As for what “immunize [the culture] to ecological realities,” in the US, it is useful to read the public pronouncements of the Chamber of Commerce (the main business lobby), the American Petroleum Institute, and other core components of the dominant business classes. Of course, that requires the contributions of the information and political systems, largely willing to line up in the same parade with only occasional hesitation.
During the Tar Sands Action in Washington, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute told the press, “the protesters are really protesting jobs.” What do you make of API’s statement?[103]
The translation of the API statement to English is easy: “The Tar Sands Action is protesting an initiative that will severely harm local environments and accelerate the global rush to disaster—while putting plenty of bucks in our pockets for us to hoard or spend while we watch the ship sinking.”
From what I know of the Tar Sands Action, it consists of people whose priorities are virtually the opposite of the API’s. They want to maintain an environment in which people can live decent lives, to protect their grandchildren from disaster, and to create far more good jobs by using the ample resources available to develop a sustainable energy future while also rebuilding a decaying society and turning it to different and far more healthy directions.[104] But, admittedly, they have inadequate concern for the bulging profits of the super-rich and their desperate need to run the world to the ground.
The lack of serious media attention seems to me to fall into the normal pattern of downplaying the threat of global warming, along with general dislike of popular activism, which might revitalize democracy and threaten elite control. As for the former pattern, it is standard. Open the morning’s paper and it is likely to be illustrated.
Today (August 17, 2012), for example, the press reports increasing reliance on Saudi oil, welcoming their increased production in response to US demands, but warning of a problem: dependence on foreign sources. Fortunately, the report continues, the problem is only temporary because we will soon have massive supplies from Canadian tar sands and expansion of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—while also accelerating the race toward environmental catastrophe, a topic too insignificant to mention.[105]
On the “big twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change” and the fallacy of a “limited nuclear war,” activist and physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote: “Recent studies have concluded that even a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, for example—involving perhaps 100 warheads—would significantly disrupt the global climate for at least a decade and would kick at least 5 million tons of smoke into the stratosphere. Estimates suggest this would potentially lead to the death of up to a billion people because of the effect of this smoke on global agriculture.”[106]
Any concluding comments on the threat of nuclear war in a world already challenged by ecological collapse?
Sixty years ago President Eisenhower warned that “a major war would destroy the Northern Hemisphere.”[107] Notwithstanding his warning, a few years later President Kennedy was willing to face his subjective probability of one-third to one-half of nuclear war to establish the principle that we have the right to ring the USSR with missiles and military bases, but they do not have the right to place their first missiles beyond its borders, in Cuba, then being subjected to a brutal terrorist attack that was scheduled to lead to invasion in the month when the missiles were secretly dispatched.[108] That was the essence of the issue. We escaped that time, but it was not the last. A decade later, in 1973, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert to warn the Russians to keep their hands off when he was informing Israeli leaders that they could violate with impunity a cease-fire established under US-Russian auspices—so we have just learned from declassified documents.[109] Ten years later, Reaganite adventurism, probing Russian defenses at their borders, led a serious war scare as Russia feared an imminent nuclear attack.[110] There have been all too many cases of programmed missile attacks aborted by human intervention minutes before launch, and while we don’t have Russian records, it’s likely that their performance is worse. Right now President Obama is planning to establish an antimissile system—recognized on all sides to be a potential first-strike weapon—close to the Russian border, leading them to enhance their offensive weapons capacity.[111] According to the German press, Israel right now is loading nuclear-tipped missiles on the advanced new submarines that Germany has transferred to Israel, in the full knowledge that they are likely to be deployed in the Persian Gulf as part of the threat of escalated war against Iran.[112] And there is much more.
All of these crises can be mitigated or overcome. Many of the major barriers to doing so are right at home—a fortunate situation, because these are the factors that we can best hope to influence—hardly easy, but not impossible.
Those who choose to know, do know. The current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to the exciting prospects for science in the twenty-first century. The distinguished scientist who introduces the collection reviews these possibilities, adding, rather plaintively, “If we can manage to avoid total human disaster resulting from societal and environmental challenges (matters that in fact demand our most serious and immediate attention).”[113]
Bolivian campesinos understand.[114]
Appendix 1
Conversation between Gen. Groves and Lt. Col. Rea, August 25, 1945
On September 12, 1945, the New York Times published a front-page story by William L. Laurence, “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales.” The story and the transcript below have a direct correlation: Laurence’s report downplays radiation as the cause of death and suffering as a result of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and portrays symptoms described by the Japanese as propaganda meant to solicit sympathy. Laurence had been hired in March 1945 by the US War Department to write official statements and news stories; in 1946 he won a Pulitzer for a series of ten articles appearing in the New York Times on the “significance of the atomic bomb.”
MEMORANDUM of Telephone Conversation between General Groves and Lt. Col. Rea, Oak Ridge Hospital, 9:00 a.m., 25 August 1945.
G: “…. which fatally burned 30,000 victims during the first two weeks following its explosion.”
103
Shelby Lin Erdman, “Battle over Controversial International Oil Pipeline Growing,” CNN, September 5, 2011. The API spokesperson quoted in the article was contacted to verify accuracy; she responded, “If they [Tar Sands Action participants] are protesting the pipeline they are protesting a shovel-ready job that will put thousands of Americans to work. This industry is focused on creating jobs, producing energy responsibly and strengthening America’s energy security.” Sabrina Fang, API Media Relations, e-mail correspondence, November 16, 2011. On how Saudi interests infuse money into US elections through trade associations, namely, API, see Lee Fang, “How Big Business Is Buying the Election,”
104
The Tar Sands Action is part of an ongoing campaign to protest the proposed 1,661-mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. The unconventional product to be conveyed, chemical-laden bitumen derived from the Canadian tar sands, has been described as “the dirtiest oil on the planet.” The largest action to date took place in front of the White House between late August and early September 2011. During the two-week sit-in, more than twelve hundred participants committed acts of civil disobedience, resulting in arrest. The event involved a consortium of groups and individuals: Bold Nebraska, Indigenous Environmental Network, 350.org, activists, ’08 Obama campaigners, farmers, scientists, and writers.
105
Clifford Krauss, “U.S. Reliance on Oil from Saudi Arabia Is Growing Again,”
107
During the Geneva Conference in July 1955, Pres. Eisenhower spoke candidly to representatives from the USSR, telling Nikolai Bulganin that modern weapons were developed to the point that any country that used them “genuinely risked destroying itself…. A major war would destroy the Northern Hemisphere.” He made a similar point with Georgi Zhukov: “Not even scientists could say what would happen if two hundred H-bombs were exploded in a short period of time, but… the fall-out might destroy entire nations and possibly the whole northern hemisphere.” Francis X. Winters,
108
Leading up to the 1962 Soviet missile installation, the Kennedy administration carried out two major covert operations in Cuba: the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose. The latter has been described by historian Stephen G. Rabe as a “massive campaign of terrorism and sabotage.”
109
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 281, s.v. “Documents 8A-D: DEFCON 3 during the October War.”
110
The CIA speculates Soviet fears of an imminent attack may have been a response to US actions launched a few months into Reagan’s first term: air and naval probes near Soviet borders that sought vulnerabilities in early warning systems; fleet exercises in proximity to sensitive Soviet military and industrial sites and operations that simulated surprise naval attacks; radar-jamming and transmission of false radar signals; submarine and antisubmarine aircraft conducting maneuvers in areas where the Soviet Navy stationed its nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines; and simulated bombing runs over a Soviet military installation in the Kuril Island chain. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA.gov), CSI Publications, s.v. “Books and Monographs,” s.v. “A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare,” March 19, 2007.
111
In November 2011 Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev issued a statement drawing a direct correlation between Pres. Obama’s 2009 revision of a missile system—a two-part installation in Poland and the Czech Republic planned by the previous administration—and the willingness of Russia to negotiate the New START treaty. He also stressed any plans for a European missile defense system that excluded Russia from “building a genuine strategic partnership” with NATO could result in withdrawal from START. Medvedev delineated additional measures, and by January 2012, it was reported Iskander missiles had been deployed to Kaliningrad, an exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. “Statement in Connection with the Situation concerning the NATO Countries’ Missile Defence System in Europe,” President of Russia (Kremlin.ru), November 23, 2011; “Russia Starts Deploying Iskander Missiles in Kaliningrad Region,” RT (Moscow), January 25, 2012.
112
“Operation Samson: Israel’s Deployment of Nuclear Missiles on Subs from Germany,”
114
Chapter 4, Article 8 of Bolivia’s Law No. 071 calls for the promotion of peace and the elimination of all nuclear, chemical, and biological arms and weapons of mass destruction (IV. 8. 6. “Promover la paz y la eliminación de todas las armas nucleares, químicas, biológicas y de destrucción masiva”). For comparison, the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans all nuclear explosions, has been signed but will not enter into force until ten remaining states complete ratification; the US is among the holdouts. On Bolivia’s law, see note 1, chap. 1.