Generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it.

Fighting against the polluting and depletion of resources is the real war. Not bombing other countries. Yet they say generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it, and the war against our own excessive consumerism has never before been fought. We cannot bomb pollution into shape.

Prosperity has brought us cars, fast-food, stress and frightening pollution. An average coal-fired power station emits the same amount of CO2 as the felling of 61 million trees a year, every year.

We know we have rampant air pollution which damages our health, we know we are choking our landfill with myriad consumer waste, and we know that our energy creation, with few exceptions, creates dangerous toxins which will foul the air and the ground indefinitely.

If everything we create comes from the planet, how is that humans have managed to turn passive worldly resources into poison?

Basically design has failed. We have to accept that fact, correct our mistakes and move forward. We have to accept that our methodology has not looked beyond the end of our noses. Short term gain has seen us burn oil to get our cars to the shops, burn heavily polluting coal to create energy so that we can cook our over-packaged, over-refined meals which fall short on nutrition and clog up landfill with their residue. It’s a lose/lose situation, but we could not have known that in the beginning because the whole picture was yet to emerge.

The climate is changing. Do we wait for more crop withering heat waves such as in Russia in 2010? Do we wait for water shortages as aquifers become depleted and salinated? Do we wait for droves of desperate climate refuges to knock at our own front doors? We do not know where the tipping point is. Nature is the timekeeper and we cannot see the clock.

We have never experienced these things. They are the unknowns, the complexities and the challenges for which no strategy has yet been written, yet this is the real war.

The faint-hearted turn away from the sheer magnitude of the task, but it can be done. It has been costed at $200billion a year of additional expenditure - one-eighth of the current world military budget. This is the new security budget and we must act at wartime speed. It can be done! In 1942 President Roosevelt met the car manufacturers and asked them to switch to making armaments. All car manufacture was stopped and in just 2 years American industry had created 229,600 aircraft and 5000 extra ships from a standing start. But it wasn't just quality, innovation was essential, and the Rolls-Royce Merlin aero engine went from 1000hp in 1939 to 2000hp by 1945 through intensive experimental development and the incorporation of new features into the production lines in a highly controlled and imaginative way.

Restructuring the economy – wartime speed

We cannot continue to measure economic data as a measure of success because the market is not telling us the truth. The true cost of everything we do and buy is hidden. We need tax shifts away from income tax towards carbon emitters. The amount of tax we pay will not change, but we must price pollution in order to minimise it. Puma, for example, have published the environmental impact of its business in cost terms. They understand that ecosystem services upon which businesses depend include pollination by bees, flood protection by forests and genetic resources from plants used for live-saving drugs. As these resources become ever-more scarce, businesses will have to pay to protect them. The services nature provides are not infinite, and therefore should no longer be considered as free. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13410397

Redefining security for the 21^st Century – wartime speed

The threats are climate change, population growth, water shortages and failing states. Most governments are still choosing to define security in military terms , but you cannot have food, water or energy security without climate security. Food price stability depends on near record world grain harvests every single year. Grain harvest depends on water which is over used and diminishing. Saudi Arabia has depleted its fossil aquifer (fossil aquifers do not recharge with rainfall) and its 3 million ton wheat harvest is virtually eliminated. Similar events are happening all over the world. Food prices are rising.

Cut global carbon emissions by 80% - wartime speed.

Ban deforestation worldwide and plant billions of trees. It can be done! India mobilised 600,000 people to plant 10.5 million trees in ONE DAY. China has planted 2 billion trees, Ethiopia 1.5 billion, Turkey 700 million, and we need more.

We must arrest the fall in water tables by raising water productivity – more efficient irrigation systems and water efficient crops. Continuous recycling is needed in cities.

Help for Failing States – wartime speed

The absence of democratic power is symptomatic in environmental degradation. For example Yemen is running out of both oil and water. Economic and social stresses brought on by rapid population growth in a poverty stricken society where the absence of order allows depletion of resources such as wells drying out, trees disappearing and soils eroding.

Stabilizing population through education – wartime speed

Universal primary school education for girls and boys, reproductive healthcare and family planning services for girls and women everywhere. Let women choose the size of their families, not poverty and ignorance.

All this and more, but it can be done!

World on the Edge by Lester Brown - http://www.earth-policy.org/books/wote

What if it’s all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing!

What if there is no alternative to digging up the planet and selling it for money? We are right on track for the ultimate scenario of one large hole in the ground, beside which will be one huge pile of money. You can guess who the money will belong to (the wealthy 2%), and you can guess who will be staring out of the pitiless hole (the rest of us). Neither hole nor money (which is mostly computer digits these days) can be eaten.

If I told you there is no alternative to war, aggression, debt, starvation, money markets, capitalism – would you believe me? Or would you turn round and suggest that life is not all about money. Would you say that it was more important to preserve the fragile balance of nature than to make money. Would you say that it was more important to create a loving, caring and more equal society than to run a motor car. Would you say that small businesses are more accountable and more sustainable than multi-national corporations. Would you say there is a better way.

War, debt, starvation, money markets and capitalism are all inextricably linked in the world that has been created for us in the name of prosperity. It has taken only 50 years for us to see just whose prosperity is being increased. Some of us have been allowed a tiny share, to keep us quiet, but the vast majority have not. More than half the world is living in extreme poverty and through various mechanisms such as the IMF, “shareholder value”, and militarism these numbers will increase. To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only $13 billion - what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year. For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years

The global resources that we still have – natural resources, forests, water, gene pools – have turned into objects of utilization. We face ecological destruction through depletion of natural resources ever more rapidly. If it is possible to make more profit by cutting down trees than by planting them, then where is the reason not to cut them. Neither the public nor the state interferes, despite the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth’s climate. Animals, plants, human and general ecological rights are worth nothing compared with the interests of corporations – no matter that the rain forest is not a renewable resource and that the entire earth’s ecosystem depends on it. If greed, and the economic rationalism with which it is enforced, really was an inherent anthropological trait, we would have never even reached this day.

This year Bolivia has passed the Law of Mother Earth, which will establish 11 new rights for nature including: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. It will also ensure the right of nature to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities.

Bolivia has long suffered from serious environmental problems from the mining of tin, silver, gold and other raw materials. Traditional indigenous respect for the nature is vital to prevent climate change, and is the key to true human nature. Greed, war, oppression – this is not the true nature of humans, just something we have been taught in our increasingly urbanized existence. Let’s face it, we all want the same thing: stability, peace, security, enough to eat and enough to get by. What we do not want is the continuous pillage of nature which will call into question the existence of everything on this planet.

A young Palestinian said to me recently. ‘I can see and feel the walls of my prison, but your prison is bigger and you may never get as far as the walls, but that doesn’t mean they are not there.’

When we reach the walls of our prison; when we allow globalised and unaccountable corporations to extract every available resource from the planet, when the seas rise, when the trees die, when the food and water is gone, it will be too late. We may turn a blind eye, but the CO2 in the atmosphere today is 392.40 and rising (safety limit 350ppm), the Amazon has experienced 2 massive draughts in the last 5 years. People living on the low lying islands of Tuvalu are trying to strike a deal to migrate to New Zealand for when their land is swallowed by the sea. The great delta regions of the world are already becoming salinated and and traditional crops will not grow.

Road traffic, a massive contributor to greenhouse gasses, accounts for 70% of UK pollution and 200,000 premature deaths. We are doing this to ourselves. A 7000 lb SUV with a 150 lb driver uses 98% of the fuel to move only the SUV!

You may not believe that climate change is caused by humans, but without doubt our wasteful and callous behavior is adding to it. The right ideas for the remediation of environmental degradation involve unselfish and compassionate behaviour. The right ideas involve long-term planning, conservation and a deep commitment to preserving the natural world. Without a healthy natural environment, there will be few or no healthy humans. The guardians of true human nature understand this.

The deaths caused by pollution border on self-genocide. In retrospect, it is clear that commuters have made a mistake. We should now stop commuting by cars. This mistake has ongoing and deteriorating health and economic impacts for car drivers personally, and for every other inhabitant of planet earth.

For Co2 updates : http://co2now.org/

Bolivia’s new laws: http://www.celsias.com/article/bolivia-set-pass-world-first-laws-giving-all-natur/

Excellent piece by Prof. Claudia von Werlhof: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24403

World hunger stats: http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except the smell of smoke – Tom Stoppard

Our Neanderthal preoccupation with burning things has surely had its day. From the first snaking tendril of flame to the present day we have looked no further than to burn, burn, burn for our energy needs.

How different our evolution would have been if the gear had been invented before the spear.

Gas, oil, coal, wood, waste, the human race seems incapable of seriously developing an alternative to burning things, yet the powerful sun shines on, the wind rages and the tide just keeps on going in and out. These sources of energy will not dry up or disappear, and they are constant and free. We do not need to wage wars, invent shady foreign policy and swindle poor nations to get renewable energy. All that is required is to use the technology we already have. No pollution, no climate change, just a few redundant diplomats and tanks.

It is ironic that the countries producing the most oil have the most solar energy potential. It is criminal that inventions which make the internal combustion engine obsolete have been bought up by the largest corporations and left to moulder in the dark for 40 years or more. It is unjustifiable that millions die every year in poverty and violence because of western posturing and insatiable greed for oil when there are realistic alternatives.

Despite advances in efficiency and sustainability, of all the energy harnessed since the industrial revolution, more than half has been consumed in the last two decades. 90% of all energy produced comes from the combustion of fossil fuels.

The US consumes 25% of the world's energy, using 11.4 kW for each US citizen. Japan and Germany use 6 kW per person and Bangladesh is the lowest user at a mere 0.2 kW per person. 27% of all energy generated is wasted in transmission and the generation process.

Thanks mostly to the sun, the world has a useable renewable energy supply that exceeds 8,000 times total world energy usage, dwarfing all non-renewable supplies. Solar energy resources are huge. Less than 0.02% of available renewables are sufficient to entirely replace fossil fuels and nuclear power as an energy source.

It is widely accepted that the war in Iraq is an oil war, it is the same in Afghanistan, it would be the same in Libya. Whilst the people of Iraq continue to suffer the violence and regressive economic results of western interference, the oil production of that country has never reached the output achieved under Saddam. Unrest in the Middle East has reduced oil output even further with the House of Saud reluctant to make up too much of the shortfall for fear of jeopardizing their future income.

Instead of investing in renewables we look for new oil supplies: tar sands, the deep oceans, Antarctica. Often it costs more in pollution and CO2 emissions to extract from these difficult areas than the actual combustion of the end product. We look to biofuels and destroy precious virgin forest to grow palm oil – only to burn, burn burn.

The time has come to shed our primitive love affair with burning things. It is self-indulgent and wrong to kill for such resources when passive collection of unlimited renewable supplies will provide 8,000 times our energy needs.

What can you do? Object to the building of more power stations, actively support windfarms, use Green energy suppliers such as Ecotricity, make your local councils invest in solar collection on roofs, join sustainable communities such as Transition Towns. It is your world.

Note to NIMBY’s (Not in My Back Yard) – Your view or your morality: every time you stop a windfarm being built, you force thousands to live in the unhealthy, polluted air of incinerators and power plants.

More on tar sands - http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_17580159?nclick_check=1

Palm oil - http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/forests/palm-oil

Afghanistan oil pipeline - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline

World energy resources - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

Will Palestine march?

The tyrant exists only in the imagination of his subjects - Tamim Al-Barghouti

Some of us are witnessing the beginnings of regime change in Tunisia and Egypt. ( I say some of us because the major news channels in the US are not reporting the massive Egyptian uprising) This is not the ‘regime change’ so beloved by our governments working covertly behind their chosen despots and dictators who disenfranchise their own people and keep them in poverty and humiliation. The people on the streets in Egypt and Tunisia are not looking for palaces and wealth. They are marching for the universal values of justice and human rights; the right not to be tortured by their own police; the right to freedom of expression; dignity and the right to choose their own leaders fair and square.

The price of food is rising. An income of $2 a day allows no room for manouvre. All over the world forests and peatlands are being ripped up to provide plantations , not for food, but for fuel to satiate the ever growing demand for energy for industry and 3 car families who will not comprehend their own greed.

$2 dollars a day is the average Egyptian income. In Gaza where there is over 60% unemployment (due to the obliteration of industry by the IDF) there is barely any money at all. The Palestinian Papers have served to highlight the truth we already knew – that the PA was just another western puppet, bought off and toeing the delinquent Zionist line.

Egypt receives the second highest monetary handout, after Israel, from the US. Egypt is the puppet of America and the people will have a hard time effecting change. They know this, and their bravery is all the more remarkable because of it. Without the compliance of Egypt the Palestinians could not be kept under siege, and it is this way because our governments conspire to make it this way. The US conspires with the UN to announce the illegality of settlements, bombings, massacres, siege and destruction, yet ensures that each of these things can happen by funding them all. Nothing is achieved except bloodshed. There was no peace process.

Ordinary citizens are taking to the streets and it is entirely possible that Palestinians, so badly let down by those purporting to represent them, will follow. The 7.6 million Palestinian refugees could march. The door is opening. The borders are creaking. Would Israel massacre 7.6 million people walking peacefully back to their homes, or are the third generation refugees so snug in their cocoon of distant and safe resistance that everything they say they want is not worth the risk to life and limb after all. This may be their only chance. Pubic opinion is on the side of the oppressed.

Israel wants the world to forget that the right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to the place from which they fled is enshrined in international law. The right of return is a Right. They do not need permission.