At some basic level, climate change shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Fossil-fuel burning -- the essence of our civilization since the industrial revolution -- dumps prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. As it happens, 2010 was another banner year for carbon dioxide production; the 5.9% rise in CO2 emissions was the “biggest jump ever recorded.” That greenhouse gas, in turn, traps heat and so warms the planet. The results are clear enough for anyone to see. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. Last year was the ninth warmest on record, despite an expected cooling effect from a strong La Niña temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean.
More heat means more turbulence, which means more extreme weather events, which have clearly been on the rise -- more wetness, more droughts, fiercer storms. In that category, 2011 was definitely a year for the record books, with an unprecedented 14 weather events that each caused $1 billion or more in damage. More extreme weather means more human misery, relatively predictable globally, but reasonably unexpected when it actually hits locally.
The urge not to believe that we are despoiling our own planet has meant that we’ve been slow to develop alternate energy sources, but not slow to grow economically. What that means, of course, is that the search only intensifies for more fossil fuels, ever tougher to get as time goes on and ever “dirtier” (in greenhouse gas terms) to produce.
It’s the definition of a nasty feedback loop, made worse because the changing planet is itself setting off other phenomena that only increase the warming trend. Arctic sea ice, now melting at prodigious rates, reflects the sun’s heat back into the atmosphere. Less ice, in other words, isn’t just a sign of the planet getting hotter, but a factor in heating up the planet. In addition, the more iceless the oceans, the more their waters absorb carbon emissions, which only puts further pressure on many of the life forms living in them. Similarly, the melting of the permafrost in the northern reaches of the planet, which contains vast frozen reservoirs of another greenhouse gas, methane, might -- no one is yet sure -- sooner or later release enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, only increasing the overheating effect. It’s creepy. It’s happening. And Ma Nature really doesn’t give a damn whether we’re in denial or not.
Sooner or later, undoubtedly, denial will give way to... well, who knows what? Christian Parenti, author of a new book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, that, under the circumstances, couldn’t be more relevant or recommended, has some thoughts on why it’s time to stop cursing big government and think more seriously about what its role might be in the future that awaits us. Tom
Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big Government
A Secret History of Free Enterprise and the Government That Made It Possible
By Christian ParentiLook back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion -- and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.
In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.
Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain, causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still suffering from its worst drought in 70 years. Flooding in the Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the property of 12 million others, while ruining some of the world’s largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters ever. And that’s just to start a 2011 extreme-weather list, not to end it.
The twenty-first century hasn’t exactly been America’s greatest moment. Still, there remain winners, along with all the losers you might care to mention. If, in fact, you were to sum up the first decade-plus of the next “American Century” in manufacturing terms, you might say that -- Steve Jobs aside -- this country has mainly been successful at making things that go boom in the night. Start with Hollywood. Its action and superhero films -- the very definition of what goes boom in the night -- continue to capture eyeballs and dominate global markets in ways that should impress and that have left national movie industries elsewhere in the proverbial dust. And then, of course, there’s that other group of winners, the arms-makers of the military-industrial-homeland-security complex. They’ve had the time of their lives these last boom years (so to speak), with national security budgets soaring annually beyond all imagination.
Even now, in the toughest of tough times and despite the headlines about gigantic Defense Department spending cuts, President Obama recently reassured arms-makers (and the rest of us) that the Pentagon budget would, in his words, “still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.” In response, his Republican opponents lambasted him as weak on defense for promising so little. Which tells you just who the winners of the last decade were and who the winners of the next one are likely to be.
Of course, in any situation there are always winners and losers, but it is striking that our losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven a gold mine for a small set of crony corporations and weapon-makers, producing a group of real winners at home with names like Lockheed Martin, KBR, and General Dynamics.
TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore points, for instance, to the end results of our debacle in Iraq: the new Iraqi government is planning to purchase $11 billion in American weapons (and training), including F-16 fighter jets. A little history of American dreams for the Iraqi Air Force might be in order. When the Bush administration launched its invasion in 2003, it imagined an American-garrisoned Iraq for decades to come and a reconstituted Iraqi military “lite,” a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed troops “without an air force,” who would patrol the borders of their part of an American-dominated Middle East. In those halcyon days, there were no plans to recreate an Iraqi Air Force (though Saddam Hussein’s had once been one of the biggest in the world). Or rather, U.S. planners saw no need to do so because the “Iraqi Air Force” already existed and was settling into Balad Air Base north of Baghdad. It was, of course, the U.S. Air Force.
Consider it now a sign of defeat that almost the last military link between Iraq and the U.S. military will be the delivery of those new weapons and the years of training and support that will go with them. We didn’t win in Iraq, but someone here did! Let Astore tell you all about it. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it faded for him, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Weapons ‘R’ Us
Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds
By William J. AstorePerhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.
If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: For a recent Foreign Policy in Focus review of my new book The United States of Fear, click here; for a recent interview that David Walsh of the website History News Network did with me based on the book, click here. If you buy a copy via this book link (or any other TD book link) at Amazon.com, you’ll also be contributing a small percentage of your purchase to TomDispatch at no cost to you. Finally, visit our donation page and for $75 or more, you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book. Tom]
They say you can’t keep a good man down, but the “good” part of that equation is often negotiable. If you thought you had seen the last of the then-disgraced Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, you know what I mean. The same goes for corporations. Even scandals, swindles, and sanctions don’t seem to matter -- at least when the company is valued in the tens of billions of dollars.
Founded in 1919, Halliburton -- a Houston-based oil services company -- always did well, but it catapulted to fame and further fortune during the 2000s as it made a killing off the killing in Iraq. With former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dick Cheney in the White House, Halliburton, mostly through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, reaped billions in Iraq War contracts. As the money piled up, so did the scandals. As Politifact.com observed in 2010:
“Government officials have raised many questions about KBR's fulfillment of its contracts, everything from billing for meals it didn't serve to charging inflated prices for gas to excessive administrative costs. Government auditors have noted that KBR refused to turn over electronic data in its native format and stamped documents as proprietary and secret when the documents would normally be considered public records.
“Over the course of several years, the Defense Contract Audit Agency found that $553 million in payments should be disallowed to KBR, according to 2009 testimony by agency director April Stephenson before the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
In 2007, amid outrage over its actions, Halliburton sold off KBR. But like a bad penny, the company continued to pop up in all the wrong places for all the wrong reasons. In February 2009, KBR pled guilty to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribes paid out in Nigeria while it was still part of Halliburton. In the spring of 2011, the New York Times reported, a lawyer “accused of helping steer bribe money" from KBR (then still part of Halliburton) to Nigerian government officials in exchange for "more than $6 billion in contracts for liquefied natural gas facilities,” pled guilty to federal charges and was ordered to forfeit almost $150 million.
And then there’s the Gulf of Mexico where, in 2010, an oil rig explosion killed 11 people, injured dozens more, and resulted in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. This past fall, the Department of the Interior cited Halliburton, along with BP and another company, “for numerous safety and environmental violations in the operation of the doomed Deepwater Horizon well.”
It’s hardly surprising then that, as TomDispatch regular Ellen Cantarow reveals in groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the latest grassroots uprising in America, Halliburton also has a down and dirty history when it comes to the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” This time, however, Halliburton may have met its match in the towns and hamlets of upstate New York. Nick Turse
Shale-Shocked
Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement
By Ellen CantarowThis is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.
Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing -- “fracking” for short.
Fracking uses prodigious amounts of water laced with sand and a startling menu of poisonous chemicals to blast the methane out of the shale. At hyperbaric bomb-like pressures, this technology propels five to seven million gallons of sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the shale.
Up comes the methane -- along with about a million gallons of wastewater containing the original fracking chemicals and other substances that were also in the shale, among them radioactive elements and carcinogens. There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by rumbling machinery, serviced by tens of thousands of diesel trucks, this nightmare technology for energy release has turned rural areas in 34 U.S. states into toxic industrial zones.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called it “utterly deplorable.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “total dismay.” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was “deeply disturbed” that the actions in question would “erode the reputation of our joint force.” Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos declared them to be “wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history,” and Senator John McCain claimed they made him “so sad.”
Seldom have so many high officials in Washington lined up to denounce an event so quickly or emphatically. I’m talking, of course, about the video of four wisecracking U.S. Marines in Afghanistan pissing on what might be three dead Taliban or simply -- since we may never know whose bodies those are -- the corpses of three dead Afghans. (“Have a good day, buddy... Golden -- like a shower, ” you hear them say, seemingly addressing the bodies.) The video went viral in the Muslim world, and the Obama administration moved fast to contain the damage. After all, no one wanted another Abu Ghraib.
On this subject Washington has been remarkably united (with the exception of Rick Perry, who offered a half-hearted defense of the Marines -- “to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top”). Pardon me, though, if I find this chorus of condemnation to be too little, too late. It feels like a malign version of one of Casablanca’s famous final lines: “Round up the usual suspects.”
After all, these last years in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan have been utterly deplorable, totally dismaying, and deeply disturbing from start to finish. On occasion after occasion, U.S. troops, aka “America’s heroes,” as well as private contractors and others in Washington’s employ have run riot. There is no way to catalogue what’s been deplorable, dismaying, and deeply disturbing, but if you wanted to start, it really wouldn't be that hard.
In fact, you wouldn't have to go farther than this website. If, for instance, it was deeply disturbing pictures taken by our troops you were curious about, you could have read David Swanson’s 2006 piece "The Iraq War as a Trophy Photo," which focused on the “war porn” photos U.S. soldiers were already taking (or even setting up) and then proudly submitting to an actual porn website for posting (something, by the way, that’s still going on).
Or if checkpoint killings by U.S. soldiers in Iraq were what you were interested in, all you had to do was read Chris Hedges at TomDispatch in 2008, based on interviews he did with American soldiers for the book Collateral Damage: “Iraqi families,” he wrote, “were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son.” ("'It's fun to shoot sh-t up,' a soldier said.") And if his word wasn’t enough, you could turn to U.S. Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal who, in a moment of bluntness in April 2010, commented: “We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”
Or consider something no one has yet denounced as deplorable, dismaying, or deeply disturbing: the obliteration of wedding parties. Over the years, TomDispatch has counted up at least six weddings in Iraq and Afghanistan that were wiped out in part or full by the U.S. Air Force. All of these, including the first in December 2001 in which a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, armed with precision weapons, killed 110 of 112 Afghan revelers, were reported individually. But next to no one in our world thought them dismaying or disturbing enough to write about them collectively or, for that matter, to deplore them. (Of a wedding in Western Iraq in which U.S. planes killed 40 people, including wedding musicians and children, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?")
The troves of documents leaked to the website WikiLeaks, for which Army Pfc. Bradley Manning has been charged, certainly caused a stir, but the carnage in them was, in truth, easily available without access to a single secret document. Washington’s crocodile tears can’t wash away the stain of all this on American honor, as TomDispatch regular Chase Madar, author of the upcoming book The Passion of Bradley Manning, makes all too clear. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Madar discusses the coming trial of Bradley Manning, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Blood on Whose Hands?
Bradley Manning, Washington, and the Blood of Civilians
By Chase MadarWho in their right mind wants to talk about, think about, or read a short essay about... civilian war casualties? What a bummer, this topic, especially since our Afghan, Iraq, and other ongoing wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy: wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, etc.
A couple hundred thousand dead civilians have a way of making such noble ideals seem like dollar-store tinsel. And so, throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on (and “dwelling on” = fleetingly mentioned) civilian casualties. Washington elites may squabble over some things, but as for foreigners killed by our numerous wars, our Beltway crew adheres to a sullen code of omertà.
Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties -- but only if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.
These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered. Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:
Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry. In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police. He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf -- until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs. While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring. In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.
1967: Under the U.S. “Atoms for Peace” program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which -- call it irony -- is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program). Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the Shah might use the “peaceful atom” as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands. “An aggressive successor to the Shah,” went a 1974 Pentagon memo, “might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran’s complete military dominance of the region.” But that didn’t stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.
The Shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran's national “right” and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants. As a 1970s ad by a group of American power companies put the matter: “The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world. Yet he’s building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country. He knows the oil is running out -- and time with it.” In other words, the U.S. nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.
September 1980: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein launches a war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. In the early 1980s, he becomes Washington’s man, our “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf, and we offer him our hand -- and also "detailed information" on Iranian deployments and tactical planning that help him use his chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian military. Oh, and just to make sure things turn out really, really well, the Reagan administration also decides to sell missiles and other arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran on the sly, part of what became known as the “Iran-Contra Affair” and which almost brings down the president and his men. Success!
March 2003: Saddam Hussein is, by now, no longer our man in Baghdad but a new “Hitler” who, top Washington officials claim, undoubtedly has a nuclear weapons program that could someday leave mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities. So the Bush administration launches a war of aggression against Iraq, which like Iran just happens to -- in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- “float on a sea of oil.” (Bush officials hope, in the wake of a “cakewalk” of a war to revive that country’s oil industry, to privatize it, and use it to destroy OPEC, driving down the price of oil on world markets.) Nine years later, a Shiite government is in power in Baghdad closely allied with Tehran, which has gained regional strength and influence thanks to the disastrous U.S. occupation.
So call it an unblemished record of a kind not easy to find. In more than 50 years, America’s leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn’t lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback. Now, another administration in Washington, after years of what can only be called a covert war against Iran, is preparing yet another set of clever maneuvers -- this time sanctions against Iran’s central bank meant to cripple the country’s oil industry and crack open the economy followed by no one knows what.
And honestly, I mean, really, given past history, what could possibly go wrong? Regime change in Iran? It’s bound to be a slam dunk and if you don’t believe it, check out Pepe Escobar, that fabulous peripatetic reporter for Asia Times and TomDispatch regular. Tom
The Myth of “Isolated” Iran
Following the Money in the Iran Crisis
By Pepe EscobarLet's start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line, straight from the lion’s mouth. Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.”
How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat. Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).
What if, however, there is no “red line,” but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.
