As long as this particular winter seems to have been, spring is even more a season of time staling and standing in place. The temperatures are not the issue as much as too many rainy days making the ground hold all these ponds around my area. They are the reminder that the soil is probably too wet for me to get excited about planting.
The plum tree is fully in bloom in the front yard and is getting a lot of comments from John and the grandchildren. I have seen one humming bird near it but no Mason bees. I am going to take one of my fine watercolor brushes and see if I have the touch to pollinate fruit trees. I understand in China they hire people on a regular bases to do the pollinating of trees.
I have sprouted some peas, radishes and spinach in the house on a heating pad. They has made it to the raised beds but now wait for the warmth of the sun. Just hanging out, I could say.
Radishes has taken over my curiosity this year, this is the climate I imagine that they would do very well. I shop at a little store front Vietnamese grocer and am very interesting in the vegetables I have no word for. The idea that I may be missing something that I could enjoy cooking and eating has me staring at them, week after week. This has lead me to buy Daikon radishes this winter and I am growing comfortable throwing them in soup and on salads. I use the computer to find ways of cooking with them. The Kitazawa Seed Company has three pages of radishes listed and each are described as if they were, each, the lead star in a movie. There are Chinese radish, small radishes, Japanese radishes, Korean and giant white radishes plus radishes that are grown because their leaves are tender and good flavor. I want to serve myself a platter of radishes this summer of sorted colors and tastes, maybe photograph it and them paint them. Don't they serve radish tea sandwiches in parts of the world? The fact is this climate was not made to grow tomatoes, maybe radishes are the answer!
On Friday, the afternoon was a teaser, the sun was out and it was warm and the memories of past springs and summers made everyone rush out of buildings to experience a new season. My grandchildren and I planted some potatoes. These potatoes were harvested from last fall and were in the garage and had sprouted eyes. I viewed that as losers as far as eating but organic as seed potatoes to plant. I was very careful to plant them in clean soil but after following that rule, I broke all the rest. I followed Carol Deppe's theory, cut a piece with an eye and put it in the ground. No dipping in stuff, no drying out, no spacing and measuring. Put them in the ground. Then I covered the whole area with some leaves that were piled all winter to protect my two figs trees. (That didn't work out so well) As the weeks go by I will be checking my potatoes to see if they grow, if they need more soil build up and I will harvest a few very early as fingerling. My grandchildren enjoyed the project for a couple rows but there were there long enough that they now know how to plant potatoes. I want them to know how to grow their own food
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
science
"""""""""House Repubs Vote That Earth Is Not Warming
All Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted against an amendment that states that global warming exists, regardless of cause.
John Rennie comments.
| March 16, 2011 | 16
The Republican-led House of Representatives is currently working on the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, which would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate climate change.
In the House Energy and Commerce Committee, California Democrat Henry Waxman had proposed an amendment calling on Congress to at least acknowledge that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” just as abundant scientific evidence confirms.
But on Tuesday, March 15, all the committee’s Republicans voted down that amendment, as well as two others acknowledging the threat of climate change to public well-being. Rep. Ed Markey, Democrat from Massachusetts, had this to say:
“I rise in opposition to a bill that repeals the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet. However, I won’t rise physically, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating.”
—John Rennie"""""""""""
Saturday, March 12, 2011
today's thought
 | ||||||||||
| If we really want to end life on earth, other than rats and cockroaches, why not just detonate all our nuclear weapons and melt down our nuclear power plants right now and get it over with. Or if you want to postpone it a little bit, just start using nuclear weapons in the middle east? If we are shy, just build more nuclear power plants on fault lines and wait for the inevitable. Our governments are really insane. To the extent that we have democracy, our voters are insane too. I am absolutely disgusted. The children of today deserved so much better than this. | ||||||||||
| Jean-David Beyer [ jeandavid8@verizon.net ] - 2011-03-12 13:07:42 | ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| House Panel Votes to Strip E.P.A. of Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gases | ||||||||||
| It is almost impossible to overemphasize the stupidity of the Republican position. In another 10 years people will be screaming, "why didn't we do something?" But, by then, it will be far too late. We are all -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents -- going to live with the benighted attitudes this vote represents. This is not a partisan comment. I would say the same thing if the Democrats had voted in that way. The facts are clear, ideology is just noise. | ||||||||||
| JOHN M. BRODER - The New York Times | ||||||||||
| WASHINGTON - A House subcommittee voted on Thursday to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases, chipping away at a central pillar of the Obama administration’s evolving climate and energy strategy. |
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Child of the 60's
As a teenager and young adult of the 60's I remember how the people on the streets changed America, it is time again to go to the streets. The following says it better than I could possibly express myself on the subject.
I have watched mothers and fathers keening in grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear.
A child a day dies in war-related violence in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs, usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations, whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more wounded. But the real number is probably much, much higher. There are big parts of the country where research can no longer be carried out.
We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of injustice and to be complicit in murder. The U.N. report estimates that during the two-year period it studied almost 1,800 children were killed or injured in conflict-related violence, but numbers can never transmit the reality of such suffering.
On March 19, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I will join a coalition of U.S. military veterans from Iraq Veterans Against the War, March Forward!, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace who will gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The veteran-led action will result in numerous arrests, as did a Dec. 16 protest organized by Veterans for Peace. It will seek, because it is all we have left, to use our bodies to challenge the crimes of the state.
It does not matter if this protest or any other does not work. It does not matter if we are 500, as we were in December, or 50. It does not matter if the event is covered in the press or ignored. It matters only that those of us who believe in the rule of law, who find the organized sadism of war and militarism repugnant and who seek to protect the sanctity of life rise up. If we do not defend these virtues they will be extinguished. No one in power will defend them for us. Protests are rending the fabric of the U.S.-backed dictatorships in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and Libya. They are flickering to life in the U.S. in states like Wisconsin. And they are beginning to convulse Iraq. Iraqis, for whom eight years of war and occupation have brought nothing but misery and death, are surrounding government buildings to denounce their puppet government. They are rising up to demand jobs, basic services including electricity, a reining in of our mercenary killers, some of whom have been used to quell restless crowds, and a right to determine their own future. These protesters are our true allies, not the hired thugs we pay to repress them.
We are wasting $700 million a day to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our teachers, firefighters and police lose their jobs, while we slash basic assistance programs for the poor, children and the elderly, while we turn our backs on the some 3 million people being pushed from their homes by foreclosures and bank repossessions and while we do nothing to help the one in six American workers who cannot find work. These wars have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. They have pushed millions into refugee or displacement camps. They have left young men and women severely crippled and maimed. They have turned our nation into an isolated pariah, fueling the very terrorism we seek to defeat. And they cannot be won. The sooner we leave Iraq and Afghanistan the sooner we will save others and finally save ourselves.
There will be veterans in the park who carry with them physical and emotional wounds of great magnitude, who remain crippled by the dead hand of war, who never sleep well, who struggle in the black pit of depression and with post-traumatic stress disorder, and who will bear the cross that war inflicted upon them until the end of their days. They will have surmounted tremendous psychic and physical pain to make it to Lafayette Park, to defy what they know must be defied. And if they can walk their trail of tears to the White House so can you. They are our wounded healers, our disregarded prophets.
Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who while flying saw the killings of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in what later became known as the My Lai massacre, landed in the village during the slaughter. He spotted a group of about 10 civilians, including children, running toward a homemade bomb shelter. Soldiers from the 2nd Platoon, C Company, were chasing the civilians. Thompson, dismounting from the cockpit, put himself between the civilians and the soldiers. He ordered his gunner to open fire on the Americans if they began to shoot the villagers or him. Later, Thompson, who crusaded for justice after then-Maj. Colin Powell led the official whitewash of My Lai, received death threats. Mutilated animals were tossed on his doorstep. He was unsung for decades and forgotten until shortly before his death in 2006. He exhibited real courage, moral courage, the kind of courage the state detests, the kind of courage for which they do not mint medals.
Bradley Manning, who allegedly downloaded thousands of documents and videos that confirmed war crimes by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and passed them on to WikiLeaks, is being held in a military brig in Quantico, Va. He has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and denied exercise, a pillow or sheets for the last nine months. His prolonged isolation is designed to break him physically and psychologically. There will be a protest outside Quantico on March 20 in support of Manning, another soldier from another war whom Thompson would have understood.
The documents published by WikiLeaks detailed for the world the widespread use of torture by Iraqi and Afghan security forces and the silent complicity of Washington. They confirmed that civilians, including children, are routinely murdered by occupation forces and that the killings are not investigated. The documents lifted the veil on our undeclared, black war in Pakistan, including drone strikes that have killed more than 900 civilians in Pakistan since Barack Obama took office. They shed light on the gross corruption, drug trafficking and crimes committed by the Afghan president as well as the reign of terror carried out by the Afghan National Army. These documents confirm that huge numbers of Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. troops at checkpoints, and that since the invasion tens of thousands of civilians have died as a result of the war. These documents illustrate in page after page that our government makes no effort to protect liberty, democracy or human rights, but instead prefers crude and brutal mechanisms of power.
The Obama administration, which has proved as efficient in serving the war machine and the corporate state as the Bush administration did, is attempting to destroy not only Manning but WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The state seeks to silence anyone who practices moral courage. It does not want the truth heard. It does not want the reality seen. If these forces of war and greed triumph, and we do not, there will be darkness. But if on March 19 there is at least one person willing to defy the state, to demand justice at the cost of his or her freedom, there will be a flame held to light the way for us all.
No Other Way Out
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_other_way_out_20110228/
Posted on Feb 28, 2011
By Chris HedgesI have watched mothers and fathers keening in grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear.
A child a day dies in war-related violence in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs, usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations, whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more wounded. But the real number is probably much, much higher. There are big parts of the country where research can no longer be carried out.
We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of injustice and to be complicit in murder. The U.N. report estimates that during the two-year period it studied almost 1,800 children were killed or injured in conflict-related violence, but numbers can never transmit the reality of such suffering.
On March 19, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I will join a coalition of U.S. military veterans from Iraq Veterans Against the War, March Forward!, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace who will gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The veteran-led action will result in numerous arrests, as did a Dec. 16 protest organized by Veterans for Peace. It will seek, because it is all we have left, to use our bodies to challenge the crimes of the state.
It does not matter if this protest or any other does not work. It does not matter if we are 500, as we were in December, or 50. It does not matter if the event is covered in the press or ignored. It matters only that those of us who believe in the rule of law, who find the organized sadism of war and militarism repugnant and who seek to protect the sanctity of life rise up. If we do not defend these virtues they will be extinguished. No one in power will defend them for us. Protests are rending the fabric of the U.S.-backed dictatorships in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and Libya. They are flickering to life in the U.S. in states like Wisconsin. And they are beginning to convulse Iraq. Iraqis, for whom eight years of war and occupation have brought nothing but misery and death, are surrounding government buildings to denounce their puppet government. They are rising up to demand jobs, basic services including electricity, a reining in of our mercenary killers, some of whom have been used to quell restless crowds, and a right to determine their own future. These protesters are our true allies, not the hired thugs we pay to repress them.
We are wasting $700 million a day to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our teachers, firefighters and police lose their jobs, while we slash basic assistance programs for the poor, children and the elderly, while we turn our backs on the some 3 million people being pushed from their homes by foreclosures and bank repossessions and while we do nothing to help the one in six American workers who cannot find work. These wars have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. They have pushed millions into refugee or displacement camps. They have left young men and women severely crippled and maimed. They have turned our nation into an isolated pariah, fueling the very terrorism we seek to defeat. And they cannot be won. The sooner we leave Iraq and Afghanistan the sooner we will save others and finally save ourselves.
There will be veterans in the park who carry with them physical and emotional wounds of great magnitude, who remain crippled by the dead hand of war, who never sleep well, who struggle in the black pit of depression and with post-traumatic stress disorder, and who will bear the cross that war inflicted upon them until the end of their days. They will have surmounted tremendous psychic and physical pain to make it to Lafayette Park, to defy what they know must be defied. And if they can walk their trail of tears to the White House so can you. They are our wounded healers, our disregarded prophets.
Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who while flying saw the killings of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in what later became known as the My Lai massacre, landed in the village during the slaughter. He spotted a group of about 10 civilians, including children, running toward a homemade bomb shelter. Soldiers from the 2nd Platoon, C Company, were chasing the civilians. Thompson, dismounting from the cockpit, put himself between the civilians and the soldiers. He ordered his gunner to open fire on the Americans if they began to shoot the villagers or him. Later, Thompson, who crusaded for justice after then-Maj. Colin Powell led the official whitewash of My Lai, received death threats. Mutilated animals were tossed on his doorstep. He was unsung for decades and forgotten until shortly before his death in 2006. He exhibited real courage, moral courage, the kind of courage the state detests, the kind of courage for which they do not mint medals.
Bradley Manning, who allegedly downloaded thousands of documents and videos that confirmed war crimes by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and passed them on to WikiLeaks, is being held in a military brig in Quantico, Va. He has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and denied exercise, a pillow or sheets for the last nine months. His prolonged isolation is designed to break him physically and psychologically. There will be a protest outside Quantico on March 20 in support of Manning, another soldier from another war whom Thompson would have understood.
The documents published by WikiLeaks detailed for the world the widespread use of torture by Iraqi and Afghan security forces and the silent complicity of Washington. They confirmed that civilians, including children, are routinely murdered by occupation forces and that the killings are not investigated. The documents lifted the veil on our undeclared, black war in Pakistan, including drone strikes that have killed more than 900 civilians in Pakistan since Barack Obama took office. They shed light on the gross corruption, drug trafficking and crimes committed by the Afghan president as well as the reign of terror carried out by the Afghan National Army. These documents confirm that huge numbers of Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. troops at checkpoints, and that since the invasion tens of thousands of civilians have died as a result of the war. These documents illustrate in page after page that our government makes no effort to protect liberty, democracy or human rights, but instead prefers crude and brutal mechanisms of power.
The Obama administration, which has proved as efficient in serving the war machine and the corporate state as the Bush administration did, is attempting to destroy not only Manning but WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The state seeks to silence anyone who practices moral courage. It does not want the truth heard. It does not want the reality seen. If these forces of war and greed triumph, and we do not, there will be darkness. But if on March 19 there is at least one person willing to defy the state, to demand justice at the cost of his or her freedom, there will be a flame held to light the way for us all.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Reconciliation
The groups-- Veterans for Peace, Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation and "Bring our Billions$ Home" sponsored a gathering of over 800 people to a speech by Dennis Kucinich in downtown Olympia.
I attended with a friend.
Kucinich topic was titled "The True Cost of War". We ALL have heard the numbers, do any of us understand a trillion dollars? Do I understand why it cost 2 million a year for each soldier in Afghanistan? Costofwar.com shows the figures, the line of numbers is long. Then there are the other sites that show what is pushed aside because of this cost, what is missing in our country. The misspent money by the Pentagon, the amount given to private contractors and the over head of 130 military bases the US has around the world all add to the bill. What our government is not providing for us at home that other developed countries provide is becoming more and more obvious.
The surprising part of Kucinich talk was about the moral toll it takes on us as citizens. The betrayal of our government that lied to us. That moral issue of justice has to be address and until it is dealt with we can not heal as a nation.
Iraq did not attack us, did not has WMD, did everything do avoid war. This is the highest form of crime, war. The lie of the highest level. Until we have a commission to understand the truth, seek justice, we can not have reconciliation and move forward.
Britain has done it about their involve in Iraq, The country of South African did it about apartheid. Our politicians do not have the will or courage to do this. Some other country will probably do it for us.
It will not go away.
I attended with a friend.
Kucinich topic was titled "The True Cost of War". We ALL have heard the numbers, do any of us understand a trillion dollars? Do I understand why it cost 2 million a year for each soldier in Afghanistan? Costofwar.com shows the figures, the line of numbers is long. Then there are the other sites that show what is pushed aside because of this cost, what is missing in our country. The misspent money by the Pentagon, the amount given to private contractors and the over head of 130 military bases the US has around the world all add to the bill. What our government is not providing for us at home that other developed countries provide is becoming more and more obvious.
The surprising part of Kucinich talk was about the moral toll it takes on us as citizens. The betrayal of our government that lied to us. That moral issue of justice has to be address and until it is dealt with we can not heal as a nation.
Iraq did not attack us, did not has WMD, did everything do avoid war. This is the highest form of crime, war. The lie of the highest level. Until we have a commission to understand the truth, seek justice, we can not have reconciliation and move forward.
Britain has done it about their involve in Iraq, The country of South African did it about apartheid. Our politicians do not have the will or courage to do this. Some other country will probably do it for us.
It will not go away.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Middle Feburary
As the sky is clearer at night, the temperatures also drops this time of the year. The last couple nights the moon lite up the bedroom like it was a baby sun. The chicken water had a thin mirror of ice on it this morning. The rubbarb pink heads are show their starts, the garlic is five inches high and the branches are getting tiny swellings along the length. This is the month that I want time to speed up and so I can move my energy outdoors and work in the garden. I have a conversation each day with myself about starting seeds indoors and argue the point for and against the best time line.
My chicken have been roaming the whole backyard for the last few months as there are no seedlings for them to dig up. I enjoy the sight of them have free run. The first three steps out the back door looks like a bottom of a chick coop as they huddle there daily during their breaks out of the wind or rain. John, Daisy and I have learn to step lightly as we walk though the stained area and weekly my boom comes out and I sweep it all clean. The power washer will come to work as I lock up the chickens for the spring and summer in their own running space. It will be interesting for me to see if the work of scratching and the spreading of their droppings boost growth in the veg garden this summer.
Hopefully, I will take all my winter reading and patiently plant seeds every two weeks so I can have greens in small amounts all summer long, remember to plant my winter kale and Brussels sprouts in the middle July and not plant my beans until June.
My chicken have been roaming the whole backyard for the last few months as there are no seedlings for them to dig up. I enjoy the sight of them have free run. The first three steps out the back door looks like a bottom of a chick coop as they huddle there daily during their breaks out of the wind or rain. John, Daisy and I have learn to step lightly as we walk though the stained area and weekly my boom comes out and I sweep it all clean. The power washer will come to work as I lock up the chickens for the spring and summer in their own running space. It will be interesting for me to see if the work of scratching and the spreading of their droppings boost growth in the veg garden this summer.
Hopefully, I will take all my winter reading and patiently plant seeds every two weeks so I can have greens in small amounts all summer long, remember to plant my winter kale and Brussels sprouts in the middle July and not plant my beans until June.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
We are all Egyptians
I am sharing because I think it explores a few ideas that are not often put together in one article about the world crisis of energy and climate change and food prices.
Peak Oil, Climate Change, Political Turmoil: The Lesson From Egypt
By Matthew Wild
15 February, 2011
Peak Generation
Peak Generation
Were the Egyptian people that bravely took to the streets to overthrow a tyrannical regime taking part in the world’s first peak oil revolution?
It seems like out and out hyperbole at first. Hosni Mubarek ran the country in a permanent state of emergency in which he blocked free speech, intimidated anyone perceived as a threat, and operated a blatantly corrupt system that left millions of Egyptians impoverished. Tyrants get overthrown in the end, and the protesters on the streets of Egypt were clearly exercising their right to make a political choice – to remove Mubarak. After all, it’s such a romantic story that we want to buy into it: the disenfranchised youth who outsmarted the government’s spies by tweeting on Facebook to organize a brief, remarkably peaceful rebellion.
Right now, with the country securely in the hands of the military, who have pledged elections in six months’ time, media commentators are talking of happy endings - depending on how happy you are about martial law, that is. But what if there is more to it than that? And what if Egypt’s problems go much deeper? Without wanting to spoil the party, some additional statistics put events in a different light:
* Egypt’s oil peaked in 1996, and with output diminishing 26 per cent since then, the nation is now a net oil importer
* The nation’s debt is around 89.5 per cent of GDP
* Its population – 27.8 million in 1960 and currently estimated at 79.94 million – is set to double each 35 years
* Self-sufficient in food in 1960, the nation is dependent of food imports, which are currently at a record high price
* Prices in Egypt have surged 17 per cent following this worldwide leap in commodity prices (while around 40 per cent of Egypt's citizens live off less than $2 a day).
* The nation’s debt is around 89.5 per cent of GDP
* Its population – 27.8 million in 1960 and currently estimated at 79.94 million – is set to double each 35 years
* Self-sufficient in food in 1960, the nation is dependent of food imports, which are currently at a record high price
* Prices in Egypt have surged 17 per cent following this worldwide leap in commodity prices (while around 40 per cent of Egypt's citizens live off less than $2 a day).
Here, then, we have a collision between diminishing government revenue, population pressures, poverty, rising food costs and a corrupt political system that was indifferent to anyone outside of the elite. Egypt, formerly an oil exporter that was self-sufficient in food, now imports both – and cannot afford to feed itself.
A telling item in Le Monde Diplomatique, headlined Tunisia, Egypt and the protracted collapse of the American empire, expands on this:
[Egypt’s] oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26 per cent. Since the 1960s, Egypt has moved from complete food self-sufficiency to excessive dependence on imports, subsidized by oil revenues. But as Egypt’s oil revenues have steadily declined due to increasing domestic consumption of steadily declining oil, so have food subsidies, leading to surging food prices. Simultaneously, Egypt’s debt levels are horrendous – about 80.5 per cent of its GDP, far higher than most other countries in the region [the more recent figure is 89.5 per cent]. Inequality is also high, intensifying over the last decade in the wake of neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ reforms – widely implemented throughout the region since the 1980s with debilitating effects, including contraction of social welfare, reduction of wages, and lack of infrastructure investment. Consequently, today forty per cent of Egyptians live below the UN poverty line of less than £2 a day.
With politicians and the media sticking to the fairytale story, recent comments by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton about a "perfect storm" of unrest running through the Middle East seem particularly frank. Referring to protests in Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt, she spoke of the “strategic necessity” for democratic change. According to the BBC:
She said that with water shortages and oil running out, governments may be able to hold back the tide of change for a short while but not for long."Some leaders may believe that their country is an exception - that their people will not demand greater political or economic opportunities, or that they can be placated with half-measures."In the short term, that may be true; but in the long term that is untenable."
Egypt is also in the midst of a dispute over the waters of the River Nile, which flows through Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda before reaching the Aswan High Dam where it is required for Egyptian agriculture.
Water is short and oil is running out – and I never thought I’d hear a senior US politician admit that – while food prices are at an all-time high. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, which charts a food price index, charted costs going above “the previous record of 2008 that saw prices spark riots in several countries.” The group’s economist, Abdolreza Abbassian, cited that "unpredictable weather" means prices could go on rising.
Freak weather around the globe has slashed global food production: wildfires in Russia last year (and subsequent grain export ban), drought in Argentina, flooding in Australia, a snap freeze in Mexico and the Southern US, and Canada’s washed-out harvest. The predatory commodity markets, a growing taste for meat across Asia and competition from biofuels are also driving up costs, but it seems the main problem has been climatic. (Speculators only jump in when supply is getting tight, as there is no money to be made betting on a buyer’s market. Commodities futures speculation can be blamed for making things worse for billions of people around the globe, but did not instigate the problems.)
So, is this a run of bad luck, or are we seeing climate change at work? Back to the item in Le Monde Diplomatique:
So much of the current supply shortages have been inflicted by increasingly erratic weather events and natural disasters, which climate scientists have long warned are symptomatic of anthropogenic global warming. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10-20 per cent drop in rice yields over the last decade. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent due to climate change alone.
Writing in the New York Times last week, columnist Paul Krugman addressed the issue in a wonderfully written item, Droughts, Floods and Food. He observes that the “global food crisis — the second in three years” may not be having a huge impact on US inflation but is making “a brutal impact on the world’s poor.” He cites the current anger at repressive Middle Eastern regimes – saying the question isn’t so much why it’s happening as why now – as largely triggered by rising food prices. He continues:
So what’s behind the price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve, with at least one commentator declaring that there is “blood on Bernanke’s hands.” Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators, accusing them of “extortion and pillaging.”But the evidence tells a different, much more ominous story. While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.
He writes that there is no single weather event you can attribute to man-made climate change, “But the pattern we’re seeing, with extreme highs and extreme weather in general becoming much more common, is just what you’d expect from climate change.”
Of course, there are always politically opportunistic commentators lining up to deny any aspect of climate change you care to mention - - which, strangely enough, has all been traced back to big oil. It’s their job to make the issue as confusing and politically loaded as possible.
Egypt is a lesson in unsustainability, but not the only one, right now. (I’ve seen speculation on the future of Mexico, another oil producer that’s passed peak, along with questions about the long-term future of the House of Saud). Chris Martenson, of Crash Course fame, wrote that events in Egypt were “emblematic of what we might expect elsewhere, especially in the financial markets.” He continues:
My intent here is not to point out the future difficulties that Egypt faces, no matter who is charge, but to use the change that happened there as Egypt simply reminds us that anything that is unsustainable will someday change. It is an emblem for the world.With abundant energy and food, we are treated to expansive and stable economies in which everyone stands a chance of gaining. Not that everyone will, mind you, but the possibility is there In an energy-constrained world, what was formerly possible is no longer do-able, things don't work right, and there seem to be persistent shortages of everything from growth, to money, to food, to goodwill. What used to work doesn't. It is at these points that the prior stresses and imbalances are most likely to snap and suddenly change the world.
If it’s hyperbole to call events in Egypt a peak oil revolution or a climate change event, it’s no more twisting the facts than turning the story into a fairytale about democracy. Rage over food costs played a major role in getting people out into the streets. Egypt’s oil has peaked, which cannot be denied. Neither can the role of climate change in soaring food prices, as far as I’m concerned. Clearly there are other factors operating here beyond peak oil and climate change, but all the same you have to ask yourself if the protests would have begun in an oil rich Egypt that was importing cheap grain.
And if you believe there is space for peak oil and climate change in the account of events in Egypt, then that turmoil truly is emblematic of what to expect elsewhere. With the global population surging to seven billion, the UN warning of riots around the world if food prices don't come down, oil prices rising again on the back of growing worldwide demand, and global warming making problems worse, the elements are in place for a humanitarian disaster. Despite the actions of all the deniers, I believe the next few years will see results of peak oil and climate change. The warnings are all in place.
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