July 21, 2008 Volume VII, Number 29
Paul Stephens, Editor and Publisher 406.216.2711 greateco@3rivers.net
GREEN SOLUTIONS by Paul Stephens, CasCoGreens
What is Obama thinking (if anything)?
I subscribe to the New Yorker, so I got to read the "inside" stories about him as well as the now-notorious cover depicting he and Michelle as some sort of Islamic militants with an American flag burning on their hearth (that part was unnecessary, unless the intention was really malicious). This "drawing" (as the New Yorker calls its cartoons) actually has a title: "The Politics of Fear", and is by one Barry Blitt, who is identified as an illustrator for a children's book, "What's the Weather Inside?" Perhaps McCain will give it away next Christmas to the children of all his campaign workers. What writers and artists will do to promote their work and careers!
I asked a high school student friend who works in the local coffee shop what she thought of it. Her comment was a question, "Why would they do something like that?" I told her, "Probably because they're Republicans, and they want Obama to lose." Half or more New Yorker readers might well be Republicans, and a cover like this might "resonate" with them. However, most of them probably wouldn't "get it," anyway, and like McCain himself, would publicly denounce it.
My problems with Obama go much deeper. Like the preceding two Democratic nominee losers, Obama doesn't have that primary requisite of a "player" - a strong desire to win. He can no more imagine himself being President of the United States than I can. But unlike me, he can imagine himself as a "team player" whom the "coaches" (party power brokers) have selected to "win the game" for them. He is a puppet, a front-man, and thus the only kind of candidate the Democrats will select and support these days.
Most rational, public-spirited people quit the Democrats long ago, or maintain a tenuous relationship with that party based on supporting its candidates whenever a much greater evil is the alternative. This didn't work even against a George W. Bush, who was obviously the stupidest, most corrupt, most oblivious candidate the Republicans have ever run - pledged to fail, and like Reagan, prove that "government is the problem, not the solution." How is this supposed to work against a former POW, outspoken opponent of torture, a "maverick," and genuine hero to most God-fearing, patriotic Americans? Obviously, it isn't. And yet, the charade of Obama pretending to be more "pro-war" and "anti-terrorism" than a war hero continues.
The Democratic Party is, in effect, controlled by Wall Street, the Military-Industrial-Complex (expanded to include labor, education lobbies, the corporate media, and "for profit" healthcare). It is not "democratic" and it is not a "political party" in the usual sense of the word. It is a junta of powerful special interests, whose only goal is to keep the corporate elites in power. There are no policies, principles, or other substantive public interest goals, and those few they still claim to maintain are entirely negative - e.g., to oppose whatever the Republicans are doing, now - good, bad, or indifferent. And to keep the Republicans from appointing "pro-life" Supreme Court justices, I suppose. That sure worked well, didn't it, with many Democratic Senators (including Baucus) voting to approve some of the most reactionary Justices in history. To hear them tell it, any particular issue is just one small part of the overall "deal", and you win some, you lose some. But the oil and coal junta, the nuclear lobby, Big Pharma, and the prison system always seem to win. If they suffer any reversals, they're bailed out at taxpayer expense so that there isn't any money left for "welfare" or "foreign aid" - except aid in fomenting civil wars and genocide.
I must say, I've never seen a Democratic Party strategist or campaign manager I liked or respected - not, at least, since T.J. Gilles here in Montana (and he remains a loyal Democrat to the present day, in spite of what they did to him). Usually, Democrat activists begin as students or other volunteers with a lot of enthusiasm for a variety of causes - most often they are anti-war, anti-corporate, for better public education, universal health care, and against "tyrannies" such as a domestic police state, the War on Drugs, the Prison-Industrial-Complex, etc. But by the time they are paid staff, working in campaigns, or even running for office, themselves, they have dropped all this "excess baggage."
I can't help but think that the Democratic Party is even more concerned with "thought control" for its own members than the Republicans are. In fact, the Bush White House is probably the first Republicans to maintain this sort of "iron discipline" over its own people. Before Reagan (where there were lots of dissenters - e.g., David Stockman), the Republicans supported "good government" by the people best-qualified and with the best ideas. It was Republicans who first supported Women's Suffrage, an Equal Rights Amendment, most of the original environmental laws, etc. And they were the "Isolationists," against American involvement in foreign wars.
When there was a strong labor movement, Democratic candidates often supported worker protection and union-protection laws, but that basically ended with Taft-Hartley, which passed over Truman's veto. It has been a long time since any Democratic candidate has promised to repeal Taft-Hartley, and Obama is no exception. Since unions now represent mostly higher-paid and public employees rather than "the working class" as such, nearly as many of them vote Republican as Democrat. The Democratic Party as a force for reform and change is all but non-existent. They don't even use the word "working-class" except derogatorily. "Working class" is now equated with "welfare" and even "criminal under-class." It's "tax cuts for the middle class" - a perennial Republican position - which the Democrats have now adopted as the centerpiece of their economic "vision." The working poor and dispossessed will be forgiven for voting Republican or Green, since the Democrats now seem to be the party of "capital" and "middle class values."
Bill Greider (in "Who Will Tell the People?") made a compelling case pre-1992 that the Democratic Party was "owned" by the K-Street lobbyists and bill brokers who channel special interest money to those campaigns which are pledged to serve their interests. Since I have never been a Democrat, I extend this analysis back to World War I, at least. It took a lying Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, along with a British Fifth Column, to get the U.S. involved in World War I (then called "the Great War"). This, I believe, was directly responsible for the Holocaust, World War II, Stalinism, the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, as well as the present situation in the Middle East. Quite an accomplishment for one puppet former President of Princeton University! It must have been "pre-destination" or something.
A century earlier, Andrew Jackson was supposed to have been the first "populist" Democrat, but he was also responsible for "Indian removal" and a lot of other corrupt and genocidal policies (a reason, I suppose, why the Democrats still don't take Native American rights and interests seriously). Even though today's Democrats claim Thomas Jefferson as a founder as well, his party (such as it was) went by the name "Democratic Republicans." It was a "unity party", which soon gave rise to the "Federalists" as an opposing force. It was the banner of Federalism (along with Manifest Destiny) which the Republicans would later use to consolidate their power during the Civil War. The Federalists wanted a strong central government, a central bank, tariffs to protect domestic industry, and other policies to facilitate capital accumulation and the New Industrial State. The Jeffersonians were for state's rights, free trade (since most of their agricultural products were exported), expanding the number of eligible voters, and what we would now call "investments in human capital" - education, skills, and broader cultural enrichment for all - not a small elite. And they continued to support slavery up to the Civil War, and Segregation afterwards, right up to the present time.
Neither party was in any way "socialistic". Socialism had hardly been invented except for a few utopian religious communities. All believed in personal freedom, limiting the size and scope of government, and encouraging people to accumulate wealth controlled by individuals and families, not corporations. And all were opposed to war, standing armies, and "tyrannical" rule by monarchs and dictators - policies which neither major party seems to take the slightest interest in, today.
And so, there simply aren't any "good guys" within "the two-party system of denial and blame." The Libertarians recognized this 30 years ago. The Reform Party tried to buck the two party system in 1992, resulting the smallest minority President (Clinton) in history. We Greens thought we could do it again in 2000 with Ralph Nader. But Nader had a lot of "baggage" of his own, and the Democrats were ready for him, preferring to lose and blame the Greens, than challenge the fraudulent election and win. That pattern continues to the present day.
Greens all over the country will be fearing for their jobs, reputations, and even safety if they oppose Obama and support Cynthia McKinney. And this is especially true if they are Black or other minorities. Even so, the emerging consensus on the Left is that we don't want to help someone like Obama get elected. Call it a "protest vote" or a real opportunity to "grow the Green Party." Most of us will be voting, writing in, and campaigning for Cynthia McKinney and Green Party values. If Obama wants our vote, he will have to support our agenda, and that's obviously just not going to happen - this time, next time, or ever. -- PHS
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Spoiled Rotten
A point we haven't addressed recently, but which is extremely important for the Green movement, is the idea of "spoiling." This has been the great (and really the only) objection to the Green Party growing and flourishing as a political force in the U.S. And we Greens think it is totally fallacious. If you're really for change and reform, and a sustainable environment and economy, you must support those position, not waste your votes and intellectual/political capital on candidates who pander to (and are supported by) the most vicious elements in society.
It's interesting, too, that it is mostly people with Marxist backgrounds who think that "objectively, Ralph Nader put George Bush in the White House, and is directly responsible for everything that's happened, since." This is absolute dogma among 90% of "liberal Democrats" and various Trotskyist, accomodationist groups. It seems to hinge on the Marxist concept of "objective" - i.e., what the real "facts" are, independent of any spinning or sophistical arguments against it. And this is something which less sophisticated, working class people can easily grasp. The same arguments are used against environmentalists, like: "They are anti-labor and thus anti-working class. They are elitists, who want to take away your jobs and put everyone on welfare. They are socialists. They want to control your lives and personal choices, Etc."
And there is good evidence for this position. The Greens do support an expanded public or non-profit sector. They're against "for profit" education, healthcare, etc. They support negative economic and population growth. Those happen to be issues where not everyone agrees with the platform (which we are allowed to do, so long as we're willing to discuss it openly, with intellectual honesty).
We are also "feminists" and advocates for gay rights - hence "pedophiles" and "anti-family" to those who would attack us. We are appalled that the U.S., with 5% of the world's population, should use a quarter of its energy and natural resources, and produce a quarter of its pollution. And have a quarter of its prison population. (We lock up 5-15 times as many people, per capita, as any other "free" country). But to campaign against prisons, torture, and police states is believed to be political suicide. It's like being "pro-Jewish" in Hitler's Germany.
We believe in participatory democracy and participatory economics - self-governing collectives characterized by a maximum of personal freedom and diversity. But they are not STATE collectives - they are communities of choice and values, and all would be allowed to coexist peacefully. (What about Mormon polygamists? To the extent that it's a coercive religious cult, I'd say no. To the extent that everyone has a choice and experience of alternatives, like the Amish and Hutterites, I'd say it's OK).
Greens, I believe, are half or more libertarian in their thinking - in the sense of the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill (which also includes Hayek, but not Friedman and the Chicago School of Gangster Capitalism). So it is very confusing to understand what we believe, and what the political (as well as economic) consequences of our policies might be.
Many Greens joined us in order to "reform" the Democratic Party, or be a sort of drag or anchor, making sure that the Democrats didn't sell out the people in their quest for power and influence. We've hounded most of these "Demo-Greens" out of the party. We are not Democrats, and don't wish to "enable" the Democratic Party in any way. The Democratic Party leadership are fundamentally dishonest and sociopathic. They are much more interested in harming people and causing problems (in order to blame the Republicans and fund more programs) than they are in solving them. If I were to prioritize the parties according to "truth value" and public-interestedness, it would be Greens, Libertarians, Republicans, and Democrats. The doctrinaire socialist parties are practically non-existent in the U.S. (which is why a lot of Leftist-socialists have joined the Greens - to our mutual discomfort, in many cases), and less than 10% of Democrats are still "labor" or "social democrats" as those policies would be understood in the rest of the world as promoting an egalitarian, peaceful society. (The British "Labor Party" is now actually to the right of the pre-Thatcher Tories, and most social democratic parties embrace more centralized "state power" as the answer - including military build-ups).
A third or more Republicans will actually support the best policies - peace, environmental sustainability, anti-monopoly policies, taxing away unearned income (economic rents), rewarding good behavior rather than "punishing bad people," etc. But as a party organization, they, too, are fundamentally interested in harming people and making the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer. They have sold out to a different set of bill brokers and influence peddlers. They are "Social Darwinists", and an extreme form of it at that. I call them "sociopaths," as well. And like the Democrats, they are absolutely dominant in Great Falls and Montana politics. The "leadership" elements in both the Democrats and Republicans have made a common cause to suppress and eliminate anyone who challenges "the dominant paradigm" of rule by a corporate gangster elite - the "military-industrial complex", the "national security state", plantation slavery, or whatever you want to call it.
The Democrats are also Stalinist and extremely dishonest in all sorts of ways. Each major party has evoked the worst behavior from the other. It more or less reflects Jerome Frank's "image of the enemy" theory.
Maybe we should call ourselves "the Green Non-Partisan League," because the Greens stand clearly above all this. We are the Peace Party. We are the real democratic republicans. We have no other agenda except saving the world, the environment, our civil society, and our humanity, beginning with our own local communities. We're not interested in "jobs", government contracts, influence-peddling, or getting our "cut of the loot." The Libertarians used to be "the party of principle," but that ended long ago. They have been taken over by right-wing, socially conservative Republicans! And so, I'm afraid we stand alone, against the madness, the lies and destruction, the force and fraud that our "public institutions" have become. -- Paul Stephens
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FILM
American Gangster a film by Ridley Scott starring Denzel Washington
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765429/
This film is based on a true story - how black American gangs took over the heroin trade from the French Connection (from Turkey) with "Golden Triangle" opium from Southeast Asia, transported by the Air Force in coffins from the Vietnam War. According to Ridley Scott's Commentary on the DVD, it's all true. He interviewed both Frank Lucas, the drug boss (Denzel Washington), and Detective Ritchie Roberts (Russell Crowe) in the process of writing the script and preparing to make the film. The portrayals are as accurate as he could make them with these two superlative actors.
The first time I heard about this was in the book and lectures of Bo Gritz, who was said to be "the most decorated soldier" in the Vietnam War. Several fictionalized versions of his attempts to free POW's were also made into films. He spoke in Great Falls more than once, and was a favorite of militia people and radical Vietnam Vet's groups. He also mediated a standoff between the FBI and some militia people in Idaho - the Weaver family, I think it was. That didn't end well, however.
But apparently he had it right about the heroin trade (plus the fact that many or most of the addicts being served here were also Vietnam vets who had begun using when they were in Vietnam.)
It's a very good film - as good as any "gangster film" ever made - understated and very believable in nearly all respects. And very much in the tradition of films like Ragtime and The French Connection. Don't miss it. - PHS
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Ignorance does not justify omnipotence - a word from our friendly, neighbourhood Cyborg
I believe I've identified a common epistemological disorder among people in Great Falls, and one which has deadly consequences for public policy, education, the economy, the environment, and other "objective" decision-making. Those who claim to know or understand anything are disqualified from participation for that very reason. Either they "work for" someone or some organization, and are thus required to maintain whatever "consensus" that organization supports (or can be coerced to support), or they are "self-interested" or "self-supporting" and thus have no rightful say in public decisions. They must also have political loyalties to one or the other major party. Being a Green, Libertarian, or other independent gets us no respect at all.
Originally, I thought the plea of ignorance should be restricted to women and other "oppressed" or lower-class people, and those lacking higher education and understanding. Thus, when I disagreed with a relative or neighbor, they would often say, "I don't know", "Nobody told me that" or some similar statement to defend their right to disagree or oppose whatever I had said or proposed, without having to justify why they thought that way, or why they disagreed with me. It's a version of "God told me to do it" or "The Devil made me do it" - neither of which holds up in a court of law. It's what's called "the argument from authority," although a very weak form of it, because they didn't claim to be acting under orders or in obedience to an authority. That was taken for granted. It was more like they were claiming that I wasn't in accord with the imagined "authorities," "superiors" or bosses, and therefore whatever I was doing and saying was suspect - it was not something they understood or agreed with, so I was "on my own" with that, whatever it was.
"You're not my boss" was the formulation of a similar principle I often heard in domestic relationships. Had I been their boss (or in some cases, husband), they might have done what I said. But the bottom line was that since I wasn't any sort of "authority", they felt no need or obligation to even consider what I said, let alone obey or agree with it. This, I suppose, is "working class consciousness" at its finest.
It turns out that very few people believe in "free will" or self-determination, let alone individual freedom or a "live and let live" attitude of mutual respect among a wide variety of peaceful and self-sustaining communities. They think everyone should have a boss, and be obedient to someone or something - to an organization or collective. I've been watching some of the Star Trek films and episodes involving the Borg, where this theme is played out endlessly. Just last week, I saw for the first time the beginning of the 4th year of "Star Trek Voyager", where the Borg woman, "Seven of Nine," is rehabilitated to have human thoughts and emotions, and finally to act like a human, albeit a very superior kind of human. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112178/ It turns out she is played by the same actress, Jeri Ryan, who plays James Woods' boss on "Shark." Borgs and prosecutors seem to think along similar lines, so it is a good fit for her.
I've long wondered who "the Borg" are supposed to represent. In a political and epistemological sense, they are "collectivists" - they have no value as individuals, and their every action, thought, and impulse is to expand and enhance the collective. And, of course, they are "cyborgs" - half machine and half human. They are something like the clone soldiers in Star Wars, except that they aren't mass-produced to be identical. Instead, each is an individual "assimilated" from one of several different humanoid species. Should we take them to be some sort of political "techsters" as well? It would seem to be so.
In the Star Trek "Next Generation" series, Jean-Luc Picard is "assimilated" by the Borg and later reclaimed and "de-programmed" from the Borg technology. This characteristic plays a big part in the film "Star Trek: First Contact," which is mostly set in Montana at an old Minuteman missile silo in the 2060's, following an all-out nuclear war, and the threat of it starting up again. An alcoholic rock music fan named Cochrane (James Cromwell, in one of his very best roles - he's also played William Randolf Hearst, Jr. and Prince Philip) has invented the warp drive, and the first test of it attracts the attention of a passing Vulcan ship, thus initiating "First Contact" with an alien species. But the Borg and Enterprise E, from the 26th century, have come back in time - to try to prevent it, in the case of the Borg, or to prevent the Borg from preventing it, in the case of the Enterprise E. It makes a very good story, indeed, with lots of futuristic economics and social philosophy woven into the plot.
Perhaps the best way to understand who the Borg are and what they represent is to think of them as robot, cyber-technology as a whole. What have computers and other robots done to our minds, our culture, our freedom, our economy, and even our spirituality (not to mention our bodies)? All of these themes are repeatedly examined in the various Star Treks and other science fiction literature. At first, the opposition to "artificial intelligence" was so great that many authors postulated future societies where robots and sophisticated computers would be banned entirely. This was the case in both Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, as well as the "Dune" novels by Frank Herbert and the films based on them. Both are of the highest quality and rank with H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein in the annals of science fiction classics. Yet, so quickly has cybernetic technology advanced that these works from the 50's and 60's seem hopelessly outdated, today.
Indeed, no science fiction prior to the 1950's had even begun to imagine the complexity and sophistication of our present cyberculture. Star Trek was indeed visionary, in that many of the technologies first described there on screen have come to pass - especially the hand-held "flip phone" communicators, matter-anti-matter propulsion systems, and faster than light drives which, although often imagined, were not very well explained in terms of known science before Star Trek. The story "The Fly" (originally a short story in the June 1957 Playboy by George Langelaan, a British writer raised in France) is, of course, the prototype for the "transporter" technology in Star Trek. Whether or not some of this more advanced technology will ever be built and used on an everyday basis is open to question - particularly with the continuing threat of nuclear war, alien invasions, artificially constructed plagues, as well as the potential religious backlash against all higher technology as such. Just remember: people and their well-being come first.
Enjoy it all, but just don't tell me that because you know and understand less than I do, you have the right to block me out. It should be the other way around. My values include perpetuity, truth and enlightenment, as well as human freedom, survival and well-being. I am not "in it for the money," or because I am someone's slave or puppet. I am here to serve, in accordance with Asimov's original "Laws of Robotics." - PHS
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OF WOLVES AND MEN
Perhaps it's just because I'm a descendent of many generations of livestock breeders and small family farmers. Or maybe it's because I came to the Green Party from the conservative tradition, rather than radical, revolutionary politics. But I've always had problems with "protecting" predators like wolves or even grizzly bears - at least outside of public land and other designated wilderness and conservation reserves. If I'm a rancher, and a wolf or grizzly is attacking my livestock, or even just "trespassing," I'm going to shoot it whenever I have the opportunity to do so, and whether or not I tell anyone about it, later.
A hundred years ago or more, the federal government paid a bounty on wolves. There's even a picture in my grandparent's family photo album of the last wolf pelts from the Highwoods nailed up to dry on the side of a log cabin. My grandfather had an old .45-70 single-shot army rifle, and one of the family stories was about him seeing a wolf feeding on a carcass. It was so far away that he could barely see it, but just for the hell of it, he set the sights at 1100 yards and took a shot. When he finally arrived at the scene, thinking he had missed because there was no wolf there, he was surprised to find that he had killed the wolf, and it had collapsed inside the rib-cage of the dead steer it was feeding on.
Wolves are very hard to eradicate, once they get a foot-hold. While grizzlies really are endangered, and are not prolific breeders, wolves can increase from a few dozen individuals to thousands in only a decade or two. There are now estimated to be 1500 wolves in the Northern Rockies Ecosystem. They do good service in controlling deer, elk, rabbit, and other populations. They will also have some effect on controlling the bison population in the Yellowstone herd, which seems to be a problem with no solution, otherwise.
My main concern is the knee-jerk reaction of "environmentalists" to always protect the predators and other "bad guys" against the people who are trying to make a living off of the land. I won't second-guess Judge Molloy's decision (see story below) because I'm not an expert, but politically, it is disastrous for the environmentalist cause, and one of the reasons why no Democrat in Montana will proudly claim to be an environmentalist. It has become political suicide for them to do so. Which may have been the point all along. And why we need a Green Party which will support the economy as well as ecology - the "Greateco" which I use for my blog name.
A good ruling would allow any farmer or rancher to kill wolves on private land. Whether or not those with grazing permits on public land should be able to protect their herds with lethal force is another question. That's where the dogs and llamas come in, I suppose. How about tranquilizer guns? -- PHS
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Judge restores wolf protections
By EVE BYRON - Independent Record - 07/19/08 http://www.helenair.com/articles/2008/07/19/top/65st_080719_wolves.txt
Gray wolves once again are under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, after federal court Judge Donald Molloy ruled late Friday that state management plans in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming will irreparably harm the species’ reintroduction.
In particular, in his 40-page decision the judge pointed toward the 1994 reintroduction document that discussed the need for genetic diversity among the wolf populations. Molloy said genetic testing of wolves in Yellowstone National Park, where wolves were reintroduced in 1995, showed that few if any new wolves were moving into the area from northern Montana and Idaho. He and others fear that low genetic diversity will lead to inbreeding that will diminish reproduction.
"Dispersal between the Great Yellowstone core recovery area and the northwestern Montana and central Idaho recovery area — a precondition to genetic exchange — is rare," the judge wrote. "Only four to 12 wolves have dispersed beyond the core recovery areas in the 13 years since wolves were reintroduced.
"The reduction in numbers that will occur, based on wolf hunts and state depredation control laws, will lessen the population making genetic exchange less likely."
Molloy added that the federal government seemed to be casting its earlier genetic diversity argument aside in its delisting decision earlier this year and focused instead on wolf population numbers as one of the main criteria. He noted that in the 1994 document, the federal government warned against doing so.
Wolf numbers have multiplied much quicker than what initially was expected, with more than 1,500 wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains.
Molloy could lift the injunction if the defendants in the case, including federal and state agencies, prove to the judge that Montana, Wyoming and Idaho have sufficient safeguards in place to perpetuate wolf populations.
Representatives from some of the 12 conservation groups that filed the lawsuit seeking to reverse the gray wolf’s removal from the list of threatened or endangered species applauded Molloy’s decision.
"This injunction is necessary to prevent the states from implementing management schemes that have the primary purpose of eliminating, rather than conserving, wolves," said Michael Garrity, executive director of the Helena-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity in New Mexico added that the injunction will "give wolves a fighting chance...."
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Amory Lovins: Expanding Nuclear Power Makes Climate Change Worse
We speak with Amory Lovins, the cofounder, chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, who has been described as "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers."Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/16/amory_lovins_expanding_nuclear_power
(transcript)
AMY GOODMAN: There’s one issue President Bush and presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama all agree on: expanding the use of nuclear power. President Bush addressed nuclear power at a news conference Tuesday and hailed it as a way to reduce American dependence on oil and protect the environment.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: This is just a transition period. I mean, all of us want to get away from reliance upon hydrocarbons, but it’s not going to happen overnight. You know, one of these days, people are going to be using battery technologies in their cars. You’ve heard me say this a lot, and I’m confident it’s going to happen. And, you know, the throwaway line, of course, is that your car won’t have to look like a golf cart. But the question then becomes, where are we going to get electricity? And that’s why I’m a big believer in nuclear power, to be able to make us less dependent on oil and better stewards of the environment. But there is a transition period during the hydrocarbon era, and it hasn’t ended yet, as our people now know. Gasoline prices are high.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is presidential hopefuls Barack Obama, beginning with, though, Senator John McCain, on nuclear power.
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I actually think that we should explore nuclear power as part of the energy mix. There are no silver bullets to this issue. We’ve got to develop solar. I’ve proposed drastically increasing fuel-efficiency standards on cars, an aggressive cap on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted. But we’re going to have to try a series of different approaches.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: My dear friends, nuclear power must be part of any equation that leads to addressing climate change and also leads to addressing reduction of our dependence on foreign oil. You know, we always love to imitate the French. The French, 80 percent of their electricity in France is generated by nuclear power. We either got to reprocess it or store it.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator John McCain, and before that, Senator Barack Obama.
Well, the debate over nuclear power is back in the news with the admission of Energy Department official Ward Sproat on Tuesday that it would cost taxpayers $90 billion to open and operate the nation’s first nuclear waste dump. Speaking after a congressional hearing, Sproat added the dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada would open only in 2020. It was originally estimated to cost $58 billion and open in 1998.
Well, our next guest has been described as "one of the Western world’s most influential energy thinkers." He’s also a leading opponent of nuclear power. Amory Lovins is co-founder, chair and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. He is a consultant physicist, MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of numerous awards, including the Right Livelihood Award. Lovins advised the energy and other industries in countries around the world, including here in the US. He invented the hybrid Hypercar in ’91 and has written twenty-nine books, including Soft Energy Paths, Natural Capitalism, Small Is Profitable, and Winning the Oil Endgame. Amory Lovins joins us here in our firehouse studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
AMORY LOVINS: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, talk about nuclear power. Why do you feel it’s not an option, given the oil crisis?
AMORY LOVINS: Well, first of all, electricity and oil have essentially nothing to do with each other, and anybody who thinks the contrary is really ignorant about energy. Less than two percent of our electricity is made from oil. Less than two percent of our oil makes electricity. Those numbers are falling. And essentially, all the oil involved is actually the heavy, gooey bottom of the barrel you can’t even make mobility fuels out of anyway.
What nuclear would do is displace coal, our most abundant domestic fuel. And this sounds good for climate, but actually, expanding nuclear makes climate change worse, for a very simple reason. Nuclear is incredibly expensive. The costs have just stood up on end lately. Wall Street Journal recently reported that they’re about two to four times the cost that the industry was talking about just a year ago. And the result of that is that if you buy more nuclear plants, you’re going to get about two to ten times less climate solution per dollar, and you’ll get it about twenty to forty times slower, than if you buy instead the cheaper, faster stuff that is walloping nuclear and coal and gas, all kinds of central plans, in the marketplace. And those competitors are efficient use of electricity and what’s called micropower, which is both renewables, except big hydro, and making electricity and heat together, in fact, recent buildings, which takes about half of the money, fuel and carbon of making them separately, as we normally do.
So, nuclear cannot actually deliver the climate or the security benefits claimed for it. It’s unrelated to oil. And it’s grossly uneconomic, which means the nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It’s a very carefully fabricated illusion. And the reason it isn’t happening is there are no buyers. That is, Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
AMORY LOVINS: It’s uneconomic. It costs, for example, about three times as much as wind power, which is booming.
Let me give you some numbers about what’s happening in the marketplace, because that’s reality, as far as I’m concerned. I really take markets seriously. 2006, the last full year of data we have, nuclear worldwide added a little bit of capacity, more than all of it from upgrading old plants, because the new ones they built were smaller than the retirements of old plants. So they added 1.4 billion watts. Sounds like a lot. Well, it’s about one big plant’s worth worldwide. That was less than photovoltaics, solar cells added in capacity. It was a tenth what wind power added. It was a thirtieth to a fortieth of what micropower added.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s micropower?
AMORY LOVINS: Again, it’s renewables, other than big hydro, plus co-generating electricity and heat together, usually in industry.
In 2006, micropower, for the first time, produced more electricity worldwide than nuclear did. A sixth of the world’s electricity is now micropower, a third of the new electricity. In a dozen industrial countries, micropower makes anywhere from a sixth to over half of all the electricity elsewhere. This is not a fringe activity anymore.
China, which has the world’s most ambitious nuclear program, by the end of 2006 had seven times that much capacity in distributed renewables, and they were growing it seven times faster. Take a look at 2007, in which the US or Spain or China added more wind capacity than the world added nuclear capacity. The US added more wind capacity last year than we’ve added coal capacity in the past five years put together.
And renewables, other than big hydro, got last year $71 billion of private capital; nuclear, as usual, got zero. It is only bought by central planners with a draw on the public purse. What does this tell you? I mean, what part of the story does anybody who take markets seriously not get?
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, well, the media clearly in this country doesn’t get it, because it is raised over and over again by the candidates. I mean, it seems that Senator McCain has a favorite number: a hundred years in Iraq, also hoping for a hundred more new nuclear power plants. He had said something about, he doesn’t want to lose the knowledge of building, since the last one was built more than thirty years ago; the people are dying who had built it, so we’ve got to rush and build them now.
AMORY LOVINS: Well, you could say that’s already been lost, in the sense that most of a nuclear plant built now in the US, if there were any, would have to be imported, which, by the way, means we buy it in weak US dollars, which is part of the incredible cost escalation we’ve seen. Moody’s latest number is $7,500 a kilowatt. That’s, again, as the Journal said, about two to four times the numbers that were being bandied about just last year by promoters.
AMY GOODMAN: And Barack Obama, while he hasn’t laid out a plan for building, he has a big campaign contributor, Exelon, and has supported the expansion of nuclear power. And, of course, we heard what President Bush has to say.
AMORY LOVINS: Actually, I thought what Senator Obama said was "explore", which is different. And you will find major environmental groups saying something like "explore" or "consider", but they will also say very carefully it has to be competitive, it has to be cost-effective. And clearly, that doesn’t even pass the giggle test.
A new nuclear plant, according to Moody’s, would send out electricity for about fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour, which is half, again, as much as the average residential rate. And that doesn’t even account for delivering it to your house. And I think if nuclear plants were built, which I don’t think is likely, you would see incredible rates shock and a big political reaction.
AMY GOODMAN: Environmentalists like Stewart Brand and James Lovelock are pushing nuclear power.
AMORY LOVINS: There are actually four individuals involved in the world who are prominent environmentalists who had that view, and you’ve named two of them.
AMY GOODMAN: Who are the other two?
AMORY LOVINS: Patrick Moore was active in founding Greenpeace back in the ’70s, now works for industry; and Peter Schwartz, who used to be on my board, who used to run group planning for Royal Dutch/Shell, is of the same view. But I can’t think of any others. There are no actual environmental groups who favor nuclear power.
AMY GOODMAN: What is your answer to them, and why have they arrived—these are your old colleagues?
AMORY LOVINS: Well, yeah, a couple of them are old friends. Well, I think they haven’t done their homework. And I keep asking for their analysis and not getting it, because I don’t think they have one. But they somehow form the view that because nuclear doesn’t emit carbon, it must be a good thing. Well, that’s not good enough.
You need a source that doesn’t emit carbon—nuclear emits a little bit in the fuel cycle and in building plants, and so on. But you need one that doesn’t emit carbon and is faster and cheaper than other ways to do the same thing. You see, renewables don’t emit carbon. Efficiency doesn’t emit carbon. Cogeneration based on recovered waste heat you were throwing away anyhow doesn’t emit carbon, because you already paid for the carbon in making the useful part of the heat in industry. And these sources are a great deal cheaper and faster than nuclear. So if climate’s a problem, we need to invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, to get the most solution per dollar, the most solution per year. Otherwise, we’re making things worse.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Amory Lovins. He is co-founder, chair and chief scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is based in Aspen in Colorado?
AMORY LOVINS: Old Snowmass.
AMY GOODMAN: Old Snowmass. Nuclear power is one of the issues that is being posed as an alternative to reliance on foreign fuel, and this is also an issue we addressed yesterday with Naomi Klein on Democracy Now!, the issue of expanding oil drilling, offshore and onshore. You’ve been looking at this.
AMORY LOVINS: Well, we seem to be wanting to drill in all the wrong places. For example, over fifty times as much oil as might be under the Arctic Refuge at very high prices can be saved at very low prices by using the oil efficiently. Also many times faster. So, my wildcatters have been drilling lately in the Detroit formation. That is, making efficient cars is equivalent to finding an all-American Saudi Arabia under Detroit, about eight-and-a-half million barrels a day, inexhaustible, climate-safe and costing about twelve bucks a barrel. Now, altogether, there is about 14 million barrels a day of oil savings, averaging twelve bucks a barrel cost. And we know exactly where the oil is. There’s no doubt that it’s there. It’s under Detroit, Seattle, and so on. That’s out of twenty-or-so million barrels a day we’re using. So if you’re an oil company and you go to the ends of the earth and drill for very expensive oil that might not even be there, wouldn’t it be embarrassing if somebody else meanwhile found all that cheap oil under Detroit? Shouldn’t we drill the most prospective place first?
I’ve tried this formulation lately on the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and the American Petroleum Institute, and they found it pretty persuasive. You know, I’ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil. Take the Arctic Refuge as an example. You might think that at today’s oil prices, it would be clearly a great deal to go drill there. Well, it wasn’t before, when oil was in the twenty-odd dollar a barrel range instead of $140. And that’s why the oil companies weren’t interested. Guess what. They’re still not interested. Why not? Well, because their costs of drilling have gone up more than the oil price went up. If you talk to people who run exploration in major oil companies, they’re still not excited about the Arctic Refuge, because practically any other place in the world they could drill would be cheaper and less risky than that extraordinarily remote and hostile environment.
AMY GOODMAN: So why is Bush pushing it?
AMORY LOVINS: Who knows? But it doesn’t make any economic sense. There’s no business case for it. And the real showstopper, interestingly, is national security, which you would think that he and Senator McCain and so on would be concerned about. Jim Woolsey, a not-hostile-to-oil, per se, Oklahoman, former— AMY GOODMAN: Former CIA director.
AMORY LOVINS: —former CIA director, has actually testified against Arctic Refuge drilling on national security grounds. There’s a very simple reason. There’s only one way to get the oil south: it’s through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which is the most vulnerable part of our energy infrastructure, the biggest terrorist target in our energy infrastructure. It’s what he calls Uncle Sam’s "kick me" sign.
So, think about it. You’ve got an 800-mile pipeline, mostly above ground, mostly accessible by road or by floatplane. And if the flow through it is interrupted in the winter for about a week, 900—well, nine million barrels of hot oil congeals into the world’s largest Chapstick, a big candle. Then you can’t pump it anymore. Could this happen? Well, actually, yes, if certain points on the pipeline, pumping stations and so on, were attacked—
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got five seconds.
AMORY LOVINS: —or stuff at either end. And has that happened? Well, let’s see. It’s been sabotaged, almost blew itself up on occasion through mismanagement. It’s been incompetently bombed twice. It’s been shot at fifty times. A drunk shut it down with one hole from a rifle bullet. And the scariest thing to me is around Y2K, at the turn of the century, a disgruntled engineer was caught by accident about to blow up three critical points with fourteen bombs he had built and tested.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. But one answer: have we solved the nuclear waste problem even?
AMORY LOVINS: No, but I’d just come off the wagon on the economics, and then we don’t need to argue about whether it’s safe.
AMY GOODMAN: Amory Lovins, head of Rocky Mountain Institute, thanks for joining us.
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