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Sleepwalking to extinction
By George Monibot
We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain, we
recognize that our existence is governed by material realities, and that,
as those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this awareness
is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs the moment in which we live,
then generalizes it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances
of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our
true reality. All that separates us from the indigenous people of Australia
is that they recognize this and we do not.
Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the conditions
necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by reason, we would
be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan
Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning
power stations, bursting in upon the Tony Blair’s retreat from reality
in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the
one we bore when we went to war with Hitler. Instead, we whine about the
heat and thumb through the brochures for holidays in Iceland. The future
has been laid out before us, but the deep eye with which we place ourselves
on Earth will not see it.
Of course, we cannot say that the remarkable temperatures in Europe this
week are the result of global warming. What we can say is that they correspond
to the predictions made by climate scientists. As the meteorological office
reported on Sunday, “all our models have suggested that this type
of event will happen more frequently.” In December it predicted that,
as a result of climate change, 2003 would be the warmest year on record.
Two weeks ago its research center reported that the temperature rises
on every continent matched the predicted effects of climate change caused
by human activities, and showed that natural impacts, such as sunspots
or volcanic activity, could not account for them. Last month the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that “the increase in
temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in
any century during the past 1,000 years,” while “the trend since
1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period.” Climate change,
the WMO suggests, provides an explanation not only for record temperatures
in Europe and India but also for the frequency of tornadoes in the United
States and the severity of the recent floods in Sri Lanka.
There are, of course, still those who deny that any warming is taking
place, or who maintain that it can be explained by natural phenomena.
But few of them are climatologists, fewer still are climatologists who
do not receive funding from the fossil fuel industry. Their credibility
among professionals is now little higher than that of the people who claim
that there is no link between smoking and cancer. Yet the prominence the
media give them reflects not only the demands of the car advertisers.
We want to believe them, because we wish to reconcile our reason with
our dreaming.
The extreme events to which climate change appears to have contributed
reflect an average rise in global temperatures of 0.6 degrees Celsius
over the past century. The consensus among climatologists is that temperatures
will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius:
by up to 10 times, in other words, the increase we have suffered so far.
Some climate scientists, recognizing that global warming has been retarded
by industrial soot, whose levels are now declining, suggest that the maximum
should instead be placed between 7 and 10 degrees Celsius. We are not
contemplating the end of holidays in Seville. We are contemplating the
end of the circumstances which permit most human beings to remain on Earth.
Climate change of this magnitude will devastate the Earth’s productivity.
New research in Australia suggests that the amount of water reaching the
rivers will decline up to four times as fast as the percentage reduction
of rainfall in dry areas. This, alongside the disappearance of the glaciers,
spells the end of irrigated agriculture. Winter flooding and the evaporation
of soil moisture in the summer will exert similar effects on rainfed farming.
Like crops, humans will simply wilt in some of the hotter parts of the
world: the 1,500 deaths in India through heat exhaustion this summer may
prefigure the necessary evacuation, as temperatures rise, of many of the
places currently considered habitable. There is no chance of continuity
here; somehow we must persuade our dreamselves to confront the end of
life as we know it.
Paradoxically, the approach of this crisis corresponds with the approach
of another. The global demand for oil is likely to outstrip supply within
the next 10 or 20 years. Some geologists believe it may have started already.
It is tempting to knock the two impending crises together, and to conclude
that the second will solve the first. But this is wishful thinking. There
is enough oil under the surface of the Earth to cook the planet and, as
the price rises, the incentive to extract it will increase. Business will
turn to even more polluting means of obtaining energy, such as the use
of tar sand and oil shale, or “underground coal gasification”
(setting fire to coal seams). But because oil in the early stages of extraction
is the cheapest and most efficient fuel, the costs of energy will soar,
ensuring that we can no longer buy our way out of trouble with air conditioning,
water pumping and fuel-intensive farming. So instead we place our faith
in technology. In an age in which science is as authoritative but, to
most, as inscrutable as God once was, we look to its products much as
the people of the middle ages looked to divine providence. Somehow “they”
will produce and install the devices — the wind turbines or solar
panels or tidal barrages — that will solve both problems while ensuring
that we need make no change to the way we live.
But the widespread deployment of these technologies will not happen until
rising prices ensure that it becomes a commercial imperative, and by then
will be is too late. Even so, we could not meet our current levels of
consumption without covering almost every yard of land and shallow sea
with generating devices. In other words, if we leave the market to govern
our politics, we are finished. Only if we take control of our economic
lives, and demand and create the means by which we may cut our energy
use to 10 percent or 20 percent of current levels will we prevent the
catastrophe that our rational selves can comprehend. This requires draconian
regulation, rationing and prohibition: all the measures which our existing
politics, informed by our dreaming, forbid.
So we slumber through the crisis. Waking up demands that we upset the
seat of our consciousness, that we dethrone our deep unreason and usurp
it with our rational and predictive minds. Are we capable of this, or
are we destined to sleepwalk to extinction?
Source: Guardian (UK)
Power outage traced to dim bulb in White
House
The tale of the Brits who swiped 800
jobs from New York,
carted off $90 million, then turned off our lights
By Greg Palast
I can tell you all about the ne’er-do-wells that put out our lights
tonight. I came up against these characters — the Niagara Mohawk
Power Company — some years back. You see, before I was a journalist,
I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In
the 1980s, “NiMo” built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a
brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies
charged billions to New York State’s electricity ratepayers. To pull
off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost
and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account
books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner,
Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to
government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and,
ultimately, put them out of business.
And that’s why, if you’re in the Northeast, you’re reading
this by candlelight tonight. Here’s what happened. After LILCO was
hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk
and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies
all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions
of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break
the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to
eliminate the rules. They called it “deregulation.”
It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking
legal.
But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious
little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating
under the alias “Enron,” talked an over-the-edge free-market
fanatic, Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing
the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.
And so began an economic disease called “regulatory reform”
that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher’s
Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for “consulting”
services and a seat on Enron’s board of directors. The English experiment
proved the viability of Enron’s new industrial formula: that the
enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to
the payola provided by power companies.
The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn’t
swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to
cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin
Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the
power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull creator
of the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books
and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us
the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company
Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed
regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set
profit. The laws banned “power markets” and required companies
to keep the lights on under threat of arrest — no blackout blackmail
to hike rates.
Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told
utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed
in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire
and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power
execs spent customers’ money on parts and labor. If they didn’t,
we’d whack’m over the head with our thick rule books. Did we
get in the way of these businessmen’s entrepreneurial spirit? Damn
right we did.
Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies
— no “soft” money, no “hard” money, no money
period.
But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from
the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long
deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity.
It was a legacy he wanted to leave for his son, the gratitude of power
companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000,
seven times the sum they gave Democrats.
But Poppy Bush’s gift of deregulating of wholesale prices set by
the feds only got the power pirates halfway to the plunder of Joe Ratepayer.
For the big payday they needed deregulation at the state level. There
were only two states, California and Texas, big enough and Republican
enough to put the electricity market con into operation.
California fell first. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat
a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nader which would have blocked the deregulation
scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign
coffers of legislators to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act’s
preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity
bills by 20 percent. In fact, when San Diegans in the first California
city to go “lawless” looked at their bills, the 20 percent savings
became a 300 percent jump in surcharges.
Enron circled California and licked its lips. As the number one life-time
contributor to the George W. Bush campaign, it was confident about the
future. With just a half dozen other companies it controlled at times
100 percent of the available power capacity needed to keep the Golden
State lit. Their motto, “your money or your lights.” Enron and
its comrades played the system like a broken ATM machine, yanking out
the bills. For example, in the shamelessly fixed “auctions”
for electricity held by the state, Enron bid, in one instance, to supply
500 megawatts of electricity over a 15 megawatt line. That’s like
pouring a gallon of gasoline into a thimble — the lines would burn
up if they attempted it. Faced with blackout because of Enron’s destructive
bid, the state was willing to pay anything to keep the lights on.
And the state did. According to Dr. Anjali Sheffrin, economist with the
California state Independent System Operator which directed power movements,
between May and November 2000, three power giants physically or “economically”
withheld power from the state and concocted enough false bids to cost
the California customers over $6.2 billion in excess charges. It took
until Dec. 20, 2000, with the lights going out on the Golden Gate, for
President Bill Clinton, once a deregulation booster, to find his lost
Democratic soul and impose price caps in California and ban Enron from
the market.
But the light-bulb buccaneers didn’t have to wait long to put their
hooks back into the treasure chest. Within seventy-two hours of moving
into the White House, while he was still sweeping out the inaugural champagne
bottles, George Bush the Second reversed Clinton’s executive order
and put the power pirates back in business in California. Enron, Reliant
(aka Houston Industries), TXU (aka Texas Utilities) and the others who
had economically snipped California’s wires knew they could count
on Dubya, who as governor of the Lone Star state cut them the richest
deregulation deal in America.
Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor
George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the
lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of
the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid
system.
And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have
former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven:
They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid
of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of
their wages — producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching
$90 million. Is tonight’s black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to
us in the field who’ve watched Bush’s buddies flick the switches
across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio
de Janeiro’s electric company. The Texans (aided by their French
partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and,
CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it “Rio Dark.”
So too the free-market cowboys of Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed
staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! — New York joins Brazil in the
Dark Ages. Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster:
re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to
the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray
Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis
called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of “pirates” — and
now he’ll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.
So where’s the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the
Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing
the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for
yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there’s
no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.
Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don’t know
if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light — until we
change the dim bulb in the White House.
Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin
USA) and Democracy and Regulation, a guide to electricity deregulation
published by the United Nations (with T. MacGregor and J. Oppenheim)
Source: www.gregpalast.com
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