaches tools you need to start using your new operating system right away.
"I have learned more in two weeks than in YEARS of reading manuals and playing around with my software. I actually started my own business utilizing lynda.com. WOW." —Ai R.
more from our members »


text:
When I moved into my loft, I didn't want to let the style of the home dictate too much of what the interior would look like… but it's hard not to let that happen with brick walls and an open floor plan. So, now that I'm about to have a whole house to decorate, I'm revisiting some of […]
4 responses on "ONE ROOM INSPIRATION :: FRESH COTTAGE STYLE"
Audrey | Brunch at Audrey's The round and bubbly tables are really cool! I love how they're placed with the plush sofas, because it makes the whole room just seem so nice and cozy. -Audrey | Brunch at Audrey's
↓ -
Agus Very fresh and cozy!
↓ -
franki Architecture of the dwelling is hugely important, to me, when decorating. Beautiful photos!! franki
↓ -
Kevin | Thou Swell I'm loving all of the hides in this home! I'm thinking of doing a living room refresh and a hide rug would be the first new thing… They feel so fresh and classic.


text:
Thanks to technological change, life expectancies everywhere are rising. John Kay this that this is wonderful -a demographic change to be welcomed rather than feared.
Achieving these extended lifespans costs money. Not necessarily much, because healthy lifestyle is a more important contributor to longevity than medical treatment. But we all die, either from the remaining diseases we have not yet learnt to cure, or the accumulated effects of old age itself. So medical and care costs will inevitably be an increasing fraction of national income. But this is money the public really wants to spend. It resists attempts to control the grotesque costs of private US healthcare. "More for the National Health Service" is always the British electorate's top spending priority. ….
Gloomy prognostications, sometimes of population explosion, then of secular stagnation, have repeatedly been falsified. But one certainty is that all the issues of concern result from developments that give us more choices – the choice between higher material living standard and more leisure, the indulgence of spending more looking after ourselves, and the opportunity for women to have careers as well as, or along with, family lives.
What is not to like about these developments? Why should we care about lower gross domestic product per capita, or higher public spending as a share of national income if it is the consequence of things that make us better off?
John Kay, "Economic growth allows us to choose longer lives – surely that's a good thing?", Financial Times, 15 October 2014 (ungated link).


text:
Beef Soup (Caldo de Res)
- Total Time:
- 1 hr 10 min
- Prep:
- 10 min
- Cook:
- 1 hr
- Yield:
- 4 to 6 servings
- Level:
- Easy
- One 2-pound bone-in beef chuck, cut into 1-inch cubes
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1/2 medium white onion
- Pinch salt
- 2 carrots, cut into 1-inch rounds
- 1 celery stick, cut into 2-inch pieces
- 1 chayote squash, cut in 2-inch strips
- 1 corn on the cob, halved
- 1 zucchini, cut into 2-inch chunks
- 1/2 head cabbage, quartered
- Lime wedges, for serving
- Hot sauce, for serving
- Corn tortillas, warmed, for serving
Combine the beef chuck cubes and the bone with 10 cups water, garlic and onion in large pot. Sprinkle with the salt and bring to a boil. Cover and reduce to a simmer. Simmer for 30 minutes. Then uncover and skim off the foam and grease. Add the carrots, celery stick, chayote squash, corn, zucchini and cabbage. Cover, and continue simmering for 30 more minutes. Turn the heat off and serve hot with lime wedges, hot sauce and warm corn tortillas.
Recipe courtesy Marcela Valladolid
Cooking Tips
More Recipes and Ideas
Caldo Gallego
Recipe courtesy of Emeril Lagasse
Corned Beef and Cabbage Soup
Recipe courtesy of Food Network Kitchen
Chicken in a Pot, No Pie
Recipe courtesy of Rachael Ray